Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

So, uh, yeah! Here's the political philosophy thread. Place to discuss rad stuff like first principles, Kantian ethics, and Robert Pippin. Fair game are any questions about any current political event that you think might be too distracting in a main thread (or that you simply want to articulate without worrying about people calling you names). Any conversation is fair game here, imo, but you have to be prepared to defend any assertion. And the further down the rabbit hole the better, so if you state that X principle is a priori good, then be prepared to get into a discussion about ethics and different ethical systems. I don't think anyone on this board is a professional philosopher, so obv we'll be feeling through a bunch of issues as they come up. Also! A good place to discuss actual real political philosophers and books by those people. If this doesn't get used for anything else, it'll be a place for me to post my thoughts about issues that I don't feel like get called a fascist for having, so if anyone has any interest in those thoughts, this'll generally be the place. I'm also going to be severely limiting my posting on current politics threads and stuff because - uh - fucking annoying. Anyway, have at it.

rad thread idea, and productive to have it outside of main thread imo

but man if u think it'll stop people calling u names :(

Anyway, there's actually something I want to discuss and think about right out of the gates. It's in the new Zizek book, Living in the End Times and it's a quote from Robert Kagan. I'd love to discuss the quote independent of Kagan + Zizek's personalities (tho if that's illuminating it can obviously be brought in) because I find it independently provocative. Here's the quote in question:

Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might... Perhaps it is not just coincidence that the amazing progress toward European integration in recent years has been accompanied not by the emergence of a European superpower but, on the contrary, by a diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United States. Turning Europe into a global superpower capable of balancing the power of the United States may have been one of the original selling points of the European Union — an independent European foreign and defense policy was supposed to be one of the most important byproducts of European integration. But, in truth, the ambition for European “power” is something of an anachronism. It is an atavistic impulse, inconsistent with the ideals of postmodern Europe, whose very existence depends on the rejection of power politics... Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important... Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

The ellipses are as in the Zizek text (p. 169), the original Kagan piece was published in Policy Review in 2002 and can be read in full here: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107 -- Something possibly to be discussed is if Zizek is using Kagan to say something different than what Kagan is actually saying.

Oh, people can call me shit here, but if someone calls me a fascist I'll ask them to explain what the term means. lol.

Another quote that's relavent:

If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system? “The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era — force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others. The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates European norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper’s jungle. American power, even employed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing human progress — and perhaps the only means. Instead, many Europeans today have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus.

I heart this thread already! oh to be young and in college again...

I was talking with a fellow former UCSC politics major awhile back and he was complaining to me about how academia has more or less reduced politics to a branch of statistical analysis, that everything these days is about polling data and test studies which made me very sad... cuz my favorite stuff was always the theory and the history. number crunching has its place, but come on.

Basically, to just begin to unpack this quote - this has been on my mind a lot, and it's the question of whether a certain amount of outdated State struggle is essential to preserving and furthering what Kagan calls the Kantian paradise. We understand what that means, I think, the unyielding ethical moment. Kant posits that ethics are evaluated action by action as a general rule -- would the world work if everyone did this action? And if it wouldn't, it can never be done ever. This is unyielding -- Kant's on the Supposed Right to Lie for Philanthropic Concerns discusses the case of a murderer asking you where his victim is. Kant says you can refuse to answer him, but you can't lie to him, because lying is never ethically appropriate (even if necessary to mediate some greater struggle -- the moral decision is always pure on its own). The Hobbesian struggle is definitely much more murkier. Kagan is suggesting here that you can have this Kantian paradise, but only if the Hobbesian decisions are being handled by someone else. So -- is this so?

Btw, ftr, the Cooper being quoted above is Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and chaos in the Twenty-first Century

This is not a philosophical point, but I'm not sure about the claimed "diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United States". France for instance has lots of nuclear weapons, & the state is quite in support of this. At the air & space museum I visited just outside Paris a few weeks ago---a public museum, mind you---had an exhibit celebrating France's nuclear arsenal, with decommissioned nuclear missiles on display, & quotes from all the recent French presidents proclaiming the importance of France having a nuclear option separate from NATO. So while it's true that the USA can out-occupy foreign nations (to the extent that the USA can do this at all), the French are pretty confident that they can nuke the fuck out of whoever poses an "ultimate" threat.

