My view of the piece isn't that Freddie is saying the definition of socialism has changed, so much as he concerned about praxis. Most of the types of people he's criticizing would probably admit that he's a socialist...
I'm living in Portugal right now (only for a month). I don't see the need for "socialism." Capitalism plus redistribution plus social programs seems pretty good.
You can disagree with it, say it's impossible, say it won't work, etc. But it is a pretty detailed vision of a political program. But it seems when people judge DSA it's always judged by the social media drama, podcasts, scandals, etc.
A lot of people came together and democratically deliberated and voted on a political program. But it seems that gets overshadowed by all the social media stuff, not just to you, but to many people I speak with. And I wish it wasn't that way :(
It is, in fact, totally vacuous, like all socialist "platforms". There is not a single word about how any of "To ensure the well-being of everyone, we also must secure adequate compensation and living standards, as well as effective infrastructure, healthcare, and institutions in our communities and abroad" will actually be accomplished. It's a wish list for a magic fairy.
I joined DSA at one point. I was optimistic and thrilled to get involved in real world organizing. After a year and a half I quit and stepped back from politics altogether, which is where I find myself now. I don't know what I believe anymore, if I'm being honest. I just know that that organization is a complete shitshow that I doubt will ever have a significant real world impact. It made me realize how futile the leftist project is in present day America. I was becoming increasingly depressed and nihilistic about politics while I was in DSA so I understand where the online nihilism comes from - a lot of those people probably DID try to get involved with real world socialism at one point. The endless infighting, backstabbing and interpersonal drama is a nightmare for anyone who isn't an aspiring politician or a walking collection of cluster B traits and on top of that everything you're working towards feels absolutely impossible and your smallest efforts are thwarted at every turn. It's hard to be hopeful under those circumstances. I find myself significantly more hopeful about the fate of humanity now that I'm basically apolitical and spending almost zero time in political spaces. I wish my experience had turned out differently but here we are.
Edit: to your point about people negatively judging DSA for it's social media drama and scandals - I found the organization to be exactly as dramatic as such a reputation would have predicted, if not worse.
That is a fair critique, and one I agree with. I think our platform is a grab bag of priorities that lacks focus and coherence, and for that matter the same critique can be made of the Chilean constitution that just got voted down.
But "the left is unable to set concise priorities" is a different critique imo than "the left is an affective stance without a policy vision."
I hope this doesn't come across as splitting hairs.
To zero in on one example you cite as incoherent, people in DSA truly believe that there is no tradeoff between defunding police and public safety. I personally believe this tradeoff does exist, and find it frustrating so many people in my organization refuse to acknowledge the imo strong evidence that this tradeoff exists. If you want to say a lot of DSA members refuse to acknowledge truths about human nature in the face of strong evidence I would agree. But in my experience people believe these things very earnestly.
Freddie says:
"The face of online socialism is some embittered grad school dropout doing irony at you, ladling out performative disaffection, making sure you all know that everything is expected by them, nothing exciting or surprising or scary. Their language is sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm, lol lol lol lib capitalism lib lib lib lol lol lol."
The people I have encountered in DSA are largely true believers. Not to say my org is perfect, far from it, but in my experience the problem is different than what Freddie describes.
Sometimes I dream of a day where the people who actually rigorously study and practice political science begin to overlap more with the people who actually attempt to practice politics
I am disappointed to hear that was your experience in DSA, I know you are not alone and many others have had that experience. I don't know what to do about it. I try to be "chill and normal" and encourage others to be the same. But there is a lot of toxic behavior that makes us less effective, no question about that. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Ahem. Kropotkin was NOT a socialist. He was an anarchist. After the Bolshevik revolution, the first thing the socialists did was get rid of the anarchists. The second thing they did was get rid Trotsky and his followers. Real world socialism has always sucked, I'm afraid.
I was utterly and completely swept off my feet by a guy who could talk about the history of the Italian Communist Party as if it were his own family history. I'm not kidding when I tell you that his explanation of the Historic Compromise is what made me fall in love with him. We are now married. Our wedding songs were Union Maid, It's Better with a Union Man, Solidarity Forever, and Bella Ciao. I found my soul mate.
Consider the two options this person (and the two people who liked their comments) had.
1) Freddie has spent a lifetime as a leftist and specifically described years of socialist study. He mentions Kropotkin because (shocker of shockers) people along the broad left read people like Adam Smith and Bakunin who are not strictly Marxists
2) Freddie listed Kropotkin as someone who he has read and yet somehow he literally doesn't know that Kropotkin is broadly associated with anarchism.
Second thing? I'm sympathetic to Trotsky/Trotskyists but the `United Opposition' was active ten years after the revolution. He had at least more than a passing influence on the Party throughout much of the 1920s. There were other political persecutions during this time...
Doesn't the whole concept of a revolution force people to reject incremental improvements in the present world? What's the point in storming the winter palace if we can already sing in tune today?
The giveaway is the complete and utter lack of interest in so much of the online left-o-sphere in the USA rail worker strike. You're more likely to meet "anti-work" yuppies in these spaces than working-class unionists, and it shows.
I tried bringing up that example to a socialist friend, of an Inconvenient Labour Movement bucking the left Narrative consensus...and the rebuff I got was "no, that wasn't an Officially Sanctioned Strike by the Canadian Labour Council" or some such bullshittery. Had no idea that it's only a strike when the powers and institutions that be say it's a strike. Reminds me of legal vs illegal protests during other recent events...
