Faceless reflections

Capitalist individualism and liberal idealism combine for a double erasure

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Iranians have been under an unprovoked imperial assault from the US and Israel for over a week now. Those of you who read my stuff know my position on the matter. My goal here is not to discuss why I think that the only correct moral and political line is unyielding anti-imperialism. There are lots of pieces making that argument and I don’t think I can add much of substance to these arguments.

What I want to try to do is to examine reasons for another phenomenon that has become apparent in the leadup to the US/Israeli aggression and that has been amplified—at least by my algorithms—since the bombing started. This would be the dancing Iranian diasporans. You’ve seen these videos, Iranian people who don’t live in Iran dancing with monarchist, Israeli, or American flags as a way of showing just how happy they are that their country is being liberated by Israeli and American bombs.

There are also plenty of videos of angry Iranians scolding leftists and activists who dare to show solidarity with Iran over being carpet bombed by Western imperialists. How dare they? Do they not care about real Iranian voices? How can people who have never lived in Iran and suffered under the brutality of the theocratic regime even understand what it is like? We in the West have no idea how bad things have to be in order to cause someone to pray for American bombs. Similar conversations are occurring regarding Cuba and Venezuela, with the most glaring example being María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for continually calling for the US to bomb her country over the years, only to be kicked aside by Trump and dismissed as a possible leader after his kidnapping of Maduro at the beginning of the year.

One response to this line of thinking is to say that these people are just buying into American propaganda. After all, the mainstream media feeds a constant narrative of American exceptionalism and the abject and self-evident evil of countries that the US sanctions or is at war or hoping to go to war with. So Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, China, and others are de-facto portrayed as criminal enterprises, socialist or communist or theocratic regime hellscapes. Demonized wholesale.

So on the one hand, the country stands in as a monolithic idea of everything bad and threatening about an enemy of the US. But on the other, as demonstrated by the dancing diasporans and those who demand we “listen to the people”, certain individuals are given credibility as authentic and authoritative voices from the country. These “voices of the people” are then juxtaposed with the position of “the regime” to convince us that the “real” Iranians are against the regime and that if we would only listen to these real Iranians we would understand why all the real Iranians are celebrating being carpet bombed. Of course, all of the videos of dancing diasporans are shown by Western media, while the millions of people who mourned the Ayatollah’s death and the deaths of the schoolgirls killed in a double-tap strike are not shown. And if they are shown or acknowledged, we are told we can be sure that there are many millions more Iranians who are celebrating the American bombs in the privacy of their homes, afraid to do so openly because of the regime that killed tens of thousands of their own people last month.

I suggest that this conflicted stance on the issue, taken predominantly by Western commentators and members of the Iranian diaspora, reflects the convergence of two ideological pillars of modern society: capitalist individualism and liberal idealism. Both of these ideologies, while being held up as the paragon of recognition of the rights and dignity of all humanity, in reality constitute a double erasure of people whose rights and dignity are most at risk or actively being violated. The most visible current victims of this erasure are the Iranian people inside the country who are in support of their country’s resistance to US imperialism.

Capitalist individualism

Capitalist individualism is the idea that we are all just independent economic agents who seek to maximize our own benefits. This idea is ubiquitous in society. It is codified in our economics. This individualism emerged historically along theological developments that said that individuals had to pay for their own sins (I’ve written at length about this theological shift here). Before that, the sin of humanity was considered as a total debt that needed to be paid to God, but Protestant theology said that Jesus paid not only the price for all of our sins collectively, but individually, so people started to consider themselves apart from their social relations for really the first time in history.

It is also not surprising that these changes in theology were accompanied by development of the capitalist mode of production. This mode of production, among other things, led to the majority of the public being forced into wage labor to survive and workers being separated from the product of their labor, paid only enough to sustain their own lives while the rest of their labor generated profit for the capitalists. The end result of the labor process, the commodity, hid the social process—the labor—that went into it.

As capitalists and rent-seekers expanded into more and more areas of our lives, more and more things became just another means to turn a profit. Thus, more and more of our lives became commodified. This was ramped up into overdrive during the last 50 years of the neoliberal era where anything that differentiates us from others is turned into a marketable asset or something to be commodified and profited from. In our struggle to differentiate ourselves from others, to cultivate our own unique brand in order to accumulate more money or social capital, we unwillingly or willingly commodify our identities.

This commodification of our identity has led to the current quagmire of liberal identity politics. Anything that differentiates us from others, any intersectional identity, is held up as proof that our lived experience of oppression is totally different and not understandable to anyone who does not share our particular constellation of identities. If you are a man, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a woman. If you are a white woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black woman. If you are a black straight woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black LGBTQ woman. If you are a black LGBTQ neurotypical woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black LGBTQ woman with ADHD…

These identities can be amplified ad finitum. In many ways, our society encourages this type of differentiation, as we have to demonstrate what our individual contribution will bring to a given situation—what value will you add to this company? To be clear, this is not a diatribe against wokeness, and it is absolutely true that different identities lead to different experiences of deprivation and suffering under capitalism. But as should be obvious, the end result of this obsession with identity is that solidarity becomes impossible. So capitalist individualism, rather than providing us with the opportunity to realize and be our best selves—a realization that can only come as we work out our selves in relation with others—cuts us off from meaningful social relationships. The only thing that is left is a black hole of ever-increasing differentiation. In this, however, the unique and individual combination of our identities is lost and we become a tick mark on a list depending on which identity is required. The sum total of our identities, and so the whole individual, which can only be understood in reference to our social relations, disappears, or, we might say, is erased. We are so invested in rejecting similar identities, in differentiating ourselves from those around us, that we, like same-charged atomic particles, repel one another in perpetuity. At best we can coalesce around a shared identity for a while, but soon enough, we feel the urge to differentiate ourselves further.

