For the Record: Gunga Dinesh Holds Forth on the Demonstrations in Ottawa

 

Video screenshot via CTV News.

Oh, you're a Marxist now are you? That wasn't on my bingo card! Welcome to the Left, but there are a few things you need to get straight before you start speaking on our behalf.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

"Workers" revolting against vaccine mandates aren't doing anything to help workers. Low-income inviduals end up in hospital and dying of COVID-19 at horrifyingly higher rates than upper-income. https://t.co/8KJUIfz3Cc pic.twitter.com/6zoqrlemQG

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

But rich amateur pissants like yourself and Tucker Carlson get a big share of responsibility for all this suffering and death, as you work to churn up vaccine hesitancy and refusal because you think it will gain votes for your political party.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

So if you want to join a mighty workers' revolt, just remember that the class enemy isn't Justin Trudeau, it's you.

/fin

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Lumpenproletarier living in a false consciousness promoted by the pet intellectuals of the bourgeoisie is something Marx waa pretty familiar with, though I don't know if he would have identified it with white nationalism (arising among white trash told they could at least be proud of not being Black in the Old South) as easily as we can today.

For the Record: Crenshaw Is a Wanker

 

Image via howtofightantisemitism, 2018.

I've been superbusy. Hope material in this thread isn't too familiar:

Interestingly, Davis wasn't a Democrat while he presided over the Confederate presidency; pro-slavery Whigs and pro-slavery Democrats united for the duration of the war https://t.co/ChmhK5Hkxx Union Democrats in the North, originally led by Stephen Douglas, were loyal to the US

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 14, 2021

Because a lot of people forget that the Democrats persisted in the North, especially in big cities like New York and Boston, where they already stood not for slavery but for labor, and the vulgar immigrants from Ireland and Germany.

Hi, It's Stupid: Critical Race Pedagogy

 

Pledging the flag to conceal their wicked aims. It's what they always do, the swine, especially the first graders. Via Learning for Justice, and some great big explication of what "CRT" in the classroom is actually like (it works extremely hard to not make anybody feel bad, white kids in particular).

Hi, it's Stupid to say critical race theory is being taught in school classrooms all across the USA. Do you want to get good teachers in trouble? Anyway it's not really critical race theory, and it's certainly not being taught. 

But then I ran into somebody smart saying something similar, my tweep Nathan Newman, professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in a post at his substack ("Critical Race Theory IS In Our Schools—And It Needs to Be Defended):

The rightwing legislators seeking to ban “Critical Race Theory” from our classrooms are lying about what CRT teaches about race in our society – but they are not lying that CRT has been influencing how children are being educated.

Some progressives want to pretend that Derrick Bell is some kind of Gnostic learning, taught only to the select in the cloisters of elite law schools, but that does a disservice to the profound impact, Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw and other CRT scholars have had on our culture, including in the field of education and teacher training in particular.

Because it indeed is not the case that there are any grade school teachers imparting this gnarly body of theory to their charges, but there are some who are applying it, or what Newman suggests calling a "critical race pedagogy" (at the moment I like "CRT-informed pedagogy"), in the classroom, and it's a really good thing. Kids don't have to learn CRT, but teachers should learn about it and bring it to the way they do their practical everyday work, as an aid to the way they handle the difficult feelings about race they may encounter in the kindest and most productive possible way:

Post-Trump Conservatism: A Marxist Approach. By David F. Brooks

Pablo Picasso, Girl With Mandolin (1910), via PabloPicasso.org.

David Brooks has a column predicting that the post-Trump GOP will be thoughtful and compassionate. Alongside that, there's an op-ed arguing that the GOP is getting serious about the climate.

In other words, the Failed Biden Presidency has already begun at @nytopinion.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 7, 2020

Today's Brooks ("Where Do Republicans Go From Here?") is fooling everybody like that, because it starts out looking like a column he's written 15 or 16 times in the last couple of years and you think you know how it ends, but you're wrong. Actually he ends up with the Bernie Sanders theory of how to fix the post-Trump Republican Party—"deracialize", and move on to class struggle!

working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men. To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the G.O.P. has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites [non-old high school–educated?], working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.

