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

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

brecht, who begs forgiveness for the antifascist's lack of civility

You, who shall resurface following the flood
In which we have perished,
Contemplate —
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also the dark time
That you have escaped.

For we went forth, changing our country more frequently than our shoes
Through the class warfare, despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

And yet we knew:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse. We
Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, when at last the time comes
That man can aid his fellow man,
Should think upon us
With leniency.

ouch

Kim Stanley Robinson, sci-fi author of the well regarded Mars Trilogy & other things, at Commune:

One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas. This is the necessary next step following the dystopian moment, without which dystopia is stuck at a level of political quietism that can make it just another tool of control and of things-as-they-are. The situation is bad, yes, okay, enough of that; we know that already. Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place any more. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not.

https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/?fbclid=IwAR2733kCfV39NeLdaxUGDU8Ti7XL6lBmE1BJfudXfLRCkRZJ1xzm1hC4LB0

dude is a treasure

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.

― sleeve

this is where i get out. if it was just that i could fantasize that i have skills that would become useful in the absence of the social order, i might be on board with "prepping", i might be tempted. in a world that requires the willingness to enact armed violence for survival, i don't survive. i've been suicidal, off and on, for decades. i get a gun and i know who it's going to wind up being used on.

stockpile mres all you like, but the greater part of "prepping" is mental. realize that the world you are preparing for is a world where you have abandoned uncountable numbers of people, present company included, to die.

In 2k18 I do a lotta death meditation

Speaking of

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/socialist-left-guns-nra-trump.html

Curious how popular Mosin-Nagants are in the crowd.

Re: prepping:

Brad said they try to screen the people who are invited to their monthly range days, weeding out those who seem like “adventurers.” “We don’t want the John Wayne of the left showing up to our range,” he said. Indeed, the S.R.A. comes off more like a wholesome civic organization than a revolutionary underground. It recently became a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and its members spend a lot of time on mutual aid projects like collecting funds and supplies for hurricane relief.

paging a HOOS for comment

The experience of Refoundation over the course of the year since its founding has taught us many hard lessons. On the basis of those lessons, we have decided to dissolve the caucus in order to seek out more effective means to build and transform DSA.

While Refoundation rapidly grew from around 40 to around 400 members, DSA has mushroomed to more than 50,000 members. The interest in socialism among young workers in this country is clear. The connection between this small caucus and the growing membership of the organization is considerably less clear. In fact, we feel as though we have cordoned ourselves off from the majority of new socialists by establishing an unnecessary demarcation by a somewhat spurious political distinction.

We believe that by first gathering people nationally under a banner of presupposed ideological unity, we have reproduced a number of the problems of the US left from the era immediately preceding the explosive growth of DSA, namely: sectarian isolation and an increasing difficulty in assessing the political terrain. Simply put, we have found ourselves in the opposite position we had intended. Our caucus has begun to feel like its own organization and in some cases it has behaved as such.

https://dsarefoundation.org/2018/11/11/dissolution/?fbclid=IwAR2h-ZK0CbJxPIOK9JCQeekSqQyxWch9AidkPFnmvhqN2i3HkbjqdkVxiHk

Shruggie tbh

Chris R, a decades-long DSAer and lesbian socialist, made a forceful case recently that this is absolutely the wrong moment for us to be forming ideological caucuses, when we have no meaningful power, and so quibbling over ideas about revolutionary programs amounts to the infamous cookshops. I'm inclined to take her wisdom seriously and am just kinda throwing up my hands at this.

Ya I didn't necessarily take it as a huge loss or anything, just wondering if you had any added intel

Bevan said "The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism … The argument is about power … because only by the possession of power can you get the priorities correct."

Arguing about priorities before attaining power is a mistake. Of course, saying 'don't worry, we can sort that out when we get power' sounds like an apology for despotism.

A principled retreat is better than a retreat from principles, I suppose.