By Kelly Sears

I am deeply troubled and discomfited, intellectually and emotionally, by what I see as a deep contradiction in how persons as emotional subjects in the cultural order of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the state-social order prevailing under capitalism, process and discuss violence. How can I tolerate my liberal peers who shiver and cry over a break-in, a crime against property-ownership, but spare not a thought for the millions dying for crimes of property-ownership, dying because the warm buildings in which they might sleep are locked tight and marked “private property?” How can I make sense of those who cry at the few hundred killed on October 7th, but justify tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, and millions dispossessed, as “self defense?”
I had cause recently to ruminate on this problem for an extended period. I came to a conclusion in the form of three heuristic axioms, three general descriptions of the manner in which the emotional subject under the psychosocial conditions of bourgeois culture processes violence. I believe this is an accurate description of the contradiction to which I refer. It must be emphasized: this contradictory relation to violence, which bleeds into the media, art and propaganda of hegemonic capitalist-imperialist bourgeois culture and, as such, is terribly useful for cultural-state machinations that help facilitate very real and bloody violence serving the further expansion of capital, is not a normal, natural, or good state of affairs. We must strive
to invent a kind of person that does not think in this way, through socialist cultural development and Cultural Revolution.

3 General Theses on Violence

Or, on its perception by the bourgeois cultural subject.

1. Violence is noticed and objected to in proportion to its apparent abnormality and exceptionality, not its severity.
2. The perceived severity of violence relates to its apparent abnormality or
   exceptionality, and not its actual severity.
3. That violence which is most severe, being most likely to become ubiquitous and therefore not exceptional, is least likely to be perceived as abnormal and exceptional, and therefore least likely to be perceived as severe. And vice versa.

Here, I think, I have successfully achieved an approximate description of how the personal subject as manufactured by the cultural superstructure of capitalism and the social order of the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, the archetypal “normal person” one is taught how to be by the media, education, philosophy, morality, ideology etc. produced by and for capital and institutions which serve its economic tyranny, perceives and reacts to “violence.”

We live under an economic order in which violence of the ruling class and its capital against the exploited of the world is absolutely superfluous. The fruit I eat for lunch would not be available for a Yankee capitalist-imperialist firm to sell to me and profit off of without the brutal violence that goes with the semifeudal-capitalist exploitation of peasant workers in semicolonized countries like Guatemala: not only the inherently monstrous contradiction of US capital growing by billions in abstracted value through the work of people that can hardly afford to live, but also the funding by this capital of genocidal fascist comprador regimes which brutalize the peasant populations, especially indigenous nationalities, with murders and disappearances to keep them in place, so this exploitation can continue¹. Laptops, probably including the one on which I type presently, are marked with the blood of Congolese children, forced at gunpoint by either government troops or bandit armies supported by the Kagame government in Rwanda to mine “conflict minerals” that they can ferret over the border back into Rwanda and then sell to their real masters, American and Chinese capitalist-imperialist bourgeoisie for whom pillaging the carcass of a country is just another investment opportunity.

But these acts of violence are so enormous, so constant, so high in number of victims and so vast in scope, so (as Comrade Sigmund puts it) “overwhelming” that they fill the entire field of vision, and are not perceived at all. They are invisible, in the same way that one cannot see clearly the shape of a continent when one is standing in it. If one waits for the exceptional, abnormal, explosive moment of violence to object, then one never will- because finance capital, and the media and educational systems and state powers that it funds, owns, and controls, have so successfully normalized the whole affair.

For a worker to murder their boss, “in cold blood”- this is violence, clearly understood. But for the boss to enforce conditions intolerable to human life, to force workers into overtime without extra pay, to refuse to investigate or act on safety concerns in the workplace, to keep dangerous outdated hardware in use after it should be in order to avoid investing capital in new means of production and go on squeezing profit out of the “productive capital” they have already invested until the last possible moment, and to do a million other little things that risk and shorten the lives of the collective worker- this is not conceived as violence, because it is so totally “normal.” It is murder for the worker to kill the boss; when the boss keeps the worker working for their profit by extraction of the worker’s produced surplus value until the last possible moment, in dangerous conditions, and stands in the way of their swift escape from those conditions, until it is too late and half a dozen workers die, then that is a tragic accident or, at worst, manslaughter. If I were to walk up to a stranger and say “when I push this button, I will shorten your life by ten years,” if the stranger could be sure I was telling the truth, then they would call correctly call pressing this magic button an act of violence against them, and would try to prevent it by any means necessary, even violent ones- and this would be justified, as self-defense. But the abuses of capital which lower the average age of the working class by decades, in prioritizing accumulation of surplus product as new capital to invest over the wellbeing of the human workers who make that surplus product, are not seen as violence because they are under capitalist political-economy so ubiquitous, so totally normal, that they are not even noticed, just as one does not notice individual water molecules while swimming in the sea.

