Post-Progressivism

The Case for Destructive Liberation

If the previous decade or two have been a time of continuous movement towards queer liberation, then this decade is a time of reaction, and it washes over us very strongly. The revolutionary wave of queer deterritorialization crystalizes and stops, like lava freezing into rock. While revolutionary momentum stutters to a halt, a reactionary wave rushes forth to try and undo what progress was made. It is, in general, a time of conservatism. Conservatives themselves, out-spoken, self-identified ones I mean, have the power, momentum and opportunity to establish a puritan regime over much of the globe. Progressives meanwhile, also turn to conservatism and puritanism, what was a crusade for justice and what it deemed morality turns inward against what it now considers unjust and immoral within itself, looking to build rules and barriers in a movement that is itself puritan and conservative. Make no mistake, the left is part of the reactionary wave as well, because what washes over us is not just a reactionary wave, as the tendency towards liberal ideas of morality give way to a reactionary puritanism that moves to spread its (chaste -disappointing) tentacles into each and every corner of the progressive movement.

Progressivism, if it is to be understood, as it should, as a movement for individual liberation and autonomy, is on the back foot right now, we ought to sacrifice ourselves for morality, so society says. If we are to learn from this and enable ourselves to move forward, we must first understand how the progressive movement itself fell into puritanism, after all, while puritan waves come and go it is progressive collaboration that makes this crisis special. The answer, I propose, is that the main culprit is liberalism. Now, there are progressive movements that do not indulge in a liberal epistemology, such as progressive marxists for example, but the progressive movement in general has been a liberal project, that is to say, a humanist one. It orients itself on a mission for equality, justice and human rights, viewing liberation as something to be achieved under the liberal system through law and civil institutions. Every progressive fight has been entirely or in part for concessions under a liberal regime, whether it be marriage, adoption or other legislation. Not to say that those fights aren’t important, only that the progressive movement thus far has been unable to imagine itself outside of the liberal state, that it has so far framed its struggle as one to have liberal law adjust itself to the natural equality that should be granted to all human beings or even living beings. It establishes the human being as a base, gives it natural, unalienable rights and then demands that liberal law, that the regime of rights and duties, adjust itself to this rightful position. So to say, it is liberal.

This liberalism which has been so far a foundational structure to progressivism and its goal of liberation only serves to hinder it, and ultimately limit it in its potential, that is to say, there will not be liberation under capitalism. Tying progressivism into liberalism ties it by necessity to capitalism, structuring rhetoric and ideology around the liberal epistemology that justifies and upholds capitalism, making the progressive movement subjected to and making so it is mediated by Technocapital, making it susceptible to being co opted and assimilated as it has been now. Its co option and assimilation into Technocapital then makes the movement itself fragile, on a macro level it is subjected to the whims of political operations which prioritize political machinations over liberation. In an electoral sense, progressive movements are disposable, as we see in the US, queer people and other marginalized groups are meant to be thrown under the bus whenever the political climate calls for it.¹ For this reason, if at least from a purely strategic standpoint, the progressive movement as a movement for liberation cannot stand alongside liberalism, it must stand on its own two feet. Though this explains the sterility and incapacity that permeates the progressive movement, this does not explain the other part, that is, how does progressivism turn itself into puritanism? Well, it is liberalism, but how so?

Liberalism, despite its own claims, is not individualistic (Not that individualism should be aspired to), rather it is a system of self-sacrifice and self-denial, Stirner writes:

The true human being is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore cast off your individuality or separation in which egoistic inequality and discord dwell, and devote yourself entirely to the true human being, the nation, or the state. Then you will count as human beings and have all that is the human being’s; the state, the true human being, will entitle you to all that belongs to it, and give you “human rights”; the human being gives you its rights!

