Towards the Abolition of All

Introduction

I wrote this because I believe we, as a nation, have nearly reached the point of no return. We are at crossroads, with one path leading to freedom, and the other, to barbarism. The freedom I am speaking of is socialism, and, of course, the barbarism I am speaking of is fascism. 

The truth is, I wasn’t ready to write this. There’s so much that I hadn’t read, and still haven’t read, and there’s so much more I need to learn. I’m years away from being able to write all of this in a way that’s coherent and does justice to the thinkers who I based all of this on. Because I wasn’t ready to write this, well, whatever it is, it presents itself less as a coherent, structured whole and more as a series of highly detailed notes that are all loosely connected to each other. I wouldn’t even call this proper philosophy; it’s more like a philosophical journal, a record of the why and the how. Because this is more of a journal than anything else, I didn’t try very hard to keep a single style. This wasn’t intentional, but I really don’t see a need to go and fix it, cause honestly I don’t expect many people to read this. 

I also should clarify that not only was I far from ready to write this, but I also wasn’t, and still am not, studying philosophy in an academic setting. My knowledge of philosophy, though more extensive than the majority of people, comes purely from my own unguided reading of philosophical texts, and because of this there are many gaps in my knowledge that wouldn’t exist if I had undertaken philosophy in an academic setting. Because of this, lots of what I have written here has likely already been said, and the original conclusions I do draw are mostly the result of syncretism. More so, it’s important that I acknowledge that I very likely got a few things wrong, and unintentionally misrepresented the arguments and thoughts of others. Again, I am not an academic. However, I did my best to be as intellectually honest as possible, and I genuinely hope that it shows in the few original ideas that I have put forward here.

1

I became obsessed with the idea that it was possible to construct the ultimate ethical theory - a systematic approach to ethics that would lay the groundworks for not only life, but also the future of societal organization. I went through my old books and re-read Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Spinoza and Kant. I drew from not only philosophy, but mythology, theology, psychology and sociology. I took hundreds of notes and subjected my source materials to dozens of different analyses. And what did I come up with? Nothing. There is no ethical theory in existence, and there can never be any ethical theory, that properly addresses the plight of modern humanity. Certain ethical theories may properly address certain aspects of the plight of modernity, but there isn’t a single ethical theory that encompasses the entirety of our crisis. There is no religion, no mythology, not ethical system, that can give us the answers we need. This is a hard truth, but it is one that must be understood. 

This idea - that the search for ultimate meaning and an all encompassing explanation is futile - is expressed very well in the short story The Library of Babel by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (which I highly recommend that you read). Borges shows us a world that is obviously meaningless, full of people who are obsessed with the idea that every little insignificant event and story they read and hear must have some sort of divine meaning. Why do they think this? It’s not because they’re stupid; it’s simply because they feel that the world must have meaning, because if it doesn’t, what would be the point of living?

The Library of Babel is told from the first person perspective of a dying old man, who describes to the reader the world he lives in as an endless library of never ending hexagonal compartments which contain shelves upon shelves of books, each shelf containing exactly thirty two books, and each book containing exactly four hundred and ten pages. The protagonist of the story describes to us how when he was young he “journeyed in quest of a book,” what he refers to as the “catalogue of catalogues,” the book that contains the secrets of the workings of the library, its origin, and all other questions that its denizens have. This quest for a book that explains the library and the contents of all the books in it is an obvious metaphor for the quest for a philosophical system that explains the world. This quest for the ultimate book could also be compared to the scientific quest of formulating a grand theory of everything that neatly explains the functioning of the universe and its forces.

As said by the protagonist, there are those in the library who dedicate the majority of their lives to looking for books that contain even a single meaningful sentence. These people are called the Inquisitors. They spend their days wandering the halls of the library, fruitlessly searching for the one book that will answer all their questions. It may be a single sentence. It may be a paragraph. The answer may lie on a single page in the middle of a random book that has remained untouched for hundreds of years. And when I say that their task is fruitless, that isn’t just my opinion; the Inquisitors themselves seem to feel the same way;      “they arrive exhausted at some hexagon, they talk about a staircase that nearly killed them - rungs were missing - they speak with the librarian about galleries and staircases, and, once in a while, they take up the nearest book and leaf through it, searching for disgraceful or dishonorable words. Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.”

