Victims: Real & Invented

2,445 words

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

There are two distinct ways in the modern world to be a victim. The first is to be an individual who suffers from an act of evil, moral or physical, deliberately inflicted by another individual or individuals. Any outside observer will immediately experience vicariously what it must feel like to succumb to violence, depredation or fraud. A woman raped, a man robbed and beaten, a child sexually molested by an adult, an elderly person defrauded of his life savings by a confidence man – with any of these, one reflexively empathizes with the victim and feels loathing and contempt for the perpetrator. Both the innocence of the victim and the culpability of the aggressor are unassailable. The moral polarity is inescapable and primal.

The second way to be a victim is a more complicated story and requires the mediation of theoretical constructs.  In fact, this kind of victim is a theoretical construct of a particular sort that is at once compelling, broadly encompassing and far reaching.

The theoretically-constructed victim sprung from the brain of a German, Jewish theorizer of mythic stature, Karl Marx, in the form of a Manifesto, the intention of which was not only to announce the existence of a historically determined class of victims, but to stir them to action against their victimizers as well.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes[…]Workers of the world arise and unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. (The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Herein lies the theoretical foundation from which emerged the prototype “victim” of the modern age, one identified as member of an oppressed “class,” produced by the “laws of historical necessity.” These “laws” (asserted to be both explanatory and predictive) Marx himself claimed were a momentous discovery, and one cannot but be deeply impressed by the arrogance of his radical reductionism. For all of the richness and complexity in how it might seem to unfold, history, peeled down to its essential core, is for Marx a story of unrelenting oppression, featuring a world of human beings who fall into two conflicting camps, victims and victimizers. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

All social intercourse, however benign or innocent its appearances may present themselves, is about someone using and dominating someone else. The identity of Marx’s victims is not immediately and strikingly apparent as it is with the first kind of victim. It must be discovered by a properly accoutered intellectual class using the hermeneutical lens of “dialectical materialism.” Thus emerges the “theorist,” a privileged “knower,” as we see with Marx himself. But the knower is also a “doer,” a revolutionary destined to take power and complete the destruction of the bourgeois oppressors.

Marx’s formation and family origins were bourgeois, not a trivial detail to note as it points to an insidious element of self-hatred deeply embedded in the dynamics of Marxist theorizing. Theorists of revolution from Marx and Engels in the 1840s to Bill Ayres and many of the U.S. radicals in the 1960s claiming Marx as their inspiration tended to come from affluent, socially advantaged families. The bourgeois ruling class as “an instrument of exploitation” was not just a detached, theoretical act of judgment; it erupted from a deep personal animus as well and as such is suggestive of pathological motivations and implacable hatred. Successful communist revolutions did not merely overthrow the ruling class, they savagely annihilated it. Theorists such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, who ruled the masses in large portions of the globe on behalf of the exploited class, turned out to be mass murderers and destroyers of epic proportions.

The role of the theorist is critical because the victims may not know that they are victims and unable even to recognize their oppressors for what they are and what they do. Their consciousness needs to be “raised,” a moral and psychological awakening expertly guided by the theorists. Also, the exploitation is imposed by a rationalization of the oppressive status-quo. Thus, another piece of the theorist’s labor is to expose the rationalization as an elaborate disguise of the identity of the oppressor and to illuminate the façade of his legitimacy. The victim, insofar as he believes the substance of the oppressor’s rationalized version of his oppression, assents to the conditions of his own bondage. The theorist is a “de-legitimizer.” His wreckage of the status-quo will open the path to the victim’s “liberation.”

Unlike the first kind of victim, Marx’s victim plays a starring and triumphal role in a grand historical morality play. (“The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” a favored quote of starry-eyed lefties.) By virtue of the part his victim plays and the suffering he endures as a member of an exploited class he becomes endowed with a transcendent moral superiority. This is because he functions at a huge disadvantage within a system that from the beginning is completely rigged against him by powerful forces that not only exploit him but conceal the exploitative relationship from him. Bertrand Russell has called this “the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed”.

