Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

hyup xp

The new Tribune looks interesting:

https://tribunemag.co.uk/relaunch-preview

Some excellent contributors.

ah look its my twitter TL in the culture section #proud

https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2018/09/18/22990739/burgerville-employees-go-on-strike-on-national-cheeseburger-day

Interesting tactics

Good comments from Spain's Borrell

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/19/donald-trump-urged-spain-to-build-the-wall-across-the-sahara

into this piece

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/9/18/17876024/mcdonalds-strikes-walkout-me-too

I’m guessing that means they’re going after Allison then

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish), Tuesday, September 18, 2018 6:16 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Allison of DC DSA was fired this week

https://www.gofundme.com/activist-fired-for-protesting-trump

Yup, was just about to link that:

And if you don't know why you shouldn't lose any sleep over someone yelling at Secretary Neilsen this should clear that up. https://t.co/Lzl7tmcwdK https://t.co/YD6tWNi6zs

— Charles, Star of MicDicta (@Ugarles) September 25, 2018

If you can, please donate to my friend @allisongeroi, she was one of the super brave protestors who shamed DHS Secretary Nielsen in public, and got fired from her job for it months later https://t.co/r3SB51Z3Wr

— hell woods (@floozyesq) September 25, 2018

Pretty into these two short articles, one presenting a taxonomy of the current US left, and a second that responds to the first.

https://theleftwind.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/the-us-left-has-only-four-tendencies/

https://theleftwind.wordpress.com/2018/09/26/how-many-tendencies/

From the second, which of the two I prefer:

regardless of all protestations to the contrary, the US left owes more to the period between Occupy Wall Street and Blacklivesmatter than it does to the Russian or Chinese revolutions. While we may ideologically claim adherence to any historical movement we wish, practically a movement is limited by the organizational makeup and strategies of the movements that came before it. We may do what we want with this body we have, but sadly we have inherited our skeleton.

What we must understand about this skeleton the left has built on is that, as opposed to the 50s, the 30s, or the 1910s, the current era of radicalism is coming from an incredibly narrow range of organizations. Activist orgs and intellectuals were the two forms of activism which predominated on the left, with some interplay between these two groups and electoral advocacy. In terms of what union work there was, it was scant and often guided one directly into the nexus of liberal organizations, and as for mutual aid, it was often focused on supplying the milieu with half-molded bread.

This came to a peak at Occupy, and after that the slow collapse of the left of the Oughties became a far more rapid process. In its place we began to see a series of different tendencies, marked by their shared oppositions to what they viewed as the failures of the last decade. But these new tendencies did not spring up completely new; they were built on the organizations that existed before them. This led to a strange interregnum: the left was increasingly disgusted with itself after Occupy but its reactions could only manifest through the same kinds of organizations as the ones who produced Occupy. A kind of magical thinking arose, where replacing the seemingly mundane forms of organizing associated with the anarchist left with some other form would lead to immediate success.

Here’s Sophia on RevLeft Radio talking about the one of those she wrote: http://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/marxist-center

man, fuck Bhaskar Sunkara

??

http://paydayreport.com/jacobin-publisher-accused-of-reneging-on-wage-deal-in-takeover-of-british-magazine-the-tribune/

their statement in response:

https://tribunemag.tumblr.com/post/178442272996/tribune-statement

Fuck the Jacobin. They have all that money to be benevolent buyers, but can't pay their writers?

pic.twitter.com/3eAcdwNhwj

— shut up (@itsbedtimebitcj) September 27, 2018

i'm not sure the name is worth that much, i'd have started a new magazine

http://paydayreport.com/jacobin-publisher-accused-of-reneging-on-wage-deal-in-takeover-of-british-magazine-the-tribune/

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:26 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the guy that wrote this is an acquaintance and honestly i don't trust his reporting as truthful anymore

he's had a years long vendetta against sunkara over this issue because of a pay dispute

good podcast episode here on the elections/movements dialectic from a gang that imo knows what they're doing

https://radiopublic.com/healing-justice-podcast-WznLEJ/ep/s1!fd2df?fbclid=IwAR3rV8WrJnbyNJs9ZNFNPTmZ_telcU-N3ftA73ikV4RXMZkG2nKj6-wjZkY

Nice ep here from Ryan Cooper et al about eco-socialism, criticisms of “degrowth,” and then sequel into discussing Jonathan Chait’s recent column

https://leftanchor.podbean.com/e/episode-9-champagne-ecosocialism-jon-chait-join-dsa-feat-jeffspross/

Tim Faust has a new newsletter out.

