It's almost as if applying a fatuous, strict oppressor/oppressed binary to the people of the world impedes ones ability to perceive human life with any clarity
Yes. There is a lowest-common-denominator school of discourse that has become ubiquitous. Journalists can’t examine a subject if it can be conceived that someone with ulterior motives might “misuse” any knowledge derived from it. Any discussion of complicated or nuanced issues should’t be had in the public square for fear that somebody somewhere might misunderstand it. And in the age of social media, the public square ends up being everywhere.
This is such an important point. Black people are a diverse group like any other group of humans. If we think no Black person would ever take advantage of free money, it's like saying Black people are a different species.
Same with identity discourse, as you mentioned--in certain elite woke circles, there are huge incentives to claim various identities, so of course people will respond accordingly. I see it in the queer community, especially with labels that don't require a person to change any aspect of their life (such as a married person announcing they're "queer" with no further details).
Someone will come out as [identity] and receive praise and affirmation for days. Now instead of being a groveling "ally," they get to speak with authority and call other people oppressors. But if you suggest we're creating incentives for people to adopt labels that may not be sincere, everyone freaks out. But like you said... it would be really weird if that didn't happen. Incentives are incentives. Humans are human.
I was wondering about the term "queer" I thought it meant gay. But now I see it to mean... well I'm not even sure. People just feel queer or something.
Aubrey Gordon identifies herself as queer, and I believe part of the reason is she dated a trans man. The emergence of more trans people may dial up queer identification, as people fall for someone who presents cis but have different equipment in the undercarriage.
This history and the word’s present uses both completely fascinate me. I think this is a really good explanation of the complexities.
I used it when I was younger in a “none of your business what my sexuality is” kind of way; as I got older, I switched to using “lesbian“ exclusively, not because I’m opposed to the reclamation of the slur, but because its vagueness was starting to bother me, related to the incentives to identify out of straightness Carina talked about above. It’s come to imply a level of material solidarity that doesn’t always exist.
I guess I tend to assume a level of visibility in a queer identity, related to gender nonconformity or an obvious preference for same-sex partnership. I’m perfectly willing to accept that all of the women I know in long-term monogamous heterosexual partnerships who first started identifying as queer well into those partnerships are genuinely same-sex attracted; I’m not actually interested in questioning any individual’s gay bona fides unless someone’s getting hurt. But I still feel the need to draw a semantic difference, if only for myself, between my experiences as a woman exclusively partnered with women, and their experiences as women whose queerness is only visible to the degree they choose to announce it when the social incentives are present.
…So I guess for me, avoiding “queer” is a concession to my personal sour grapes about people getting to reap social rewards for being courageous and interesting that I never got to reap, by virtue of coming out before it was cool. I do try to keep it from souring me on the term completely, though.
(Editing just to clarify, because I think your comment really helpfully avoids dismissive sneering about the word, that the entire concept of coming out as queer being cool, or having sour grapes about its coolness, is both a state of affairs I could not have imagined as a gay teenager, and infinitely preferable to the state of affairs leading to “queer” being ripe for reclamation in the first place.)
I believe this refers back to Critical Queer Theory. One of the more recent acquisitions by Critical Theory. Can't recall now, 2005? Probably not. No matter.
From feeble memory, the primary thrust of Queer Theory is that boundaries of ANY kind are limiting. Therefore, to be done away with. Pretty broad agenda, but can't argue against success.
It means you identify as not 100% straight and/or you don’t conform to all gender stereotypes. Asking someone to explain what they mean is considered literal violence.
It's a common occurrence for scam GoFundMes to pop up whenever there's a racially charged event. They claim to be family or friends of the victim raising funds for some noble cause, but they're just scammers hoping to trick people.
I have seen people resist being told "So-and-so's family has not created any fundraising efforts; do not donate to any causes for So-and-so as they are scams", which is just wild to me. Twice someone has tried to float that maybe reports that the fundraising is a scam is somehow alt-right propaganda, and it's like...are *you* the scammer? We're talking to So-and-so's family, the fact that these are scams is coming straight from the horse's mouth!
How so? I thought the most basic argument for various forms of socialism ( a vague concept that you'd need to define before making such a sweeping statement) was that other economic structures incentivize bad behavior.
You're posting on a substack of someone who writes a lot about education, including the push towards privatization of K-12. There's multiple essays on this exact site that argues for socialized schools on the basis of the incentive structures different school systems provide to parents, educators and students.
Quoting: "A socialist economy would have to be a planned economy. This would involve bringing all of the big corporations, which control around 80% of the British economy, into democratic public ownership, under working-class control. Of course, it would not mean bringing small businesses, such as the local shops, many of which are forced out of business by the multinationals, into public ownership."
OK, now: how do we define "big" and "small"? What happens when a small business grows to be a big one, and is now subject to collectivization? Would not the owners of the small business do everything possible to keep it small? Would they not divide it in two, say, and have a relative (or just a shill paid under the table) run the other half? Are the incentives for this not enormous? How do socialists plan to deal with this?
There are about a million more questions like this. There are literally zero answers to any of them in the socialist literature.
I find Alexander's review of my book totally bizarre, particularly his unhinged rant about bullying at the end, which has literally no connection to what I wrote. A pretty clear example of a rationalist who's unable to maintain rationality.
I thought the bullying portion was relevant, if a little tangential. "Should people have to go to school?" is a question that can come up any time education policy is discussed.
