Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

― hamqueen (bamcquern), Friday, June 24, 2016 3:02 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well you can argue that white upper class people are voting against their interests on things like the environment or w/e but the point that white people vote against their interests in greater numbers than everyone else *to some degree* is true of the poor, too. but yes, in general, poor people are more apt to vote left

thanks for sharing that, bam. i hadn't seen it before and frank's book was tremendously influential on me when i first read it. this is pretty damning tho:

Even in 2004, after decades of increasingly widespread college education, the economic circumstances of whites without college degrees were not much different from those of America as a whole. Among those who voted, 40% had family incomes in excess of $60,000; and when offered the choice, more than half actually called themselves “middle class” rather than “working class.” Meanwhile, among working-class white voters who could even remotely be considered “poor” – those with incomes in the bottom third of the national income distribution – George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2004 was not 23 percentage points but less than two percentage points.

so really what we're talking about - at least regarding many of our most reactionary right-wing voters - is bourgeois counterrevolution, not false consciousness proletariat counter-productive revolution.

relevant (reposting from JCLC):

https://www.thenation.com/article/progressives-need-to-stop-ignoring-rural-communities/

I think it's worth stressing that outside of the fairly stable and confused old fashioned racist crew the referendum debate was about immigration rather than race, and while sometimes difference was dwelt upon (language especially) generally there's not been too much effort spent differentiating the majority of EU immigrants in terms of race, more just culture and sheer numbers. the racism is mostly saved for the non EU migrants who are ofc less white

also that link nakh posted about authoritarianism makes sense, although this mentality is still mysterious to me in many respects, especially how it develops and fixates on certain issues

well they're authoritarians they fixate on what they're told to

a lot of taboo fixation is about social cohesion in the same way authoritarianism is -- i found it much easier to understand conservative/reactionary impulses when i realized that a lot of it has to do w/ preserving a social body which in-and-of-itself is a worthwhile goal even if i feel most of the time that the tactics used to pursue it are too blunt + ultimately ineffective. like i don't think necessarily the authoritarian voter wants a dictator to make them feel safe bc it offloads the decision making - which often seems like the subtext of the 'authoritarian' argument. i think it's more that societies with heavily centralized, concentrated authority making and strong social obedience is inherently going to be a society w/ better cohesion and sense of collective self. that's the link to the social taboos - both in terms of literal health of the community (taboos against incest, excrement, violence) and symbolically (religion taboos, strange cultural practices that by their very existence bind their practitioners and make them distinct from neighboring tribes, etc).

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants. Right? So if it's about immigrants, it's about non-white immigrants, no matter what they say.

Otm

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants.

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

seeing the vote as for a certain sort of nationalism makes the most sense to me, the idea of repatriating powers had a big emotive pull, even if people only cared about it wrt migration

a friend's gran told her she voted leave because there were too many bangladeshis in her area. the right wing haven't really focused on commonwealth or other international migration for a long time, they've been concentrating on the referendum for years. the infirm and delirious might conflate all migration, but to the extent that there's an emblem of perceived excess immigration it's the polish labourer - plumbers, builders, farm labourers in the east especially, which had the strongest leave vote - undercutting their british competitors, sending their money to family at home

the sense of nihilism comes in part from the fact that there has never been a plan. there have been two leave campaigns with different spokespeople and styles, covering all manner of different issues and with various visions, but it's untested waters, no one could say what was going to happen and yet still managed to disagree with each other. the vote wasn't about the future, it was about the present, a present which has been building up for years in headlines. why did i think the sun might be on the losing side?

the thing which struck me most about the vote was that you could get people voting leave out of contempt for the ideal of the benefits scrounging working class, as well getting working class people voting leave out of frustration, mistrust and resentment of whoever they perceived as elites.

the british political system is one of the most stable and long lived in the world and an exemplar of political decay. the westminster parliament has been in place for hundreds of years, has changed little since 1707 and i don't think i have a chance of outliving it. there is no constitution, no architect, the system has slowly congealed over hundreds of years, with no big occasion for reform. we are literally still ruled by barons. politics is disconnected, remote, unrepresentative and seen to be unresponsive. does this explain an irrational politics? can it be rationalised as stemming from a sense of desolation in much of the country, urban and industrial but also of communities, and of the sense of the loss of some harmonious national imaginary, unreal england? it's the sad nationalism of a country that sees signs of decline everywhere and has become supremely cynical and sometimes paranoid

it sounds more desperate written down

the party system has been fracturing for a while now, likely to be more on the way and a second scottish referendum was always on the cards, so there is something v empty about waving union jacks. the guy two doors down has taken his union jack flag down now, leaving just the flag of st george & I'd go take a photo of it stuck to window with rain but fuck it