I consider myself very ignorant of European Union politics but in general those quotes ring true to me... I maintain a deep suspicion of Europe's ability to successfully deal with its many internal ethnic divisions, however, and wouldn't be surprised if those one day erupt, yet again, to ruin this "post-history" paradise that Kagan describes.

x-posts

Kant's on the Supposed Right to Lie for Philanthropic Concerns discusses the case of a murderer asking you where his victim is. Kant says you can refuse to answer him, but you can't lie to him, because lying is never ethically appropriate

yeah i never had any time for Kant tbh

Ok, to reduce this question to a recent event: We all agree that sending predator drones to suspected terrorist homes feels icky. And yet, possibly someone needs to be sending those predator drones so that other countries can condemn sending them. I believe what Kagan is positing is that if you don't send drones, you will simply have to deal with war and terror yourself. So the United States emerges as this military power and sends the predator drones in (and even makes jokes about it at White House Correspondent dinners -- because this is now who we are in the world, this is our job so-to-speak), and then Europe can be a location that can afford not to send predator drones. It's a very provocative argument! On one hand, I want to say that no one needs to send predator drones, that the Kantian model can be embraced across the board. But there are real issues of coercive violence that aren't addressed by Kantian morality -- who asserts Western positions + values if no one uses coercive force? (Obviously assuming that Western positions + values are worth asserting, but I'm certainly willing to hear an opinion that says that they are not worth asserting.)

I don't understand that reference - why doesn't the murderer know where his victim is? or is it that someone has stated the intent to murder the victim and is asking you where to find that person? If so, I don't really have a problem with Kant's response.

The way I learnt it in undergrad is that the murderer knocks on your door and the victim is hiding upstairs. He asks, "Where is the victim?" You can refuse to answer, but you can't say, "He went that way," and lie. Because lying is wrong on its own, even if it might save the victim's life.

You are aware that a murderer is seeking the victim (xp)

also I think it's BS that "Europe" (whatever that means) wouldn't send in predator drones if they thought it was worth it. There's just a much different political/economic calculus over here. I.e. I don't think the differences are about morality as much as they are about dollars & euros (& yuan & yen).

A more provocative example: Acc. to Kant you cannot steal bread to feed your family, or steal anything to do anything good (so by Kant's extreme definition, stealing leaks to release them and save lives is wrong because theft is wrong).

Prob with Kant applied to real-world is that every action or chain of action from every angle all th way down will eventually have some Kantian 'wrong' in it, surely?

One thing a friend of mine was suggesting the other day, that I also thought was really provocative, is that Europe actually supports most American military action around the world, they just do so hypocritically -- demeaning it in the press while simultaneously supporting it in the UN and sending troops to areas like Afghanistan. There was a big controversy a few years ago when the German public discovered that the German army was much more involved in Afghanistan than the German people had been told. There's definitely a sense, I think, of: "You go ahead and do it and we'll protest."

Europe being the govts or the , y'know, the people as a whole, Mordy?

That's a good question, I don't know the best way to parse that.

One thing that I think isn't acknowledged by standard American leftist critiques of the war is that there is vast participation across the Western spectrum -- Germany, Italy, Canada, the UK, Spain, etc, etc all have troops in Afghanistan. Not the amount that the United States has sent, but there is a wide agreement that there should be Western troops in this country at the moment.

Definitely something worth discussing is the relationship in a Democracy between a government and a people -- it could be argued, I think that the relationship between a people and a government is a lot like the relationship between the United States + Europe. The government does things we find distasteful, but that we understand is necessary, and then we complain about it so that we can continue to live in a more Kantian bubble, even while giving support to those actions (by allowing them to continue!). Or, maybe we don't allow them to continue, but the people are so alienated from governance that we don't see a way of changing it even if we'd like to.