Alexander believes that schools are unpleasant places and shouldn't be mandatory to attend. Bullying is a factor in that unpleasantness. The rant about schools doesn't address your ideas about how schools should operate, but addresses the larger point of whether they are worth forcing people to attend.
Without going back to re-read it, the part of the review that resonated with me is that having no alternatives to government-run schools is a bad idea.
My experience: I sent my kid to public school, except for 3 years of junior high, when she went to a small Catholic school. And this was because the available public junior highs (all pretty big) had issues with bullying etc that I believed my kid was especially susceptible to (yeah, I may have been overly concerned).
So I agree with Alexander that a socialist monopoly on schools is bad.
And my argument is that there is nothing special about schools: a socialist monopoly on anything is bad.
I also note that you did not attempt to rebut my claim that socialists have no answers to the million practical questions that socialism raises, or cite any such rebuttal. I take this as further evidence that no reubuttal exists.
(And that ad hominem attack, "a rationalist who's unable to maintain rationality", is uncalled for. You're above that.)
If schools were actually integrated most if not all of these problems would disappear. Rich White people opt-out of sending their kids to integrated schools and not surprisingly segregated schools with an extremely high concentration of poverty and mostly parents with little time or energy or political power are unable to advocate successfully for their children.
I know that schools that are even moderately integrated are much higher achieving that the segregated schools we have now.
That's not to say that you should send your child to a school where they would be beaten up and be unable to learn. No one individual can solve this problem.
Sweden forces public schools to compete for students. That is a good way to break the monopoly.
I will pull a more radical critique of education from the SF DSA website:
"Education
Under capitalism, schooling is reduced to a means of producing wage-workers who uphold dominant ideology, not human beings prepared to challenge it. Capitalist education forecloses human potential and creativity by minimizing the space for self-directed learning, expression, and growth. As socialists, we strive to make education a freely, equitably provided public good that everyone can freely pursue for their own enlightenment and empowerment.
The history of working-class struggle has been distorted by decades of ruling-class suppression, including during the Red Scare, the Cold War, and contemporary neoliberalism. It is crucial that we educate ourselves and others about the rich history of class struggle in the U.S. and around the world."
Now there is a lot of in-group buzz in that paragraph, but the idea that education should be revamped to teach people how to think critically, instead of just regurgitate slanted "facts" that reinforce ruling class dominance is something I can get behind.
Is it possible? It's hard to see how we get to there from here, but I have not given up hope.
I read the review and liked it, although I thought it was more of an essay about his own thoughts on school rather than a review. Even if it did "disprove" the book's thesis, I don't see how that would mean the arguments weren't based around incentives.
As for your questions about specifics in a broad manifesto, you could probably fill in some of the blanks. I didn't write that, but I could give some answers.
How do we define big and small?
We currently have a legal system that is able to define "big" businesses while evaluating anti-trust legislation. You could imagine that being expanded to include more companies.
"Would not the owners of the small business do everything possible to keep it small?"
Yes, probably. They would therefore be out-competed by worker-owned firms that share profit more equally.
If you are interested in how this debate plays out in practice, you could read/watch the debates about the NHS, public schools, trains or other socialized institutions. You will probably see recognition of incentives on both sides, with socialists emphasizing that profit motives are often misaligned with providing the desired service.
"They would therefore be out-competed by worker-owned firms that share profit more equally." Why doesn't that happen now? Nothing is stopping a firm from sharing profits more equally, and then, according to you, becoming more successful because of that. Yet it doesn't ever seem to happen. Why not?
There are in fact millions of people who work for worker owned cooperatives all over the world and millions housed in housing cooperatives. Your claim that "it doesn't ever seem to happen" is transparently not true.
I am on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Student Cooperative, a democratically run member owned and run housing cooperative that provides food and housing for over 1300 students.
We are hardly being "outcompeted" in fact we offer room and board for $700/mo and a workshift requirement of 5 hours. That is about 1/3 the cost of the dorms and quite a bit less than the private market. We have a waiting list of over 1000 students.
If you really want to open the pandora's box of union busting the 20s and 30s. we can go there. The Capitalists didn't win the war of ideas, the won with brute force and propaganda.
There is no cognitive dissonance in claiming that workers should get a larger share of the pie and the capital has been steadily gaining its share for a generation now. There is no cognitive dissonance in organizing for higher pay for work.
Asking for a detailed version of how societies would work under socialism is kind of an absurd question, especially from someone who is not a socialist. I am much more anarchist than socialist. Socialists today generally believe in incremental change anyway.
Haywood (thank you) and the IWWs vision for how to improve capitalism ring as true today as ever. If you ask me for a more updated vision, I would say that the Nordic model is a good one. The most modern critique of capitalism that I can point to is on the DSA website. Of course, no vision is considered doctrinaire. There has been no Internationale for a very long time.
What is your vision of who things should work under capitalism? Tell me what your vision of utopia is like and I will criticise it and respond in kind.
"There is no cognitive dissonance in claiming that workers should get a larger share of the pie and the capital has been steadily gaining its share for a generation now. There is no cognitive dissonance in organizing for higher pay for work."
Sure, but organizing for higher pay for work is not socialism. Socialism, at minimum, has to mean collectivization of large businesses. If it doesn't mean at least that, it becomes a meaningless concept (which should then be abandoned, because too many people have a bad opinion of it).
Philosophically I'm a social democrat. Given the unchangeable facts of human psychology (people generally don't give too much of a shit about other people), and the lessons of history so far, capitalism tempered by strong government regulation and strongly redistributive tax policy seems to me to be the best possible system. Today, Germany comes the closest to that ideal.