Same person once alleged that police unions aren't Real Unions(tm) because they're class traitors and agitate for non-left goals. But all other public-sector unions, like teachers, are sacrosanct and do no wrong. I gave up discussing anything worker-related soon after.
I think that any critique of the current "left" (the hegemonic force, not the political movement) needs to include the fact that its members have never been anywhere, never seen other places, and has little idea that other nations and cultures exist. Of course, as a hegemony, the "left" has little need for outside knowledge, but still--it's quite jarring from the outside looking in.
Thanks Miles. So many leftists think their utopia won't involve shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty bosses, and horrific consequences to bad-mouthing the system-party-boss.
This comes at a good time. Bernie's loss gave me a sour attitude and I retreated out of any and all politics in favor of cynicism. I'm now trying to find some positivity in local politics, which seems more tangible and important than national stuff.
Freddie's clear and thoughtful explanations of socialism are the reason I've stopped calling myself as such. I'm just not that ambitious. He helped me come to accept: I'm a fairly milquetoast Bernie Sanders social democrat, and that's okay. I still want a hell of a lot more than the Democrats are offering, but right now it's nothing higher than "Northern European social democracy, and we'll see how things go from there". (And if "how things go" is socialism? I could live with that.)
Social democrat here, as well. The fact that Sanders says he's a democratic socialist, and there is a sizable distinction between what that means and what social democracy is, but his stated positions/goals seem social democratic has always been slightly irritating.
Possibly not the most important distinction to be concerned about, I admit.
It's a terms problem for sure. I agree that what most left-of-center-left people want is closer to postwar European social democracy or the New Deal than to any real program of workers owning the means of production if for no other reason than those systems existed in free, friendly countries, and they're evident proof that rich countries don't instantly become poor when they nationalize healthcare. Bhaskar Sunkara has the best treatment I know of the issue of why social democracy was so feeble and fleeting and why socialism would be more durable. You can take it or not, but I'm not sure of others who write about that question as specifically.
Where do you stand on Bernie's observation that there's just too many shampoo products in the grocery store? Is it OK for President Sanders to appoint a retail over-seer to limit how many products can be allowed in the grocery store?
I for one, don't want to live under such a busy-body government which thinks it's proper place is to wring the neck of the retail stores.
Typical socialist nonsense. The variety of products on the shelf don't subtract anything from anyone. The plain fact is, capitalism feeds more of the people better than communism, socialism, or any of those abusive economic systems.
So you're saying that the manufacturers of those products don't make a profit? That they're selling everything just to break even? Because if not they're subtracting from someone.
Of course they make a profit. Everything animals do they do for a profit. You'd not reply to my post if it didn't profit you via some sort of oxytocin hit. SubStack wouldn't host Freddie's page if it didn't involve some sort of profit. You'd not walk to the market unless you were assured of some sort of profitable exchange of calories [read money] for calories [read food].
But something magical happens when someone makes a profit. They expand the economy. People get employed to make and distribute product, retailers make a profit selling product, designers make profit designing new shampoos and new shampoo containers ... that ultimately, only go to stroke people's egos. But the end result, is we get to be free, free from the oppressive socialism that Vlad-the-Inhaler can only describe, the oppression of the nanny-state that tells you that you can't pamper your hair with the newest bestest shampoo your pocket change can afford.
Do you want to know who the monsters are? The people who want to tell you how to run your life, the people who want to limit what you can buy, the people who want to limit your options. Do you see who that monster is? Its the same ol' monster it always was—be in denial if you want—the fascists were first socialists. Mussolini was the editor of the socialist paper in Italy, Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist party.
"You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."
Consumer *choice* as the target (instead of the more traditional consumer *excess*) is an odd one. It's doubtful that trimming the selection of underarm sprays would make people consume less of them in any appreciable amount, which leaves only the argument that having one/few brands would lead to greater economies of scale for the remaining producers.
Implicit to enforcing that kind of market limitation is that you either have to nationalize it all, or hand a single/few producer(s) the keys to the kingdom. All for a marginal benefit, which is definitely not the reason a particular kid isn't getting enough food, and at the cost of a severe reduction in consumer choice--what if it gives you a rash? If you want to make a new deodorant do you have to apply for space in the market? The statement seems innocuous on the surface but the implications behind it sound like a nightmare.
Again, this statement seems innocuous on the surface. How many brands of deodorant are acceptable? What's the enforcement mechanism to keep producers from entering the market? When you whittle the market down to your desired state, will you actually have more discretionary income extracted from the industry to save the children?
Don’t forget the “positive vibes only solarpunks” who reflect the hollow and aimless optimitic side of that culture, borne of daydreaming sans substance
I think it very much is. I myself am very oriented towards being an optimist, and there is nothing wrong with producing these kinds of creative ideas and aesthetics.
It should not be confused for politics or effective political action, which so often seems to be the case with these kinds of things.
*I should add that I view the function of aesthetics - when imbued with politics - to operate as a form of critique or political statement at best, and artists should understand the strengths and limits of this function.
I might be misapplying the concept of "not taking a W".
I think you were discussing the phenomenon of "ask for a whole loaf, get a half loaf, then bitch about only getting a half loaf--even though you only ever get a half loaf". This kind of behavior is annoying but not necessarily all that harmful.
Ehrenreich's vote for Nader falls into the category of "ask for a whole loaf, get nothing--even though if you'd asked for a half loaf, you'd have gotten a half loaf". That's much worse, IMHO.
