So I read it starting a couple days after you sent me this, mostly to wait for Fallout and then the last bit in between Fallout, and its pretty enjoyable. The first part is a Marxist-influenced history of 19th century America, while the second part covers the modern era with a focus on the dueling ideas of the time. Both would be good for beginners in the eras covered, or perhaps for those with an intermediate knowledge looking to make sure they have all the bases covered. It’s one of those books that generally summarizes the main ideas of tons of other books in a couple paragraphs while citing them, so it can be a good jumping off point for deeper reading into specific topics if you consider yourself one of the latter (note I mean to use beginner and intermediate as approximations of how people feel about their own knowledge rather than a way to rank leftists or something). Definitely something I’d recommend. As to where he goes wrong, it’s not in the ideas he brings up but more an inability to take those forward to more conclusions.
For instance, one of Fraser’s main points is that cultural class warfare has replaced economic class warfare. Socialism performed better at the ballot box in America in the early part of the 20th century because European migrants, Slavs, Jews, Italians, Finns, its main base, were familiar with socialism in their home nations. As they became assimilated into a more open whiteness in the mid-century, they weren’t otherized and their children became mainstream Americans immersed in mass media that denied a leftism embracing both civil rights/feminism and class warfare from the Overton Window, leading to class warfare’s only visible instance being an image-based style on the pro-segregationist right. Nowadays, Americans tend to care more that the rich look, talk, and act like them than they care that the rich are fleecing them. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush could be working class heroes not through policies that expanded welfare but by being people you’d “want to have a beer with”. American popular culture has built a dichotomy, best seen among the Republican base, where provincialist trappings like whiteness, blue jeans, trucks, Christianity, country music, heterosexuality, and beer, are signs that you’re a kind Capitalist who treats your workers fairly, while cosmopolitanism, being tolerant of things that aren’t those, is an indicator of being a cold corporate drone intending to force your way of life on others. Fraser attributes this to the Republican base simultaneously being a class that Capitalism has benefited on one hand while on the other being a class that is in fear of Capitalism’s speed at which it destroys other social relations (he quotes Marx’s brilliant imagery of this, “all that is solid melts into air”, and William Buckley’s apt term for the pseudo-class struggle on display, “Country and Western Marxism”).
What he doesn’t take a serious look at is the way that this has been fought on the part of the Democratic base by correctly pointing out that this outlook is filled with bigotry and then incorrectly siding with powerful Neoliberal-oriented corporations to fight it (see for instance how many Fortune 100 companies filed amicus briefs in Obergefell V. Hodges). Fraser notes that the Republican base is a cross-class alliance. Skilled labourers and low-level white collar employees mesh with the owners of privately-owned businesses, what he terms “Family Capitalism”, a form of corporate ownership that reaches into the richest American corporations that are still wholly or largely controlled by single dynastic families, like the Kochs or the Waltons, replicating the late 19th century styles of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. This base has been growing in recent years as the number of small businesses have grown, a side-effect of larger businesses both attempting to escape federal regulations and unionization, and trying to create more, smaller lines of products to appeal to boutique markets more than mass markets, by outsourcing, sub-contracting, and franchising. Fraser notes that this newly-minted era of the self as a business has a libidinal power, by framing “going independent” as another form of conquering the American frontier. There’s good detail on this stuff, even if I’m not absolutely accepting of it.