Eventually, after years of fruitless adventuring through the labyrinthian halls and corridors of the library, many of the inquisitors became frustrated. Fanatical, even. The narrator refers to these inquisitors as “the Purifiers.” These people “thought the first thing to do was eliminate all worthless books. They would invade the hexagons, show credentials that were not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and condemn entire walls of books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes.” The Purifiers, like the inquisitors who came before them, were motivated by the belief that there is a single, universal truth that explains all things in existence. If there is such a truth, it logically follows that everything that is not that truth is false, and therefore, worthless. That is why they had no problem with torching millions of volumes. Because, to them, culture, art, history, folklore, none of it mattered - all that mattered was the single, universal, divine truth. Many of you reading this are probably able to see similarities between the crusades of the Purifiers, and the real life crusades (both literal and metaphorical) of our world. One may think of the Christian Missionaries who, upon arriving in Ireland, bastardized the local folklore and spirituality and twisted it in order to fit into Christian dogma. Or, one may think of the literal Crusades waged against the Islamic world by the Catholic Church.

2

This idea, that in order to discover truth, all non-truth, (whether said non-truths are malicious or not) must be purged, and all methods that lead to it must be wiped out, has some similarities with the Kantian idea of Discipline. Discipline, according to Kant, is a form of negative judgment, in the sense that its main purpose is not to aid us in discovering and creating new ideas and concepts, but rather, in the words of Kant, “the proper objective of negative judgements is solely to prevent error… in cases where the limits of our possible knowledge are very narrow, where the temptation to judge is very great, where the illusion which presents itself is deceptive, and the evil consequences of error are considerable, there the negative element, though it teaches us only how to avoid errors, has even more value than much of that positive instruction which adds to the stock of our knowledge.” (Critique of Pure Reason, 574-575).

This, at first glance, seems to make sense, and as far as most people are concerned, it does. But then, Kant says something interesting; “that our temperament and our various talents (such as imagination and wit) which like to indulge in free and unlimited exercise, require some kind of discipline will easily be admitted by everybody. But that reason, whose proper duty is to prescribe a discipline to all other endeavors, should itself require discipline may indeed seem strange.” (575). Kant then goes on to say that reason, when used empirically, does not require discipline, seeing that it is constantly tested against by experience, and that it also does not require discipline in the realm of pure intuition, such as mathematics. He argues that discipline need only be applied to reason when it is used transcendentally, which is what he just spent the last 500 pages fleshing out and describing. So what is transcendental reason? It is reason in relation to pure concepts. Kant argues that when using transcendental reason, i.e., pure reason, it is far too easy to get swept away in fantastical modes of thought. This seems reasonable enough… but there is one problem. Kant is attempting to critique and keep in line the methodology of pure reason… using the methodology of pure reason… which doesn’t really work. That’s like trying to critique a political system using the morals and values of said political system. It’s like trying to critique the methodology of Christian philosophy using the methodology of Christian philosophy. It’s like trying to regulate the police using the police. It just doesn’t work. But I digress. Though, as you will soon see, it wasn’t an entirely pointless digression.

Kant, with his notion of Discipline, is basically telling us that in order to arrive at truth, we must relentlessly police our own minds and purge them of all things irrational. Which, ok, if you are someone who strives to operate as rationally as possible, fine. But it is with his moral philosophy that this principle gets out of hand. Kant, like almost all moral philosophers, was very concerned with the issue of how people should act. Or, to put it more bluntly, he was concerned with prescribing moral imperatives to the denizens of society and ensuring that they followed said prescriptions. He believed that there are certain things that human beings are morally obligated to do and not do, and if they failed to do (or not) do them, they were violating moral law. There is no leeway with Kant; to him, you are either right, or you are wrong. There is no inbetween. But, more so than just that, Kant was a deontologist, meaning that he believed the morality of any particular action was not derived from its consequences, but rather, that it was derived from an innate quality of the act itself. So, to Kant, the act of lying to someone is always wrong. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. It doesn’t matter why you do it. It is wrong, always, and should not be done.