"More and more often I complain that people have no idea what socialism entails. (Decommodification, in a word, if you’re curious.)"
Freddie, I don't know if I can say it without coming across as a sanctimonious pain in the ass, but I'll try.
What exactly do you mean by decommodification, and how will it make things better?
On one level, I understand what "commodification" is. It's going from "child frolics happily in meadow, picking wild flowers for free" to "greedy for-profit company buys meadow, charges child's parents $20 to enter meadow and pick no more than 2 flowers per visit." Which seems bad! "Decommodification" is presumably the opposite of that, and hence sounds wholesome and good.
My problem is that socialists/Marxists seem to commit a category error: the evils of the world (which are real! Starvation, people dying of curable diseases, alienation, workers trapped in shitty jobs, etc. etc. etc.) are caused by evil capitalists, and if only we could get rid of the evil capitalists and decommodify the economy, a new day will dawn and all will be well.
In reality, the evils of the world are largely caused by fairly intractable causes such as "human nature" and "entropy" and "not enough stuff for everyone who wants some (this applies specifically to positional goods, by definition)" and "someone still needs to spend their day cleaning dirty toilets in order for there to be clean toilets." Go ahead with your decommodification, but how is it going to solve these problems?
Example: I once asked you, on an Ask Me Anything thread, how you envision housing being allocated in a post-capitalist economy. And you replied, "Whatever the democratically elected local council of housing decides." Which is an honest answer, but also... not helpful? Once you've overthrown the greedy landlords and implemented your democratically elected People's Soviet for Housing Allocation, how will you make sure said People's Soviet allocates the housing wisely and fairly? How will it prevent nepotism or favoritism from taking over, or solve the problem of "half the population of Detroit wants to move to Orange County, which doesn't have enough housing as it is"? What to do about the perverse incentive of "I'm free to trash my house or be a d*ck to my neighbors, because housing is a human right, so I can't be deprived of it no matter how I behave"?
I love the slogan. It makes so much sense, but it failed miserably in the real world.
I think we need a strong social safety net and a vibrant, well regulated market economy. What currently exists is not a free market, it's monopoly power and crony capitalism.
I don't think a slogan ever causes the failure of a social system. In any case the same slogan exists for market capitalism 2022, just in modified form: each should produce according to their ability, and yet there will always be people with unmet needs. The social safety net, charity, the church, etc. will provide for them.
It does so because we accept it does do. It does so whenever people in a system appoint it to do so. Which exactly mirrors how people in a capitalist system tacitly accept that an entity called ‘the market’ can allocate housing and other goods wisely and fairly, even though in practice this market for housing is almost entirely an after-effect of state manipulation. Just like in any social system, whenever enough of the right people do not accept the results of the system, the system will be changed. Some people like the current state of our bureaucratized market system, but they are probably in the minority, so it will change in one direction or another. There is nothing essentially different about something called a housing ‘Soviet,’ though I would hope a less inflammatory name would be chosen.
I don't disagree with the general thrust of your post, but Marxist theory doesn't attribute evil intentions to capitalists. Marxist propaganda frequently does though.
I’m not Freddie, but I think the answer you’re looking for is “we can’t solve human behavior”.
The point is to construct a political framework that advocates for and encourages rational and cohesive policy that most broadly benefits the people (re: a “housing soviet” that best apples their skills as civil sector housing specialists to parse the details of allocating housing). Not to solve human nature and the debate that lies therein our interactions with each other.
There’s absolutely a give and take. I didn’t mean to imply that such an organization should ever be submitted to likes it’s a godhead, or that specialists in anything should occupy a similar roll, my apologies. I meant that such an organization could facilitate such needs like how anyone in the civil sector now develops housing, and that (as with anything really) it would require outside auditing by the people in question it would affect.
I do think we should have some kind of democratic central planning (which just amounts to a more majoritarian version of what we already have in the US, but that's another story), but what's missing in a lot of planning schemes is small-scale autonomy, shop-floor democracy, workers owning their tools and selling their wares, which Marx called for, but which was absent in the USSR and China. You have to have universal needs and individual rights. Everyone needs a place to live, but buildings should be able to punish or even exclude people for antisocial behavior or property destruction like they do now-- it's just that the issue should be human quality of life and not property values. Universal and particular, supply and demand, will always be in tension. That tension should just be worked out socially and politically, not through alienation and coercion.
I'm not imagining small-scale capitalism with large-scale planning, which we already have, but balancing needs democratically. This would also be part of my answer to the woke-capital problem. When people run their own shops and there are strong job protections, the whims of managers don't determine who starves.
That would represent intellectual labor, and I'd love to do it, but I don't work for free. If we had some media pay for this kind of writing and not another piece about how wokeness is killing us or we need more diversity in private prison management, that would be money better spent than the system does now.
Go look at working housing cooperatives. The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t need a dictator to write down the rules, the members are empowered to make them collectively.
That’s the real category error that often gets missed. I see it as - this point still must be dealt with on an as-it-comes basis and with nuance, but having a framework that people are convinced by which makes it easier for everyone to be on the same page with, in order to better address problems founded on proper fundamental socioeconomic treatment of all is the goal.
This claim doesn’t seem as accurate or defensible to me. Decommodification doesn’t mean you lose work ethic or incentive, a Marxist understanding of labor is based on having a healthy work ethic and overtly rejects idealistic and baseless altruism (at the very least according to Althusser).
Would it be too perverse if I said the following: we should be optimistic because we're living in a time just like the one that Marx emerged from? The right has seemingly monopolized discourse about "rational self-interest," while the left is screeching sentimentally about human values?
