Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

thx i will watch. i almost bumped this thread this week actually w/ a long post but self-censored oops.

reading thucydides - it's cool.

thought about posting this to right-wing drift. seems v hostile to ilx: https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/

goddamn. that should be required reading with a competency exam before one is allowed to post on the 'smart socialists explain conservatism' etc. threads

it's a repetitive mess, a mixture of things a lot of ppl are saying abt the difficulty of building a broad leftist coalition/the contradictions within, a bunch of bitter attempts at score settling, some flattery for conservatives, the occasional baseless assertion and a whole lot of hubris. the real split is between ppl who find this sort of bravado impressive and those who roll their eyes

wow that was boring. maybe one or two good points somewhere in there but people keep writing this same fucking article like they’re saying something new

beyond sick of people tossing around lazy received crap like “identity politics scares away workers” without bothering to specify either term. since the writer is moaning about the “cancellation” of Angela Nagle due to her “class-based, materialist perspective” on why ethnic cleansing is necessary (another fucker who thinks nationalist workerism is class analysis and identities aren’t material) it’s pretty clear which workers are supposed to matter here. vampire castle bollocks

I looked at that but boy is it long, without any definition of what they take "strasserism" to be.

guys I think we should all pay attention to one of the most compelling, straight-talking political philosophers of modern times who isn't afraid to pierce the bubble of delusions of the bourgeois left: paul embery

the debate caused by the nathan robinson thing about the utility of marx in 2020 is actually interesting tho

it's a lot of shite tbh. strasserite is obviously an insult and isn't to be taken literally when applied to the likes of la nagle - though pace the article strasserism is still influential in far-right circles. but nagle's politics is a mixture of right-wing populism on social issues, and left-wing populism on the economy, and for some of us anti-immigration rhetoric is a personal attack so I'm happy to think she's an arsehole and this useless cunt writing the article can away and lie in his pish.

people - including piketty - have written well on the "brahmin left" and the hemorrhaging of support of "the left" from the white working-class. a trend that - in the uk, France, and the US - has been a constant since the 1960s and is not particular to the contemporary "left"

he points out in that piece something i've mentioned a few times to leftists debating the robinson thing which is that there are egalitarian and even radical egalitarian movements that long predate marxism the idea that marxism is the only ideology fit to serve as the vehicle for our egal aspirations is ahistorical and robinson isn't a reactionary to note that it might not even be the most productive vehicle.

They seem to be railing against tumblr dorks who called them names rather than any specific left ideas (other than Corbyn’s promise of free broadband). The Fight for 15 in the US, for example, seems like exactly the kind of thing they ought to support, but since that doesn’t suit the tenor of the rant, it isn’t mentioned.

xp. yes, trad marxism is bad and people being like "let's just do bolshevism again" as if we don't already know how that turns out, and it's not very good

cares way too much, despite above-it-all posturing, about electoral prospects for “the left”

is “actually existing socialism” is being used unironically?

zizek cited without a fart noise

big reveal that “stasserism” isn’t a thing as such... wow my mind is blown. still more than enough fascist and authoritarian collaboration on/from the left

cool thing about the vampire castle genre is no one can call you racist/sexist/reactionary/whatever without proving your point. I’m cancelling the writer by calling them a dickhead thus demonstrating how correct they are in their analysis of everything wrong with the left these days

no he's trying to answer a bigger question which is why is the hemorrhaging of support of "the left" from the white working-class. a trend that - in the uk, France, and the US - has been a constant since the 1960s and is not particular to the contemporary "left" is so. the tumblr dorks are just symptomatic if anything. xxp

he's not really answering that question tho

like in a substantive way, it's just the airing of grievances

you can be aware of leftist intellectual history and still think that marxism is the bee's knees, in fact I think knowing abt the precursors will in some respects make marx seem more important/useful but still, I would be happy to see some other things brought in more often and I def have issues with marx's class analysis (for one thing it leads to drivel like this)

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles

This guy is transparently full of shit.

In the comments of that article, the guy basically defends Duda and Orban as promulgating a welfareism and Nationalist plank at the same time.

But that the article refuses to substantively address race or idpol as anything but concerns of the left bourgeoisie just shows how out of touch it is... At least in the US, race has been used as a cudgel to separate and deplete working class solidarity since Reconstruction, and that cudgel remains in place today, so dismissing concerns of racism within the white working class as merely a diagnosis made by the bourgeois managerial class is ahistorical and dismissive of a huge swath of the population that isn't white, and is also demonstratively less wealthy.

Total shite piece.

In the comments of that article, the guy basically defends Duda and Orban as promulgating a welfareism and Nationalist plank at the same time.

jesus, I didn't read the comments

i couldn't find any comments ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

oh now they came up - before when i scrolled down i just got infinite suggestions for other articles to read

I haven't read the piece yet and am perfectly willing to believe that it's a shitpost in all but name but I really wish we would stop deciphering everything through a US-centric lens. Even if it's well-intentioned a gesture (and on ILX, it almost always is), it smacks of cultural imperialism. I mean, I assume the person who wrote this is Swedish? I suppose this is one of the world wide web's inevitable pitfalls: its lingua franca is English, and it is ideologically American, with a few notable exceptions here and there. Or perhaps the illusion of universalism does more harm than good in the long run, I don't know.

oh he doesn't defend them in the comments anyway - he just gives them as an example of a right-wing movement that a working class polity could find compelling. less useful for class analysis in the US where i have yet to discover what major economic benefits the working class receives from the GOP. why they're repulsed by the left is so overdetermined by contrast it's easy to produce explanations.