This idea, that there is an objective right way to do things and that there is an objective wrong way to do things… well, let’s just say that it leads to some issues. You see, Kant was what we could call a liberal… sort of. In his essay titled Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant lays down some principles which he believed, if they were followed by the nations of earth, would eventually lead to world peace. His proposals are interesting, in the sense that, on the surface, they seem reasonable. But once you start to think about them, you realize that what you’re reading isn’t a step by step guide for how to reach a perfect world, but rather, a guide for how to reach the opposite; a tyrannical, hyper-fascistic world international order.

That may sound a bit alarmist, but bear with me. In section one, article two, Kant writes that “No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation.” This seems reasonable enough. However, he justifies it by saying that a state is not just a piece of property, but “it is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself.” He goes on to say that “...to incorporate it [a state] into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing…” What Kant is saying is that the state isn’t the result of a group of people coming together to protect themselves and their property, as the classical liberal philosophers imply, but rather, that the state exists for itself, not for the people, and that the people, in turn, exist not for themselves, but rather, the state. If this seems a bit far fetched, remember what Kant said earlier - that the state “is a society of men whom no one else has any right whatsoever to command or to dispose except the state itself.” Here, Kant equates society with the state, something fascists do very often, for, according to them, it is not the state that rises out of society, but society that rises out of the state. Mussolini, in The Doctrine of Fascism, writes that “the nation does not beget the State, according to the decrepit nationalistic concept which was used as a basis for the publicists of the national States in the Nineteenth Century. On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which gives the people, conscious of their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence. The right of a nation to its independence is derived not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own existence, much less from a de facto situation more or less inert and unconscious, but from an active consciousness, from an active political will disposed to demonstrate in its right; that is to say, a kind of State already in its pride (in fieri). The State, in fact, as a universal ethical will, is the creator of right.”

Of particular importance is the last sentence of that quote; “The State, in fact, as a universal ethical will, is the creator of right.” To the fascist, whatever opposes the state, opposes the will of “the people,” and must be annihilated. Under fascism, something only has value if it aids in progressing the goals of the state. In whose name? Well, the state’s name, and the state is the cumulative will of the people. But what people? It is obviously impossible for any state to represent the will of every single individual that lives under its rule, and this is even more the case with fascism. So, a return to the question; which people? The spirit of the people. The state, as Mussolini clearly writes, “...gives the people, conscious of their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence.”

3

This same sentiment is echoed not only in Kant’s essay on peace, but throughout the entirety of his philosophy. To Kant, reason is the rightful governor of the mind. To Kant, reason dictates right and wrong, what should be done and should not be done. Reason dictates where a man’s place in society is. By establishing the existence of an objective morality, ethical Kantianism is not the ultimate end result of a psyche desires world peace, but rather, of a psyche that is obsessed with subjugation, conquest, and imperialism. Nick Land, in his essay titled Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest, says the following; “Kantian morality is… legitimated by the existence of imperial or universal jurisdiction. Only that is moral which can be demanded of every rational being unconditionally, in the name of an ultra-empire which Kant names ‘he empire of ends’… the law of this empire is called the ‘categorical imperative’, which means a law stemming solely from the purity of the concept, and thus dictated by the absolute monologue of colonial reason.” (Fanged Noumena, 74).