Of course, the Democratic base is also a cross-class alliance. Neoliberal corporations, attempting to appeal to the broadest consumer base possible, went to women, the racialized, and the LGBT community and asked them to divorce their struggles from class struggle in exchange for granting greater civil rights. This is how you get civil rights activists like DeRay McKesson who helps smash teacher’s unions on the side. Fraser sort of traces this to the 1972 Democratic Primaries. The labour movement then tended to back Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace, who not only displayed all the cultural affections of the white working class but also campaigned on heavily expanding the New Deal social safety net. In contrast, George McGovern actively courted a civil rights coalition that included Gloria Steinem and the anti-war movement while attacking organized labour as too conservative. This dichotomy has held up pretty reasonably in the years since, with the segregationist wing leaving for the Republican Party. Today, one can see it in the 2016 presidential election, as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton embody the positions of Wallace and McGovern. The former has staked out a position of increasing Social Security and Medicare benefits and opposing the TPP, while the latter has gained endorsements from all the big civil rights players. (In some ways, you can even see this in the Democratic primaries when you look at Sanders’ and Clinton’s demographics, although I’m not implying that Sanders is a segregationist or in any way not the superior candidate on both civil rights and class warfare, just saying he gets what’s left of organized white working class labour’s support).
With leftism out of mass media’s view, every issue in the mainstream media becomes framed in this dichotomy, a Neoliberal-backed “tolerant” position and a national Capitalist-oriented provincialist/bigot position associated with “country and western Marxism”. Look at the immigration debate. The former needs immigration for their own profitability. They allow immigration but force immigrants to be “illegal”, which prevents them from accessing wage and health and safety regulations and ensures that they can only undermine the wages of workers already in America. The provincialist position that there should be no immigrants period because they undermine wages is the only one that’s allowed to show up. A position where borders are opened, unemployed Americans are put to work providing them with basic needs and ensuring they have the proper training to access workplace protections, and wages are eventually put on an upward path, is simply unthinkable (“There Is No Alternative”). So white working class sympathies often get placed into the only class-conscious position on the board, the Republican one. Of course, it takes two parts of the dichotomy to build this false display of choice, but only the Republican part gets significantly talked about in Fraser’s book, while it’s both that the left needs to mount a sustained assault on. But that’s a major quibble I have with the American left in general, that it shields the Democratic Party from more serious criticism because it believes the party can be somehow redeemed for the working class, instead of recognizing it as the predominant Neoliberal party in America.
Anonymous asked: So another tankie tumblr user (l-etat) went from being a ML to pretty much a neo-nazi overnight. What causes so many tankies to ally so willingly with fascists or agree with certain portions of fascist thought? Sort of like how Malhereuxmarxist said a couple years ago that xenophobia against immigrants was understandeable given how immigration under neoliberalism was a tool for the bourgeoisie to lower wages.
Option 1: It’s this great (sarcasm) new thing called the “Fourth Position”, where you take what remains of much of the pro-Soviet left, put them alongside the nationalist/Fascist right, and use their tendency to hate on America/American imperialism to cross-pollinate their reading material. Aleksander Dugin’s been spearheading it in Russia. It’s actually been around for a while, and you can see it when, say, somebody who normally gets published in Liberty Lobby gets an article in Counterpunch. RT has also picked it up, probably to some degree because it’s the natural position of Russia to appeal to both right and left wingers to come to its aid, and also because it’s got a relationship with globalresearch.ca, which has made itself a home for where the far right and far left intersect.
Option 2: It’s the natural trajectory of all of us to end up as Neocons, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Fascists as we get older.
H2 channel Ancient Aliens-style show all “there was this one case, in an Old West boomtown, where a mysterious figure made wild claims… and was never seen again. . . …?!?“
Just a delicate balance of “respectability” capital and audience demographics away from chemtrails. Give it 15 years.
So I took ownership of my first house this week. Portland real estate is ridiculous but it needs everything but the bones fixed and for how close in it is it’s still bordering roughness (in Portland that means white people with script neck tattoos, the charming local term is “Felony Flats”) so I got a deal.
I realized I was starting to think as a homeowner - thinking of how I could improve my property value by improving it, and with startling ease extending the thought to the neighborhood, in a way that’s basically the motive force of gentrification and enclosure et cetera - and was startled by how smoothly and suddenly that came on. (Moneycat went through a phase fixating on the term “house-proud” and that kept coming back to me.)