Because the system itself and those who run it are thoroughly corrupt, those who are its victims are innocent and even heroic insofar as they struggle against the system. Whatever resistance the victim makes against the exploiters and oppressors justifies his methods. Marx envisioned his oppressed and down trodden proletariat as a force of fury and rectification whose violence in service to a revolution would put a righteous end to the exploitative system that was the cause of their suffering, their victimhood. Stalin wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1930 a letter that captures not only the sense of moral superiority of the forces of liberation, but a seeming eager anticipation of an ensuing season of violence and destruction resembling the fascist affinity for “therapeutic violence”.

We are for a liberating, anti-imperialist, revolutionary war despite the fact that such a war, as is known, not only is not free from the ‘horrors of bloodshed’ but abounds in them. (Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2004, 25)

Marx’s concept of “class struggle” is the imbedded premise in all genuine historical understanding and the engine of human progress. It has deeply insinuated itself into our thinking and interpretation of social conflict, reaching far beyond his failed prediction of a titanic clash of the proletariat and the capitalist exploiters that would culminate in a world of material plenty, free of domination and exploitation. The most compelling, enduring feature of Marx’s morality play is the notion of the morally privileged victim. Achieving victim status within this framework entitles one to immunity from the existing order’s norms because they are invented and enforced by the oppressor. They serve only his interest and advantage.

Two key things emerge from this immunity. First, the absence of moral limitations on what the victim can do to engage the oppressor class is greatly empowering, “liberating” to employ a morally charged term from the Marxist Wörterbuch. Whatever he does to bring the system down is permissible because the system is inherently unjust and oppressive. Law is a capitalist tool of domination; morality is a bourgeois fraud, and thus the legal and moral norms of the existing order can have no claim on any of its victims. Lying, theft and murder are permissible if they advance the victim class’s cause and ultimate victory. (See, Charles Mills “The Moral Epistemology of Stalinism,” Politics & Society, V. 22, No. 1, March 1994, 37-51)

Second, the oppressor class for all of its iniquities remains bound to its own bourgeois norms and legal system. Thus, if in its defense its members lie, break promises, suborn and corrupt officials, steal and murder, they betray their own professed principles and demonstrate further their utter corruption, hypocrisy and loss of legitimacy.

With this kind of “differential” in moral boundaries, whatever the outcome of the struggle between the victim and the oppressor, the victim prevails. If he wins, he has heroically participated in the righteous overturning of an unjust order and succeeded in extracting himself and his fellows from the jaws of exploitation. The world thereafter is a more decent, just and happy place.  If he loses in the struggle to the lords of reaction, he becomes a tragic hero of resistance, overwhelmed by superior material force. The “struggle” continues. Even his defeat, however, testifies to the raw power, the amoral character, and voracious malevolence of the rigged system he failed to bring down. He forever wears the martyr’s crown.

Consider the Spanish Civil War that ended in 1939. It has been mythologized by the left as democracy’s finest hour of tragic-heroism, one act in a perfect Marxist morality play. The progressive, democratically elected Republican government, struggled valiantly against great odds. It was, alas, abandoned by the Nazi-appeasing British and French, and ultimately crushed by Spanish fascism in collusion with and abetted by Hitler and Mussolini. The history of this civil war, interpreted from this perspective, exonerates the losers in the conflict as innocent victims of fascist aggression and accentuates the brutality and the innate atavism of twentieth-century fascism.

With the struggle of oppressor and oppressed as the core of historical reality, the year 1945 marks a fundamental turning point in the history of theoretical victimhood. WWII was a war of good versus evil in which, unlike the Spanish Civil War, the good guys prevailed. They crushed the bad guys, the fascists, who were so very bad… because?