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

Yes, a lot of people who viewed this as a referendum on immigration will go nuts if they find out later on that free movement is the cost of doing business with the EU, particularly if the UK loses any influence on whether, idk, Serbia or Ukraine join in the future. However, along with the 'threat' of Turks, refugees and French-speaking North Africans, i think there has been a concerted effort to racialise Eastern European migration from the press that really kicked into gear when Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania joined - an effort to hint that Southern Europeans are not quite white enough, lots of stories about 'Albanian criminals', an effort to ramp up anti-Roma prejudice, etc.

was this article by Will Davies already linked to on the uk politics thread? goes into the nihilism discussed above, also the apparent paradox of areas that had benefited the most from EU investment seeing some of the strongest majorities for Leave etc:

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

one thing that seems to particularly characterize leftist movements of yore is an active participation in a print culture - writing up manifestos, pamphlets, publishing newspapers, going door to door selling them, party members rising in stature partially on the basis of their success in a. understanding the ideology and b. selling it, literally sometimes on the streets. when the nazis came to power there was a whole left-wing printing press apparatus that they commandeered. so what is the equivalent to this in a contemporary era where basically literacy culture is dead and no one is buying pamphlets about communism from anyone anywhere and if they are they aren't reading them. maybe it was never particularly useful/successful (tho the radicalization of the army/navy + industry proletariat in post-tzar russia suggests that print culture did play an important role in recruitment / spreading the ideology), just something to pass the time?

I mean, there is still no end of communiques and manifestos, but they tend to be mostly distributed on the internet these days. Print zines, pamphlets, and radical small presses seem to have remained important to the anarchist left, at least in punk circles, but largely as a supplement to online communication.

where do most socialists congregate online?

Like, there are still infoshops in many cities, but I don't know how important they are to recruitment in particular.
Xp

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

yeah to (regretfully) paraphrase Frum, it's not necessarily a leadership problem on the Left, but the "followership"

That seems pretty decentralized to me: forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists, tumblr cliques, but there are probably other gathering places I'm not aware of.
Xp

(As a disclaimer, most of the demonstrations and activist projects I've been involved with over the last couple of years have been locally organized and somewhat disparate, so other ILXors can probably give you a more informed answer.)

lol socialists still have blogspot blogs

i was reading the start of gorky's 'mother' some months back, at the beginning of which a worker self-radicalizes himself by a program of study of radical literature, which makes him a fearsome disciplined figure to his family, and it definitely seemed like a characteristic trope of the times a la mordy's description above, but one that does not quite hold anymore.

i went to a union meeting years ago during a time when my campus grad students were trying to unionize with like electricians i think, and i actually had someone at the meeting encourage me to read something that went into an explanation of the nature of exploitation, etc.; it seemed very much like a throwback. and while there are still marx-reading groups aplenty (somewhat rebounding since the financial crisis/OWS imo), i have gotten the impression that at least the shared-doctrine/outlook-generating function those used to serve, whatever the leftist tendency toward anarchism or absolute egalitarianism, is no longer vital.

i mean you still have jerkoff right-wing aspirants out there reading their bibles, and the catholic classics, and the documents of the american founders, and von mieses, but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization. i know a political-theory guy from grad school who went through a phase of enthusiasm for radical cartography. basically i'm saying nothing is biblical enough to help center a print political culture on the left?