None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people — and wage a class struggle between diverse workers in their coalition and the highly educated coastal manager and professional class in the Democratic coalition.

Pile those coastals into the tumbrils! It's the political revolution! All you need is "some working-class Blacks!"—not all of them, just some as-yet-undefined critical mass—and that sniveling manager and professional class won't know what hit it.

That is, I mean, there may be a flaw in this plan, but you can't say it lacks boldness.

The rest of the column gets a little more interesting when you try to reconstruct how his usual point of departure, the History of Conservative Thought, led him through a Hegelian dialectical model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis to this radical conclusion.

If identity politics exists it's probably not that bad. Explain your disagreement in detail.

Via Boston Review.

In Saturday's post-mortem on the Bernie Sanders campaign, contemplating the idea of the Sanders strategy for winning as a kind of bona fide and sort-of-Marxian theory (that certain classes of oppressed voters will respond to a certain kind of economic analysis of their situation and this is the way to get them to vote in greater numbers than they normally do) that has now been definitively shown to be false, I found myself wandering into some very big topics without adequate preparation, perhaps, and saying some things that maybe sounded more adventurous, or horrifying, than they actually were, and because I'd like to keep using these thoughts, I thought I'd spend some time pulling back to couch them in a more traditional political-science discourse.

Excruciatingly traditional, in fact, with the help of the trusty old Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and beginning with old Aristotle, who named the subject, πολιτικη επιστημη, politikē epistēmē, the science of things related to the polis, city stuff, by analogy with (say) physics, φυσικη επιστημη, physikē epistēmē, the science of material bodies, and so forth.

Politics

The idea of "politics" has a bad reputation, going back a ways, used, as Jordan was saying in the comments,

Note on ideology

A little outdoor Joe.

I like this insightful piece by Zack Beauchamp/Vox, though at first sight it's just validating something I've been trying to say for years:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s theory of victory was simple: An unapologetically socialist politics centering Medicare-for-all and welfare state expansions would unite the working class and turn out young people at unprecedented rates, creating a multiracial, multigenerational coalition that could lead Sanders to the Democratic nomination and the White House.

“When we bring millions of working people, people of color and young people in the political process, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders wrote in a February 2 Facebook post....

In the end, this approach failed. It was former Vice President Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders, who assembled a multiracial working-class coalition in key states like Michigan — where Biden won every single county, regardless of income levels or racial demographics. Sanders had strong support among younger voters, but they did not turn out in overwhelming numbers. In at least some key states, they made up smaller portion of the primary electorate than in 2016.

But where I'd just have said Sanders was misled by his fear of alienating the "white working class" into putting economic issues up in front of race and gender, and ended up courting a working class that didn't exist, Beauchamp brings out some other thoughts that might lead to some more positively helpful conclusions, starting with bringing Marx into it:

For the record: Happy birthday Uncle Karl!

In 1861, via Wikipedia.

The old boy's turning 200 in a few days (May 5), and this guy called Jason Barker, who has written a piece of historical fiction in which Marx is the protagonist, got an op-ed in the Times to celebrate:

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right! https://t.co/iEPenRz6GC

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Right, this philosophy professor (in South Korea!) and novelist (https://t.co/8J1oUWZqCY) argues, in that everybody now knows the basis thesis, that capitalism is unsustainable over the long term, is correct. pic.twitter.com/KOJz1XrO14

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

I'd add that since that 2002 statement the research of Piketty and Saez on longterm tax collection has demonstrated empirically that it's true, as continues to be corroborated https://t.co/6UeGKFbbGk

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Also gratifying to note somebody agreeing with me that Marx's work represents a definitive break with the Enlightenment, in his rejection of idealism for materialism, a leap comparable to Darwin's in natural science. pic.twitter.com/j9ln3QBTvj

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Communism is long dead, thank goodness, and there's not going to be a revolution, but Marx's critical spirit is alive, and more needed than ever, pic.twitter.com/KYfovsVjW1

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Is Conservatism a Thing?

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1877, by Robert Antoine Muller, via nationaltrust.org.uk.

A lengthy comment from Jordan:

Maybe I'm in a contrary mood but despite the tremendous intelligence and accuracy of what both you and Jim are saying, I must emphatically disagree.