Well, here is the crux of this “turning point.” It can be captured with a single word, the most prolific, frisson-producing word in our twenty-first century moral vocabulary – “racism.” In the WWII historical “struggle,” the bad guys were “racists.” The good guys were “democrats,” a word that would become a synonym for “anti-fascists.” They were all about “making the world safe for democracy,” as in a world where everyone would be … “equal,” and, as FDR effused in 1944, free from want and fear, a kind of one-upmanship of Marx.”

With the conclusion of the war in 1945, there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that the good guys had won. The Third Reich was in smoking ruins. The most evil man in the world had blown his brains out in a Berlin bunker, and the corpse of a battered Mussolini dangled upside down above a gas station in Milan beside his unfortunate mistress. A more decisive material and symbolic triumph of good over evil could not conceivably be imagined.

The bad news was that the good guys had won. Evil was crushed, but Marx’s reductionist, moral historiography had taken a firm hold in the minds of the triumphalist, western intellectuals. You see, without evil, the arc in “the arc of the moral world bending toward justice” is done bending, and Marx, the head moralist, who was all about the “bending” part, would have to be cashiered. What now, comrades?

In order to make sense of the post WWII world, the good guys needed to keep evil alive and well. It was needed to play a critical role in how the victors would go forward in rationalizing their use of power in service to “democracy.” Good guys aren’t “good” without bad guys.

The military defeat of fascism did not mean that “fascism” was vanquished. The racism that induced the white Germans and Italians to embrace fascism was very much alive. And given that their “whiteness” was shared by all European heritage people, well, “whiteness” was going to turn into a big problem. “Racism” would fill the void as the sociological driving force and, world-wide. “People of color” would emerge as the new theoretical victim, replacing the predominantly white, “racist” proletariat. Since white people are inherently “racist,” they are also, latently, if not openly, “fascist.” Donald Trump, somehow, comes to mind.

Such a theoretical turn could not be more opportune for enthusiasts of Marx’s moral-struggle historiography. The causality of evil is no longer rooted in an economic structure of the unjust ownership of the “means of production” – a structure that could be rectified in a Bolshevik-style “revolution” with a “socialist workers’ paradise” outcome.

The success of twentieth-century communists in overthrowing the capitalist oppressor only further immiserated the victims, the members of the proletariat who were supposed to emerge prosperous, free and equal. The failure of communism to deliver on its promises was confirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The evil of “racism” has a more profound and less “fixable” structure because “racism” is more abstract and protean than “capitalism,” more formidable, and impervious to any forces to arrest it. Which means, practically speaking, that “racism” is a permanent fixture of contemporary society. No dispute about who the “good guys” are, and why they get carte blanche to deal with the “bad guys.”. Worse, “racism” has proved to be so fecund in producing “victims” that it serves as a template for the production of further theoretical victims, while the victimizer remains singular and increasingly wicked. Thus, the multiplier effect: “sexism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” and of recent vintage, “transphobia,” a cornucopia of victim-classes, and a massive governmental regulatory and legal edifice to remediate the onslaught of grievances and enforce compliance as matter of “civil rights.”

The “civil rights” movement, initiated post WWII, was animated by “the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed,” the moral foundation for the proliferation of theoretical victims. These victims have now swollen into a malignant mass and accorded an impregnable, transcendent moral superiority that puts their oppressors (us) in a permanent bind. These victims, to put it in Marx’s own words, have “expropriated the expropriators.” For those still enjoying their “white privilege,” distracted by the upcoming Superbowl, March Madness, Netflix, CNN and Fox News chatterboxes, Mike Johnson’s fitness (?) as Speaker of the House, I’m sorry: you failed to notice. There’s been a “revolution.” You’ve been “expropriated.”

Time now for the counter-revolution! Time to overthrow the entire wretched Marxist apparatus of theoretical victimhood along with all of its manipulative, phony moralizing and self-serving dishonesty.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.-
-H.L. Mencken