Capital, you'd think but maybe too dry?

yeah, i think that used to be it, but no longer is

i mean pick up a contemporary text in that vein and the first thing they'll do is twist themselves into pretzels justifying returning to marx or ignoring marx or setting marx right, but still, the idea that one really has to read marx to get off on the right foot in this lyfe is like, nonprevalent

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

i'll contribute my best guess about that. I fear that left wing leadership in general believes quite strongly in the essential goodness of human nature. as a result, they consistently direct their narratives and appeals for support to our better side. they experience just enough success with this approach that they persist in it as their habitual mode of operation to a degree that no practical politician ever would.

to be fair, if left wing political leadership were to swing very far or very obviously away from their stated idealism they would risk alienating those who have responded most strongly to their idealistic positions and these are the people to whom they most directly owe their current position and power. this dynamic makes them vulnerable to the attack that they are out of touch with reality, or, if they have moved tentatively toward the center, the attack that they are 'mushy' or 'waffling'.

in practical terms, this has some explanatory power in regard to the successes of single issues in left wing politics. by isolating an issue it becomes easier to dissociate it from left wing politics as a whole, so that the center elements of the center-left coalition that eventually help the issue to succeed do not have to identify with broad left wing aims or tenets, but can address the issue on its individual merits. It is a variation of divide and conquer, dividing the center so that parts of it can be split off to form an ad hoc majority on that one issue.

but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization.

im not very smart or knowledgeable about this kind of thing, but i think this is a really insightful point. the post-marxist left is more or less founded on post-68 critical theory, but it's that same foundation which makes any actual program or sufficiently large coalition impossible to achieve (cf. deleuze's notion of an authentic leftism being devoid of content). and while im sympathetic to that deleuzian point it's also important to recognize that it is in no way a political point. this is the big failure and misunderstanding of a lot of critical theory on the left imo. there's no real politics in it at all--hence the massive and infuriating hyper-inflation of what counts as "political" thinking in a lot of current theoretical discourse. as a result the left devolves into the endlessly fragmenting forms of identity politics you see going on now and thus an "authentic leftism" becomes a kind of performance of absolute theoretical purity.

(i also think there's also more than a touch of gnosticism in a lot of theoretically oriented leftist discourse, hence its essentially a-political slant at times)

remember when 'everyone' was suddenly excited about the political potential promised in hardt & negri

last fall i did a 'name the last book you read' exercise and one of my students had read graeber over the summer, was hoping to read piketty, so i think that's indicative of how wide of philosophy the curious-to-be-political reading syllabus is going to be for some time

I have a 15 year old unread copy of Empire on my shelf that testifies to that moment.

coming out of a Schmitt/Koselleck ---> Luhmann school I probably sit uneasily in the Left as currently construed but for myself I'd argue that one of the more important projects for the Left is to achieve an understanding of politics and political action that is more, and not less, specific and limited.

recently i feel like the problem is that the left walled itself in -- it put all its eggs into articulating a dramatically different vision of society from capitalism and when the ussr collapsed (and chinese communism was forced to transform) it essentially lost touch with reality. there's never going to be the popular will for the dismantlement of the essential institutions and structures that provide order + stability to people's lives. the best thing the left could do is continue to mitigate the failures of capitalism and slowly guide the project along the historical route to communism, but that kind of incremental action is demeaned as neoliberalism (or "soft" neoliberalism, as i've heard recently, or third-wayism). the main difference obv should be that while neoliberalism uses progressive policy to perpetuate the capitalist system (take care of the people so they don't riot), a leftist incrementalism would see it as a process towards developing a more communist government (tho everyone at this point should be honest that it's always going to look a little hybrid - obv fully state-planned economy does not work). so a difference in goal and motivation, if not really in practice. the good news tho is that if the left embraced this we'd eliminate a lot of the idea that communists cannot work w/ socialists (or liberal democrats or whatever the more moderate left is calling themselves that week) bc they could contextualize these incremental reforms as inherently subversive. you see this psychologically too i think - as things get better the people demand more. even if the capitalist bankers see government jobs, or higher minimum wage, as a way of keeping the proletariat under control, they're making the changes that will fundamentally alter the system.

idk if anyone here missed it (i linked to it from the stalin thread) but ppl might find this thread worth checking out - mostly quotes i thought were interesting from some reading i did over the weekend re the left + the weimer republic: social fascism

not an expert by any means here, but i feel like a lot of the problem between socialism and capitalism is that for a socialist, the greatest imperative is to ascertain what the right thing to do is, and do it, whereas for a capitalist the question is what action will yield the best results. that's not to say that capitalists don't have values and socialists are never pragmatic, just the the two groups have different ethical hierarchies. for a capitalist, compromise necessarily implies compromising some of one's principles, which they are willing to do, but they will expect that anyone they compromise with do the same.