And so, of course, the explosive resistance of a colonized population, being an exception to business as usual, is condemned; but their continual dispossession, which is the very essence of business as usual under capitalist-imperialism, is not, for, as Sigmund writes, they have been hostages all along. Even the liberal who may recognize something wrong in imperialist violence at its worst, like the present escalation of genocide in Gaza, will often blanch when told that this is only the explosive escalation of a violent reactionary negation that has already been raging more quietly for decades.

This contradiction in perception of violence in the bourgeois culture of capitalist-imperialism and its hegemonic social order (the large is not perceived, the small is perceived as large) is symptomatic, I believe, of liberal individualism. To further elaborate what I mean by “the personal subject as manufactured by the cultural superstructure of capitalism and the social order of Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie”:

1. People necessarily live in societies. Indeed, the nature of a person is being that exists as a process of becoming that is the sum and synthesis of all the material relations in one’s life, and the resolutions of those relations considered as material dialectics². Who am I? I am a writer, a relation between text and audience, fingers and keyboard, pen and paper; I am a worker, for I do a task for a client and receive a wage from a firm; I am a friend, a relation between me and others whom I love; these are only a few small fractions of what is a list of infinite length, but my selfhood is the synthesis that comes together out of myriad relations of interacting aspects of the material world. So, we must understand that the relations that are “normal” in a given political-economic system and state-social order shape the kinds of people that live under it. Part of the function of the social and cultural order of capitalism is to produce the kinds of persons most well-suited to live under capitalism: “normal” ruthless capitalists, “normal” obedient workers, and a helpless stratum of the unemployed for capital to hire when it booms, fire when it busts (and, in the colonies, peasants, semifeudal landlords, and the comprador and bureaucrat bourgeoisie).
2. Part of the kind of person bourgeois culture produces, furthermore, is liberal individualism. This is the obfuscation of the exact type of analysis we have just been doing. People are taught to think of themselves as absolute individuals, as souls existing in total isolation from both the material world and other people. So anything good that happens to me, I must deserve all the credit, and all the reward. And if anything bad happens to you, then it must be your fault for failing to “lift yourself up by your bootstraps,” and absolutely no one else’s. The most extreme and succinct statement of the liberal individualist thesis was made by former UK prime minister, neoliberal politician, and capitalist-imperialist war criminal Margaret Thatcher: “there’s no such thing as society³𝄒⁴.” It is clear how useful this ideology is to the maintenance of capitalism. For the person totally inculcated with this ideology cannot conceive of capital as being made out of the products of a million natural processes and a billion exploited workers’ hard toil: if a man is rich, this ideology says, it is because he has excelled so well⁵! Nor can they conceive of systemic injustices or contradictions in the very structure of society like those of exploitation or colonization (which, remember, does not exist): if a worker is poor despite working all day, it must be by their own ineptitude.

It is the liberal individualist mindset that includes and gives rise to this contradictory view of violence; for, if one can only conceive of activity as being the activity of individuals, then the vast motions of institutions and complex material relations synthesizing together millions of “individual” lives- armies, banks, states, capital- are simply too large to be conceived of, and
appear not to exist at all, except as a million small acts of “individuals,” each of which alone is so “normal” that it would be inconceivable for it to provoke moral outrage. The liberal individualist mindset of the perfect “capitalist person,” proletarian or bourgeois, under bourgeois culture simply does not allow them to conceive of what Engels calls “social murder”: “when society [or its ruling class and their institutions of rule, i.e. the big bourgeoisie, capital, and capitalist-imperialist states] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, and places them under conditions in which they cannot live.”⁶ And so, while if one person kills
dozens of others they are a “serial murderer,” if dozens die in warehouses owned by the same corporate conglomeration, that institution, that breathing and sucking body of parasitic capital, cannot be marched into a courtroom, and the deaths are so many “coincidences” and “misfortunes” and “tragedies.”

