I have often of late been tempted – and given way to temptation in the privacy of my home – to spew hatred at the ego-fixated narcissist Johnson and his wooden ventriloquist’s dummy Starmer. It feels like a fully warranted but somehow demeaning emotion. But is it? I am reading China Mieville’s excellent A Spectre, Haunting, a commentary on the Communist Manifesto’. In it he has a section querying the role of ‘hatred’ in progressive as well as regressive politics. While the case FOR love is pretty obvious that FOR hatred seems a lot more troubling and suspect. So do I hate the Tories, say from 2010 on, and culminating in . on them.
Mieville gives examples of the now-blatant celebrations of wanton cruelty that have resurfaced in post-1970s financialised of rentier capitalism. ‘This is a system’, he writes, ‘that thrives on and encourages such sadism, despair and disempowerment.’ Switching the emphasis from hate to love seems a natural and compelling move for socialists: who can gainsay a politics of love? But … Trump is quoted as saying in 1989: ‘maybe hate is what we need if we’re going to get something done.’ His hatred was certainly effective.
Steven Shakespeare proffers warning to be ‘more discriminatory about hate, where it comes from, where it should be directed, and how it gets captured for the purposes of others.’ And he adds that hatred ‘which assumes no founding truth or harmony, but … knows itself to be against the dominating other’ is ‘a constituent part of the singularity of every created being.’
Hatred, particularly on the part of the oppressed (eg the slave) is inevitable. Mieville: ‘it is hardly productive to pathologise hate per se, not least when it’s natural that it arises, let alone to make it a cause for shame.’ Is hate necessarily a part or tool of resistance in a class-ridden capitalist society?
Tronti draws on Marx to insist on the salience and power of class hatred: hatred by a social force, of an opposing social force, of that ‘dominating other’ Shakespeare identifies. This kind of hate is just, indicated and necessary: ‘not a personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a radical structural hate for what the world has become.’
Surin: ‘the proposed melding … of hate with a strategic logic is essential if hate is not ro descend into rage or a mindless apocalypticism.’
Mieville again: ‘the ruling class needs the working class. Its various fantasies of getting rid of them can only befantasies, because as a class it has no power without those beneath it. Thus wider ruling-class contempt for the working class (‘chavs’), thus class loathing, thus social sadism, thus the constant entitlement from the ruling class, that sense that they are special and that rules don’t apply, thus the deranged eulogising of cruelty and inequality. Vile as all this is, what it is not is hate, certainly not Aristotelian hate – because its object absolutely cannot be eradicated. For the working class, the situation is different. The eradication of the bourgeoisie as a class is the eradication of bourgeois rule, of capitalism, of exploitation, of the boot on the neck of humanity. This is why the working class doesn’t need sadism, nor even revenge – and why it not only can, but must, hate. It must hate its class enemy, and capitalism itself.’
So hate has a role: hatred of the system and its enduring structures, forces and tendencies. Class hated is part of a complex set of arms and tools of resistance and can and must inform an effective strategy for transformatory change. This is not to displace an emphasis on love; but it is to be realistic.
Where does this leave me as I grit my teeth listening to the day’s news of yet another piece of calculated political sadism? Today the iniquitous Grant Shapps is on screen lying and smearing the RMT for striking to avoid yet another severe pay cut and for insisting on tolerable working conditions, security and viable futures for its members. What Shapps wants is to engineer another ‘miners’ moment’, allowing the government to introduce even more stringent anti-union legislation. Of course emotion has its place! Even comfortable middle-class, ‘bourgeois’ lefties like me are genuinely enraged as profits, dividends and share values surge and wages collapse under the present ‘cost of living’ crisis’. We eagerly anticipate a summer of discontent, possibly culminating in a general strike, and a subsequent legitimation crisis. But let’s admit that hate might best be: (i) directed at systemic and structural change, (ii) used reflexively and strategically, and (iii) comes second to love in any transition to a better, post-capitalist society.