"Hate should never be trusted, nor treated as safe, nor celebrated for its own sake. But, inevitable, it should not be ignored. Nor is it automatically undeserved. Nor, perhaps, can we do without it, not if we are to remain human, in a hateful epoch that pathologizes radical hate and encourages outrage fatigue.
And nor is careful hate necessarily an enemy of liberation. It might be its ally.
In 1837, membership of the radical left group of the great pre-Marxian socialist Auguste Blanqui, known as the 'Seasons,' made such socially informed hate central. Standing against the degradation of the revolutionary tradition, for freedom, acolytes swore an oath: 'In the name of the Republic, I swear eternal hatred to all kings, aristocrats and all oppressors of humanity.'
In 1889, the radical Australian poet Francis Adams wrote that he had destroyed his health in the pursuit of working-class struggle in London. 'It seemed a failure,' he wrote. 'But I never despaired, or saw cause to despair. There was a splendid foundation of hate there. With hate, all things are possible.'
In 1957, Dorothy Counts desegregated a school in North Carolina. Writing of the photograph of her walking past the vicious jeering mob of demonstrators, James Baldwin wrote that '[i]t made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity.' The latter for Counts; the former for what he saw in the faces of her attackers. It would be an astonishing and priggish piety to suggest that hatred such as this was unbecoming, or that it did not work for emancipation.
Crucially, as Francis Adams wrote, all things are possible with hate — not only good things. That’s the danger. But some good things, surely, in terms, for example, of activist vigor. Raging, too, certainly, but raging against something, wishing its eradication. The very absence of a critical mass of hatred may militate against resistance: Walter Benjamin, in his extraordinary, prophetic, controversial 1940 essay 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' took social democracy, as opposed to militant socialism, to task for its focus on the future and on the working class as 'redeemer,' thus actively weakening that class by directing its eyes away from the iniquities of the past and present, to 'forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice.' It was in part in this hatred that he thought there might be strength.
And hate may help not only with strength but intellectual rigor, and of analysis, too. The very flat abstractions of capital can generate their own seemingly implacable logic, against which an emotionally invested, a hating contrary eye, might prove necessary not only ethically but epistemologically.
'What will never function is the cold logic of reason,' Mario Tronti writes, 'when it is not moved by class hatred.' Because 'knowledge is connected to the struggle. Whoever has true hatred has truly understood.' Tronti goes so far as to describe a radical antinomianism, that is, opposition to 'the entire world of bourgeois society, as well as deadly class hatred against it' as 'the simplest form of Marx’s working-class science.' Even in Marx’s early political writings, from 1848–9, wrong as they were in various particulars, Tronti finds 'a clear-sightedness in foreseeing future development such as only class hatred could provide.'"
- China Miéville, from "China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred." Jacobin, 27 November 2022.
