Poverty of Morals: Why Liberal Idealism Sucks

- George Grosz, The Pillars of Society (1926)

 This current historical moment is rife with evil, and philosopher Susan Neiman is right that the left should not shy away from naming these evils explicitly. In a recent interview published by Jacobin, Neiman argues for a return to the language of evil, pointing rightfully to the genocide in Gaza. As she notes, words like "Authoritarian" mask the reality of cold blooded slaughter of women, children, medics, journalists, etc. But it is here, right after naming the horror, where Neiman's argument collapses and flattens into anti-material, and by extension anti-reality nonsense. 

In setting out to reclaim a Kantian universal morality, Neiman dismisses the material reality that global capitalism creates by flattening class into an identity marker alongside race and gender. She argues that leaning too heavily on materialism is a detriment, suggesting instead that a universal moral framework has the power to change minds across political and class groupings. This is a profoundly dangerous way of understanding how power operates. 

Class is not an identity; it is a structural reality in our global system. You cannot change the minds of the super-rich through some alchemy of moral persuasion because their class position dictates their nature and worldviews. The "morality" of this class is bound to their material imperative to extract surplus value and maintain dominance by exploitation. To assert that a rhetorical appeal to a universal justice will somehow dissolve the entrenched interests of the ruling class is to abandon the actual historically proven mechanism of liberation: the material struggle to dismantle class barriers entirely. 

Nowhere is the failure of Neiman's idealist framework more apparent than in her own admitted shock over Germany's recent trajectory. For years, Neiman held Germany up as the standard for historical reckoning and ground zero for successful universal Idealism. She argued that Germany had came to terms with and made serious efforts to overcome its fascist past. It was a conclusion built on false assumptions and incomplete observations of shifting language and cultural apologia. 

Because she lacked a material analysis that accounted for the interlocking systems of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy—she was stunned when Germany criminalized the BDS movement, violently suppressed Palestinian solidarity, and backed Israel to the hilt as it enacted a genocide. 

But to a materialist, there is no shock to be found here. Germany never truly overcame its fascism or its imperial past. Instead, it merely adopted a new sanitized vocabulary to maintain its dominance. By subsuming itself into the American global imperialist system, the German state found a way to continue exploiting the Global South under the guise of "historical responsibility." Germany's backing of the Gaza genocide is not a sudden shocking departure from their moral progress, but the logical operation of the imperial core managing and exploiting the periphery. 

Platforming this brand of liberal idealism on the Left is deeply concerning. It takes the urgent, bloody necessity of structural transformation and dilutes it into an academic game. Legitimizing this kind of theoretical posturing as useful to the socialist project does nothing but provide cover for a system that thrives on endless going nowhere debates while the bombs continue to fall and the poor continue to be enslaved. We do not need a vague project of universal morals that changes the lives of no one. Rather, we need the ruthless critique and dismantling of the material realities that make evil profitable and possible in the first place.