Yeah, and the guy next to you pulled the quiet-quit, still gets paid the same as you, and the gal on the other side of you pulls the quiet-quit, and you're carrying a heavier load ... and that is how real humans work in the real world.
Building a society based on greed it pretty dumb if you ask me. Thinking that it is the end all and be all of human political, economic and cultural evolution displays a stunning lack of imagination as well as a lack of history.
Socialism might not be the answer but capitalism sure isn’t either. We can and must do better.
Is there an economic system built on anything other than greed? Every Socialist I've ever met is a quiet-quit socialist, they stand to gain by working less than you, whilst still getting paid the same.
The thought of Karl Marx is underpinned by a dubious metaphysical account of human nature inherited from Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was described as a "pious atheist": he believed that human nature was essentially good, but that men fail to understand this because they project their best qualities onto an imagined alien being called "God". Once men stop believing in God, they can see they are themselves God, and establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Thank you, I did not know this. It explains a lot.
I'm an atheist, but the idea that if only men stopped believing in God, they would "establish the kingdom of heaven on earth" is *cough*USSR*cough* dubious, to put it mildly.
Just to be clear: this is a matter of controversy within Marxist circles. Feuerbach isn't viewed as a key proto-Marxist by the official Soviet doctrine.
In the introduction to `Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', it seems pretty clear that Marx thought that dispensing with religion was a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve `real happiness' or man becoming `his own true Sun'.
Does this accurately summarize things, in your view, poodie?
If anything, the ways in which the world has gone to shit at the same time as it's gotten less religious than ever moves that idea from "dubious" to outright delusional. I'm also an atheist, but I think the worst parts of religion are also the worst parts of human nature, and if people didn't have God or Allah or whoever they would just find some other excuse to let the Monsters of the Id run free.
But we're trying to take down a skyscraper with a scalpel. There's not going to be this one weird citation where it all went wrong. If you don't want to get into this system of thought, that's totally fair, and no one's forcing you, but there's not this one weird trick. Everyone is a utopian in the sense of having an idea of how things are supposed to be or to work. Every political program has a goal. The Scottish enlightenment had the fable of bees and the invisible hand, the Puritans had America as city on a hill, and modern neoliberals imagine a world of charter schools and foodtrucks served by an invisible slave class who don't get to complain because everyone has equal opportunity. While all these may be telling aspects of the programs, just having some sort of ideal is not in and of itself disqualifying. As for systems where men think they're gods, can you honestly say that's not how our system treats Bezos, Musk, Obama, and Trump?
Modern wokies are completely unaware; fearing a disasterous collapse, the US actually tried to prop-up the Soviet Union by providing wheat during the 80s.
Because the housing council manager has no skin in the game. You'll have a class of Karen-managers pushing people around, taking bribes, selling favors.
And now we have hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Do you consider that an example of success?
The only reason we don't have millions of homeless is that The State steps in and keeps them off the streets.
Go look at Social Housing somewhere else in the world to see working alternatives that are better than what we do now. Google for Red Vienna or Singapore.
We have all the homeless because of decriminalization of marijuana.
There is some level of responsibility required to maintain a home; which is the sum of: have a job, pay the bills, pay the taxes etcetera. Marijuana reduces the responsibility levels and those marginal individuals become unable to keep above the line, drift below, if there's no family able, and still willing to step in, those less responsible individuals drift below the line, lose their home, and fall into homelessness. Will a socialist system magically cause them to become responsible, or will these individuals join the quiet quit and with sufficient compadres, sink the economy, as we see in all examples of "worker's paradise."
Apples to oranges. Working housing cooperatives are opt-in, and the people running them know that if they screw up too badly, their tenants will leave and take their chances on the open market. In the hypothetical post-capitalist society, the People's Soviet for Housing Allocation is the only game in town, so the incentive to not screw up too badly is missing.
My view of the piece isn't that Freddie is saying the definition of socialism has changed, so much as he concerned about praxis. Most of the types of people he's criticizing would probably admit that he's a socialist...
I would advise against generalizing all socialists in such a way that you make claims that are inherently indefensible
Then what would he have to say in the comments here every week?
dude, you are on fire. don't burn yourself...
(also, FIRST!)
Isn't the teleology a big part of it?
I was genuinely confused about that myself
I'm living in Portugal right now (only for a month). I don't see the need for "socialism." Capitalism plus redistribution plus social programs seems pretty good.
19th century plumbing isn't that great, though.
At our last convention DSA ratified this platform:
https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/
You can disagree with it, say it's impossible, say it won't work, etc. But it is a pretty detailed vision of a political program. But it seems when people judge DSA it's always judged by the social media drama, podcasts, scandals, etc.
A lot of people came together and democratically deliberated and voted on a political program. But it seems that gets overshadowed by all the social media stuff, not just to you, but to many people I speak with. And I wish it wasn't that way :(
Wachtell Lipton Mao & Katz?
I think too many people focus only on what happens on twitter.
My personal problem is that I simply don’t trust any DSA that isn’t based off of Class Unity lmao
*But I absolutely agree with what you said!
But this is the real world socialism I'm contrasting against the online nihilism
"pretty detailed"? And you're not joking?
It is, in fact, totally vacuous, like all socialist "platforms". There is not a single word about how any of "To ensure the well-being of everyone, we also must secure adequate compensation and living standards, as well as effective infrastructure, healthcare, and institutions in our communities and abroad" will actually be accomplished. It's a wish list for a magic fairy.