The ethical philosophy of Kant is the secularized apotheosis of thousands of years of religious oppression. The people of modernity, no longer reliant on the authority of god and kings, had freed themselves from their iron grasp, only to fall into the illusive hands of reason, the new monarch of reality. This transition of power was supposed to liberate the human mind from the shackles of dogma, tradition and elitism. The rise of reason, which coincided with the rise of free market capitalism, was supposed to take the power out of the hands of church representatives, feudal lords and kings, and put it into the hands of the toiling masses. And it did, but purely in theory. Technically, anyone could make it big under capitalism. Technically, anyone could run for president. Technically, anyone could vote (and by anyone, it is meant white men), and anyone had freedom and the ability to own property. But the thing was, as Innuendo Studios puts it, “though anyone could, not everyone can.” Women couldn’t. Why? According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s because “the framers of the constitution - and many who followed them for more than the next 100 years - believed that women were childlike and incapable of independent thought.” In other words, women couldn’t vote because they weren’t viewed as being able to exercise the faculty of reason. This was in spite of the fact that women were citizens. 

African American slaves couldn’t vote because they weren’t citizens, and they weren’t allowed to be citizens because - well, because it was economically convenient for the current powers to deny them basic rights and enslave them - but this denial of their rights was justified post hoc by the argument that “they weren’t fully human and therefore couldn’t participate in the everyday life.” And this was further justified by the idea that non human animals (which african american slaves were viewed as) were incapable, or viewed as being incapable, of exercising reason. This same argument was used to justify the genocide of indiginous peoples. It was used by the nazis (and still is used today by some contemporary governments) to justify the systematic torture (veiled as “scientific experimentation,” which is, ironically enough, another example of reason being used to justify cruelty), imprisonment, and murder of the mentally and physically handicapped. It is used today to justify the societal position of young children and the poor treatment of farm animals (and really just animals in general).

Reason, like whiteness and straightness, is an exclusionary concept. It is used to justify the subjugation and exploitation of out-groups by denying their existence as autonomous entities. It is assumed that reason and rationality are character traits, that a person is either rational or irrational, reasonable or unreasonable, when in reality reason and rationality are processes which can be employed by anybody to varying degrees of success or failure, depending on how they are applied and what they are applied to. 

Not only is it oppressive when viewed as an inherent quality or character trait, but it is also oppressive when it is viewed as a totalizing process by which all things existent can be understood, as is the case with Kantian philosophy. Remember early when I mentioned Kant’s idea of discipline as a way of taming the mind? To Kant, as I said earlier, discipline is the method by which we police our own minds to ensure our thoughts remain rational. Nick Land, in his essay “Delighted to Death,” writes that “Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination, and which he exhibits as natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to act without the prior authorization of a juridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of natural intelligence that the human animal comes to prostrate itself before universal law. Kant is quite explicit about this in the second critique; only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principle definition as the super sensible element of the subject, and thus as fundamentally negative. In other words, morality is precisely the powerlessness of animality.” (Fanged Noumena, 141-142).

In order for reason to exist and remain intact, it must constantly re-affirm itself against the other, against what Kant calls “animality.” It must impose upon the mind artificial regulations that it otherwise wouldn’t adhere to. In other words; as long as the natural mind is free and unrestricted, reason is incapable of existing. Reason cannot exist without something to contrast itself against. It has no purpose without something to contrast itself against. The existence of natural intelligence, or “animality,” as it is described by Kant, does not require such an opponent in order to justify itself. It does not have to constantly reaffirm itself against an intrusive other that could supposedly attack at any moment. It is free, unbothered by the existence of the other until said other imposes itself on it (as reason must inevitably do in order to continue existing).

Discipline, Reason’s method of keeping imagination in check, only exists when imagination breaks free from its chains. Discipline only exists negatively; “it teaches us only how to avoid errors…” (Kant 574-575). Not only that, but it doesn’t put an end to existing “errors”; it prevents them from happening in the first place. Here, a connection can be drawn between Kant’s reason and Tiqqun’s Empire. In Introduction to Civil War, Tiqqun writes that “the jurisdiction of the imperial police, of biopower, is limitless, since what it must circumscribe and put a stop to does not exist at the level of the actual but at the level of the possible. The discretionary power here is called prevention and the risk factor is this possible, existing everywhere in actuality as possible, which is the basis for Empire’s universal right to intervene,” (152). It is in this way that Empire justifies its various violations - mass surveillance in the form of public cameras, the monitoring of phone calls and text conversations, the tracking of purchases, the gathering of data from social media posts - all of it is justified in the eyes of Empire and its citizens, because the enemy is, to them, everywhere. “The enemy of Empire is within. The enemy is the event. It is everything that might happen, everything that might disturb the mesh of norms and apparatuses. Logically therefore the enemy, in the form of risk, is omnipresent.” (Tiqqun 151). Like Discipline, “Empire exists ‘positively’ only in crisis, only as negation and reaction.”