This is not merely a conscious choice on our part or an indication of selfishness. The capitalist system selects and chooses which identities will generate social capital and the identities that are fit for purpose change as the needs of the system requires. The system provides the imperative to amplify certain identities over others. And only certain combinations will do. This is why in the current imperialist moment only the dancing diasporans are acceptable, while those mourning the Ayatollah are not. Only the Western Iranians are acceptable, with their botoxed lips and shiny hair and short skirts, while those in the full burka are unacceptable and victims of a totalitarian theocracy. Only those cheering for the bombs are acceptable, while those ripped apart by them or smothered by noxious clouds or poisoned rain are hidden behind the dancing smiles. Thus, identities that correspond to the Western imperialist narrative of liberation of the oppressed and repressed Iranian people—particularly women—are selected and amplified, erasing the millions of Iranians who stand for the revolution and against US imperialism.

Liberal idealism

If capitalist idealism constitutes one method of erasure, liberal idealism is the other. Liberal idealism here refers to the abstraction of real lives and material conditions behind the lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, human rights on the one hand and totalitarianism, theocracy, terrorist state, etc… on the other. Both of these strategies have the effect of flattening the real lives and livelihoods of people into faceless mirrors that reflect whatever the observer already believes. This is the way that societies differentiate between “us” and “them”. The abstractions serve a useful purpose because they can be molded to fit whatever definitions are most useful to the state at a given time. For this reason the amorphous nonspecificity of liberal ideals are a feature, not a bug. Most in the West will have been conditioned to believe that the ideal social order is a liberal democratic capitalist one. Only this order can provide humans with freedom. Everything else is unacceptable or is only a transitory phase in the eventual adoption of democracy. It is simply unthinkable that given the choice, everyone would not adopt a liberal, Western-style democracy. Whether or not a given democracy actually upholds the ideals of freedom and liberty is beside the point. The ideal is what is important.

Negative ideals are just as powerful. In the case of the current situation in Iran, Westerners, having spent at least the last almost 50 years being told about how Iran was evil and an enemy to the West and repressed and brutalized its own citizens—particularly women—and was trying to develop a nuclear weapon so it could kill all Americans, have a hard-to-shake idealized version of Iranians in mind already. This no doubt is why even the most well-intentioned critics of the current US imperial aggression often feel the need to caveat their condemnation of the bombings with a criticism of the Iranian government. To be clear, the Iranian state, like any other state, is not above criticism, but the criticism must not succumb to liberal idealism. Critiques often focus on human rights issues that are amplified by imperial propaganda while failing to acknowledge the positive aspects of the revolution. Conditions of instability and deprivation are blamed on the government rather than the imperial sanctions and blockades. The imbalanced use of the word “regime” to refer to the Iranian government while never being used to refer to any government in the West is a prime example of the type of abstraction I’m referring to here.

This type of idealism, then, has a twofold erasing effect. On the one hand the image of an oppressed people struggling to free themselves from a totalitarian regime evokes both the democratic ideals of freedom and liberty and so automatically privileges the Iranian diasporan voices that are amplifying the imperialist propaganda. On the other this framing excludes voices that are supportive of the Iranian state’s resistance to imperial aggression, demonizing them as anti-American, extremist, or communist. The overall effect is to erase the voices of Iranians inside the country that are rejecting US imperialism.

Beyond the reflection

The historical trajectory of Iran, particularly since the beginning of the 20th century, has followed two major trends. First, when the Iranian government is favorable to Western corporate interests, the West supports them. This is regardless of the government’s record on human rights. When the Iranian government threatens Western corporate interests, the West does not support them (and overthrew their government). This lack of support is often framed in the language of being concerned with human rights or democracy. But the lack of concern for human rights that the US actually has is evident in them turning a blind eye to even the grossest human rights violations, state repression and violence, or lack of liberal democracy in countries with which they have a cozy corporate relationship.

This admittedly cursory material analysis should at least help us move past any of the liberal idealism that is currently being applied to the situation. History teaches us that the primary reason that the US engages in foreign policy and imperialist aggression is to protect its corporate interests. This fact must be the underlying truth behind all analyses of the US’s actions in the world. We cannot get sucked into the talk of liberation, freedom, democracy, and human rights. We cannot buy into and amplify the propaganda about totalitarian and repressive regimes that gives imperialists license to kill. The time for criticizing the government of a country under imperialist assault is not when the bombs are falling. Treating American bombs as an act of liberation flies in the face of every single historical example. American imperialists care nothing for the lives of the people in the countries they bomb. They care only for the markets and resources. Of this we can be absolutely sure. Centuries of evidence and hundreds of millions of lives testify. Life will not get better for Iranians under a dictatorship of American capital.

For these reasons we must reject and push back against the imperial propaganda that is being fed to us. That is erasing Iranians. We should realize that the identity markers of the people whose voices are being amplified by the Western media have been selected by a capitalist machine that cares only for reproducing itself through imperialism. These dancing diasporans do not speak for the majority of Iranians, and their calls for more bombs should be treated with the contempt they deserve. Supporting the proletariat of Iran right now means amplifying anti-imperialist voices and fighting against imperialism and its supports in our own countries. We must look beyond the reflection of liberal idealism into the faces of the people behind the platitudes and abstractions. We must amplify their voices. And we must support their continuing revolution.