"... organizing for higher pay for work is not socialism." It's what Socialists and Communists have done throughout the history of those movements when they were organizing in Capitalist societies.
Marx believed that Communism was the end game, after Capitalism. In fact Freddie had an article this week about this. Did you read it?
Incremental change to a society like Germany is something we can agree upon. Germany certainly supports a lot of socialist principles. Some kind of mixed economy is almost certainly the way to go.
Less government intrusion in our lives, with fewer people in prison, ending all the foolish wars (and not getting into any others), a massive cut in defense spending and redeploying the money into actually improving the lives of Americans, eliminating the mass spying of Americans and breaking up the tech monopolies is a good start. Once we get there we can see where we are at. I think these are all achievable goals. Tilting at windmills is not my thing.
We exchanged a few posts on another site, but I remember You, el Monstro.
In a word You've expressed what I have against Socialists, Marxists, and any OTHER kind-a "ist." You'll never agree with me, likely, but using "utopia" as a starting point is a non-starter. As a practical matter, if not on the basis of it being impossible to define a utopia that will appeal to many people. And a lotta those who it does appeal to envisions themselves to be thrust to the top-a the heap.
I was asked to give my vision for a socialist utopia and responding in kind.
Anarchists don't want anyone at the top of the heap. We don't support coercion or hierarchy of any kind. You are confusing me with the other kind of leftist.
I don't think we can organize a global economy with a bunch of small scale worker cooperatives, don't get me wrong. Pure "A" Anarchism is not realistic. But it can serve as a loadstone to a better world.
"The trouble is that many left-leaning people feel that they can safely disregard anything published in conservative media, and thus a badly-needed conversation hasn't happened."
Same goes for the right with CNN, MSNBC, etc. This is a huge problem. We live in a Choose Your Own Adventure reality where what is and what isn't is completely up to us, and where there's no shortage of information to support our views.
I don't claim to have the solution, but I watch zero cable news (besides clips that are posted on Twitter). I read the majors like WSJ, NYT, WashPo, etc but I find myself relying more and more on the FdB, Taibbi, Weiss, Greenwald, Yglesias, Noah Smith, AGM, of the world. I look for people I think are smart (obviously) but mostly honest. Doesn't matter if I agree or not. Freddie's the perfect example.
I follow a similar pattern as you regarding news. The biggest reason I don't bother with cable news is in the age of the internet I can almost always get the proper source material.
Anytime there's video of a scandal why would I watch 5 minutes of talking heads telling me what's happening, 15 seconds of the actual video taken completely out of context, and then more talking heads. I'd rather just watch the 3 minute video and then go find any other information that the video brings up that I'm not familiar with (a particular college or institution, the person in question if they are somewhat well known, any items on display that I don't recognize, etc).
This can be tougher with documents if it's made for a specialist audience or if it's particularly long (say the Panama Papers) but if nothing else you can easily look for context when you see something in the news or social media that looks particularly egregious.
Same here. Smart people who are independent, trying to find the truth and push back against ‘noble lies’. Don’t really care if they are left or right, I support them.
I would *never* watch some corporate news network like Fox or CNN, their whole business model is antithetical to any sort of truth.
The media constantly told us lies ... lies that caught up to them. Now no one believes anything the main stream media say, so we turn to Bari, Freddy, Joe, etc. Joe Rogan has more daily viewers than CNN.
The 'poor character' of the main stream media caught up to them and that character caused their demise. This is the same with people. Your character is your destiny. Your past defines your future. Spent your life living frugal, retire comfortably. Spent your life profligate, retire poorly.
We listen to the same voices, it is uncanny. I recommend adding Caitlin Johnstone to that list. She's not always right, but she is always thoughtful and provocative.
Dunno if it's a solution, but it makes the days a LOT better: Spend 10 minutes scanning headlines, almost never read an article.
I see You and raise You one: Never spend a minute on social media. Gimme a break. I actually believe free-thinking isn't outmoded. But ICBW (I Could Be Wrong) about that.
Only thing that I think even obtains are books. Authors, to get published, actually put some thought into the things. Unlike what I'm doing now.
Choose Your Own Adventure reality is a great phrase. I think it goes hand in hand with "the truth is paywalled but the lies are free" that Nathan Robinson described a few years ago.
Just recently read Joshua Bloom's Black Against Empire, which is a history of the Black Panther Party. Your essay is reminding me of it. It's maybe overly charitable to the journalist and pundit classes, but some of the hesitation may be because they don't want to seem to be working with the CIA or FBI to undermine another Black movement. It's been reported that BLM activists are under increased surveillance (easier now than ever!) so media types may just want to ensure they're on the "Right Side of History."
This helps no one, of course, but the professional consequences, as you point out, are real. Is it worth torching your career to criticize an amoebalike movement that is both everything and nothing that one may want out of a social justice project?
The state certainly has a horrific and damning history with regard to black-led/initiated movements. Is there credible evidence that “increased surveillance” is more than simply that? Because as Freddie has said, a small group of people being given billions of dollars without a clear idea of where it’s going, who have also openly voiced radical aims that would undermine how our democracy works, it makes sense to me to keep tabs.
I think the history of he CIA and FBI should be enough to discourage anyone from thinking that their increased scrutiny is only an extra level of illegal surveillance.