I joined DSA at one point. I was optimistic and thrilled to get involved in real world organizing. After a year and a half I quit and stepped back from politics altogether, which is where I find myself now. I don't know what I believe anymore, if I'm being honest. I just know that that organization is a complete shitshow that I doubt will ever have a significant real world impact. It made me realize how futile the leftist project is in present day America. I was becoming increasingly depressed and nihilistic about politics while I was in DSA so I understand where the online nihilism comes from - a lot of those people probably DID try to get involved with real world socialism at one point. The endless infighting, backstabbing and interpersonal drama is a nightmare for anyone who isn't an aspiring politician or a walking collection of cluster B traits and on top of that everything you're working towards feels absolutely impossible and your smallest efforts are thwarted at every turn. It's hard to be hopeful under those circumstances. I find myself significantly more hopeful about the fate of humanity now that I'm basically apolitical and spending almost zero time in political spaces. I wish my experience had turned out differently but here we are.
Edit: to your point about people negatively judging DSA for it's social media drama and scandals - I found the organization to be exactly as dramatic as such a reputation would have predicted, if not worse.
That is a fair critique, and one I agree with. I think our platform is a grab bag of priorities that lacks focus and coherence, and for that matter the same critique can be made of the Chilean constitution that just got voted down.
But "the left is unable to set concise priorities" is a different critique imo than "the left is an affective stance without a policy vision."
I hope this doesn't come across as splitting hairs.
To zero in on one example you cite as incoherent, people in DSA truly believe that there is no tradeoff between defunding police and public safety. I personally believe this tradeoff does exist, and find it frustrating so many people in my organization refuse to acknowledge the imo strong evidence that this tradeoff exists. If you want to say a lot of DSA members refuse to acknowledge truths about human nature in the face of strong evidence I would agree. But in my experience people believe these things very earnestly.
Freddie says:
"The face of online socialism is some embittered grad school dropout doing irony at you, ladling out performative disaffection, making sure you all know that everything is expected by them, nothing exciting or surprising or scary. Their language is sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm, lol lol lol lib capitalism lib lib lib lol lol lol."
The people I have encountered in DSA are largely true believers. Not to say my org is perfect, far from it, but in my experience the problem is different than what Freddie describes.
Sometimes I dream of a day where the people who actually rigorously study and practice political science begin to overlap more with the people who actually attempt to practice politics
I am disappointed to hear that was your experience in DSA, I know you are not alone and many others have had that experience. I don't know what to do about it. I try to be "chill and normal" and encourage others to be the same. But there is a lot of toxic behavior that makes us less effective, no question about that. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Ahem. Kropotkin was NOT a socialist. He was an anarchist. After the Bolshevik revolution, the first thing the socialists did was get rid of the anarchists. The second thing they did was get rid Trotsky and his followers. Real world socialism has always sucked, I'm afraid.
are you honestly so arrogant as to think that I don't know who Kropotkin was
Hardy har
I was utterly and completely swept off my feet by a guy who could talk about the history of the Italian Communist Party as if it were his own family history. I'm not kidding when I tell you that his explanation of the Historic Compromise is what made me fall in love with him. We are now married. Our wedding songs were Union Maid, It's Better with a Union Man, Solidarity Forever, and Bella Ciao. I found my soul mate.
Bella Ciao is a great tune, it has to be said.
I once heard it blaring from a jukebox in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and I must say I was nonplussed
Consider the two options this person (and the two people who liked their comments) had.
1) Freddie has spent a lifetime as a leftist and specifically described years of socialist study. He mentions Kropotkin because (shocker of shockers) people along the broad left read people like Adam Smith and Bakunin who are not strictly Marxists
2) Freddie listed Kropotkin as someone who he has read and yet somehow he literally doesn't know that Kropotkin is broadly associated with anarchism.
My apologies. You lumped him in with Marx and Lenin so I made an assumption.
It's alright, I should have predicted the outcome
Second thing? I'm sympathetic to Trotsky/Trotskyists but the `United Opposition' was active ten years after the revolution. He had at least more than a passing influence on the Party throughout much of the 1920s. There were other political persecutions during this time...
Fair enough.
I took your original point above. =)
Q: what’s the plural of Trotskyist?
A: factions
Depending on the revolutionary context, `fraction' is also appropriate.
"Marx said [X]" or "Marx explained it differently....."
Well, so what? Das Kapital isn't the Inerrant Word of God.
Oh I don’t know. Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights…
You’re assuming Marx wasn’t the second coming of Jesus
I like to assume the third coming will be in a benevolent cavie form
Doesn't the whole concept of a revolution force people to reject incremental improvements in the present world? What's the point in storming the winter palace if we can already sing in tune today?
The giveaway is the complete and utter lack of interest in so much of the online left-o-sphere in the USA rail worker strike. You're more likely to meet "anti-work" yuppies in these spaces than working-class unionists, and it shows.
You'd think leftists might consider supporting a working class movement or 2. Might be a good move politically.
How distasteful! 😞
I tried bringing up that example to a socialist friend, of an Inconvenient Labour Movement bucking the left Narrative consensus...and the rebuff I got was "no, that wasn't an Officially Sanctioned Strike by the Canadian Labour Council" or some such bullshittery. Had no idea that it's only a strike when the powers and institutions that be say it's a strike. Reminds me of legal vs illegal protests during other recent events...
