A brief note on the appearances and essences of capitalist morality, justice, and humanity

By Fazal Rahman                                 August 20, 2023

Capitalist morality is founded upon built-in structural immoralities of the capitalist system.  Capitalist justice is founded upon built-in structural injustices of the capitalist system.  Justice in the judicial system of capitalism reflects these contradictions and judges are trained to ignore the foundations and issue decisions based upon mechanistic applications of laws hiding the classist and racist injustices. In fact, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based robots can issue more efficient and competent decisions, based on such laws, than most of the “human” judges. Capitalist humanity is founded upon built-in structural inhumanities of the capitalist system.  The essences remain hidden behind the deceptive appearances for overwhelming majorities. At the imperialist stage, these are extended to rest of the world in greatly enhanced types and forms, which frequently fail to cover up the essences of immoralities, injustices, and inhumanities.

The above observations need to be expanded and elaborated further.

A brief note on the multidimensional problems of Advanced Capitalist-Imperialist Technocratic Society (ACITS) of the US, including that of racist police brutality: Necessity of relating appearances and essence, forms and content.

By Fazal Rahman, Ph.D.                               June 29, 2020

Racist and other forms of police brutality in the US are mostly being treated and responded to in fragmentation and abstraction from their structural causal connections to overall social, cultural, mass psychological, and politico-economic reality, which constitutes a fundamental intellectual and conceptual error.  In reality, violent police is a product of a violent society, which, in its turn, is a product of a violent politico-economic system, that is, the extremist militarist capitalism and imperialism.  Externally, this is manifested in constant wars and mass slaughters of people in the weaker Third World countries that are no match for the military and economic superpower. Internally, this violence is exercised in extremist forms against the blacks, who have been, historically, the victims of the worst forms of the most brutal injustices and exploitation, in prolonged slavery, and later subjected to numerous other forms of discrimination and inequality.  Other racial and other minorities also have suffered, and continue to suffer, the disastrous consequences of discriminatory injustices and inequalities.  Both external and internal violences have a large component of racism and are transformed into extremist forms against the others.  These and innumerable other disastrous problems are ultimately rooted in their essence, that is, the political economy of extremist forms of advanced technocratic capitalism and imperialism.  Single issue approaches to the solutions of these problems are doomed to failure.  These can, at best, produce minor cosmetic reforms.  For effective comprehensive solutions, these problems need to be understood and analyzed in their mutual relations and interactions, as well as to their essence.  No radical changes are possible without radical transformation of the essence, as, if the essence remains the same, the appearance will also remain the same, only assuming different forms.  Even though, theoretically and dialectically, radical transformations in most or all the appearances can bring about radical changes in the essence, in practical terms, in the areas of social reality, this is next to impossible.  Only the social revolutions can bring about radical changes in the essence, which are then manifested in radical changes in the appearances and forms.