Back in 2020, when everyone and their brother was going to mass protests, I made what I thought was a mild and well-reasoned post on Facebook, the gist of which was that if you wanted to make signs and stand around with masses of strangers that you would never see again, fine, but real change would be effected more by getting together with local folks and digging into local matters (what are the hiring/oversight practices of your own city police department etc.), actions which would also have little likelihood of resulting in anyone's home or workplace being burned down...which I argued was a bonus, fool that I was.
Of course, almost instantly a "friend" responded with a post that said, in effect, "Shut the fuck up, White Man."
Is it any surprise that so many decline to have the "conversation on race" that we're always being told we so desperately need - and that we DO need? The current climate traps us in our own very narrow circles, and it's leading us nowhere.
I came to the same conclusion BZC. That's the last time I did it. Since my cat is dead, I now stick to poems (not my own, don't worry) and funny quotations from old movies.
I run my own, local, Facebook community group. I have strict rules on politics and civility and me and the missus enforce them with an iron hand.
I have nearly 4200 members now and I think there's a lot of value to it. I mean, half the posts are people asking for recommendations for plumbers, painters, HVAC and other contractors as well as doctors, vets, etc., but that's fine by me.
I hadn't been much of a poster on social media in recent years, but when black squares became mandatory and it became fashionable to critique the inadequacies of white peoples' online struggle sessions, I stopped posting anything whatsoever.
The black squares were the moment I had to drop Instagram, which was the last social media I was still using. It felt like the inflection point where you could get in trouble not just for posting something wrong, but for not posting something at all! The fact that everyone who did post one had to immediately castigate themselves for having hurt the movement with their hashtags only cemented the point that there was literally nothing you could do that was okay. Whatever fun social media once offered was already hanging on by a thread, and that moment snipped it.
There's a relatively small but well-known organization that claims to help marginalized people that was founded by two mentally ill grifters who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization and got quietly moved out. None of this got any media attention at all. People don't want to criticize people who claim to be doing good. It sucks.
I've tried being the light bringer, I sent the public tax forms that mentioned the embezzlement to a bunch of news sites, activists and journalists. Some of them actually got angry at me. To be honest, I think that my fixation on this might be a bit unhealthy and that's one of the reason I gave up on sending it to people.
I’m frustrated by the women whose careers I’ve followed (in my case it is specifically women) who equate waning support for BLM with the “inevitable” white backsliding they expected. I’m like, there’s a difference between supporting (or not) a specific political organization and continuing to support social and political goals. Not anymore, apparently.
The extremely weird thing about this is, anything a white person says to defend against charges of racism, or even just to illustrate that you're not in some white supremacist bubble...is racism.
I didn't even realize until I actually thought about it last week, that of the 17 children who live on our block, only 5 are "white." I value the diversity of cultures that have come together in the US, and specifically in my neighborhood. But the white kids aren't even "the same." One's mother is eastern European, for example. I'm half not-American, and my kids technically have dual citizenship in another country. We are ALL different. But expounding on the virtues and beauty of my neighborhood is "erasing" other experiences, I guess, instead of proof that something better is possible.
"The extremely weird thing about this is, anything a white person says to defend against charges of racism, or even just to illustrate that you're not in some white supremacist bubble...is racism."
Yup, it's full epistemic closure. It's like a conspiracy theory. To the conspiracy theorist, providing additional evidence of the moon landing is just proof that more people were in on the job.
It's called a Kafka trap and it's both pernicious and dehumanizing. I would hazard that it is a key reason so many progs and libs have turned against woke ideology. Nobody likes being dehumanized.
As long as we all prefer the strategy of paying indulgences over meaningful action and sacrifice, there will be fraudsters who show up to take advantage. I don't know if corporate media has much incentive to call it out and risk nudging people toward actions that might actually afflict their comfort.
Critical solidarity is a great term. This is so important especially when thinking internationally about left-leaning governments. There's such a tendency on the left to either write them off for their imperfections, or defend them as perfect and dismiss all criticism because they are under attack by the US (militarily, economically, or through propaganda).
Also adding to the mess is the abuse/misuse/overuse of standpoint epistemology. Its too often a conversation ending catch phrase to shutdown anything unwanted. "YOU DONT HAVE MY LIVED EXPERIENCE SO SHUT UP"
Totally agree. I remember this being basically how the BLM organizer who had four houses responded when confronted. Not an exact quote, but her response amounted to, “Fuck you for asking nosy questions about a struggling black person who made honest money and is using it to take care of herself and her own.” Being black and “struggling” was the entire justification for needing four houses. The lived experience made it ok for *her* to be a rich property owner.
(Disclaimer that I don’t care if a rich community organizer has four houses, just that I’m with Freddie that the lack of accountability and mainstream unwillingness to call out this weird hypocrisy is bizarre.)
I don't think any of it really is hypocrisy. None of these people really have any robust critique of capitalism or private property. Their toughest line is that white people's property is built on theft and is therefore illegitimate -- but that accepts the premise that private property built on "one's own" labor is actually good!
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think – and I’m completely guilty of this – people ascribe concrete political and economic stances to these people that they never actually express, because we just assume that they must have endorsed them at some point based on a vague sense of the movement’s uniting politics. It is in its way very capitalistic – not actually about a desire to eliminate massive racial wealth gaps, but to ensure that black people get to join the one percent on the same unequal terms as white people.
Which is precisely what some of the Left was saying about the Obama-to-BLM-to-Clinton axis back in 2014-2015, but then that branch of the Left was basically "politely requested" to shut the fuck up until Trump was out of office and racial liberalism was saved from his "fascism".