Same person once alleged that police unions aren't Real Unions(tm) because they're class traitors and agitate for non-left goals. But all other public-sector unions, like teachers, are sacrosanct and do no wrong. I gave up discussing anything worker-related soon after.
I think that any critique of the current "left" (the hegemonic force, not the political movement) needs to include the fact that its members have never been anywhere, never seen other places, and has little idea that other nations and cultures exist. Of course, as a hegemony, the "left" has little need for outside knowledge, but still--it's quite jarring from the outside looking in.
What?
Are you saying that to be a True Leftist you need to have spent time in other countries?
I'm glad everyone has a ready critique for imaginary people
Thanks Miles. So many leftists think their utopia won't involve shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty bosses, and horrific consequences to bad-mouthing the system-party-boss.
yes
This comes at a good time. Bernie's loss gave me a sour attitude and I retreated out of any and all politics in favor of cynicism. I'm now trying to find some positivity in local politics, which seems more tangible and important than national stuff.
Freddie's clear and thoughtful explanations of socialism are the reason I've stopped calling myself as such. I'm just not that ambitious. He helped me come to accept: I'm a fairly milquetoast Bernie Sanders social democrat, and that's okay. I still want a hell of a lot more than the Democrats are offering, but right now it's nothing higher than "Northern European social democracy, and we'll see how things go from there". (And if "how things go" is socialism? I could live with that.)
Social democrat here, as well. The fact that Sanders says he's a democratic socialist, and there is a sizable distinction between what that means and what social democracy is, but his stated positions/goals seem social democratic has always been slightly irritating.
Possibly not the most important distinction to be concerned about, I admit.
It's a terms problem for sure. I agree that what most left-of-center-left people want is closer to postwar European social democracy or the New Deal than to any real program of workers owning the means of production if for no other reason than those systems existed in free, friendly countries, and they're evident proof that rich countries don't instantly become poor when they nationalize healthcare. Bhaskar Sunkara has the best treatment I know of the issue of why social democracy was so feeble and fleeting and why socialism would be more durable. You can take it or not, but I'm not sure of others who write about that question as specifically.
Where do you stand on Bernie's observation that there's just too many shampoo products in the grocery store? Is it OK for President Sanders to appoint a retail over-seer to limit how many products can be allowed in the grocery store?
I for one, don't want to live under such a busy-body government which thinks it's proper place is to wring the neck of the retail stores.
Typical socialist nonsense. The variety of products on the shelf don't subtract anything from anyone. The plain fact is, capitalism feeds more of the people better than communism, socialism, or any of those abusive economic systems.
So you're saying that the manufacturers of those products don't make a profit? That they're selling everything just to break even? Because if not they're subtracting from someone.
Of course they make a profit. Everything animals do they do for a profit. You'd not reply to my post if it didn't profit you via some sort of oxytocin hit. SubStack wouldn't host Freddie's page if it didn't involve some sort of profit. You'd not walk to the market unless you were assured of some sort of profitable exchange of calories [read money] for calories [read food].
But something magical happens when someone makes a profit. They expand the economy. People get employed to make and distribute product, retailers make a profit selling product, designers make profit designing new shampoos and new shampoo containers ... that ultimately, only go to stroke people's egos. But the end result, is we get to be free, free from the oppressive socialism that Vlad-the-Inhaler can only describe, the oppression of the nanny-state that tells you that you can't pamper your hair with the newest bestest shampoo your pocket change can afford.
Do you want to know who the monsters are? The people who want to tell you how to run your life, the people who want to limit what you can buy, the people who want to limit your options. Do you see who that monster is? Its the same ol' monster it always was—be in denial if you want—the fascists were first socialists. Mussolini was the editor of the socialist paper in Italy, Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist party.
The quote in question, just so we're clear:
"You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."
Consumer *choice* as the target (instead of the more traditional consumer *excess*) is an odd one. It's doubtful that trimming the selection of underarm sprays would make people consume less of them in any appreciable amount, which leaves only the argument that having one/few brands would lead to greater economies of scale for the remaining producers.
Implicit to enforcing that kind of market limitation is that you either have to nationalize it all, or hand a single/few producer(s) the keys to the kingdom. All for a marginal benefit, which is definitely not the reason a particular kid isn't getting enough food, and at the cost of a severe reduction in consumer choice--what if it gives you a rash? If you want to make a new deodorant do you have to apply for space in the market? The statement seems innocuous on the surface but the implications behind it sound like a nightmare.
Again, this statement seems innocuous on the surface. How many brands of deodorant are acceptable? What's the enforcement mechanism to keep producers from entering the market? When you whittle the market down to your desired state, will you actually have more discretionary income extracted from the industry to save the children?
This is easily the weirdest comment out of all the weird comments on Freddie's blog (which I love).
Don’t forget the “positive vibes only solarpunks” who reflect the hollow and aimless optimitic side of that culture, borne of daydreaming sans substance
Might solarpunk, like many movements of optimism that have come before, be a reaction to the very real despair splintering daily life?
I think it very much is. I myself am very oriented towards being an optimist, and there is nothing wrong with producing these kinds of creative ideas and aesthetics.
It should not be confused for politics or effective political action, which so often seems to be the case with these kinds of things.
*I should add that I view the function of aesthetics - when imbued with politics - to operate as a form of critique or political statement at best, and artists should understand the strengths and limits of this function.
I was going to comment: "Barbara Ehrenreich would have liked this piece" but then I remembered that Ehrenreich voted for Ralph Nader.
In 2000. In Florida.
Why can't the left take a W?