beyond that, perhaps compromise, as a relational mode, is so strongly identified with capitalism that expressing a willingness to compromise makes you look like a capitalist.

i'm not sure i agree. you can have dogmatic capitalists and pragmatic socialists. for me it's the difference between economic liberalism / free market / adam smith and state-planned economy / regulated market.

hmmm. maybe it's that capitalists have the opportunity to put their ideas into practice on a much wider scale than socialists do. i mean, i guess you have that basic income experiment going on in oakland, but compare that to the much greater extent of micro-lending (the failure of which didn't become apparent until it was deployed on a wide scale) and you have a lot of socialists talking theory and a lot of capitalists talking about their experiences.

partially though isn't that because communism has generally been a failure - in the USSR, in China, most recently in Venezeula. obv lenin would say that this also has to do w/ the inextricable link between capitalism and imperialism/colonialism (about which there's maybe room for skepticism but still it would explain why capitalism has been so persistent at getting their ideas out there). certainly while communism was a going concern tho it was being exported diligently. and also, tho this is obv an area ripe for discussion, ideologies associated with successful states are going to be more attractive. now the question is whether capitalist west was successful bc of historical contingency (aka for arbitrary non-ideological related reasons) and you can imagine a counterfactual where the eastern bloc is more powerful and so communism is v attractive, or whether capitalism was successful bc it's actually a better economic theory for developing nations / keeping stability. my reading of the literature suggests the latter to me - and even marx had his infatuations with the productivity of capitalism.

Socialism can try to be a theory of everything, the Right is much more comfortable with odd or contradictory alliances.

On the Question of Free Trade: Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition pamphlet

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created -- for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount; the industrial monopoly of England on the market of the world seemed more firmly established that ever; new iron works, new textile factories arose by wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on ever side. There was, indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was overcome, and the onward movement in trade and manufactures soon was in full swing again, until in 1866 a fresh panic occurred, a panic, this time, which seems to mark a new departure in the economic history of the world.

curious about the translation of the colloquial "anyhow," but anyhow, the attraction of free trade - in spite of the 'inevitable' crises it produces - is obv. 'productive forces expanding to such a degree,' that they rebel but if you can mitigate the rebellion and keep the system running you get all the production and limited downside. and maybe it's worth asking whether he was right anyway that they contain their own undermining - i mean in 2008 i looked at the world and felt like holy shit this is obvious what he was talking about, but otoh life is full of crises (which was what i was asking when i bumped the thread above) so to attribute a collapse to capitalism /inherently/ is not so certain and certainly when compared w/ equally (or more) unstable systems where you don't even get the production but you still get the crisis.

personally, i'm no more interested in lenin's excuses for the failure of soviet communism than i am in churchill's self-justifications on the topic of gallipoli. i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

the far left is dead, everyone still claiming commie status is just fronting IMO

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

― flopson, Monday, March 14, 2016 4:54 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually know ONE real honest-to-god communist. he reads Andrew Kliman and political papers, and he's part of a group that goes to industrial towns and give out pamphlets about the revolution to factory workers

Marxism is parlour games for members of a small, and unimportant cabal and attempts to use Marx as a tool for creating revolution is doomed to failure because literally everything he expected to happen to precipitate world revolution hasn't occurred, class as he understood it no longer exists, and his writing is almost completely non-programmatic.

i thought this piece by Mike Konczal was interesting in terms of figuring out what the whole 'democratic socialist' thing is all about

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders

but it's an extremely booj socialism (if it can even be called that) he describes. more along what we now see as yuppie craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality kinda stuff and 'you can't turn me into a commodity, maan' individualism than blood-thirsty class conflict and false consciousness. focus on tensions between the market and democracy, it's closer to what someone like Dani Rodrik or 'Political Economy of Institutions'-development people preach than raw-dog decommodification of the material economy.

topic for discussion: does bernie sanders understand how capitalism works? does he need to?

wow this thread sucks

make it better

tbf he did post a link to a vice article about a year ago so what more do u want

i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

^^^this

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

also this

there is no capitalism or socialism, there are only degrees of mediation between the state and capital