Anger is a Gift...

But.

Morning Comrades.

There is nothing wrong with getting angry at the institution that has just fucked you over. If the police brutalise somebody, be angry at the police. If a bank forecloses on a home, be angry at the bank. If a landlord throws somebody out because they cannot pay an extortionate rent, be angry at the landlord. If a corporation destroys a community, poisons a river or sacks thousands of people while paying its executives millions, then anger is not only understandable, it is an entirely rational response to what has happened. The problem begins when the thing that pissed you off most recently becomes, by default, your explanation of the entire world.

That is where you need theory. I know, I know, not another one of those “but theory” rants, but, fear not, I am too exhausted to really get into it, and I already have anyway. However, we all need some way of moving from the immediate object of our anger towards an understanding of the relations that produced it, because without that movement politics becomes little more than a sequence of emotional reactions, with each new outrage temporarily replacing the last one as the supposed centre of all evil.

The point of Marxist theory, in this sense, is not to tell you which particular institution you are allowed to hate most. It is to help you understand why so many different institutions keep producing the same kinds of misery, why they reproduce themselves despite the constant exposure of their crimes, and why changing the personnel, branding or surface appearance of one institution so often leaves the underlying relationship completely intact.

This is why the argument over which particular branch of Marxism, and that’s a debatable understanding of the vast library of praxis and theory at hand, one belongs to can become such a distraction. Obviously the differences matter. Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mariátegui, Marx, Engels, Federici, Harvey and the enormous range of Marxist and socialist traditions that followed them do not say precisely the same things, and some of their disagreements are politically consequential, but before arguing over every theoretical distinction, there is a much more basic requirement: you need a theory of how society actually works. You need an explanation capable of connecting the apparently separate things that make you angry. Without that, you can spend your entire political life moving from outrage to outrage, discovering capitalism anew every Tuesday because something different has pissed you off on Monday.

And capitalism is exceptionally good at producing precisely this kind of fragmented anger. The danger is not that your anger is wrong but that it remains trapped at the level of the event. You see the landlord, but not the property relation. You see the bank, but not the financialisation of social reproduction. You see the police, but not the state apparatus that protects particular property relations. You see the corporation, but not the accumulation process that compels it to behave in ways which are destructive even when the people running it privately consider themselves perfectly decent human beings. You see where I am getting at here.

This distinction matters enormously because capitalism does not require every capitalist to be personally monstrous, that is one of the first things theory teaches you. A capitalist can be polite, charitable, progressive, vegetarian, impeccably educated and genuinely concerned about climate change and still participate in an economic structure whose reproduction depends upon the extraction of surplus from other people’s labour. Something about Arendt’s Banality of Evil comes to mind at this point. The individual morality of the capitalist is therefore not the fundamental question. The question is the social relation in which that individual operates. Capital is not simply a collection of greedy people making greedy decisions but it is a social relation which imposes pressures upon people occupying particular positions within it. “Competition” forces firms to accumulate, accumulation demands profitability, profitability demands the continual disciplining of labour, and the whole process presents itself as if it were simply the natural consequence of economic life.

That is the difference between having an enemy and understanding a system, which most definitely is your enemy, whether you know about it, yet, or not.

Without theory, politics can easily become an endless search for villain and there is always another villain available because capitalism produces them continuously. The political imagination then becomes almost entirely reactive: identify the latest bastard, expose the latest scandal, demand accountability, organise a campaign, win a concession if possible, celebrate, become exhausted, and then start again when the next bastard appears. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, but without a theory capable of explaining why the same structures regenerate after every individual victory, activism becomes an exceptionally energetic form of running on a treadmill.

This is one reason reactionary politics can emerge from genuinely legitimate anger. Reaction is not simply what happens when people become irrational. It can begin with a completely rational perception that something is profoundly wrong, followed by a catastrophic explanation of why it is wrong. Somebody notices that wages are collapsing and housing is unaffordable, but instead of understanding the political economy of labour, property and capital, they are encouraged to blame immigrants, and we have seen that play out a lot, of late. Somebody notices that public services are deteriorating, but instead of asking why wealth has been transferred into private accumulation, they are encouraged to blame welfare recipients. Somebody sees communities being abandoned and concludes that some racial, religious or cultural group must be responsible. Somebody recognises that political institutions are profoundly unresponsive and concludes that democracy itself is the problem.

The anger is real but the diagnosis is false and that distinction should be at the centre of any serious revolutionary politics.

The reactionary does not necessarily misunderstand suffering. Quite often the reactionary sees the suffering perfectly well. What they misunderstand is its cause. This is why reactionary politics can be so effective: it attaches a real material grievance to an imaginary or displaced explanation.

Theory interrupts that mechanism and asks the irritating question that anger does not automatically ask: why?

Why is housing treated as an asset rather than a home? Why does food become more expensive while agricultural productivity increases? Why does technological development coexist with increasingly precarious employment? Why can a society possess extraordinary productive capacity while millions experience insecurity? Why does the state repeatedly find money for financial rescue while claiming that public housing, healthcare or social infrastructure are unaffordable? Why does the same society that celebrates individual freedom tolerate workplaces in which people spend most of their waking lives under somebody else’s authority? Why does a technology capable of connecting billions of people produce enormous quantities of loneliness? Why does productivity rise while the working week stubbornly refuse to collapse accordingly? Why does every crisis seem to result in greater concentration of wealth?