Corruption in a major organization... that's generally the kind of thing investigative journalists live for. Except, oops. It's a liberal organization. Gotta stay quiet about that. Can't empower our political opponents.
Presumably they also don’t want to feed into a stereotype. I’ve noticed that a lot of talk about racism is about people using the wrong words. That’s not what it is.
The intimidation into forced silence is a sign of an unhealthy society. I suspect one day we'll look back on this period in America with the same sense of shame as the Blacklist era of the 50s Red Scare
I'm skeptical that this "critical thinking" is going to have any positive result ...
> And now that people are paying $3.50 a gallon
Ha. Privilege is when your largest problem in life is the price of gasoline.
Yeah, because poor people never have to drive to work. 😏
Fox has done a few stories on BLM financial shenanigans.
I don't know what you mean by better, but they certainly covered it more critically. Like, Breitbart or National Review and assorted garbage.
It's almost as if applying a fatuous, strict oppressor/oppressed binary to the people of the world impedes ones ability to perceive human life with any clarity
Humans aren't that great at nuance. At least most of us.
Yes. There is a lowest-common-denominator school of discourse that has become ubiquitous. Journalists can’t examine a subject if it can be conceived that someone with ulterior motives might “misuse” any knowledge derived from it. Any discussion of complicated or nuanced issues should’t be had in the public square for fear that somebody somewhere might misunderstand it. And in the age of social media, the public square ends up being everywhere.
> it would be weird if that didn't happen!
This is such an important point. Black people are a diverse group like any other group of humans. If we think no Black person would ever take advantage of free money, it's like saying Black people are a different species.
Same with identity discourse, as you mentioned--in certain elite woke circles, there are huge incentives to claim various identities, so of course people will respond accordingly. I see it in the queer community, especially with labels that don't require a person to change any aspect of their life (such as a married person announcing they're "queer" with no further details).
Someone will come out as [identity] and receive praise and affirmation for days. Now instead of being a groveling "ally," they get to speak with authority and call other people oppressors. But if you suggest we're creating incentives for people to adopt labels that may not be sincere, everyone freaks out. But like you said... it would be really weird if that didn't happen. Incentives are incentives. Humans are human.
I was wondering about the term "queer" I thought it meant gay. But now I see it to mean... well I'm not even sure. People just feel queer or something.
Aubrey Gordon identifies herself as queer, and I believe part of the reason is she dated a trans man. The emergence of more trans people may dial up queer identification, as people fall for someone who presents cis but have different equipment in the undercarriage.
This history and the word’s present uses both completely fascinate me. I think this is a really good explanation of the complexities.
I used it when I was younger in a “none of your business what my sexuality is” kind of way; as I got older, I switched to using “lesbian“ exclusively, not because I’m opposed to the reclamation of the slur, but because its vagueness was starting to bother me, related to the incentives to identify out of straightness Carina talked about above. It’s come to imply a level of material solidarity that doesn’t always exist.
I guess I tend to assume a level of visibility in a queer identity, related to gender nonconformity or an obvious preference for same-sex partnership. I’m perfectly willing to accept that all of the women I know in long-term monogamous heterosexual partnerships who first started identifying as queer well into those partnerships are genuinely same-sex attracted; I’m not actually interested in questioning any individual’s gay bona fides unless someone’s getting hurt. But I still feel the need to draw a semantic difference, if only for myself, between my experiences as a woman exclusively partnered with women, and their experiences as women whose queerness is only visible to the degree they choose to announce it when the social incentives are present.
…So I guess for me, avoiding “queer” is a concession to my personal sour grapes about people getting to reap social rewards for being courageous and interesting that I never got to reap, by virtue of coming out before it was cool. I do try to keep it from souring me on the term completely, though.
(Editing just to clarify, because I think your comment really helpfully avoids dismissive sneering about the word, that the entire concept of coming out as queer being cool, or having sour grapes about its coolness, is both a state of affairs I could not have imagined as a gay teenager, and infinitely preferable to the state of affairs leading to “queer” being ripe for reclamation in the first place.)
I have the same doubts, it's unclear what these words mean. And the meanings keep changing too, like every six months.
Stable definitions are bourgeois, and the language of the oppressor.
I once had a same-sex dream about Julia Roberts. I think that probably means I'm queer?
If it gets you a high-paying DEI job, yes.
Did it make you happy? Then you're gay.
Or you might be trans. If you also like football then you're probably a boy.
I frequently tell my husband if I were a gay man, I’d still be super into him.
You’re queer if you’ve read at least one FF romance novel. 😉
I believe this refers back to Critical Queer Theory. One of the more recent acquisitions by Critical Theory. Can't recall now, 2005? Probably not. No matter.
From feeble memory, the primary thrust of Queer Theory is that boundaries of ANY kind are limiting. Therefore, to be done away with. Pretty broad agenda, but can't argue against success.
It means you identify as not 100% straight and/or you don’t conform to all gender stereotypes. Asking someone to explain what they mean is considered literal violence.
You were kind to step into the ring and take that violence for the team.
I don't believe that anyone's 100% straight.
I don’t know about you but I’m 55% water and water is the gayest of the humours.
spot on.
It's a common occurrence for scam GoFundMes to pop up whenever there's a racially charged event. They claim to be family or friends of the victim raising funds for some noble cause, but they're just scammers hoping to trick people.