Such is the speech of the bourgeoisie.²

And in doing so portrays how the liberal system has established itself as one of self-denial, one centered around the Human Being and His upkeep, what is egoistic, what is your own affair remains a private matter, one that you keep to yourself. As a consequence of this, the crusade against egoism does not at all subside under liberalism and so under progressivism, rather it remains at large pursuing its main goal of expunging society of that which is self-interested. It is a system of upkeep, of defensiveness, what is being pursued under liberal progressivism is not a breaking free of barriers but a locking in of egoists, wherein all of the repressive and oppressive forces in society are deemed as immoral “outside” tendencies which a society must defend itself against. Conservatism is thus seen not as that which keeps you from being free, but that which is too free for a healthy society. This defensive position only serves to delineate and organize, in an attempt to contain selfish egoism it captures the free flow of desire into a wider order which represses this desire, it folds itself into moralism. It is this fear of egoism that brings the progressive to shout “Ban alcohol! Ban pornography! Ban libertinage! Down with the egoist who thinks only of himself!” in a chorus with the conservatives. All this to say, progressivism rather than liberating the individual becomes a series of orders of what you cannot do, and in doing so rather than potentializing any liberation it only recreates a system of rule and repression. It becomes puritanical.

What I propose then, is that if we are to maintain a movement that aims for the liberation of the individual (the Unique) from all systems of oppression, it must be a Post-Progressivism That rejects liberalism and its defensive stance, rather it takes an offensive position, and defines itself around the dismantling and undoing of systems of repression and reaction. It is deterritorialization, the undoing of the conservative status quo, that must be the aim of such a movement. Yes, Iconoclasm as the main demand, what I propose then is not a genealogy of progressivism that starts with Kant, passes through Robespierre, and lands in the US with the many liberal thinkers of the 20th century, but one that starts at the devil, De Sade³, and passes through all of the iconoclastic rebels that took the destruction of the conservative status quo as their mission before reaching the post-structuralists like Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari who deconstructed much of the panopticon we live in. The movement which has so far liberated has been the movement which has deconstructed the conservative, and it will remain so, it is through destruction and the deconstruction of all icons and churches that one can finally be free. As such, Post-Progressivism must not articulate itself through liberal politics, it must be, by itself, insurrectionary, one that starts at the life-style on an atomic level and explodes forward through collective action. Only such action can possibly aim to liberate the individual, to escape the bindings of the systems of oppression that lord over us today, because only such action operates on a level as to free the flow of desire, to allow the individual (the Unique) to free itself from being captured and subjugated by wider systems.

The task at hand for Post-Progressivism then, is to articulate a form of liberation that overcomes both the liberalism of classical progressivism without at the same time turning to Sadean apathy. It does so through a Post-Structuralism which allows it to deconstruct oppressive power relations through a perspective that encompasses the general relationship of oppressor-oppressed and permits the articulation of resistance in the sphere of the oppressed against the oppressor. It does not become, then, a simple narcissistic egoism, that aims to deconstruct only through a narrow individualist lens, but it takes into view one’s participation, and sacrifice into a wider system of oppression. Taking in consideration both one’s place in the machinic cog of oppression, as well as necessitating a constant process of resistance against those very same institutions. To use Deleuzian terms, Post-Progressivism demands a constant becoming-woman. Only that such a demand is not prescriptive, it is descriptive, one should not be that way, it is only that liberation is that way. One constantly resists not as a cause one takes for themselves but through a cause based on nothing, through egoistic living, insurrection.

If we are to remove ourselves from this conservative swamp in which we are stuck, a maintaining of classical liberalism will only bring us back here again, it is through insurrection, iconoclasm, immoral rebellion and active life-stylist resistance that an outside can truly be found.

1. It should be noted this isn’t exclusive to the center-left or even liberalism per say, as certain strains of marxism treat marginalized people with this very same disposability, prioritizing class issues while side-lining or even rejecting outright gender, racial, queer, disability issues.

2. Stirner, Max 1844. The Unique and It’s Property. Baltimore: Underworld Amusements, 2017

3. In his rebellion against all good moral norms, misguided and regressive as it was.