This individualist myopia and the contradictory perception it essentially includes and engenders are anathema to progressive, revolutionary, or anti-imperialist consciousness. One cannot understand how one stands in the historical process of the struggle of classes, in the contradictions between material aspects in civilization and the history-shaping struggles that emerge around their resolution and explosion, if one cannot even conceive of oneself as a member of a class, but only as a radically “free” “individual.” So the perfect “capitalist person,” the person perfectly trained by the institutions of bourgeois culture to fit into capitalist-imperialist political-economy, fails to see or perceive as violent the immense, systemic mechanisms of violent intrinsic to that political-economy; but, whenever capitalist media tells them to, or even simply when the little capitalist in their head tells them to, they stand ready to cry outrage and indignity at comparatively small acts of violence in response, which are more easily perceived as abnormal and exceptional.

What is the solution, the resolution of the contradictions in our minds as they have been manufactured by our backward culture? It is quite simple: we must invent a new kind of person.

Don’t be so startled! This is not such an unprecedented idea. In the classic socialist and communist, and in its developed form Marxist-Leninist, literature of the first half of the 20th century, one will find many references to the “New Socialist Man,” and sometimes the “New Socialist Woman.”⁷ In 21st century parlance, of course, we’d prefer to say “socialist people.” Every state-social order — be it the pre-scarcity world of the “primitive community,” the reactionary dictatorship of the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the post-class and post-scarcity world of future full-stage communism — produces, through its superstructural institutions of culture and education and ideology, the kind of person that is capable of living under it. So, the state-social order that exists under the economic system of capitalist-imperialism, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, produces “capitalist people,” people whose subjectivity and way of interacting in the world befit them to capitalism and its contradictory circuits of social intercourse; the construction of socialism necessitates that the nascent new state-social order, the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat on the road to abolition of classes and liquidation of state authority into full-stage communism, construct as part of itself a cultural superstructure which educates its citizens as people capable of living communist lives. This is part of the task of a Cultural Revolution.

The new socialist person cannot really be born until socialism is constructed in which such a person can live. At this point, with the Communist Party, leading a working semi-state government and state-social order of the working class and a United Front of progressive society, can embark on building on the base of socialist economic structures the revolutionary culture that sustains and nourishes that base in the continuing struggle toward full-stage communism. This is the task of the Cultural Revolution under socialism, the nourishing of socialist society through effort to raise the consciousness of the people to socialist personality, destroy bourgeois personality, and construct the revolutionary culture of what Lenin and Stalin called the “entire historic epoch” of the socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat on the road of continuing struggle toward world triumph for communism⁸, abolition of classes and states, and the resolution of all class contradictions in forming a world communist community. Such revolutionary developments, of course, must be guided with a concrete application of the scientific ideology of the proletarian revolution, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, to the conditions at hand.

The socialist person will be born with socialism- but we can and we must make a start on what will become socialist culture, socialist personality, now. Part of the United Front of a revolutionary movement, itself a nascent workers’ state power or D. of the P., must be the organizing of culture and intellectual activity toward this end, in service to the concrete struggle waged militarily by the Party and Army⁹. Let us raise up the call to write, sing, and think our way out of the contradictory worldview of bourgeois ideology, of liberal individualism, and into a communist mentality that sees all humanity as a dynamic dialectical unity of struggling opposites, that understands the inherent violence and struggle in existence under capitalism. A magazine like The Masses is a colossal part of this, which is why I am so proud to have made a few contributions to it. Painters, writers of fiction, rappers, poets- they also have a role to play.

But above all, we must reforge our thinking in struggle. Mao teaches us in On Practice: newer and more correct ways of thinking that resolve the contradictions in the old ones emerge in concrete struggle to resolve social contradictions in lived social reality; only thereafter can they be applied usefully. The new socialist personality will be forged in struggle, with the hot steel of the people’s Army in their hands, the songs of organized revolutionary cultural workers in their ears, and the wreckage of the capitalist-imperialist political-economic system and the state-social order of bourgeois dictatorship under their feet. To the frontlines! To the trenches! Forward to communism!