I have seen people resist being told "So-and-so's family has not created any fundraising efforts; do not donate to any causes for So-and-so as they are scams", which is just wild to me. Twice someone has tried to float that maybe reports that the fundraising is a scam is somehow alt-right propaganda, and it's like...are *you* the scammer? We're talking to So-and-so's family, the fact that these are scams is coming straight from the horse's mouth!
Now there are the covid scams. Some beautiful young girl needs a “double lung transplant” and so to fix it, please send money to the GoFundMe.
The cognitive dissonance required to beieve both in the existence of incentives AND in the viability of socialism is truly striking.
As well as the failure to acknowledge that overcoming incentives requires force.
How so? I thought the most basic argument for various forms of socialism ( a vague concept that you'd need to define before making such a sweeping statement) was that other economic structures incentivize bad behavior.
You're posting on a substack of someone who writes a lot about education, including the push towards privatization of K-12. There's multiple essays on this exact site that argues for socialized schools on the basis of the incentive structures different school systems provide to parents, educators and students.
Re schools, you should read Scott Alexander's review of Freddie's book. He makes a pretty strong counter argument.
More generally: defining the vauge concepts should be job one for socialists, but they almost always demure.
Here's one attempt that's more concrete than most:
https://www.socialistalternative.org/socialism-in-the-21st-century/how-could-socialism-work/
Quoting: "A socialist economy would have to be a planned economy. This would involve bringing all of the big corporations, which control around 80% of the British economy, into democratic public ownership, under working-class control. Of course, it would not mean bringing small businesses, such as the local shops, many of which are forced out of business by the multinationals, into public ownership."
OK, now: how do we define "big" and "small"? What happens when a small business grows to be a big one, and is now subject to collectivization? Would not the owners of the small business do everything possible to keep it small? Would they not divide it in two, say, and have a relative (or just a shill paid under the table) run the other half? Are the incentives for this not enormous? How do socialists plan to deal with this?
There are about a million more questions like this. There are literally zero answers to any of them in the socialist literature.
I find Alexander's review of my book totally bizarre, particularly his unhinged rant about bullying at the end, which has literally no connection to what I wrote. A pretty clear example of a rationalist who's unable to maintain rationality.
I thought the bullying portion was relevant, if a little tangential. "Should people have to go to school?" is a question that can come up any time education policy is discussed.
Alexander believes that schools are unpleasant places and shouldn't be mandatory to attend. Bullying is a factor in that unpleasantness. The rant about schools doesn't address your ideas about how schools should operate, but addresses the larger point of whether they are worth forcing people to attend.
Without going back to re-read it, the part of the review that resonated with me is that having no alternatives to government-run schools is a bad idea.
My experience: I sent my kid to public school, except for 3 years of junior high, when she went to a small Catholic school. And this was because the available public junior highs (all pretty big) had issues with bullying etc that I believed my kid was especially susceptible to (yeah, I may have been overly concerned).
So I agree with Alexander that a socialist monopoly on schools is bad.
And my argument is that there is nothing special about schools: a socialist monopoly on anything is bad.
I also note that you did not attempt to rebut my claim that socialists have no answers to the million practical questions that socialism raises, or cite any such rebuttal. I take this as further evidence that no reubuttal exists.
(And that ad hominem attack, "a rationalist who's unable to maintain rationality", is uncalled for. You're above that.)
If schools were actually integrated most if not all of these problems would disappear. Rich White people opt-out of sending their kids to integrated schools and not surprisingly segregated schools with an extremely high concentration of poverty and mostly parents with little time or energy or political power are unable to advocate successfully for their children.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-racial-achievement-gap-segregated-schools-and-segregated-neighborhoods-a-constitutional-insult/
I know that schools that are even moderately integrated are much higher achieving that the segregated schools we have now.
That's not to say that you should send your child to a school where they would be beaten up and be unable to learn. No one individual can solve this problem.
Sweden forces public schools to compete for students. That is a good way to break the monopoly.
I will pull a more radical critique of education from the SF DSA website:
"Education
Under capitalism, schooling is reduced to a means of producing wage-workers who uphold dominant ideology, not human beings prepared to challenge it. Capitalist education forecloses human potential and creativity by minimizing the space for self-directed learning, expression, and growth. As socialists, we strive to make education a freely, equitably provided public good that everyone can freely pursue for their own enlightenment and empowerment.
The history of working-class struggle has been distorted by decades of ruling-class suppression, including during the Red Scare, the Cold War, and contemporary neoliberalism. It is crucial that we educate ourselves and others about the rich history of class struggle in the U.S. and around the world."
Now there is a lot of in-group buzz in that paragraph, but the idea that education should be revamped to teach people how to think critically, instead of just regurgitate slanted "facts" that reinforce ruling class dominance is something I can get behind.
Is it possible? It's hard to see how we get to there from here, but I have not given up hope.
I read the review and liked it, although I thought it was more of an essay about his own thoughts on school rather than a review. Even if it did "disprove" the book's thesis, I don't see how that would mean the arguments weren't based around incentives.
As for your questions about specifics in a broad manifesto, you could probably fill in some of the blanks. I didn't write that, but I could give some answers.
How do we define big and small?
We currently have a legal system that is able to define "big" businesses while evaluating anti-trust legislation. You could imagine that being expanded to include more companies.
"Would not the owners of the small business do everything possible to keep it small?"
Yes, probably. They would therefore be out-competed by worker-owned firms that share profit more equally.
If you are interested in how this debate plays out in practice, you could read/watch the debates about the NHS, public schools, trains or other socialized institutions. You will probably see recognition of incentives on both sides, with socialists emphasizing that profit motives are often misaligned with providing the desired service.
