Don't Expect Liberals To Save You

What is the difference between identity politics and justice-driven movements? Identity politics essentializes “oppression” based on identities – that simple difference is by definition injustice. It focuses on “equality” in a theoretical sense – that x is equal to y, and therefore x and y are congruent with one another in an absolute sense. This over-emphasis on “equality” as congruency reduces every social problem to a problem of congruence – if we were simply more equal and more free, we would be more prosperous and happy.

Progressivism does no better – it simply internalizes and regurgitates liberal logic while critiquing its imperfect practice instead of recognizing that deficiency in liberal practice is indicative of a much larger dysfunction in the core concepts that underpin the entire apparatus of liberalism. Progressives are nothing more than the Puritan zealots of the liberals, and their “cancellations” are the contemporary equivalent of witch trials held in the heart of modern Salem. To the liberal and progressive, bigotry and deviance in belief is the greatest sin. Deviance must be inquisited, and bigots must be sacrificed at the stake for the sin of incantation.

It is no surprise, then, that the liberal and progressive offers no real meaningful answer to the plight of the suffering of the many disenfranchised people of the world. What good is greater theoretical equality for the Palestinian? What will come from greater theoretical equality for a woman or person of color? What will come from the recognition and apology for the evils of the colonial enterprise? The liberal – even the most sincere liberal – can offer nothing but a theoretical equality; and history is the greatest instructor that theoretical equality means little in the face of actual extraction.

And, indeed, what is justice other than systematic, methodical freedom from extraction – from the exploitation of the resources, toil, and effort of one party for the benefit of another while systematically trapping the exploited party into a cycle of extraction? Will equality in theoretical rights grant equal exchange of value between parties? Indeed, theoretical equality has been one of the greatest means of creating systematic exploitation and extraction. Let us turn our attention for a moment to the global financial and trade order, which is the contemporary mechanism for the perpetuation of modern colonialism.

The contemporary global order does not simply colonize the East; modern colonialism is a dual colonialism. On one end, it creates a system of trade and finance that traps neo-colonized nations into subject relationships, creating dependency on the peanuts tossed at them by neo-colonial ones. The forces of neo-colonialism pay cents on the dollar for the labor of neo-colonial subjects and dramatically lower the cost of production for their own products. Meanwhile, a secondary colonial apparatus exists both within the colonial nations and the colonized ones: a colonial elite that turn their own populations into colonies.

Just as the colonial country extracts from another country, the colonial elite within the extracting and extracted countries turn their own nations into colonies for their economic embezzlement. In America, the world’s largest colonial enterprise since the British Empire, the billionaire class has turned corporate legal and financial structures into a mechanism of untold extraction from the American populace. Just as the nation of America uses law and trade to colonize other nations, the American elite use law and trade to colonize the American populace. This same system exists within colonial nations in relation to their elite and populace.

Not only can this not be remedied by liberalism – it has been caused by liberalism. The liberal emphasis on theoretical rights, freedoms, and identities over real world functions of economic, legal, and political structures has created the very extractionary system. Free trade, legal equalities between the powerful and the powerless, and focus on identity over extraction has enabled the elite to use their power to manipulate legal and economic structures using freedoms and equality as the mechanism and identity as the distraction.

If you are not amongst the elite, Liberalism is of no use to you. The idea that betrayed you will not save you.

If you are a person who experiences real extraction at a systematic level, greater equality based on identity is the red herring, the distraction, that keeps the economic, legal, cultural, and political systems in place that enable your extraction. You need a theory far greater, more robust, more grounded in reality; you need something that shifts the focus away from equality in rights and freedoms and something rooted in equality of real exchange of value. The former is liberalism; the latter is justice.

And justice – real, practical, serious – is the only thing that will save man.

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