"We have not yet passed beyond class morality…"

Recently I have been reflecting on an anecdote at the beginning of Mobo Gao's The Battle For China's Past regarding a presentation on the Cultural Revolution at a conference in South Korea.  After one presenter attacked the Cultural Revolution because of her parents' negative experience, an audience member stood up and asked the presenter about her family's background.  When the presenter admitted that her parents were members of a privileged intellectual class––a class whose privilege was targeted during this confusing period––the audience member replied, "So no wonder.  My father used to be head of the production team leader in my village.  He still recalls the Cultural Revolution with fond memories because that was his most brilliant years.  Those were years when the farmers felt proud and elated."  Gao's overall point was that our understanding of the past, and how we assess significant historical moments, is always filtered through our social position and the consciousness this position produces.

Furthermore, our ability to make moral judgments about the past and present––to call something like the Cultural Revolution, despite its clear failures, the high point of revolution, or to dismiss it as either a lamentable tragedy or heinous "abuse of human rights"––is never objectively separate from our class position or consciousness.  If we morally side with mass movements on behalf of the oppressed than we have to side with those great revolutions that empowered the oppressed masses and disempowered the exploiters and oppressors; if we morally side with business as usual, and accept that the liberal capitalist state of affairs is not synonymous with terrible violence and oppression but is in fact "liberating", then we will always be drawn to those liberal and conservative historical accounts that morally condemn this century's world historical revolutions.  As Engels argued in Anti-Duhring:

"[A]ll moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time.  And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonism, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. […] But we have not yet passed beyond class morality.  A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life." (Engels, Collected Works of Marx and Engels vol. 25, p. 88)

So when we make moral assessments and judgments we are always making them according to a class position and to believe otherwise is to imagine that there is a morality outside of history, Platonic notions of the good and the just, rather than to understand that ethics is eminently historical.  If we can speak of ethical universality, and I think we can, then it has to be based on a socio-historical understanding of the material nature of the human species, and since humans are currently not outside of class conflict, or free from historical structures of oppression, then we have to accept that such a universal understanding of ethics is an ethics in development, a morality that only become "really human" once humanity has been freed from the oppressive structures it itself has produced.

And yet there is a common sense understanding of morality that, often naturalizing liberal moralism, imagines there can be objective ethical judgements.  Amnesty International, regardless of what it sometimes is able to accomplish, functions according to the dogma of "human rights", a liberal understanding of morality based on the notion of individual rights bearers, calculating death statistics, and relying on dubious sources that they imagine to be objective.  The fact that Amnesty representatives in Nepal during the height of the Peoples War were seen as collaborators, supported the Royal Army, is something ignored when people assessed the statistical reports Amnesty produced during that period: believers in liberal morality did not ask questions about the sources, about whether or not an organization like Amnesty could really exist outside of the imperialist world system, or critically engage with the possibility that NGOs work, to greater or lesser degrees, in propping up global capitalism.  The organization can pass as "neutral", as if there can be neutrality in class war, and its statistics as "scientific", as if they were produced in a laboratory, under a microscope, by an observer who was not embedded in the larger class-divided ethical terrain.

I was again reminded of this failure to understand morality as a class-contested terrain when, a couple nights ago, I was talking to a comrade about the Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) and she was rightly complaining about a classmate who was presenting the normative North American mainstream media understanding of this organization.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru produced a thorough report human rights report about abuses in Peru during the Peoples War and, representing itself as an "independent" body, concluded that the Sendero Luminoso was responsibility for the majority of the violence.  And yet, a cursory investigation of this Commission should indicate, to anyone who is critical enough to examine the source they repeat without reflection, that it was far from "independent"––in fact, it was even less independent than other class-embedded Human Rights groups.  The Commission's chairman, for example, was Salomón Lerner Ghitis, a Peruvian businessman and politician who would eventually become Peru's Prime Minister.  And the rest of the Commission was stacked with former Peruvian military representatives (including an Airforce General), conservative Catholics, and Evangelical Missionaries.  There is no representation of the Peruvian peasantry in this commission; they were a priori barred since the majority of them (who make up the majority of Peruvian society) supported the Senderistas.  So trusting such a group to honestly assess a revolutionary war, when the majority of its members were anti-communist, is like filling an "independent commission" with members of the IDF and Kahanist settlers and then asking them to give us an accurate assessment of the Palestinian Intifida.

I am not arguing that the Sendero Luminoso was beyond reproach.  I think the organization degenerated in various areas due to an erroneous political line on the national question, and the cult of personality around Abimael Guzman ("Gonzalo Thought") that actually served to prevent the Sendero Luminoso from winning the Peoples War.  Nor am I arguing that they were not responsible for excesses.  What I am arguing, however, is that to use the supposedly "independent" Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a rational measurement of the activities of the Shining Path is in itself an ethical judgment made from a position of class.  Moving away from the Sendero Luminoso example, I would argue that so many leftists make this type of ethical judgment without even realizing they are ethically deciding to side with the morality of the ruling class which will *always* present every failed revolution as a crime against human rights––human rights understood, in this context, as a violation of the rights of the oppressor by those masses who don't want to be oppressed.

Even worse, so many people rely on these ruling class sources without even understanding what sources they are using.  Whenever I argue with irate liberals about Mao and the Chinese Revolution, I am shocked by how many of them do not understand that they are relying on the anti-communist, and extremely dubious, arguments originally made by John Foster Dulles (and later repeated, without any other sourcing, by Chang and Halliday), one of the pre-eminent USAmerican Cold Warriors (known for his "domino theory" of East Asia and for engineering the Shah's coup in Iran).  The source is forgotten, the argument normative because it is an argument that defends the state of the world as is––it is part of the common sense that treats capitalism as the end of history.  I have always argued that without investigation there should be no right to speak: if you're going to uncritically accept the ethical position of the ruling class, at least know your sources.  Simply arguing something is "common sense" only means that it is common sense for the moral sensibilities you have uncritically adopted––it is not common sense for those of us who support class revolution, it is not common sense for the majority of the world's oppressed populations who still believe that your villains are their heroes.

None of this is to say that the left should not be critical about its mistakes, failures, and excesses, let alone to simply accept every act of revolutionary violence as "moral".  But if the point is to critique from the left rather than the right, then we also have to critically engage with the necessity of revolutionary violence from the standpoint of the oppressed's morality.  This engagement, however, not only teaches us that the greatest violence is what is made normative by global capitalism––and that all revolutionary violence is primarily a tragic response to a context of ongoing terror––but forces us to ask difficult questions that are not always easily solved, are not clear-cut in the way that liberal ethicists would want them to be, and do not rely on the uncritical acceptance of bourgeois morality.  So when we understand that the oppressor at every stage of history has charged hir rebellious slaves with being "oppressive" and "violent" and "immoral", and that this charge is an insult for the slaves who make history, we will begin to understand ethics.