It is in this way that Empire maintains its dominance over the world. Empire relies on reason, which it uses to exclude and suppress ideas, philosophies, organizations and even people that either do not fit into its narrative or that directly oppose it. But what makes modern Empire different from other types of governance is this; very rarely does it have to enforce its own cultural and philosophical rules and norms itself. By implanting within the minds of its citizens a false idea of what is rational and what isn’t, it is able to enforce its rules through them. “It is no use distinguishing between cops and citizens,” Tiqqun writes. “Under Empire, the difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any moment each citizen of Empire can, through a characteristically Bloomesque reversal, reveal himself a cop.” (154).

Under Empire, every citizen is a cop, or at least has the potential to be one. But there is a certain group of people who are more likely to take up the mantle of the social police officer; conservatives. The conservatives, possessed by a false confidence in their ability to think rationally, who view rationality as a character trait and not a process, are the first to reinforce the status quo by attempting to discredit every idea that falls outside of it as being “irrational.” Ironically enough, by clinging to a static, highly subjective view of rationality that they then attempt to impose upon other people, it is they who are the irrational ones, for is it not highly irrational to stick to old, outdated modes of thinking? Yet they persist. They persist in pushing their agenda of what I will here refer to as irrational reasonability, which can be defined as an irrational affirmation of all that is considered “reasonable” by broader society, and an outright rejection of anything that goes against it (it must be kept in mind that when I say “conservative, I am also referring to those who identify as “moderate liberal.” which is really just a fancy way of saying “ok, we can change things for the better, as long as they aren’t changed so fast that they negatively impact me). 

The conservatives are the ones who, alongside Empire, fight tooth and nail to ensure that nothing ever happens that occurs outside of the spectacle. Anything that occurs outside of or in spite of the vast network of commodities, images, and propaganda must be either viscously condemned, or outright ignored. Anyone who even seems to suggest that human beings do not need to live the way they are currently living, or who acts in a way that suggests that we shouldn’t try and change things within the system, but rather, outside of it, is condemned as an anarchist, an extremist, or a terrorist. 

4

I believe Mark Fisher says it best in his book Capitalist Realism; “‘being realistic’ may once have meant coming to terms with a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment,” (54). It is in this sense that the nature of capitalist realism is very similar to the Buddhist conception of the self, anatman. Interestingly enough, though capitalist realism (the expectations of what is real or realistic under late capitalism) is itself elusive, undefinable, and has no core essence, those who maintain it do, and it expects the individuals who live under it to maintain a single image of who they are that rarely fluctuates and changes. This is the contradiction inherent to capitalist realism; it itself is fluid, essence-less and ever changing, it expects those that live under it to be the opposite. Capitalism, which is possessed by no abstract properties, and is rather the possessor of them, expects the individual to subjugate himself to abstractions that would in all other scenarios be subjugated to him.