"They would therefore be out-competed by worker-owned firms that share profit more equally." Why doesn't that happen now? Nothing is stopping a firm from sharing profits more equally, and then, according to you, becoming more successful because of that. Yet it doesn't ever seem to happen. Why not?
There are in fact millions of people who work for worker owned cooperatives all over the world and millions housed in housing cooperatives. Your claim that "it doesn't ever seem to happen" is transparently not true.
I am on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Student Cooperative, a democratically run member owned and run housing cooperative that provides food and housing for over 1300 students.
https://bsc.coop/
We are hardly being "outcompeted" in fact we offer room and board for $700/mo and a workshift requirement of 5 hours. That is about 1/3 the cost of the dorms and quite a bit less than the private market. We have a waiting list of over 1000 students.
If you really want to open the pandora's box of union busting the 20s and 30s. we can go there. The Capitalists didn't win the war of ideas, the won with brute force and propaganda.
The IWW union organizers certainly understood the idea of incentives.
"Every dollar that the boss did not work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it.” -Big Bill Hayward
Hayward was a communist who fled to the Soviet Union after being arrested for opposing WWI.
That's a very catchy line, now please fill in the details of how socialism is going to work in practice.
Are small businesses still allowed? Because that line would apply to them to, right?
Haywood (not Hayward) died in 1928. Isn't time to do a bit more work on filling out his vision?
There is no cognitive dissonance in claiming that workers should get a larger share of the pie and the capital has been steadily gaining its share for a generation now. There is no cognitive dissonance in organizing for higher pay for work.
Asking for a detailed version of how societies would work under socialism is kind of an absurd question, especially from someone who is not a socialist. I am much more anarchist than socialist. Socialists today generally believe in incremental change anyway.
Haywood (thank you) and the IWWs vision for how to improve capitalism ring as true today as ever. If you ask me for a more updated vision, I would say that the Nordic model is a good one. The most modern critique of capitalism that I can point to is on the DSA website. Of course, no vision is considered doctrinaire. There has been no Internationale for a very long time.
What is your vision of who things should work under capitalism? Tell me what your vision of utopia is like and I will criticise it and respond in kind.
"There is no cognitive dissonance in claiming that workers should get a larger share of the pie and the capital has been steadily gaining its share for a generation now. There is no cognitive dissonance in organizing for higher pay for work."
Sure, but organizing for higher pay for work is not socialism. Socialism, at minimum, has to mean collectivization of large businesses. If it doesn't mean at least that, it becomes a meaningless concept (which should then be abandoned, because too many people have a bad opinion of it).
Philosophically I'm a social democrat. Given the unchangeable facts of human psychology (people generally don't give too much of a shit about other people), and the lessons of history so far, capitalism tempered by strong government regulation and strongly redistributive tax policy seems to me to be the best possible system. Today, Germany comes the closest to that ideal.
"... organizing for higher pay for work is not socialism." It's what Socialists and Communists have done throughout the history of those movements when they were organizing in Capitalist societies.
Marx believed that Communism was the end game, after Capitalism. In fact Freddie had an article this week about this. Did you read it?
Incremental change to a society like Germany is something we can agree upon. Germany certainly supports a lot of socialist principles. Some kind of mixed economy is almost certainly the way to go.
Less government intrusion in our lives, with fewer people in prison, ending all the foolish wars (and not getting into any others), a massive cut in defense spending and redeploying the money into actually improving the lives of Americans, eliminating the mass spying of Americans and breaking up the tech monopolies is a good start. Once we get there we can see where we are at. I think these are all achievable goals. Tilting at windmills is not my thing.
We exchanged a few posts on another site, but I remember You, el Monstro.
In a word You've expressed what I have against Socialists, Marxists, and any OTHER kind-a "ist." You'll never agree with me, likely, but using "utopia" as a starting point is a non-starter. As a practical matter, if not on the basis of it being impossible to define a utopia that will appeal to many people. And a lotta those who it does appeal to envisions themselves to be thrust to the top-a the heap.
But me? I'm a dreamer too. Third-party.
I was asked to give my vision for a socialist utopia and responding in kind.
Anarchists don't want anyone at the top of the heap. We don't support coercion or hierarchy of any kind. You are confusing me with the other kind of leftist.
I don't think we can organize a global economy with a bunch of small scale worker cooperatives, don't get me wrong. Pure "A" Anarchism is not realistic. But it can serve as a loadstone to a better world.
"The trouble is that many left-leaning people feel that they can safely disregard anything published in conservative media, and thus a badly-needed conversation hasn't happened."
Same goes for the right with CNN, MSNBC, etc. This is a huge problem. We live in a Choose Your Own Adventure reality where what is and what isn't is completely up to us, and where there's no shortage of information to support our views.
1) Ignore the Fox Pundits
2) Ignore the CNN/MSNBC pundits and figure out which stories they're omitting, then find out the facts of that story.
I don't claim to have the solution, but I watch zero cable news (besides clips that are posted on Twitter). I read the majors like WSJ, NYT, WashPo, etc but I find myself relying more and more on the FdB, Taibbi, Weiss, Greenwald, Yglesias, Noah Smith, AGM, of the world. I look for people I think are smart (obviously) but mostly honest. Doesn't matter if I agree or not. Freddie's the perfect example.
I follow a similar pattern as you regarding news. The biggest reason I don't bother with cable news is in the age of the internet I can almost always get the proper source material.