Work is being done all around us. In Idaho, a woman in a van built the popular movement which will win Medicaid expansion at the ballot box this fall. In Maine, the Maine People’s Alliance won Medicaid expansion off the back of a minimum-wage-increase campaign. In San Francisco, people won right to guaranteed counsel in case of eviction at the ballot box. In Cincinnati, the DSA won a needle exchange--the first in the region. And in Texas, beautiful Texas, we have the paid sick leave campaigns. The paid sick movement in San Antonio organized San Antonio residents (instead of well-meaning liberals from California and New York) who spoke to other San Antonio residents about paid sick leave. It turned out 140,000 signatures -- 40% higher than the number of people who voted for mayor in 2017. This is the largest popular movement in San Antonio in years, if not decades.

What do all these campaigns have in common?

One, they offer material and redistributive relief to people who are suffering now. Two, they’re all fundamentally movements toward health justice. Three, they organize with the people who most need to be heard and respected in the development of a radical single-payer program.

This is the work that excites me: the work of highlighting the specific manifestations of health disparity in our communities, working to alleviate it, and through this work building the local grassroots movement which, in coalition with hundreds of local movements nationwide, can demand, win, and enforce federal, universal single-payer--one which forces the state to bear the costs of providing care--AND the risks and costs of what happens when care is not provided.

Only by forcing the state to reckon with the financial consequences of unsafe housing, of inadequate food, of abandoning the rural population, of the carceral state, can we force it realize that housing is healthcare; that food is healthcare, etc. But the state alone is insufficient and untrustworthy: only through the mass popular movement, this big quilt organized from below, which demands health justice can we develop the mechanisms to hold it accountable.

forgot the link: https://tinyletter.com/error/letters/some-thoughts-on-health-justice-and-the-way-forward

Backgrounder on Citizen Strong - a group that's crowdsourcing opposition research on GOP candidates:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/a-former-obama-operative-built-a-new-anti-republican-attack-machine

(I'm proud to be one of the 16000 researchers for them!)

couple good pieces i liked this week:

http://newsocialist.org/karl-marx-revolutionary-heretic/?fbclid=IwAR2YSsWt38KQj3WKAPYHNDu1r1UsoOyhCJoknblbkknslNslOAL4hgaenes

There is no “playbook” from Marx, Lenin or anyone else waiting to be applied to our age. To realize the thought and struggles of the past is to actualize in new conditions, in conditions that are in some respects more appropriate to the struggles of the past. This requires attending to the changed circumstances in which we operate, while nourishing past dreams of liberation.

https://communemag.com/the-shield-of-utopia/?fbclid=IwAR3kpPmkvDWHLqiPRV71fsN8X7bS0VQiUWHtGQ8Hg5XNWwxgqn5eTM50bl0

Development is not only at the heart of the novel form, but is the basis for Karl Marx’s conception of communism. While many revolutionaries of Marx’s time and ours emphasized equality in their depictions of the world to come, Marx himself insisted on the centrality of freedom and, in particular, what he called free development. He is, in this sense, much closer to anarchism than the contemporaries who insisted on the right to work or a fair wage. In Marx’s view, proletarian revolution would produce “a community of freely associated individuals” in which “the free development of each is the precondition of the free development of all.” Equality, he argues in many places, cannot be the goal in any sort of simplistic way, since people have different needs and capacities: equal treatment produces, paradoxically, inequality. We do not have similar expectations for children and adults, for example. Instead of asking everyone to consume or work an equal amount, or in the same way, the equality that matters would be one that gave everyone the same opportunities to freely participate in any activity, to freely take, but most importantly, to freely change and grow. In The Dispossessed, what we see through Shevek’s dissatisfaction is a society in which there is freedom but not quite free development, in which there is equality without the fullness of free access and opportunity that is possible.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

In maintaining this principle, the greatest difficulty to be encountered does not lie in the appreciation of means towards an acknowledged end, but in the indifference of persons in general to the end itself. If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated[Pg 106] by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be under-valued, and the adjustment of the boundaries between it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty. But the evil is, that individual spontaneity is hardly recognised by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its own account. The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind. Few persons, out of Germany, even comprehend the meaning of the doctrine which Wilhelm von Humboldt, so eminent both as a savant and as a politician, made the text of a treatise—that "the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient[Pg 107] desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole;" that, therefore, the object "towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow-men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development;" that for this there are two requisites, "freedom, and a variety of situations;" and that from the union of these arise "individual vigour and manifold diversity," which combine themselves in "originality."