This, really, is the nature of all authority. Empire’s authority is not based in mutual agreement, love, truth, goodness, or anything like that; it is based in plunder, swindling, deceit, and theft. Power doesn’t care about what is actually true; it cares about peddling false truths that will aid it in its goals. Power doesn’t care about love; to power, love is being a loyal, obedient servant. Power doesn’t care about goodness; what is good is what defends and enriches it. Thus, when living under the authority of Empire, what is “true” can and will change at any moment. Living under Empire, love isn’t something that occurs between individuals; it is something that occurs between the individual (or groups of individuals) and itself. And don’t even bother trying to challenge what is considered “good.” “Good,” to Empire and its loyal citizens, is what maintains stability. Thus, in post-modernity, the classical liberal idea of how society should function is reversed. Rather than the state and its law being something that is in general static, something that only changes when the people wish for it to change, and the people being something that are undefined, formless, diverse, and autonomous, and unimposed against so long as they remain within the clearly defined regulations laid out by the state (which were decided by representatives who were put there by the people), the modern ruling authority, Empire (which is very much different from the liberal conception of the state) is what is undefined, formless, autonomous, etc, and the people are the ones who must act within a framework that is both rigid and formless, rigid because it is cruelly and barbarically enforced, and formless because no one really seems to know where the framework ends and begins, and how to remain within it. Outside of a few general expectations such as work, consume, vote, and obey the law (unless you're rich), the general population isn’t really told how to live, yet they are constantly punished for their choices by the state (which at this point is nothing more than an arm of Empire).

It should be pointed out that though the unofficial regulations put in place by Empire are fluid, formless, and undefinable, it is easier for some people to navigate them than others, and they are applied more harshly to some than they are to others. For example, there is no law that explicitly states that it is illegal to walk outside on the sidewalk at night time, or walk to the store at night. It isn’t illegal. However, that doesn’t change the fact that police brutally attack people (specifically black people, though it does happen to white people as well, just to a lesser extent) all the time for doing that. Of course, they don’t say that in their reports; they usually justify it by saying “the suspect was acting suspicious” or “he wasn’t complying with orders” (which still doesn’t answer the question as to why the police were antagonizing the “suspect” in the first place, but I’m sure the point is clear). Take, for example, the case of Elijah Mcclain, who, last August, was murdered by the police while on a walk home from the convenience store. Elijah, due to his Anemia, would wear a ski mask whenever outside during the winter. According to the police, while he was on his way home, someone called them and reported a suspicious person wearing a mask. So, the police showed up and confronted Elijah, tackled him to the ground, and began to choke and beat him.

“One officer accused McClain of reaching for his gun, and one put him in a carotid hold, which involves an officer applying pressure to the side of a person’s neck in order to temporarily cut off blood flow to the brain. ‘Due to the level of physical force applied while restraining the subject and his agitated mental state,’ officers then called Aurora First Responders, who ‘administered life-saving measures,’ according to a local NBC affiliate. Paramedics injected McClain with what they said was a ‘therapeutic’ amount of ketamine to sedate him, while officers held him down.

McClain went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital, and was taken off life support on August 30. His family said at the time that he was brain dead, and covered in bruises.” (The Cut)

As I’m sure is obvious, there are quite a few things wrong with not only the statements made by the police involved in, let’s just be frank, the murder of Elijah Mcclain, but also the report made about suspicious activity on the part of Elijah. First off, in the state of Colorado, where Elijah lived and died, it technically isn’t illegal to wear a mask in public. Police are allowed to stop people who are wearing masks, but they cannot detain you unless there is enough circumstantial evidence that a crime had been or was being committed, for which there was none. Attorney Triston Kenyon Schultz writes that “generally speaking there is nothing illegal about wearing a mask. Situations can give rise to a potential police stop (say wearing a mask and waiting outside of a bank), but if there is no evidence of a crime, only a stop will occur.” So, Elijah was reported to the police even though he wasn’t doing anything that warranted investigation (unless walking down the street is illegal now and I just missed it), and was detained by the police, one of whom claimed that he “reached for his gun,” which is highly implausible, seeing that Elijah had both of his hands restrained. Then, Elijah is put in a carotid hold, and an officer threatens “to set his dog on McClain if he ‘keep[s] messing around.” Then, medics are called in, who inject him with what they call a “therapeutic” amount of Ketamine, which is later revealed to be twice the amount that the human body can handle. He is then taken to the hospital and pronounced brain dead, and, after the event is over, one of the officer’s even admits that “McClain had done nothing illegal prior to his arrest.” 