There is conservatism that's real. It's coherent and clear doctrine, and it's useful to ask and answer the question. Whenever I'm talking to conservatives -- just like when, say, talking to Evangelical Christians or Nazis or predatory capitalists or anarchists -- whether they're smart or dumb, erudite or ignorant, old or young, they all are saying the same thing.

What's happening in this thread is totally legitimate: you, Jim and I all disagree with Conservatism because we can see what's wrong with it; we know how it doesn't work, how it works by means of false or contradictory assumptions, how it falls apart when applied to reality...we can win the argument (which I've done, many times, just, presumably, as have you).

But you have to start with both positions on the playing field before one of them defeats the other. You have to let both attorneys make their cases -- you can't just object throughout the defense attorney's opening statement because the guy is guilty and why are we wasting our time with this sophistry.

Let them build the house and then, only then, let us tear it down. Let them say that all of their ideas of fairness and distribution of wealth and aid and education are based on meritocracy, as opposed to ours (because they do, they really do, whether they're truck drivers or billionaire donors), and, once we all agree that this is their position, we tear them down by showing how it doesn't work; how Brooks (say) reveals its self-contradiction...just like a really smart atheist can make a fundamentalist question his faith.

OK, so you're making me trot out old Marx again, and the base and superstructure story.

Metablog

The moth Darwin predicted must exist, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, using its preternaturally long proboscis on the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, pollinating it, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This is in reaction, I'm not sure it qualifies as response, to comments from Thornton on yesterday's Douthat post, in which he suggests I should stop arguing with Douthat (admittedly not a very dignified position), mentioning Marx, or being "ideological". I think. And some other stuff.

I'm so sick of idiots tied to masts: the First Amendment Liberals obsessed with Antifa, the Socialists obsessed with single payer health care (now that the economy makes it harder to obsess about nationalizing the banks), and the Conservatives convinced that they have to come up with some deeply principled reason for everything they do. Because trying stuff and seeing what works is just so... unprincipled.

Well, there you go. "What works" at accomplishing what? What do you want to get done? That's a question of principles, which don't necessarily have to be based on a big philosophical system. I want cops to stop killing black people, and I want the government to make sure everybody in the US gets good medical care as is done without too much fuss in other countries, because duh, or because I'm a Rawlsian, or because I'm an unbelieving Jew, or whatever, or because I picked a goddamned side from my Democrat parents. But the other side won't let me, for reasons I consider specious and unprincipled indeed, and on the basis of arguments made in what I call "bad faith". That's my problem, Republicans, Not being tied to a mast, though I understand how one gets annoyed with the one-issue hobbyhorse who won't even allow you to agree with him if you don't use the magic words.

Reality that politics is about identity and that ideology is just identity for educated elites from the majority race.

So really, he's a Marxian thinker himself, this being the fundamental point of the manuscripts Marx and Engels assembled in 1845-46 but couldn't find a publisher for, that came out at last in 1932 under the title The German Ideology. Blindness to the identity origins of one's ideology is where bad faith comes from.

Was Marx a Neoliberal?

F. Engels, by Akai Shizuku at DeviantArt.

I wanted to find something to say about the trillion-dollar trade deals between the US and China from the APEC meeting and between the Indian government and WTO, where the US has averted a longstanding crisis by backing down on its insistence that India stop its food security program, which subsidizes grain farmers to provide cheap wheat and rice to the—I think I heard 400 million on the radio—poor. But I'm as bad as everybody else when it comes to trade policy, and too much thinking about it makes my head hurt.

I did find something to share, though, by Friedrich Engels (vintage 1888) on Comrade Marx and his views on trade policy, which were decidedly on the liberal side in the 19th-century sense:

Autumn in New York

Autumn in New York. It's often mingled with pain. Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Shorter David Brooks, "Snap Out of It", New York Times, September 23, 2014:

I don't know why everybody's so upset. There's nothing wrong with our government that couldn't easily be solved by eliminating partisanship and getting legislators to dock their own pay if they don't get their work done. Meanwhile it's autumn in New York! And the city's the most walkable it's been in years, in the parts I go to!