this is good

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-color-of-economic-anxiety

hell yeah

great piece

agreed

From a very different angle: The Secret Life of a Left-Wing Prepper

The prepping I uncovered in my communities was less about individual survival and more about creating an alternative infrastructure, since the ones in place are already failing our marginalized friends and family, even without a disaster looming. Mutual aid is the core of our organizing, instead of pure self-preservation. Knowing this, I’m confident that we will not only survive, but heal, rebuild and thrive.

that's also good, thanks. been thinking about starting a prepper thread here.

ugh I have no enthusiasm or really patience for anarcho-communalist post-collapse fantasias, especially rural ones

1. the writer is not rural
2. basic preparation is not a "fantasia"

tbrr I'm not reading articles today

i hear ya there <3

I think about prepping sometimes. The biggest problem I have is understanding what exactly I would be prepping for. I could buy a few acres of cheap farmland somewhere, but what's going to protect it from roving gangs of bandits in a true "mad max" type scenario? How will I get water to irrigate it? You can't really grow enough food to feed a family in a small garden plus a little chicken coop. Do I buy guns? Are they really going to be enough to fend off a militia on my own? Better than nothing I guess? I could learn to survive in the woods, but which woods, and how many people are woods really going to support? I tend to think being part of a group is probably the best defense, but what group, where?

I'm also not completely convinced "collapse" is a thing. Societies reach various states of organization/disorder, but I don't think there's really such a thing as a permanent "collapse." Things would reorganize in some form or other.

I ask myself very similar questions. To not do anything when I see #doom on the horizon seems foolish but it's unclear what I should do. Someone pointed out to me that surviving the apocalypse is a booby prize since now you have to live in post-apocalypse, which seemed mildly compelling at the time. Learning certain areas of knowledge seem potentially useful (electrical, HVAC, carpentry, agriculture) but the best way to go about acquiring that knowledge is difficult to discern.

over on the Chapo subreddit they've pinned a thread of tips/info resources for Brazilians to either get safer or get out and it's a lovely effort but it all just makes me so sad and angry that it's even necessary

man alive those are good questions, my answers would be:

food: what you need is a 6-month supply of MREs for yr family. cooking food wastes valuable energy if there's no power. thinking about living off the land is def into "fantasia" territory imo and not productive as short term strategy (but worth some long term thought, sure)

water: use water purifiers, and iodine tablets if necessary. have extra filters for the purifiers, there are hand-pumped ones for camping that are cheap.

guns: shotgun for home defense, handgun for personal defense, .22 for game hunting if u are rural. ymmv, obviously. no, you won't fend of a militia, yes it's better than nothing.

going to the woods: not until your food runs out

other: backup medical supplies if needed

Just going to paste the whole thing because it requires registration, not because it's outstandingly good (although i liked it!)

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/10/26/1540544028000/The-White-House-is-worried-about-wages/

Every White House's Council of Economic Advisers has supported its administration. Germany has its Sachverständigenrat, a group of academics who once a year issue an economic report telling the Chancellor's office what it's been doing wrong. Not so in the US, where the basic transaction for an academic elevated to the President's council —commonly known as the CEA — is this: think about things, write about them, even, but don't make us look bad. This is what George W. Bush's CEA reports did. It's what Barack Obama's CEA reports did, too.

This week Donald Trump's CEA released a 72-page report on socialism. In the last two years, this White House passed a historically large tax cut for businesses. It slipped free from regulations and trade agreements. And yet its wonks, as they prepare for midterm elections, have composed a report that mentions Lenin a dozen times. Perhaps socialism is the field where the White House would prefer to fight. It's remarkable, though, that this is a fight that's even available in the first place.

Republican policies rely on a popular understanding of economic thought: workers are paid according to their marginal contributions. If you get a salary of $56,000, that's an objective measure of the extra value that you contribute. This isn't any single policy. Rather, it's a philosophical way of looking at what a salary is. For decades, it has been the way American policy-makers of both sides think. But trust in this idea has been crumbling. What the report betrays is panic.

Even by the somewhat compromised standards of any CEA, the report is particularly sophomoric. That is, it both engages in sophistry and appears to have been composed by a college sophomore. It investigates the cost of owning a Ford Ranger truck in a Nordic country, for example, helpfully explaining that to calculate the costs of a Ford F-150 would be absurd, as that truck is too large for Nordic parking spaces.