When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

I have absolutely no clue where he gets this 'fear of joining the proles' thing from - apart from Trotsky's analysis of the rise of Nazism, of course.

xp
pom, you're usually right about that, but if you read the piece it's the author who isn't making particularly fine distinctions among political movements in different countries, plus it's written in English for a reason

Fair enough! I'll read it later today.

Btw I meant to say less harm than good.

He has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to Corbyn and the Labour Party or the UK, that much is plain.

Yeah this guy didn’t invent the idea of the international left, so I’m not going to disregard him entirely for talking about it. But treating concepts like “identity politics” and “the white working class” as interchangeable among the US, UK, Sweden, Hungary, and Poland puts your argument on pretty shaky ground imo. Tempted to leave “now do Québec” in the comments

Tempted to leave “now do Québec” in the comments

Please do. ;)

this kind of shit is catnip to certain types of leftist shithead since they keep sharing endless variations on the same fucking rant

the most annoying thing is how they seem to think materialist class analysis just means repeating that phrase over and over while defending social conservatism against the liberal elite

nationality has much less to do with it than what you could euphemistically call “europeanness”

Left, what is yr analysis for recent electoral failures by ostensibly unapologetic Leftist campaigns particularly vis-a-vis their failure to activate a working class polity on their behalf?

I don’t have an analysis, there are too many different things but a few reasons would be
- “ostensibly”- these campaigns were actually extremely apologetic on issues of race, police, prisons, nationalism etc. for fear of alienating their idea of the working class, which ended up being either too much or not enough for much of the actual working class, plenty of whom still supported the campaigns, not enough for them to win
- the managerial structure & nature of party politics: the attempt to create, or appropriate existing, social movements from the top down worked to some extent byt guaranteed this kind of relationship which stifled actual movement from the bottom
- these projects like all electoral projects were based on class collaboration which in this system means middle class domination
- this middle class loves adopting superficial signifiers of social justice which produces backlash in different directions
- white people are racist, the same campaign can be too or insufficiently racist for different working class people
- trying to revive post war social democracy without regard for changes in capitalism and class composition was doomed to failure
- white (and some other) working class in the UK and US has benefitted from colonialism and leftism here is largely concerned with preserving as much of this as possible, which precludes genuine international solidarity; to the extent that it’s not it’s not appealing to most citizens
- the media is very right wing, some people believe it
- there is still plenty of working class resistance everywhere, this is more important than parties and politicians or the opinions of leftist gatekeepers

I'd just like to briefly note that political analysis is not the same as political philosophy and that any analysis of current politics should first be considered as propaganda. This doesn't mean Mordy's linked article is not worth reading, but every assertion it makes should be read as critically as possible.

Thx Aimless from the response here it definitely seems like ppl are accepting it on face value and not criticizing it at all lol

Read it. I'm not sure why. Your summation "seems v hostile to ilx" doesn't fit any version of ilx I'm aware of. It appeared to be the usual pointless wrangling over the exact details of eliminating capitalism, when there is no evidence such wrangling has a single identifiable consequence. In fact, it is written from and about a Marxist point of view that is so marginal in US politics that it analyzes nothing germane here at all.

With respect, it's the kind of piece that seems convincing until you think about it. The first obvious question it raises is what Kyeyune - afaict himself a writer/blogger/activist, not a unionized welder - is FOR and how it would differ from the kind of leftist electoral campaigns that have failed. The Wiki on the municipal political party he belongs to doesn't make it sound very different from the Sanders/Corbyn version:

The party is heavily opposed to political corruption and high politician incomes – among some of the measures it supports are reducing the wages of politicians and senior officials,[12] making plebiscites easier to enact and more potent,[25] increased social housing and subsidies for youth recreation,[12] and free dental care.[26] The party opposes continued privatization of health care, elderly care, public housing and municipal education, among other things.

It's not like Sanders was fighting for fully automated luxury communism or massive investments in modern art museums - M4A, $15 min wage, a wealth tax, organizing Amazon workers: these are left-populist, pro-worker policies. (And I mean, if anything, at least here, it's Trudeau the winning centrist Liberal, who doubled arts funding. I doubt the more left-wing NDP would have made that a priority.)

I'm also not sure about where he is drawing his hard lines when it comes to class. If the educated children of the PMC are angry about their jobs stocking shelves at Walmart, does that really make them bad socialists or inauthentic workers? Why shouldn't they be angry - Marx didn't call for a worker revolution because he thought their lives as workers were good, surely. Even if they are grad students or adjunct teachers or freelance writers, should they be excluded from the working class? On what grounds? Many of these people face the very same material struggles.

In fact, it is written from and about a Marxist point of view that is so marginal in US politics that it analyzes nothing germane here at all.

It seemed much more about UK politics (and UK ILXors) tbh.

The point here is not a moral one.

Just read the whole piece. Not sure what the exact point was in the first place tbh, other than 'the contemporary left is failing', which is a debatable statement, depending on your perspective. I do agree that the so-called left should start by actually winning elections, which is probably not a very popular opinion on this here board, but I'm not convinced that the author's would-be analysis paves the way for such a victory.

At least in our country, I'm pretty much OK with the NDP doing a good job of representing its constituents (who mostly are in authentically working-class ridings) and winning concessions from minority governments. In general, though, yes, political movements should try to win.

I am too, and in many ways our current federal government is farther to the left than it's been in decades just by virtue of leaning on the NDP. If anything, this once again speaks to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of a one-size-fits-all reading of the 'international' left, which is something we must aspire towards, but whose pragmatic existence is so flimsy as to be laughable. Hence the need, once again, for some measure of caution when writing such pieces, unless you explicitly identify with the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which the author clearly does.