30,000 registered Dems in Florida voted for Nader. 300,000 registered Dems in Florida voted for Bush. So what was the problem, really?
The 300,000 were idiots. The 30,000 do not have that excuse.
I might be misapplying the concept of "not taking a W".
I think you were discussing the phenomenon of "ask for a whole loaf, get a half loaf, then bitch about only getting a half loaf--even though you only ever get a half loaf". This kind of behavior is annoying but not necessarily all that harmful.
Ehrenreich's vote for Nader falls into the category of "ask for a whole loaf, get nothing--even though if you'd asked for a half loaf, you'd have gotten a half loaf". That's much worse, IMHO.
"More and more often I complain that people have no idea what socialism entails. (Decommodification, in a word, if you’re curious.)"
Freddie, I don't know if I can say it without coming across as a sanctimonious pain in the ass, but I'll try.
What exactly do you mean by decommodification, and how will it make things better?
On one level, I understand what "commodification" is. It's going from "child frolics happily in meadow, picking wild flowers for free" to "greedy for-profit company buys meadow, charges child's parents $20 to enter meadow and pick no more than 2 flowers per visit." Which seems bad! "Decommodification" is presumably the opposite of that, and hence sounds wholesome and good.
My problem is that socialists/Marxists seem to commit a category error: the evils of the world (which are real! Starvation, people dying of curable diseases, alienation, workers trapped in shitty jobs, etc. etc. etc.) are caused by evil capitalists, and if only we could get rid of the evil capitalists and decommodify the economy, a new day will dawn and all will be well.
In reality, the evils of the world are largely caused by fairly intractable causes such as "human nature" and "entropy" and "not enough stuff for everyone who wants some (this applies specifically to positional goods, by definition)" and "someone still needs to spend their day cleaning dirty toilets in order for there to be clean toilets." Go ahead with your decommodification, but how is it going to solve these problems?
Example: I once asked you, on an Ask Me Anything thread, how you envision housing being allocated in a post-capitalist economy. And you replied, "Whatever the democratically elected local council of housing decides." Which is an honest answer, but also... not helpful? Once you've overthrown the greedy landlords and implemented your democratically elected People's Soviet for Housing Allocation, how will you make sure said People's Soviet allocates the housing wisely and fairly? How will it prevent nepotism or favoritism from taking over, or solve the problem of "half the population of Detroit wants to move to Orange County, which doesn't have enough housing as it is"? What to do about the perverse incentive of "I'm free to trash my house or be a d*ck to my neighbors, because housing is a human right, so I can't be deprived of it no matter how I behave"?
I genuinely would like to know.
Old but may serve as an introduction to what you’re looking for
https://people.umass.edu/dmkotz/Soc_and_Cap_Lessons_00.pdf
I love the slogan. It makes so much sense, but it failed miserably in the real world.
I think we need a strong social safety net and a vibrant, well regulated market economy. What currently exists is not a free market, it's monopoly power and crony capitalism.
I don't think a slogan ever causes the failure of a social system. In any case the same slogan exists for market capitalism 2022, just in modified form: each should produce according to their ability, and yet there will always be people with unmet needs. The social safety net, charity, the church, etc. will provide for them.
Then please enlighten me. How does the People's Soviet for Housing Allocation allocate housing wisely and fairly?
It does so because we accept it does do. It does so whenever people in a system appoint it to do so. Which exactly mirrors how people in a capitalist system tacitly accept that an entity called ‘the market’ can allocate housing and other goods wisely and fairly, even though in practice this market for housing is almost entirely an after-effect of state manipulation. Just like in any social system, whenever enough of the right people do not accept the results of the system, the system will be changed. Some people like the current state of our bureaucratized market system, but they are probably in the minority, so it will change in one direction or another. There is nothing essentially different about something called a housing ‘Soviet,’ though I would hope a less inflammatory name would be chosen.
I don't disagree with the general thrust of your post, but Marxist theory doesn't attribute evil intentions to capitalists. Marxist propaganda frequently does though.
I’m not Freddie, but I think the answer you’re looking for is “we can’t solve human behavior”.
The point is to construct a political framework that advocates for and encourages rational and cohesive policy that most broadly benefits the people (re: a “housing soviet” that best apples their skills as civil sector housing specialists to parse the details of allocating housing). Not to solve human nature and the debate that lies therein our interactions with each other.
There’s absolutely a give and take. I didn’t mean to imply that such an organization should ever be submitted to likes it’s a godhead, or that specialists in anything should occupy a similar roll, my apologies. I meant that such an organization could facilitate such needs like how anyone in the civil sector now develops housing, and that (as with anything really) it would require outside auditing by the people in question it would affect.
I do think we should have some kind of democratic central planning (which just amounts to a more majoritarian version of what we already have in the US, but that's another story), but what's missing in a lot of planning schemes is small-scale autonomy, shop-floor democracy, workers owning their tools and selling their wares, which Marx called for, but which was absent in the USSR and China. You have to have universal needs and individual rights. Everyone needs a place to live, but buildings should be able to punish or even exclude people for antisocial behavior or property destruction like they do now-- it's just that the issue should be human quality of life and not property values. Universal and particular, supply and demand, will always be in tension. That tension should just be worked out socially and politically, not through alienation and coercion.
That’s why such systems shouldn’t punish success in addition to their bureaucratic function
I'm not imagining small-scale capitalism with large-scale planning, which we already have, but balancing needs democratically. This would also be part of my answer to the woke-capital problem. When people run their own shops and there are strong job protections, the whims of managers don't determine who starves.