Then sometime in the last week someone got into the house and extracted the (incongruously nice-ish) washer and dryer, ripping several doors off their hinges along the way, and now I never have to feel bad about that again.
starting to think that the defining characteristic of the young and upper-middle-class is “i dont want a nice upper-middle-class job, i want to save the world. also stability is scary i want to travel and do cool things”
of course stability is scary
the problem is the young and upper-middle-class aren’t brave enough to face up to it
how is stability scary and instability not scary
i seriously don’t get some people’s brain chemistry
opportunity cost.
Stability means letting go of all possible lives you might have lived, except for one.
The one thing I’ll say in favor of vape culture, it’s given more American consumers an introduction to electrical engineering and circuit design than anything since you were expected to build your own radio.
Anonymous asked: So, uh, Trump lately. Should we be worried?
I DID put a lot of stock in his ability to claim the initiative, tear the media a new Overton Window, get inside liberals’ OODA loop and put them on the defensive, but even I’m a little slack-jawed lately.
I’m not terribly worried though, for two reasons.
First, Trump’s made very clear for decades that he thinks of himself as a negotiator first and foremost. And that one of his go-to tactics is to open with an absurd ask, backed by an adamantine self-confidence that means he can’t be laughed or shamed out of the room.
So to the extent there’s anything here, I think it’s just a refusal to do the “negotiating with yourself” - making preemptive concessions in the mere hope that your counterpart will reciprocate - that first-term Obama caught flak for.
So if a President Trump did anything with this, I expect it would be to say “Here’s this thing I’ve got enough support to make a decent run at that you really, REALLY don’t want. Now am I married to it? No. So. What’ll you give me in exchange for ruling it out?”
Honestly I think it’s the same with immigration. When your offer is as far from the status quo as “deport everyone immediately, Mexico pays for a wall”, you’re opening a lot of space for compromises where everyone leaves satisfied, your team feeling triumphant and the other guys like they held a defensive action.
Now, if you picture yourself on the other, liberal/Democrat side of the deal you could sniff that given our traditions and institutions you shouldn’t HAVE to give anything up in return for not registering and/or deporting ethnic and religious minorities.
Fair, fair. And going into 2015 conservative/Republicans thought that given those same things they wouldn’t HAVE to spend any power upholding the principle that full civic and economic inclusion shouldn’t be conditioned on willingness to participate in blasphemous parodies of the holy rites of the nation’s traditional and still majority religion.
So learning experience for everyone.
Second, I don’t think he has a deep enough following to bend American institutions to his unimpeded will even if he got elected and tried - he has some high profile majordomos and allies that could lead initiatives, and at his rallies a ton of dedicated foot soldiers, but he doesn’t have, as far as I can tell, a corps of loyal professional (political and/or technical) middlemen of sufficient size or scalability. Assembling such a corps is a big part of why political parties (and within parties, party elites) are so powerful.
In his business dealings Trump’s offloaded that stuff on mercenary institutions like building trades unions, contractors, investment banks, New York Mafia families, and media companies, but I can’t see that working at national scale.
Nature has invented the wheel three separate times that we know of, as far as I can tell.
1) ATP synthase, which is found (in slightly varying forms) in archaea, bacteria, protozoa, plants, fungi, animals - basically every living thing on Earth. It is older than eukaryotic cells, placing its evolution at more than 10^9 years in the past.
2) The bacterial flagellum. I couldn’t find data on when this might have evolved, but it seems likely that it was around 10^9 years ago. The split between archaea and bacteria was about 3.5*10^9 years ago. Archaea also have flagella, but they do not rotate.
3) Homo sapiens sapiens started building wheels probably sometime in the 6th millennium BC; it seems that people in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and central Europe learned this skill independently and at roughly the same time. The oldest known man-made wheel is the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel, found in Slovenia and estimated to be about 5150 years old; it is pictured below. Note that this wheel-invention required both ATP synthase and bacterial flagella (since humans are symbionts with both mitochondria and bacteria), so it’s not fair to say that nature has invented the wheel three times independently.
