By Kelly Sears

CONTENTIONS: What I contend, and set out to prove, condensed into mere logical postulates, is this:

Contention I: Premise-1: That, under the thought-system of a materialist philosophy, while they may be generally characterized as principally “negative” or “positive,” emotions of themselves as experienced internally cannot be assigned negative or positive ethical value, ethical goodness or badness; that such values can be assigned only to the external practice in which the emotion is entangled. Premise-2: That political actions have emotional content.

Contention II: Conclusion-1: That the feeling of hatred, correctly directed, can be as legitimate an emotional basis of political consciousness and action as any other, if the political ends to which it is directed are of positive (i.e., historically progressive for the struggle of proletarian revolution and liberation) value.

Contention III: Conclusion-2: That the correct direction of hatred is against the institution of capital and the capitalist economic system, against the bourgeoisie (the ruling class of that system and the human owners and political-economic avatars of capital), and against the dictatorship of the bourgeois class (the state-social order of capitalist political economy).

But philosophy cannot be properly articulated in mere postulates, so, to elaborate:

Contention I

On P-1: It is neither good nor bad in itself to think or feel anything. There is no way to argue otherwise without arguing from idealism. For thought is only the reflection in the mind of actions in the world, the synthetic result in me of some interaction, some evolving dialectic of becoming, between me and another subject- it is not a cause, but an effect, of actions. And when it does become a cause, when I have an idea and act because of it, then it is not the idea but the act resultant therefrom which is good or bad, which begets good or bad effects¹. A thought might be called “good or bad” in so far as it tends to engender good or bad acts, but this is misleading insofar as tendencies and potentialities, while real, are not always carried into the actual, and insofar as even then it is the act which is in a real sense good or bad. The tendency of a thought to engender this or that act is only indirect- this is why I say such tendencies are not “good and bad,” but only “negative and positive,” and not in themselves deserving of direct ethical praise or censure.

To disagree with any of the above is to assert that thoughts in themselves exert direct ethically significant effects exterior to the thinker- which is idealism, as it elevates thought to ontic² primacy over the material of which it is an interaction and a synthetic manifestation.

On P-2: Obviously, nevertheless, one feels emotion when one acts. Actions both are begotten by and beget emotions, just as political struggles are both begotten by and beget ideological concepts, though in both cases the act is the principal aspect in the dialectical relation and the thought-content the secondary. In this sense, actions have “emotional content.” This includes political ones.

Contention II

On C-1:We come now to the concept of hatred.

We have already determined that there are no good and bad feelings. So, although in liberal parlance “hate” is often a synonym for bigoted acts of terroristic violence, this must be erroneous; “hatred” is only a feeling, neither good nor bad. The acts in which hatred is involved are acts, not feelings, and may be good or bad.

Certainly, though, we can reasonably say that hatred is negative– acts it begets will tend to be, in a technical sense, acts of negation, of dialectical antagonism against the thing which is the object of hatred, attempting to negate it, meet it with its opposite, ultimately destroy or transform it such that the contradiction of its opposite/negatory aspect against it is resolved. If we hate our enemy, it may prompt us to negate and then ultimately surpass them- to confront them and battle them, then defeat them and abolish them.

Nothing in this, though, necessitates that hatred is bad- as any materialist ought to know, whether an act of negation is good or bad from the perspective of the revolutionary ethics of the workers’ revolutionary communist movement depends entirely on what it negates. Actions against the interests of the oppressed and marginalized and bad– the feeling of hatred involved therein is not to be endorsed. Actions against the interests of reactionary power, which negates it and moves toward its abolition and progress toward liberation, is good, and so we endorse the feeling of hatred involved therein. We freely and without apology cheer on the violent opposition and destruction of what violently exploits and oppresses the workers and the oppressed strata and colonized nations of the world, for the resolution of that relation by violence is an antidote to greater violence, and an advancement of the historical dialectic of class struggle toward a better world social and political-economic order, i.e. communism, in which all people are free of class society’s contradictions and the injustices (exploitation, colonization, racism, patriarchy) that come with them.