Fine, now write down the rules for how that will be done.
No u
That would represent intellectual labor, and I'd love to do it, but I don't work for free. If we had some media pay for this kind of writing and not another piece about how wokeness is killing us or we need more diversity in private prison management, that would be money better spent than the system does now.
Go look at working housing cooperatives. The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t need a dictator to write down the rules, the members are empowered to make them collectively.
https://bsc.coop
That’s the real category error that often gets missed. I see it as - this point still must be dealt with on an as-it-comes basis and with nuance, but having a framework that people are convinced by which makes it easier for everyone to be on the same page with, in order to better address problems founded on proper fundamental socioeconomic treatment of all is the goal.
This claim doesn’t seem as accurate or defensible to me. Decommodification doesn’t mean you lose work ethic or incentive, a Marxist understanding of labor is based on having a healthy work ethic and overtly rejects idealistic and baseless altruism (at the very least according to Althusser).
Would it be too perverse if I said the following: we should be optimistic because we're living in a time just like the one that Marx emerged from? The right has seemingly monopolized discourse about "rational self-interest," while the left is screeching sentimentally about human values?
Yeah, and the guy next to you pulled the quiet-quit, still gets paid the same as you, and the gal on the other side of you pulls the quiet-quit, and you're carrying a heavier load ... and that is how real humans work in the real world.
Building a society based on greed it pretty dumb if you ask me. Thinking that it is the end all and be all of human political, economic and cultural evolution displays a stunning lack of imagination as well as a lack of history.
Socialism might not be the answer but capitalism sure isn’t either. We can and must do better.
Is there an economic system built on anything other than greed? Every Socialist I've ever met is a quiet-quit socialist, they stand to gain by working less than you, whilst still getting paid the same.
The thought of Karl Marx is underpinned by a dubious metaphysical account of human nature inherited from Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was described as a "pious atheist": he believed that human nature was essentially good, but that men fail to understand this because they project their best qualities onto an imagined alien being called "God". Once men stop believing in God, they can see they are themselves God, and establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Thank you, I did not know this. It explains a lot.
I'm an atheist, but the idea that if only men stopped believing in God, they would "establish the kingdom of heaven on earth" is *cough*USSR*cough* dubious, to put it mildly.
Just to be clear: this is a matter of controversy within Marxist circles. Feuerbach isn't viewed as a key proto-Marxist by the official Soviet doctrine.
That’s why I think a Nietzschean-Marxist reading makes more sense lol
In the introduction to `Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', it seems pretty clear that Marx thought that dispensing with religion was a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve `real happiness' or man becoming `his own true Sun'.
Does this accurately summarize things, in your view, poodie?
https://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-3-influence-of-hegel-and-feuerbach-on-marx/
If anything, the ways in which the world has gone to shit at the same time as it's gotten less religious than ever moves that idea from "dubious" to outright delusional. I'm also an atheist, but I think the worst parts of religion are also the worst parts of human nature, and if people didn't have God or Allah or whoever they would just find some other excuse to let the Monsters of the Id run free.
But we're trying to take down a skyscraper with a scalpel. There's not going to be this one weird citation where it all went wrong. If you don't want to get into this system of thought, that's totally fair, and no one's forcing you, but there's not this one weird trick. Everyone is a utopian in the sense of having an idea of how things are supposed to be or to work. Every political program has a goal. The Scottish enlightenment had the fable of bees and the invisible hand, the Puritans had America as city on a hill, and modern neoliberals imagine a world of charter schools and foodtrucks served by an invisible slave class who don't get to complain because everyone has equal opportunity. While all these may be telling aspects of the programs, just having some sort of ideal is not in and of itself disqualifying. As for systems where men think they're gods, can you honestly say that's not how our system treats Bezos, Musk, Obama, and Trump?
Why do you think that the housing council will do a worse job than the system we have now?
That's the only history you are familiar with? Google "Red Vienna social housing" and learn something outside your very limited view of the world.
Modern wokies are completely unaware; fearing a disasterous collapse, the US actually tried to prop-up the Soviet Union by providing wheat during the 80s.
Because the housing council manager has no skin in the game. You'll have a class of Karen-managers pushing people around, taking bribes, selling favors.
And now we have hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Do you consider that an example of success?
The only reason we don't have millions of homeless is that The State steps in and keeps them off the streets.
Go look at Social Housing somewhere else in the world to see working alternatives that are better than what we do now. Google for Red Vienna or Singapore.
We have all the homeless because of decriminalization of marijuana.
There is some level of responsibility required to maintain a home; which is the sum of: have a job, pay the bills, pay the taxes etcetera. Marijuana reduces the responsibility levels and those marginal individuals become unable to keep above the line, drift below, if there's no family able, and still willing to step in, those less responsible individuals drift below the line, lose their home, and fall into homelessness. Will a socialist system magically cause them to become responsible, or will these individuals join the quiet quit and with sufficient compadres, sink the economy, as we see in all examples of "worker's paradise."
You can easily answer this question yourself by looking at working democratically operated limited equity housing cooperatives.
Apples to oranges. Working housing cooperatives are opt-in, and the people running them know that if they screw up too badly, their tenants will leave and take their chances on the open market. In the hypothetical post-capitalist society, the People's Soviet for Housing Allocation is the only game in town, so the incentive to not screw up too badly is missing.
You believe that that only alternative to capitalism is totalitarianism. Why do you believe that?
How does capitalism allocate housing?