I'd certainly agree with you to some extent if you were referring to european govt support/tacit agreement- but not if you were referring to the continent entire (not that the continent entire really makes any decisions in a historic sense anyway i guess)

xp yeah that comes into the area we're talking bout here i think- our govts do things we don't agree with and the US do things that our govts don't agree with but it's maybe a question of outsourcing agency/complicitness to those willing to do the dirty work.

this is all in theory btw cos fuck an afghan campaign

I think we're touching on, what I understand is, the dominant question of political philosophy today, which is legitimacy. What kind of legitimacy does our government have? If you believe that when it does things we don't like, it actually does so with our tacit agreement, then you'll come up with a different concept of legitimacy than if you believe we've been alienated from the governance process entirely (which reads to be as a more Marxist critique?).

I don't believe in the 'tacit agreement' line- beyond that it gets complicated for a Friday evening.

There's another thing I really want to discuss too and that I think is really constantly going on in the background in ILX -- which is what our relationship is to the other citizens in the United States. There's constantly this sense that we're a community apart (the intellectual left-wingers) from those who are apathetic, or are actually antagonistic to questions of human rights, etc. There are problematic politics at the very root of that dichotomy. If nation states are communities performed on mythical levels (an idea I buy into fully) then we suddenly need to drag in issues of Otherness (Lacanian and Levinasian) to deal with these people we occupy a country with and with whom we disagree. Who are they and is the most productive reading that we disagree with them? It might be way more productive to read our disagreements as performing broader questions and concerns -- when we get caught up on who is right and who is wrong we may be missing that the discourse itself is producing ideas and conversations. I have some examples in mind (in particular how racist slave-owners basically forced the emancipation of slaves by seceding when they could have simply kept their shit to themselves and perpetuated slavery -- the dialectic actually produced progression, even tho at the time those people were horrific human beings, their actions directly lead to emancipation).

darraghmac, you don't believe that citizens give tacit agreement to their governance? Is it because you think they're alienated by the State? If so -- I think this is really productive to follow-up on and push against. How do you read Democracy in the United States in that light?

I don't believe that there is always tacit agreement in the actions of govt- I probably believe that the machinations of govt allow for enough delay in 'feedback' (ie changes of govt by the usual means) to allow this not to matter most of the time.

re Democracy in the US- I don't! Just sitting here in western europe enjoying the concepts tbh

There's obviously a lot of stuff to sort through about the value of various kinds of representative systems, and I think many people probably feel like two-parties need to pander to the broadest interests and can't represent more niche, or fringe, positions (that a parliament, for instance, could give representation to). Of course, this cuts both ways, and many European countries have fascist or nationalist parties with representation today in their parliaments and governments.

Speaking of, a New Yorker article about how "special interests" may actually not be a bad thing for a democracy from 2008. I haven't read it in awhile but I found it really interesting at the time and I'm up for discussing it with anyone who is interested: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/08/11/080811crat_atlarge_lemann

Teaser:

“The Process of Government” is a hedgehog of a book. Its point—relentlessly hammered home—can be stated quite simply: All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure. It was, in his day as in ours, a wildly contrarian position. Bentley was writing “The Process of Government” at the height of the Progressive Era, when educated, prosperous, high-minded people believed overwhelmingly in “reform” and “good government,” and took interest groups to be the enemy of these goals. The more populist Progressives liked having the people as a whole decide things by direct vote; the more élitist Progressives wanted to give authority to experts. But Bentley, who seems to have shared the Progressives’ goal of using government to curb the power of big business, rejected such procedural tenets. In Chicago terms, Bentley was the rare Progressive intellectual who believed, in effect, that the machine had a more accurate understanding of how politics worked—how it always and necessarily worked—than the lakefront liberals did.

omg, haven't read it yet, but serendipitous!

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/political_philosophy_and_the_left/

what are "western values"

I think generally it means like the Enlightenment project

ex-ilxor of the ancien regime josh k favorited this recently

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/08/conversation-opening-salvo.html

good post!