It's a fun read, if only for a summary of the profoundly useless conversation that America has been having over the meaning of the world "socialism." ("We want the healthcare they have in Massachusetts." "You can't have it, that's socialism." "If it's socialism, can we have socialism?" "Socialism has killed tens of millions of people." "What about what the Nordics have? Can we have that?" "That's actually a kind of capitalism." "Can we have it?" "No." "What about what we do for old people, can we do that for everyone?" "That's socialism.")

There's some traditional CEA-style argument tucked in the report. As Tyler Cowen points out, it lays out a case against Medicare for All, an active legislative proposal by Bernie Sanders. Mr Sanders definitely calls himself a socialist, and Alphaville has always admired Mr Cowen as a good-faith kind of economist. But overall and at length, the report reads as if the council were instructed to type the word "socialism" as many times as possible.

The council obliged.

Tucked in the section titled "The Economics of Socialism," however, is a passage that just for a second lets us peek behind all the big red banners:

The modern socialist view is that exploitation remains real but is somewhat hidden in the market for labor. Much inequality arises, it is said, because market activity is a zero-sum game, with owners and workers paid according to the power they possess (or lack), rather than their marginal products. From the workers’ perspective, profits are an unnecessary cost in the production process.

The report never again mentions the marginal product of labor. This is remarkable, because making a case for the marginal product of labor is the entire game here. Whether wages are determined by power and bargaining, or by the prevailing beliefs that economists call "institutions," or by objective market processes that measure the worker's contribution — this has been for centuries one of the essential questions behind of the formal study of economics.

It's as if the authors simply stated that LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time, then moved on. You could certainly make a case. At some times it has seemed more true than others. But it's by no means an incontestable fact. If you stated it, particularly in a 72-page document about Michael Jordan and the history of basketball, you'd certainly be expected to spend at least a page explaining why. (Oh please oh please oh please let the comments section of this post be about basketball.)

Adam Smith, for example, was in this respect an institutionalist. Workers were paid enough to buy "whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without." Mr Smith had a soft, moral heart; he believed that wages rested on social custom. Forty years later, David Ricardo said that the natural price of labour "essentially depends on the habits of the people." An Englishman required more than just potatoes to eat, for example. When modern activists demand a "living wage," they're making an institutional argument, that a full-time job should provide for a minimally decent life. (Both historical quotes are pulled from Jonathan Schlefer's excellent Assumptions Economists Make.)

We gather that there are no institutionalists among the current Council of Economic Advisers. That's perfectly reasonable. The marginal productivity theory of wages has been the dominant way of looking at worker pay for about a century. (Look: LeBron James is an extraordinary basketball player. It's fine if you think he's the greatest.) The challenges to that theory, though, don't just come from moral philosophers. They're showing up in the data, now.

It's well established that since the 1980s, as workers become more productive, wage growth hasn't kept pace. The marginal productivity theory of wages suggests that it would. As an an observation, this is uncontroversial. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a completely readable 14-pager about it last year. The current CEA is definitely thinking about wage growth; it reported in September that wages are growing, if you measure them correctly.

There are other explanations. Some areas might not have enough companies offering jobs, for example. That would suggest workers don't have bargaining power. Or that franchise owners have agreed not to poach employees from each other, which could be about power, or about the collapse of a basic institutional agreement on what you're allowed to do as a boss. (Here's a compelling institutional argument on wage growth from way back in 2007. Alphaville is a bit of closet institutionalist, frankly.)

The point is, not only is the argument on what determines wage levels still open, it's more open than it has been in a long time.

Which is likely why the White House would prefer to talk about Lenin.

food: what you need is a 6-month supply of MREs for yr family.

How does one know what brands to trust on these? I have no room for any such thing in my apt anyway but eventually may buy a house.

Here’s a great interview with the author of that Current Affairs upthread:

https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/38946001/the-color-of-economic-anxiety/

xp gimme a day or so to look it up, I might as well start a thread

xp author was also on The Dig and very good on it

Which is likely why the White House would prefer to talk about Lenin.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, October 29, 2018 6:32 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can't believe they forgot that i would also prefer to talk about Lenin

How does one know what brands to trust on these? I have no room for any such thing in my apt anyway

The whole subject of how to strengthen one's position to endure economic hard times, or a natural disaster, or a full blown apocalypse, deserves its own thread. The idea that MREs are a universally apt answer to fit anyone's particular needs is extremely simplistic at best. Really, it comes down to sound risk assessment and assigning some part of your (usually tiny) surplus of resources (time and money) to whatever makes the most sense in your personal situation.

we do have 'rolling looming apocalypse'

xp you're misinterpreting, as usual, but we can discuss it in a different thread