There are many similar cases of police brutality; Daniel Shaver, Breonna Taylor, Tony Mcdade, and of course, George Floyd. All of them share one thing in common - they are seemingly senseless (a common theme is that victims are more often than not Black, but it does happen to non Black people as well, and though racially motivated violence made against Black people by the government is obviously an issue, I believe there is another issues that goes deeper than race, as will be elaborated on as I continue). 

What do we have to learn from these cases of unwarranted brutality? That the police can attack and/or kill you at any time, for seemingly any reason, and get away with it.

It is here that the Law, the ultimate expression of Kantian morality, of deontology, clashes with the logical conclusion of idealist thinking, the Absolute, which Hegel described as follows; “...the Absolute is not supposed to be comprehended, it is to be felt and intuited; not the notion of the absolute, but the feeling and intuition of it, must govern what is said, and must be expressed by it.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 6). This is how it may seem. However, the truth of the matter is, the Kantian ethic is merely an early manifestation of the Absolute, one that had not yet fully been realized, for it is impossible to abide by pure reason without regressing into animality. Furthermore, once humanistic reason has overthrown religious dogmatism, in order for it to remain the dominating force of the world and resist the reason of self-interested egoism, it must regress into a dogma that is even harsher than that of religion. It must regress, once again, into animality. In the same way, in order for liberalism, the ultimate product of the Enlightenment, to maintain its power against the forces of revolutionary socialism, it too must abandon the very principles that it was founded upon and regress into new, seemingly revolutionized form of what it replaced; fascism.

Or is there more to it? See, that’s the narrative that most leftists, especially democratic socialists, accept. But is it true? I don’t think so. Rather than put forth the idea that fascism is liberal capitalism in decay, I would like to argue that liberal capitalism, especially in places like America, has always been fascist. From the moment the constitution was signed, there were, as discussed earlier, people who were excluded from its protections. America, from the very beginning, was an imperialist war machine that built itself upon the bones of millions of indiginous men, women and children. America was founded upon racial discrimination, slavery, and white supremacy. It was founded upon the degradation and exclusion of the perceived other. Not only has it been exclusionary throughout history, but it still operates on exclusion to this very day. The exclusion of felons from the political process. The exclusion of undocumented immigrants from basic humane treatment. The exclusion of black Americans from their constitutional rights. The exclusion of children from decisions surrounding how they live their lives. The exclusion of those without a formal education from accessing important information about the world. It is, in fewer words, a society of exclusion. 

This exclusionary tendency shows itself most strongly in the political philosophy of Kant, who, in his essay Concerning the Common Saying, says the following; “...a joining which is an absolute and first duty in any external relations among human beings who cannot avoid having mutual influence, such a union is only to be encountered in a society which has reached the civic state; that is, the state constituting a commonwealth… the end which is a duty in itself in such external relations and which is itself the supreme formal condition of all other external duties, is the right of human beings [to live] under public-coercive laws by which every man’s [right] is determined and secured against the interference of every other man.” (Basic Writings of Kant, 419). 

Kant states that because “birth is no deed of he who is born... no inequality of legal status and no subjection under coercive laws can come through birth except that which a man has in common with all others as subjects under the sole supreme legislative power… no man can lose the equality [he has in a commonwealth as a subject] except through his own crime...” (422). 

The fact that Kant says this is odd, seeing that on the very next page he goes on to say that “he who has the right to vote on basic legislation is called a citizen… the requisite quality for this [status], apart from the natural one that the person not be a child nor a woman, is only this; that such a person be his own master (sui iuris) and hence that he have some property (under which we may include any art, craft or science) that would provide him with sustenance). [To put this another way, he must be] a man who, when he must earn a livelihood from others, acquires property only be selling what is his own and not by conceding to others the right to use his strength.” (424)

Based on this quote, Kant’s ideal society would not be democratic. Not only would women be excluded from the political process, but anyone who is not a bourgeois would also be excluded, seeing that when Kant refers to property, he is referring to what Marxists call the means of production. Kant’s ideal society would be, in the most literal sense, both an economic and political dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. 