This is an interesting and provocative argument (I think!) and one that I bet a lot of ilxors would disagree with me about. From Steve Poole:
http://unspeak.net/justice/

It is worth pausing to admire Obama’s masterful rhetorical conflation here of two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest. This has to be the sense invoked in Obama’s reference to the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice. In this spatial metaphor, justice is a place: implicitly, a courtroom, or at least a cell with the promise of process. (Or even, in extremis, Guantánamo Bay, still not closed, where indefinite “detention” or imprisonment is Unspeakily palliated with the expectation of some kind of tribunal.) To bring someone to justice is to put them in a place where they will be answerable for their alleged crimes. To be answerable in this sense, it helps to be alive.

But it is quite another sense of “justice” — meaning a fair result, regardless of the means by which it was achieved — that is functioning in Obama’s next use of the word: the quasi-legal judgment that justice was done. On what sorts of occasion do we actually say that justice was done? Not, I suppose, at the conclusion of a trial (when it might be claimed, instead, that justice was served); rather, after some other event, away from any courtroom, that we perceive as rightful punishment (or reward) for the sins (or virtues) of the individual under consideration. (Compare poetic justice.) The claim that justice was done appeals, then, to a kind of Old Testament or Wild West notion of just deserts. What, after all, happened between the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice and the claim that justice was done? Well, Bin Laden was killed. He was not, after all, brought to justice. Instead, justice (in its familiar guise as American bombs and bullets) was brought to him.

I disagree! I think the point of "legal justice" is to create a civilizational context to perform actual justice. The problem with vigilantism isn't the vigilantism. The problem is that it undermines the civilizational context. We have established these institutions and agreed to live by their laws. So we set up these hierarchies by which to establish (legislate) and enforce (execute) said laws. But its roughly a facade that, when it does its job, keeps stuff running smoothly. But the truth is always that the context is itself invented and so easily undermined. (That is, side point, why limited government Republicans are idiots. It's no feat to have no governance, just look at all the countries that can't manage it. The feat is governance.) What's one way of undermining it? Attack a civilian populace. One of the primary (and maybe the most fundamental) reason to establish these governances is to help protect us. When you kill a bunch of civilians, you have undermined the very state of the facade. The only appropriate response is using the State's monopoly on power to stop the bleeding. You actually can't use the tools of civilization to plug that hole bc the hole challenges those very tools. That's why (I think) we inuit that we can't really try ppl like Bin Laden. He declares that the entire state enterprise is invalid. In that context, executed him in court or executed him in the battlefield mean exactly the same thing. Except the later reforms the context and the first one doesn't.

(Maybe.)

Anyway, the point being that there aren't two kinds of justice. There's just the one kind of primordial justice and the particular way we funnel it through society. I think I'm actually arguing two distinct things here and I believe one is more provocative than the other. So plz take issue with one, both, or neither.

...two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest.

I agree with Mordy that Poole fails to establish his thesis that we carry around two "conceptions of justice". His invocation of courtrooms and legal process does not establish a fully-formed conception of justice, so much as a context within which we expect to find a just conclusion to a conflict. Justice itself is not legalistic, but an idealized state where conflict is resolved in favor of the superior right.

So, basically I think Mordy's critique gets right at the weakness in the argument and exposes it.

that kagan book discussed upthread is total dogshit, even if the excised quotes are reasonable enough

I want to get my friend a good 'intro to political philosophy' book for his birthday that isn't boring? Anyone know one?

it's not really an intro, but i highly recommend Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy" which is very accessible to new philosophy readers and has the advantage of feeling very current.

http://themonkeycage.org/2011/05/internet-cynics-and-enthusiasts-both-have-it-right/

The experiment’s findings confirmed this prediction. Members of the Internet group were 15 percentage points less likely to believe that the election was conducted fairly and impartially. They were also 12 points more likely to believe that the recount was conducted unfairly when compared to the control group. However, relative to the control group, members of the Internet group were also 11 points less likely to vote.

