the cultural hegemony¶

Of all the poisons inflicted on humanity by the cultural hegemony, none is more lethal to the human spirit than the individualization of oppression. This is the lesson we relearn every moment in this toxic social form: our very identity relies on giving and receiving oppression. At different strata of society, we each become acclimated to different measures of oppressing and being oppressed. Whatever that balance, we are taught to see it as natural and integral to our place in society. We are taught to rebel at the very thought of destroying oppression. We are each of us transformed from individuals--from the humans we are--into agents of the social form. We are taught not to cultivate our own humanity, but to build an edifice instead. A monument to the warped social relations we are handed. In this sense, through the reproduction of social relations, oppressor and oppressed are dehumanized. Both elements exist in us all, which helps cement the righteousness of our role in the construction of the edifice. Were we not to oppress, we would be oppressed all the more. It is from this realization that we can reckon with the source of a true politics of liberation. We must grapple with the notion that to seek liberation is deeply uncomfortable. It is a challenge to our own identities--imposed though they may be. We feel secure in oppression. Our race, our gender, our nation, our religion, our speech, our family--none are left untouched by this vital poison. Liberation must form new conceptions of these social forms, expressions which are either divorced from the oppressive construct, or crafted in opposition to it. This, of course, is the source of fascist obsession with maintaining the "traditional" form. To be queer, to be childless, to celebrate one's own racial or national heritage, to have diverse religious views--or none at all--these are destructive to the edifice. Immigration brings with it new minds, naive to the particular oppressive social form, and therefore more potent to dilute it through their mere existence. This is the core of the Great Replacement narrative--it is not the "white race" they replace, but the oppressive form itself. Thus, the project of unseating the hegemonic rule of capital cannot be disentangled from the very same cultural form which maintains and is maintained by it. Anyone who claims to value economic liberation over "cultural matters" is--unwittingly or otherwise--bolstering hegemony. This is a troubling concept for those in whom the oppressor/oppressed balance is more heavily weighted toward the former. So poisoned have they become by the dehumanizing engine of capital reproduction, that they cannot see what they have to gain from its abolition. They must learn to relieve themselves of the false identity imposed upon them. To see true liberation as the eradication of oppression. If they cannot, they will oppose liberation at all costs. They will abandon their anticapitalist veneer in favor of maintaining the social form. This is why we can never fall for the lie of patriotic socialism. Why machismo and bigotry destroys revolutionary spirit. There is no bargaining with the beast. The maw of hegemony gapes wide, ready to swallow whole all who fail to liberate their minds.