On the Political Limits of Morality

Even though morality isn't, strictly speaking, the defining feature of liberalism (classical, modern, or neo), I see it being used a lot by radlibs and liberal anarchists on social media (and liberals beyond social media) as a shortcut to thinking and tool to discipline those who voice radical or revolutionary dissent. The collected writings give some theoretical tools to push back against this.

“Ethics is an impediment to us. For Christians, the reward for leading an ethical life is spiritual. For non-believers, the only compensation is psychological – the knowledge that ‘goodness is its own reward.’ This is the self-righteousness that fuels the principled stances, empty proclamations, and futile deeds that makes one’s life into a million acts of insignificant personal resistance. It is the voice that tells you that dignified defeat is worse than playing dirty. We say: rid yourself of these illusions. The earth does not smile any more on those who refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, call themselves anti-capitalist, or eat organic. We are incensed by anyone who thinks that they can ‘be good,’ ‘do good,’ or even ‘be part of the solution.’”

—“A Short Introduction to the Politics of Cruelty” by Hostis

“Moralism, the reactive positioning of defining actions or people on the scale of good to bad based on some moral doctrine, runs deep. Moralism often runs deepest within currents of those who believe they’ve long since excised its influence from their rationality. Through moralism one abdicates any responsibility to interrogate the social relations that are attacked, reified, or replicated through particular actions or positionalities. In moralism one relies on a dogma of their choice to justify their decisions, to themselves and to others. If one follows the correct moral line, how then could they possibly be in the wrong?

So it is in moralism that these calls for support, material or otherwise, for the Ukrainian state apparatus are rooted. More specifically, they are rooted in the implicit assumption that when state conflict arises, there are no positionalities other than to support one state structure or another, and so the 'correct' course of action is in supporting the more 'moral' state. This self-imposed binary warps anarchist liberatory principles and slogans, turning them into rationalities for siding with one state apparatus against another.”

—“On Moralism, Relation, and (anti)Militarism” from Abolition Media

“More to the point was Joshua Leifer’s call for a 'humane' left, made in the cast of Michael Walzer’s 2002 essay Can There Be a Decent Left?, which claims to insist on 'the possibility, on the moral imperative, of bending what others take to be history’s iron tracks,' against the supposed primordial bloodthirst of certain segments of the left who did not immediately repudiate Palestinian armed resistance after October 7th. What Leifer does not admit is that 'history’s iron tracks' were not exactly running according to either Hamas’ or the left’s master plan when October 7th happened.

It seems that Leifer would have leftists everywhere, especially those in the imperial core, proclaim their own humanity and moral untaintedness as a precondition for entering into discourse, foreclosing any historicization of why it is that the colonized and besieged have resorted to violence. (Another fact that Leifer does not address is that Walzer’s appeal for “decency” was made against leftists who opposed the war on Afghanistan: “decency,” like “humaneness,” only ever applies to those already within the remit of the global standard of civilization.)

These responses vary and should not be conflated. But they all attempt to pass off an a priori humanitarian idealism, one that does not admit the concrete realities of its own inapplicability to and instrumentalization by empire, as an abiding commitment to a moral and secular humanism. My contention is that these proposals are obfuscatory in the struggle for a free Palestine—just as confusing as a reckoning with a Palestinian discourse of martyrdom, accompanying both armed and non-violent struggle, secular and Islamist, can be enlightening.”

—“Palestine’s Martyrdom Upends the World of Law” by Bassem Saad

“We do not often grasp what it might mean to struggle for a deeper concept of humanization because we cannot recognize that the current ideology of 'common humanity', where everyone must be murderously subordinated to the only people who count as human, is actually standing in the way of the re/humanization proclaimed by Marx and Engels. We are troubled by the notion that the expropriators must be expropriated in order for such a moment of commonality to actually exist; we want to believe that this commonality can already be understood and that, in order to be truly moral, we have to equivocate between the rights of the oppressed and the rights of the oppressors… But between equal rights, as Marx pointed out in the first volume of Capital, greater force decides.

Obviously I am reaching the point of philosophical obscurantism, if I haven't reached it already, and I apologize if I've been too hasty or opaque. The best way to escape with this descent into conceptual interrogation––a descent, I think it is only fair to argue, into which this bourgeois humanism necessarily leads––is to simply point out something that should be terrifyingly obvious: those who concretely occupy the social positions of exploitation and/or oppression do not care about the shared humanity of their exploiters/oppressors. That is, the agent of revolution has never needed to be convinced of its agency because of some ethical assumption of a 'shared humanity' or any of that sentimental moralism that has convinced some of us ('some of us' generally a cipher for economic/social privilege and petty-bourgeois academicism) to question bourgeois morality.

If you have nothing left to lose but your chains, and are forced to recognize the class responsible for enforcing these chains, you are not drawn to revolution because of some moralistic argument but because you viscerally recognize the necessity… And this is the moment, if properly understood, where all moralistic arguments about violence––the ethics of revolutionary violence, the death of reactionaries, etc.––are annihilated.”

—“Bourgeois Moralism” from M-L-M Mayhem!