This suggests that—although the Internet may have provided better information about the integrity of the election—this supposed democratic boon may carry a negative side effect. In this case, it appears that Internet users who became more aware of electoral abuses, seemingly also became less likely to believe that their vote mattered. After all, the belief that an election is not being conducted fairly can produce two very divergent responses: some people may respond by protesting and taking to the streets, while others may simply throw up their hands and stay home. Perhaps, then, both Internet cynics and enthusiasts have it partially right.

I don't know about this 'both have it partially right' piece but I do think the idea that awareness can have a deleterious effect on participation is really interesting, esp when it becomes a feedback loop where the fewer the # of people participate politically the greater the potential for corruption/abuse to occur (less eyes watching, less engaged dissent, etc) which in turn turns more people off to the process and ultimately you reach a stage where it is completely corrupt and ppl are completely apathetic (and only something radically revolutionary could break that particular stalemate). I also wonder if this is the process that the United States is currently engaged in.

Does anyone here have a recommendation for an article (etc.) making a secular case for the contemporary Western welfare state? I'm especially interested in such arguments that bear on the USA, as opposed to Europe, but really anything'll do.

Oh, & I should add that I'd prefer moral arguments, not economic or technocratic arguments.

I can't think of one off-hand, but if I do I'll post it. Your question does remind me, tho, that I'm looking for either an article or colorful chart that shows standard of living in the US over period of time ending fairly recently (closest I found was something ending in 1998).

can you really separate moral arguments from economic/technocratic arguments?

Sure you can, for example I'm pretty sure that Bismarck's early adventures into social care weren't based on a belief that it was the morally correct thing to do.

You can read a bunch of contemporary arguments defending the Poor Law in the 18th Century UK because it protected social stability, too.

Bismarck's welfare state might not have been 'social care because helping people is the right thing to do' but there was still a higher level reasoning of 'doing this will lead to what I believe is the best outcome for society'. same w/ the poor law defenders.

I mean someone supports economic philosophy XYZ because they believe it leads to the best outcome for society (or the best outcome for themselves, and there's some reasoning where society will ultimately benefit, or society doesn't matter. but you can't remove morality from this.)

The literature, however, remains unsettled as to exactly when and how misperceptions can be corrected. In addition, the role of the “backfire effect,” where corrective information can actually make false beliefs more prevalent, in these processes remains unclear. For example, Weeks and Garrett (2014) do not find evidence for the backfire effect in a study about correcting rumors in the 2008 presidential campaign. Similarly, Ecker et al.’s (2014) study of racial attitudes finds those attitudes do not change the effectiveness of discounting information. Looking at similar attitudes, Garrett et al. (2013) find no evidence of these backfire effects in a study about a proposed Islamic cultural center in New York City. By contrast, Nyhan and Reifler (2010, 2015) find evidence for a backfire effect in a vaccines context as well as in the case of being correctly informed about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This research note reports a replication of Nyhan and Reifler’s (2015) flu vaccines study embedded within a larger experimental study of flu vaccine intentions and attitudes. Data generated in the experiment do not replicate the backfire effect or the finding that corrections reduce misperceptions about vaccine safety. This suggests that more work is needed to validate the backfire effect, establishing the conditions under which it occurs and the size of its effect.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168017716547

interesting interview:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sigmar-gabriel-we-are-seeing-what-happens-when-the-u-s-pulls-back-a-1186181.html

feel like i should try and use this thread more this year

it's def a better thread than the regular politics one, which is mostly just media talk

I want to read your link, will do so a bit later I think.

it speaks to a lot of the issues that i opened this thread w/ - Europe, the US, the military guarantee of sovereignty, national interest vs. national values, etc.

I though his separation between European values and European interests was interesting but cloudy. Here's what I made of "European interests": financial interests, connected with soft power interests like being admired, but distinguished from mere "output". So it's not *just* cash, but how the cash is made: by workers and corporates acting in line with democratic values, in order to insure that democratic and free countries can continue to exist and prosper.