I love walking in New York too, I'm not going to lie. Still, it's a little bit fatuous to be so pleased to be a wealthy person (just sold the Cleveland Park place for about $4.5 million, we hear) in the most unequal city in the United States.

Driftglass keeps calling Brooks a Whig, but he's always been a Tory, longing for an imaginary time when America was governed by the well-reared, well-behaved younger sons of a squirearchy:

Marxism: So great before it went mainstream

Supermarx. Via Inciclopedia.

Well, glory be, the Revolution must have been and triumphed without anybody noticing it, because here's the New York Times seriously running a debate as to whether the theories of the noted economist Karl Marx could have some contemporary relevance—

Is Willard Mitt Romney a neo-Marxist?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial, Washington, 1891. Photo by Joan Hart, 2011.

David Brooks has passed over as predicted to stage 4 of his grief over the presidential campaign, despair:

he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits....
Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America....
Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture....
he has lost any sense of the social compact....
The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers....
Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation....
I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?

Charles Pierce paints a heartbreaking picture of his misery. It's all because of that Mother Jones video, from the $50,000 a plate dinner in Boca Raton last May, where Romney explained some of his campaign strategy:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

 A lot of commentary has been devoted to the contempt this shows for the more or less poor and struggling, not least by Pierce, but I wanted to note something different, about Rommey's assumption that he has more or less all of the votes of people who pay income tax and more or less none from those who don't. How's that?

You and I know, so well we don't bother to look up the numbers—David Brooks knows, for Pete's sake—that many Republican voters do not pay income tax: retirees and military personnel, and the church-addled poor whose only political thought is about the murder of all them babies, and all those people who tell you, "I'm not a racist, but..." And then of course there are those like Romney himself, who can afford to hire superhero accountants (as Harry Reid continues to say, we still don't know if he pays income tax or not). By the same token, many Democratic voters do pay income tax, and not just your Hollywood stars and Harvard professors, but all sorts of teachers and firefighters, teamsters and librarians, and people of innumerable professions, many of them dark-skinned, many of them women, and so on.

Romney himself must know, in some corner of his brain, but it's not what occurs to him when he's chatting with his $50,000 dinner dates; here, he's assuming that everybody votes according to pure economic interest: for taxes if you benefit from them and against taxes if you pay them (as if government spending didn't ever benefit any rich people, but that's another story). Which is, of course, classical German-Ideology Marx-and-Engelsism: the base determines the superstructure, and your role in the system of production relations determines your political beliefs:

the Tories, — in the end, are Bourgeois as much as the remainder, for where is the Bourgeois who is not a protectionist of his own purse? They are distinguished from the other Bourgeois, in the same way as the rent of land is distinguished from commercial and industrial profit. Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is national, profit is cosmopolitical; rent of land believes in the State Church, profit is a dissenter by birth. (Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, August 21 1852)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan. From Wikipedia.

It's also likely that Romney is really not very bright in a certain sense, and has difficulty visualizing what the numbers mean, as when he told us that the "Middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less." (Who sees a numerical range shaped like that, like a fishhook? Where was that "less" going to end up?*) In the same way, if you told him how many Democrats there are in the country earning more than, say, $80,000 a year, he might be unable to see the number as significant. Perhaps his business success, indeed, was due in part to his inability to understand just how big a risk he was taking in any given deal.

Anyway, I'd like to start entertaining the thought that all these money-minded Republicans, as opposed to the baby-murder ones, are really Marxists in a fairly serious way, with the difference that they think the bourgeoisie can win the class war.

*Actually, I think I know that one already: He was realizing as he spoke that 200K to 250K as "middle income" was too laughable to live with, so he tacked on "and less" to make it acceptable.

Loves them just the way they are

Potato Eaters, by Albert de Vos. From Tim Harrison's blog.

Whoever said that "God must love the common folk—he made so many of them" (Dr. Google seems to be stumped on this one, with a pretty big majority going for Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them citing a source) was being snarky, but the panelists on Fox News's The Five were being something else yesterday; they said in effect that liberals must hate the poor because they are attempting to exterminate them—as ThinkProgress reports it, [jump]