But upon what grounds does Kant exclude these people (for he obviously regarded them as people, even if he did think of them as inferior in some way) from the political process? And exactly what category are they being excluded from? I highly doubt that Kant thinks women, children and propertyless workers are somehow inhuman; he was bigoted, but he wasn’t that bigoted. I think Kant’s reasons for excluding children from the political process are obvious (but still wrong);  he didn’t view them as being capable of reasoning. However, a child doesn’t remain a child forever. It is a temporary state through which every human being passes. But being a woman in Kant’s time? That isn’t exactly something you can just change and have everyone else go along with. 

It could be argued that Kant excluded women from the political process not because he thought that they were incapable of reasoning, but rather, because under his definition, in order to be a citizen you must be master of yourself and your labor, and during his time women were prevented from doing so by the law. But I would rebuke this by arguing that Kant was a central figure in the enlightenment, an era of thinking that literally toppled the authority of the church and the monarchy and changed life on earth forever, so if Kant really wanted to, he could have argued for a change in the laws surrounding women’s rights. So, going by his definition, it seems that the only rationale for excluding women from being citizens was that they were incapable of reason by nature of being women.

This, which has already been pointed out by others far smarter than myself, is the contradiction that liberal philosophy must grapple with;

Even more importantly, and this goes back to Mark Fisher and Capitalist realism, who does and doesn’t get included in capitalist society is constantly changing, and the reasons are unknown and seemingly arbitrary.

It is here that we return to Borges and the Library of Babel. The library is the world. The languages developed and imposed upon the minds of its denizens are Empire. The people who impose their own constructed meaning onto the books within the library are the agents of Empire. Rather than viewing themselves as extensions of the library, they view themselves as the arbiters of a higher meaning that they impose upon its existence. The books that are not deemed useful are at best ignored, and at worst destroyed. And the books? What do they represent? They are everything. Trees, mountains, rocks, rivers, animals, people. The “higher meaning” imposed upon the nature of the books, like the elusive seemingly non-existent ideal of capitalist realism, is always changing, and there are more than one of them, and they all contradict each other.

Borges’ story obviously isn’t a perfect metaphor, but I believe it gets the point across sufficiently well. Human beings, first by religion and then by the enlightenment, have been alienated and separated from the rest of the world. Humans, having been artificially excluded from the world of nature, quickly began to create new categories that they then imposed upon themselves and used to alienate themselves from their property (in the Stirnerist sense). This new category, reason, developed to its fullest extent by the German Idealists, was at the same time used to exclude other human beings from the category of humanity, thus creating The Other, The Outlander, The Unman. Through the construction of gender, race, sexuality, law, religion, and “reason,” more and more of the mind became excluded from nature, and more and more people became excluded from humanity. It is not only through the abolition of things such as gender, race, and law that we lay the foundations for a greater politics of radical inclusion, but also through the total transcendence of the categories of the natural, the human, and the inhuman themselves.

Citations

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative ? Zero Books, 2010.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Marcus Weigelt, Penguin, 2007.

Kant, Immanuel, and Allen W. Wood. Basic Writings of Kant. Translated by Thomas K. Abbot, Modern Library, 2001.

Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, Urbanomic, 2019.

Mussolini, Benito. The Doctrine of Fascism. 1936.

Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith, Semiotexte, 2010.

“Why Women Couldn't Vote.” Teachingtolerance.org, Southern Poverty Law Center, www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/women_couldnt_vote[1].pdf.

Lampen, Claire. “What We Know About the Killing of Elijah McClain.” The Cut, The Cut, 30 June 2020, www.thecut.com/2020/06/the-killing-of-elijah-mcclain-everything-we-know.html.

Schultz, Tristan Kenyon. “Is It Legal in Colorado to Wear a Mask in Public?” Justia Ask a Lawyer, Justia: Ask a Lawyer, 19 Dec. 2016, answers.justia.com/question/2016/12/19/is-it-legal-in-colorado-to-wear-a-mask-i-226477.