So it is clear that hatred, being itself neither good nor bad, has the potential to accompany or form the emotional content of acts which are, in fact, good, despite its being a “negative” emotion. The hatred of the exploiter is as good a reason to strike against exploitation as the love of the exploited; the two exist in perfect dialectical unity and neither exists without the other. A person aspiring to be a communist should cultivate both. And, in the end, what matters is that the blow is struck- whatever one feels when one strikes it has no ethical character in itself but is, to the extent it leads to this act of revolutionary uprising in the class dialectic, good.

Contention III

On C-2:The development of a revolutionary outlook, subjectivity, and attitude is not about feeling the right things– there are no “right” and “wrong” feelings (see P-1), and negative and positive feelings must exist in a dialectic unity with one another, defining and shaping one another- she who hates the enemy, she must also love her comrades.

Rather, then, developing this outlook must be about correctly directing one’s subjectivity and emotions about the world. It is not right or wrong to hate; it is valuable, however, to develop hatred toward the correct enemy, such that the acts to which such a feeling correlates are correct and principled acts of negation and counter-force against the forces that presently occupy the dominant position in the dialectical structure of class society, the enemies that oppress and exploit the vast majority of humanity: capital and the big bourgeoisie, and their lackeys.

Summing Up

We must break out of the liberal mind-trap that extols the virtues of “good” feelings- love, peace, joy, contentment, and so forth- and teaches that one must be evil or ill if one feels “bad ones”- hatred, animosity, anger, sorrow. This is idealism, the idealism of the religious culture of reactionary class society, which keeps hold of the masses by controlling and punishing their psychical and emotional life, punishing “original sin” and prescribing only tranquility and sanctimonious positivity as antidotes to the ills in life. Revolutionary philosophy understands that the actual is above the potential and the “spiritual”- it understands that thought is only real to the extent it derives from and returns to action as its material effect and counterpart.

We, the revolutionaries, communists and those who aspire to be communists, must rebuke utterly any moralization against hatred, anger, or “negative” feeling. To the contrary we must seek to cultivate in ourselves and, by Mass Line leadership toward the reconstitution of a Communist Party, and the construction of a United Front and mass movement on the road to seizure of power for the socialist economy and state-social order of a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, principled class consciousness, real awareness of the state of the world and ideological understanding of how its social contradictions function and how they can be resolved and the world changed for the better, which can guide us in revolutionary action. And a part of this may well be the cultivation of hatred, negative feeling directed toward the negation of the power of our enemies- the big imperialists bourgeoisie, their states and armed enforcers (both military and police), their lackeys, their supporters, their semi-feudal and bureaucrat- and comprador-capitalist allies in the semi-colonized countries, the colonial governments, the fascists and reactionaries, the Zionist enemy, and so forth- not to mention rage against the state of things, and sorrow for the suffering of the masses under the tyranny of big finance capital and the imperialist state regimes (which exist only to facilitate its expansion, by exploitation of the world’s resources and its people’s labour-power, through their use of state force against the exploited classes, as a plurality of examples show³). But, of course, we must also have hope– we must have love for all the oppressed and exploited people of the world, and hope for their liberation in the triumphant revolution of the world socialist proletariat.

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1. “Good” and “bad” must be understood in a materialist, consequentialist way. See An Ethical And Philosophical Treatise Upon Marxism, Hedonism, & Utilitarianism.
2. “Ontic” is a technical philosophical term which means basically of or having to do with being or existence. When I say “ontic primacy” I mean the notion or state of having the most “direct” being, to which other things are secondary or begotten. In the idealist philosophy of Descartes, e.g., God has ontic primacy, begetting secondarily souls, tertiarily matter. In dialectical materialism we understand that the Material has ontic primacy and encompasses all that exists, not as static or mechanical matter but as a system of dynamically relating mutually transforming aspects.
3. https://www.instagram.com/p/C4qbynGrsHI/?img_index=1