A central problem of radical politics today is the confusion of oppression with persecution. Often the malign volition of the oppressor has been elevated to the highest question of why and how oppression happens. The fact that oppression operates upon a subject that increasingly recognises itself as an individual (or that oppression operates through the processes of individualisation), leads to the fallacy of believing that the oppressor must be an individual too. Political analysis is truncated in the Nietzschean or Schmittian ideological nonsense that the oppressor and oppressed, the friend and the enemy, are in some way mirror images, similarly constituted, equal partners in the terrible dance. The subject-centric thought cannot help but see only subjects everywhere. It leads ultimately to a sort of thinking that seems doomed to paranoia, in which oppressors appear only as gremlins and tormentors, creatures of sheer unhinged force without real interest, heartless and brutal. With the diagnosis of evil and the acknowledgement of antagonism the analysis concludes. This misinterpretation of material disadvantage as persecution is also the point at which elements of the new far right has most effectively appropriated left narratives. Surely a straight line may be drawn between the madness of Judge Schreber, who feared mystical rays causing his feminisation, and the online incel who takes up arms against the innocent women he claims have slighted him. Yet his fantastical theory of persecution made universal is truly not so far from what some left politics has become.
At the same time, real material conditions of persecution have lost their moral force. Every moment of supreme indignity is supposed to be explained away with sociological judgement. The young black man who is picked on by police, stopped and searched, framed and fitted up, week after week, is invited to accept “institutional racism” as an explanatory panacea. The woman degraded by men in her workplace and refused equal employment or wages, the asylum seeker deported and separated from their family, the benefits claimant who is “sanctioned” by a bureaucrat, are asked to hope that an account of “structural oppression” will adequately describe what they experience. The society that has lost all shame about its brutality expects its victims to feel no shame either, permitting no responsibility, while robbing people of the vital force in the demand for social transformation in their lives. The disenchantment implied by the sure-footedness of these theoretical abstractions is nothing but the devaluation of the subjective moment of suffering and indignity.
None of this is to say that we should conclude the analysis of society with either a theory of oppression or one of persecution. But in such a situation, it is worth asking whose interest is served by this sort of ideological confusion, in which subjects have already become objects and objects have already become subjects. This hocus-pocus conjures a cloud over the broken middle, obscuring any thinking of the transformations from subject to object and from object to subject as social processes. It condemns us on the one hand to be endlessly frustrated lunatics pointing fingers at the ever-fading mirages of evil overlords, and on the other hand to be mere scientists offering a steely gaze at our own collective demise.