Social Democracy. II

NOTE: Some readers might like to start with the ending, below the last ***,  for a clearer idea of where it's meant to be going.

"Women! Same rights, same responsibilities. Vote Social Democratic!" Election poster by Gustav Fritz Kirchbach, 1919.

So, as I was saying, so much for Marx as theorist. The never-to-be finished edifice of the "critique of political economy" would never have worked as science, and it's possible we should just blame the whole concept, as commenter William R. Hackman suggested in response to the previous segment, on the enthusiastic Engels, or perhaps more likely, as Michael Heinrich thinks,  later on with the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Marx himself was very diffident on the subject:

“Je ne suis pas marxiste,” stated Marx, rather annoyed, to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when the latter reported the doings of French “Marxists.” Engels had circulated this statement numerous times, including in letters to newspapers – definitely for public consumption. Marx’s distance from Marxists is also expressed in other comments. When he stayed in France in 1882, he wrote to Engels that “the 'Marxistes' and 'Anti-Marxistes”' […] at their respective socialist congresses at Roanne and St-Étienne” had “both done their damnedest to ruin my stay in France.” ...  But not only that; when the German economist Adolph Wagner was the first to deal with Marx’s theory in his textbook and wrote of Marx’s “socialist system,” the latter, outraged, noted in his marginalia that he had “never established a socialist system.” 

And Heinrich is clearly right to emphasize the critical character of Marx's own thinking, "critique" being his own favorite way to describe his intellectual work, "far more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties in order to open up new spaces for thought and action – in which it’s not immediately clear what the correct result will be."

The legacy of Marx as politician, on the other hand, as a man of the "party" he worked to bring into being, intriguing from London to make things happen in France and Germany, and its after-effects, is honestly more interesting, leaving a complex footprint of which the "social democracy" and "democratic socialism" that are bedeviling us right now in the US are some of the important residue. 

Social Democracy. I

Parade of SPD activists in Berlin on election day, January 19 1919. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-033-15 / Gebrüder Haeckel / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Labor historian Eric Blanc, member of the Bread and Roses caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, was on the radio trying to explain the DSA to the wider public, which I thought he was doing very well, but there was a point where I wanted to quibble (naturally, no socialist can ever bear to agree with another socialist about everything), which was when he described his ideological position in the DSA as on the organization's "right" (while acknowledging that it wasn't at all "right" in the general scheme of things), and I just think that doesn't mean what it's intended to mean—implying some kind of sympathy with a majority "center" imagined as too judicious to take sides, perfectly balanced between left and right views, an Aristotelian mean, as opposed to what it actually is, the gap at the middle of a bimodal distribution composed of the people who aren't able to ferret out enough information to make up their minds with any stability (maybe better illustrated as much wider and with narrower humps).

Via Wikipedia.

A more useful dichotomy would be the famous one proposed by young Karl Marx in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." 

Marx regarded "left" and "right" as categories of bourgeois government, not something he, as an anti-bourgeois revolutionary, would want to apply to himself, but he did see this other distinction, between theory and praxis if you like, eventually serving on both sides himself, theorizing it in the reading room of the British Museum elaborating the edifice of Scientific Socialism at the same time as he was practicing it in his political participation in the 1848 German revolution (when he first joined a movement calling itself "Communist") and later the International Workingmen's Association, envisaged as the source of workers' parties seeking parliamentary power in Britain and on the Continent, and forming temporary alliances with the liberal bourgeois parties of the European left in efforts to improve the lot of the wage slaves of the Industrial Revolution, or the American Radical Republicans in their fight to abolish Black chattel slavery (as European correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Herald).

Marx was both philosopher and activist, and it would be difficult to say in which capacity he would count as more "left" in today's sense, particularly hard-ass as a theorist and particularly lively as a practitioner; but I want to stress that praxis is pragmatic, and as much as "pragmatism" may often seem like faint-hearted hesitancy, it's really a matter of political judgment of what constitutes doing, as the Methodists say, "all the good you can".

Don the Builder

 

Hotel Commodore, on East 42nd Street at Lexington, 1970s, via an exceptionally modest blog called "Random Musings". Pretty sure the gray wall at right is the base of the glorious deco Chrysler Building. 

Trump: "Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are red -- the red, brick pavers -- and do we change them into a granite?"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:39 PM

And Maggie Haberman comments, in her book promo interview with Ezra Klein, “If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.”

It occurred to me that there's a reason nobody has figured out yet for this obsession with "renovations" as Maggie calls them, connected with something we've understood for a while: that there's a world where Trump really feels pretty comfortable. Where he has felt comfortable for a good 50 years, since 1975, when he first formed a partnership with the Hyatt Organization to buy the skanky old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan and and spend $100 million to turn it into a Grand Hyatt, is in the guise of Don the Builder ("Can you fix it?" "Yes I can!").

Michigan

Democrats behaving badly in Michigan Senate primary:

A week or two ago, candidate Abdul El-Sayed, until recently the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans' Services of Wayne County (that's Detroit), was on television saying something he'd said before that I'd hoped more Democrats would be saying this year, that regardless of who won the primary that's at last coming on Tuesday he intended to be campaigning for the defeat in November of Republican Mike Rogers (starting around 21:30 on the video) and ensure a Democratic victory. He didn't actually mention the name of his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, who represents the suburbs of Oakland County north of Detroit, but it's hard to see who else he could have in mind, given that the two of them are the only candidates left in the race following the departure in early July of State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose district straddles Wayne and Oakland Counties). In fact he and Stevens and McMorrow have all said it, repeatedly and decisively, and not walked it back even as the climate has gotten so much more unpleasant, and I'd like everybody to keep that in mind as we make an effort to process what's what on the way to tomorrow's primary.

Into the Woods: The Last of Platner

Maine woods, photo by George Wuerthner for The Rewilding Institute.

I've been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came Ezra Klein's interview with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving view of what went wrong, and just today Platner's replacement by an excellent candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy Jackson.

I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:

The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized – too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.

Partly because I don't think a progressive movement should be thinking of the working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because that's not what it is, at all. It's a false picture that skips over the important issues, and it's also mistaken about where the votes are (which nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they're proletarians now too). The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite; the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we could be aiming at.

AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

Assessments

Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.

I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but considerably more interested when I learned from a Reuters report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative The Hill over his coverage of the Uranium One controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023. So I naturally smelled some dirt. 

The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National Intelligence Community issued its report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:

Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)

But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the declassified version. Now his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian governments):