Daily Times

“The first man,” Freud says, “who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization” – yet he complains that civilization has changed nothing. “What progress we are making”, he says, “In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me. Now they are content with burning my books”. Freud probably had no inkling that those burning in the fire of faith spare neither books nor human beings. People accustomed to the life of an inferno shape the world according to their living conditions.Capitalism can offer nothing better than this.

Christchurch has an unfortunate history of suffering. In 2011, the natives endured an earthquake that took over a hundred lives. Despite its devastating outcome, the human-inflicted calamity of Friday 15th March, probably the sixth biggest tragedy to hit this nation of five million, was far more horrific when a white supremacist, consumed and crazed by hate, brutally massacred a mass of worshippers in two mosques. Little did they know that the house of peace would become a slaughterhouse.They had the faith, and so did the killer. “Faith”, Nietzsche says,is “not wanting to know what is true”. He adds, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything”.

After the World War, the defeat of fascism opened the possibility of a better world free from sufferings, strains and stains of race and faith, and ultimately free from the alienated objectified labor. The massive progress of human potentialities unfolded the possibility of a world dominated by technological innovation with the promise of prolonging human life and reducing painful existence and freedom from the neurotic necessity of work itself. The just, equitable division of social and natural resources was heralding a future that humans had striven for from centuries. Humanity was about to achieve its destiny.

The snake, incapable of changing its skin, is apt to stifle. The same holds true for capitalism

Life,as an end, was about to become qualitatively different from life as a means. However, a slim minority who held the reins of power in the ‘free world’ did not like the freedom of the majority except the freedom to choose between black and white, which is always the same, an un-freedom to be abjured. “The capitalist … is tolerant.His love for the people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be”. The hatred is about the emancipation, which besides conformity is inherent in this exchange system. Whereas it produces its grave diggers, it develops the indoctrinated automatons who understand their slavery yet continue to reproduce it in one form or another.

The snake, incapable of changing its skin, is apt to stifle. The same holds true for capitalism. Whenever in crisis, capitalism changes its skin and turns into fascism; a mélange of religion, race, and nation, its favorite place of refuge. For Adorno, fascism represented the realization of Western rationality, since the fascist reason maintains its domination through integration and unification. Everything from literature to art, beauty and bomb become equivalent; all dissimilar are comparable, since they are reduced to quantities. The world is a marketplace; everything else is a commodity for sale to friends and foes alike.

Capitalism is an innately barbaric system where things are produced to be exchanged and not to fulfill the basic human needs. In abundance, scarcity prevails. The process necessitates control over things.Domination over things leads to the domination over human beings, managed through consent and coercion. The violence is eternal.It is perpetrated through media and the means of destruction – whichever is useful.

Despite its inherent tendency of violence, it demands tolerance, a farce from the humanity that suffers under its wrath of war and fake, manufactured peace. Anything that is likely to impede the flow of profit, may it be color, caste or creed is abhorrent, it must be put off but not weeded out completely. When crisis lurks, the hatred stemming from the malady comes in handy to divide the people and to counter their subversive power through the age-old chauvinistic slogans of race, faith and nation.

The madness has a method.Dearth, deficiencies and degradation can be vented through the desublimated Eros.Yet if aggression is not gratified, the Hyde parks, the psychotherapists and the street protests are the alternative vistas open to attain catharsis through peaceful means. “Non-violence is normally not only preached but exacted from the weak, it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and it does not seriously harm the case of the strong”. “People tolerate the government which tolerates the opposition”(Marcuse). As long as the opposing words do not transform into deeds, the aura of change remains restricted to the change of faces and not any concrete alteration in the system.

The impregnable fortresses of the imperialist states are crumbling.The faster the process, the greater the emphasis on tolerance and violence will be.The two contradictory demands in the given conditions are innately unrealizable. There is an injunction to practice intellectual honesty, which for Adorno is nothing more than the sabotage of thought. In recent times, humanity is plagued by the affliction of white supremacy and racial profiling/hatred. Their understanding is vital since they are the “self-assertions of the capitalist class, integrated into barbaric collective”, having a definite purpose of concealing its dominance in production.

Those who fall for the snare of faith and race become the easiest prey, the cannon fodders of capitalism. A hungry man is an angry man; he is more lethal if his class is facing ultimate devastation. The slogans of blut and boden, of final solution, become more meaningful; music to the ear of a hypochondriac xenophobe who refuses to see beyond his immediate interests.Jews, Muslims, Marxists,people of color or someone else – anyone who is different is the other, hence an intruder and needs liquidation.

People under capitalism “do not tolerate, they suffer established policies” (Marcuse). They tolerate what, in reality, is intolerable that includes the policies, attitudes and opinions that are inherently anti-people and serve the cause of oppression. The inherent aggression demands an enemy.The capital readily produces one, the guns blaze, bodies fall, the outcry is raised, condemnation and slogans of ‘them’ and ‘us’ are blown and after the drama, the tragedy alongside the cadaver is buried. Life under capitalism continues to march on the gory passage as usual.

The political leaders continue to blame the terrorist, the lone wolf striker, or hatemongers like Fraser Anning without challenging the system that creates this mindset. The system submits the reason to new facts, which appear bigger and universal, but they are hollow lacking any substance since they do not communicate the real message – the repressive power of the whole that undermines the thought.

This is happening in the world generally and in New Zealand especially when on an eventful day the gall of hate drenched in human blood spread the gloom. The world is in shock but not the masters. They know the chalice of poison they offer culminates in death and disaster. The means of destruction they produce and sell entitle them to be the master. Akin to the ‘civilized world’, in this grisly business, where sun continues to shine, both Australia and New Zealand, keep making hay. For modern Shylocks, invention of arms is the mother of necessity. Meanwhile, those who died prematurely have indicted the civilization as savagery.

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani writer. He has authored several books on socialism

Published in Daily Times, March 26^th 2019.