Once you start asking those questions, you begin moving beyond the isolated incident towards the structure.

This is what makes Marxism useful even before one has settled every disagreement within Marxist theory. Its great contribution is methodological; it teaches you to look beneath appearances and ask what social relations make those appearances possible. The price of a house is not simply a price. It is connected to ownership, land, credit, wages, rent and the treatment of housing as an investment vehicle. A wage is not simply money received for working. It expresses a relationship between labour and capital. Profit is not simply the reward for entrepreneurial cleverness. It has to be understood in relation to production, ownership and the appropriation of surplus. The state is not simply a neutral machine which occasionally makes bad decisions but it has to be understood through the material relationships in which it operates. Even ideology becomes more comprehensible once you stop treating it as merely a collection of bad ideas and start asking what material interests, institutions and social relations reproduce those ideas.

Theory therefore does not make politics less angry. If anything, it should make the anger considerably more dangerous to the system because it makes the anger harder to redirect, and it is precisely why theory matters even when theory is frustrating.

There is a contemporary temptation to treat theory as something belonging to academics, intellectuals and people who enjoy arguing about obscure distinctions on the internet. This is utter nonsense. Theory is simply an explanation of how you think the world works. Everyone has one. The question is not whether you have a theory. The question is whether your theory explains reality.

Marxism begins from the useful assumption that if you want to understand society, you cannot begin with people’s opinions about society. You have to begin with the material organisation of social life. Who owns what? Who works? Who decides? Who receives the surplus? Who controls the means of production? Who is dependent upon selling their labour? Who possesses the legal authority to exclude others from land, housing, factories, infrastructure or resources? How is political power connected to economic power? What institutions reproduce these relations? What ideologies make them appear normal?

Those questions are not abstract. They are the bridge between the rent increase and the housing market, between the police officer at the door and the property deed behind the eviction, between the exhausted worker and the company balance sheet, between the supermarket price and the agricultural supply chain, between the debt payment and the financial system.

Theory builds those bridges and once those bridges exist, something politically important happens: individual grievances begin to become collective grievances. That movement from personal experience to structural understanding is one of the most politically important things theory can accomplish. It transforms “why is this happening to me?” into “why is this happening to us?”, and that is where solidarity becomes possible.

Reactionary politics thrives on isolation because isolated people are much easier to frighten than organised people are to discipline. If your explanation of society consists entirely of identifying individual villains, then your politics will tend to remain fragmented around individual grievances. However, if you understand those grievances as expressions of common social relations, then the possibility of collective action becomes visible.

Importantly, this does not mean abandoning immediate struggles for some glorious future revolution, that would be another form of theoretical stupidity. We need housing now, workers need higher wages now, communities need public services now and police violence, as well as the idea of “police” needs to be challenged now. Theory does not tell you to ignore these things while sitting around reading Marx. It tells you how to understand what these struggles mean, how they connect, what their limits are, and how victories in one arena might contribute to a broader transformation rather than becoming isolated concessions that leave the structure untouched.

The point is not to become less angry, but to become harder to manipulate with your anger. Perhaps this is ultimately the most important reason to study it, not because you need to become an expert in every theoretical dispute, not because you need to memorise every passage of Capital, and certainly not because revolutionary politics requires another thousand people arguing over which obscure Marxist tendency possesses the correct interpretation of a sentence written in 1867. It matters because without some coherent theory of social reproduction, exploitation, class, property and power, political consciousness is extraordinarily vulnerable to being captured by whatever happens to make you angry next.

You need something that survives the news cycle, because everything is not fucked in the same way. Theory allows you to recognise that today’s outrage is not necessarily an isolated aberration but potentially another expression of a much older relationship. It prevents the ruling class from constantly resetting the political conversation by presenting every crisis as unprecedented, every scandal as exceptional and every injustice as the result of a few uniquely bad individuals.

You can still hate the landlord. You can still hate the bank. You can still hate the corporation. You can still hate the police institution when it brutalises people. You can be fucking furious, and you should as all of our circumstances demand it.

This is precisely where anger has to become analysis: we have to ask why the injustice exists, what material and institutional conditions make it possible, who benefits from its reproduction, and what social relations are required for a particular institution to behave as it does. We must then be able to recognise the same underlying pattern when it appears elsewhere, rather than treating each manifestation as an isolated aberration, and ultimately ask the more important political question of what would have to change in the organisation of society so that the next generation is not merely forced to confront the same forms of exploitation, deprivation and coercion under slightly different names. The purpose of theory is to make that movement possible, from the immediate experience of injustice towards an understanding of its structural causes, and therefore from the perpetual management of recurring crises towards the possibility of abolishing the conditions that reproduce them. That is where theory stops being an academic exercise and becomes political equipment. It is what allows anger to become analysis, analysis to become consciousness, and consciousness to become collective power rather than another reaction manufactured by the circumstances imposed upon us. You do not need to belong to one particular Marxist sect to begin there. You do not even need to have every theoretical question settled. You do, however, need the habit of looking beyond the immediate object of outrage towards the material relations that produced it.

This is something I wish I could tell my younger self.

Yours, warmly,

V.