Kneeling before the Black Idol
Aydin Areta

The person who is enchanted by capital and the person who despises it are both focused on the same object: capital. For one it is a golden idol and for the other a black idol, but both kneel before the same idol.

The great historical problem of left-wing thought is that, although it is deeply concerned with human suffering, justice and freedom, justice for it often becomes merely the accounting of pain, while freedom becomes one vast “later” that never arrives.

The ideological left sees everything through the lens of “structure,” and for this reason ultimately turns the human being into a diagram: a class, a collective, a number, an instrument of history.

Justice then becomes an enormous machine that must be set in motion at any cost, even if it passes over human bodies. And freedom? Freedom is always promised “after victory,” in the final stage that never comes.

The catastrophe begins when the left calls freedom “bourgeois”: the right to speak, the right to choose, the right to say no, the right to make mistakes become, in its eyes, privileges of a particular class—especially when that class occupies an anti-imperialist and anti-Western position aligned with it.

Precisely because it diminishes freedom, it can form an alliance with great oppression. The left speaks in the language of “the subaltern,” yet is unwilling to allow the subaltern to become a speaker. Instead of listening to the living voice of the human being, it places its own voice in their mouth. The academic left believes that sometimes certain subaltern people do not themselves understand what they want—just like the people of Iran.

If reading their sermons sometimes drives you mad, the source of that madness lies in this fact: they can easily speak in unison with the very people who repress those whose cause they claim to represent, look those people in the eyes, and say, “We are your voice, but only on condition that you do not speak,” without being troubled by the fact that becoming the voice of the subaltern in this way is the beginning of silencing them. For if they truly speak, they may speak of freedom without affirming the appendices of the global left, and freedom that is not subordinated to an ideological framework is always dangerous to pure ideology.

The left has repeatedly stood behind hard power in the name of justice—not out of love for repression but through justification: “for now we are compelled and they are compelled”; “for now there are too many enemies, above all the West”; and “for now the security of the oppressed and a piece of bread on their table, emptied of freedom, matter more than anything else.” These “for now”s can easily become centuries.

A left trapped inside narrative becomes the permanent guardian of the anti-imperialist narrative of necessity used by despots. Justice without freedom arrives at prison justice: an order in which everyone is equal, but equally silent, equally afraid and equally without a voice.

The left is right that freedom without justice can slide into the freedom of the market: the right to choose commodities rather than the right to choose one’s life. But the human being is more than economics; the human being is not simply focused on commodities, is not merely a class, is not merely a unit of production.

The human being is a “soul.” And the soul cannot survive the humiliation of dignity, the suppression of truth and the justification of violence merely through concern for justice and anxiety about how much wealth or power those repressing it possessed when that repression began. If we define justice in a way that causes the human being to disappear within it, we have killed the human being so that justice can remain alive.

The issue, then, is not merely capital. The issue is whether we place the human being or ideology at the centre. Do we regard freedom as a “principle” or as an “instrument”? Do we make justice a housemate of dignity or an ally of power?

The day justice and freedom are separated, power sits between them and appropriates both. At that point left and right meet at the same place: in worship of the same thing whose name they alter but whose nature is identical—domination. The left will never understand this unless it begins even justice itself with freedom that is not subordinated to an ideological condition.