EDITORS NOTE: We would like to thank Kelly Sears for submitting this fine piece on violence. You can read more by Kelly on Medium and follow their Instagram: @queer.bolshevik2.

Footnotes, Citations

1. To explain the choice of Dole Fruit as an example: Chiquita Banana (formerly United Fruit Co.) is the most famous example of a US fruit company massively involved in imperialist violence, but Dole (formerly Standard Fruit Co.) is bloody too. There is a long history of corrupt control of the Honduran US-puppet government by Standard/Dole, greasing the gears of transnational capital gains with peasants’ and workers’ blood. In 1954, alleged Guatemalan government support for a strike against Standard in Honduras was part of the US’s propaganda offensive against the Guatemalan Arbenz government- which ended in a fascist coup and genocide against the Maya (a mostly peasant indigenous national population). Violence against peasants, and mostly peasant national minorities, has not abated since, in either country.
2. Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci elaborates this Dialectical Materialist theory in his essay “What is Man?”.
3. She said it in an interview with Woman’s Own, in 1987. This is the most popularly quoted form but what she exactly said was: “…and what is society? There’s no such thing!” This was in the context of decrying the alleged welfare dependence of workers, children, and the poor.
4. Earlier in the history of capitalism, a more roundabout and metaphysical expression to this pervasive, hegemonic attitude of modern bourgeois culture was made in the works of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who claimed to use logic to prove that the true kernel and essence of human, and all, existence was not anything material in the human body, but an infinitely indivisible, wholly immaterial, metaphysical spiritual soul (he called this a “monad,” a philosophical term which simply means the fundamental unit of existence, or else a “soul”). Though it originates before capitalism and the bourgeois state had even really come about in Leibniz’s home country of Germany (which at that time was many small statelets inhabiting the deteriorating husk of the once-mighty feudal state and society of the Holy Roman Empire; Leibniz’s lived in various of these), this misguided notion continues to loom and re-occur in bourgeois philosophy. Though it appears purely spiritual and contemplative, and is expressed as such in works like Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology, this idea expresses and is useful to ideas of bourgeois consciousness deeply steeped in political-economic realities.
5. In this respect, liberal individualism today serves a similar function to that which Calvinist theology more centrally served in an earlier phase of capitalism’s historical development.
6. Quotation from The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels, 1845, page 84. My lengthy parenthetical to amend what is meant by “society” is justified, as Engels himself gives a footnote to the same effect: “When as here and elsewhere I speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie.” The exact term “social murder” is used thrice in the book- pages 45, 84, and 91 of this edition. Engels credits his use of the term to one learned from “English working-men” and their “organs” themselves; what these press organs of the English proletariat were bravely expressing was the consciousness of a revolutionary proletariat who, in the course of consciousness-development in the dialectic of class struggle, had broken through the haze of bourgeois culture and liberal individualism as it then existed and begun to see the material reality of capitalist society.
7. For Example: “[Socialist construction in the USSR] has erected a powerful workers’ state; it has created a new social and economic system, in which the new socialist man is being formed; and it has brought into being that of which the finest minds of mankind have dreamed-socialism.” -“The Results of Socialist Construction in the USSR,” D.Z. Manuilsky, Seventh Comintern World Congress, 1935 (page 1,261, here).
8. See Stalin quoting Lenin in Chapter IV of Foundations of Leninism on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat- the state-socialist order of socialism, the rule of the liberated socialist proletariat as a democratic majority ruling class, which negates the reactionary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and continues struggle under socialism until final resolution of all class contradictions (full-stage communism).
9. Shining examples of such include militant arts organizations in revolutionary United Fronts, like ARMAS (Artists and Writers for the People) in the Philippines and MAP (Popular Artists’ Movement, allegedly defunct) in Perú.
10. Online Sources:
    • Yahoo finance live ticker record of the stock price of DOLE
    • “On Hostages,” by Comrade Sigmund
    • Well There’s Your Problem