It's also interesting that while he speaks a great deal of Europe, on foreign policy he speaks as much of Germany as Europe. He notes that France is a nuclear power, but that "Europe could not defend itself without the U.S., even if European structures were strengthened." I gather he means a land invasion by Russia, since France's nuclear arsenal is sufficient to destroy the metropolises of any invaders, but presumably not Russian tanks across the Curzon line.

He seems to judge the USA to not longer count as a democratic and free nation, so that Europe stands alone against the authoritarian states of the USA, Russia, and China. An interesting new Axis I suppose. He mentions Chinese intervention in Africa and wonders why Europe isn't working harder there; of course France does work hard there but the colonial legacy is still playing out and it's not a pretty one. Africa is Europe's future, I think; but how to do so in a non-colonial way, when we begin with such inequalities, is hard to think about. The Chinese have no such problem (and obviously the Americans don't care).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critique-and-tradition-a-conversation-with-susan-buck-morss/

You have described your thinking as close “to what Bert Brecht described (and admired) as plumpes denken — non-elegant thinking.” Plumpes denken would be a kind of vulgar or inelegant thinking that has the agility to respond to the demands of our historical present. Fredric Jameson has described this kind of thinking as not a “position” that stands alone but a “demystification of some prior position from which it derives its acquired momentum.” This seems to fit in well with what you have termed a boundary question.

Yes, my colleague Irving Wohlfarth was the first to describe my work as a form of plumpes denken, and I take that to be a compliment! You have mentioned the element of unfaithfulness or a kind of promiscuity to my method. I would also add that it offers a critique of received tradition. In 1992, I was in Berlin, and it was some anniversary of Hegel. A lot of new books came out on Hegel’s Jena Writings that offered variants of his lectures recorded in student notes. Reading those, I noticed that it was exactly in 1804/1805 that the dialectic was spoken about by Hegel in terms of master/slave. I thought that was curious: this year was the culmination of the Haitian Revolution. So I asked some scholars in Germany, but they all said, “No, no. The master/slave dialectic is a reference to the revolt of Spartacus in ancient Rome.” I thought, “Well, wait a minute. Hegel’s economic theory is about Adam Smith, and his political theory is about Rousseau and the French Revolution, so how is it that he goes back to Spartacus for the theme of master and slave?” That struck me as bizarre. So I began to read about the Haitian Revolution, but it took me almost nine years to bring Hegel and Haiti together. Eventually, I found the microfiche of the journal Minerva, which Hegel read religiously, and in it I found many pages on the Haitian Revolution.

I remember when I first gave the lecture, “Hegel and Haiti,” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminar at the University of Chicago, someone in the audience asked me, “Why are you so angry when you give this lecture?” I was angry at the thought that my education had completely overlooked this connection between Hegel and Haiti. So there is also a kind of rebelliousness or anger at received traditions. It taught me, “Don’t be too respectful of authority — if it doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s wrong.”

https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/control-groups-william-davies-nervous-states/

TH: Would you say that a relatively modest economic decline has more political impact than long-suffered misery?

WD: This is an interpretation you could draw from the data. But in any case, we live in a political world today where questions of suffering, disease and mortality have reentered the center of the political scene. Not only in the U.S., but also in Britain, the trends of life expectancy are pointing downwards. On the other end of the age spectrum, political activism has become much more existential in nature—think about things like Black Lives Matter or the Extinction Rebellion movement. Politics has become about questions of life and death again in a way that blows a hole in a key aspect of the Hobbesian liberal project, which is that unless you declare war, politics would not be shaped by mortal concerns. Over the past two decades in America, orders of magnitude more people have died due to opium overdoses than in the Vietnam War. Capitalism is generating problems that impact people’s bodies and mortality. This is a phenomenon that rationalist social sciences of economics or behavioral psychology are not equipped to deal with. It’s another reason why a more psychoanalytically informed approach to subjectivity is necessary.

mordy:

series of moishe postone lectures on marx

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzGFXPJAZ6qq7rI8GhPJ6gi7fH9cfUnI

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.