Anytime there's video of a scandal why would I watch 5 minutes of talking heads telling me what's happening, 15 seconds of the actual video taken completely out of context, and then more talking heads. I'd rather just watch the 3 minute video and then go find any other information that the video brings up that I'm not familiar with (a particular college or institution, the person in question if they are somewhat well known, any items on display that I don't recognize, etc).
This can be tougher with documents if it's made for a specialist audience or if it's particularly long (say the Panama Papers) but if nothing else you can easily look for context when you see something in the news or social media that looks particularly egregious.
Same here. Smart people who are independent, trying to find the truth and push back against ‘noble lies’. Don’t really care if they are left or right, I support them.
I would *never* watch some corporate news network like Fox or CNN, their whole business model is antithetical to any sort of truth.
"but mostly honest"
I guess it still falls out, 'character is destiny.'
I don't follow
The media constantly told us lies ... lies that caught up to them. Now no one believes anything the main stream media say, so we turn to Bari, Freddy, Joe, etc. Joe Rogan has more daily viewers than CNN.
The 'poor character' of the main stream media caught up to them and that character caused their demise. This is the same with people. Your character is your destiny. Your past defines your future. Spent your life living frugal, retire comfortably. Spent your life profligate, retire poorly.
We listen to the same voices, it is uncanny. I recommend adding Caitlin Johnstone to that list. She's not always right, but she is always thoughtful and provocative.
https://substack.com/profile/14779628-caitlin-johnstone
Pay for subscription to Snowden if you can afford it. We owe him a great debt for his sacrifice.
I think The Economist is the best of MSM.
Nice, will check CJ out, thanks!
Dunno if it's a solution, but it makes the days a LOT better: Spend 10 minutes scanning headlines, almost never read an article.
I see You and raise You one: Never spend a minute on social media. Gimme a break. I actually believe free-thinking isn't outmoded. But ICBW (I Could Be Wrong) about that.
Only thing that I think even obtains are books. Authors, to get published, actually put some thought into the things. Unlike what I'm doing now.
Choose Your Own Adventure reality is a great phrase. I think it goes hand in hand with "the truth is paywalled but the lies are free" that Nathan Robinson described a few years ago.
And almost no one is willing to call their own side to account. It's one of the reasons I appreciate Freddie so much.
Just recently read Joshua Bloom's Black Against Empire, which is a history of the Black Panther Party. Your essay is reminding me of it. It's maybe overly charitable to the journalist and pundit classes, but some of the hesitation may be because they don't want to seem to be working with the CIA or FBI to undermine another Black movement. It's been reported that BLM activists are under increased surveillance (easier now than ever!) so media types may just want to ensure they're on the "Right Side of History."
This helps no one, of course, but the professional consequences, as you point out, are real. Is it worth torching your career to criticize an amoebalike movement that is both everything and nothing that one may want out of a social justice project?
The state certainly has a horrific and damning history with regard to black-led/initiated movements. Is there credible evidence that “increased surveillance” is more than simply that? Because as Freddie has said, a small group of people being given billions of dollars without a clear idea of where it’s going, who have also openly voiced radical aims that would undermine how our democracy works, it makes sense to me to keep tabs.
I think the history of he CIA and FBI should be enough to discourage anyone from thinking that their increased scrutiny is only an extra level of illegal surveillance.
Back in 2020, when everyone and their brother was going to mass protests, I made what I thought was a mild and well-reasoned post on Facebook, the gist of which was that if you wanted to make signs and stand around with masses of strangers that you would never see again, fine, but real change would be effected more by getting together with local folks and digging into local matters (what are the hiring/oversight practices of your own city police department etc.), actions which would also have little likelihood of resulting in anyone's home or workplace being burned down...which I argued was a bonus, fool that I was.
Of course, almost instantly a "friend" responded with a post that said, in effect, "Shut the fuck up, White Man."
Is it any surprise that so many decline to have the "conversation on race" that we're always being told we so desperately need - and that we DO need? The current climate traps us in our own very narrow circles, and it's leading us nowhere.
Just a thought - no one wants to see anyone’s political musings on Facebook. What you made for dinner, cute pictures of your cat, knock yourself out.
I came to the same conclusion BZC. That's the last time I did it. Since my cat is dead, I now stick to poems (not my own, don't worry) and funny quotations from old movies.
Local politics are ok, but once you get to the state or national level, FB turns that into a toxic stew.
I run my own, local, Facebook community group. I have strict rules on politics and civility and me and the missus enforce them with an iron hand.
I have nearly 4200 members now and I think there's a lot of value to it. I mean, half the posts are people asking for recommendations for plumbers, painters, HVAC and other contractors as well as doctors, vets, etc., but that's fine by me.
I hadn't been much of a poster on social media in recent years, but when black squares became mandatory and it became fashionable to critique the inadequacies of white peoples' online struggle sessions, I stopped posting anything whatsoever.
The black squares were the moment I had to drop Instagram, which was the last social media I was still using. It felt like the inflection point where you could get in trouble not just for posting something wrong, but for not posting something at all! The fact that everyone who did post one had to immediately castigate themselves for having hurt the movement with their hashtags only cemented the point that there was literally nothing you could do that was okay. Whatever fun social media once offered was already hanging on by a thread, and that moment snipped it.
Exactly so.
There's a relatively small but well-known organization that claims to help marginalized people that was founded by two mentally ill grifters who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization and got quietly moved out. None of this got any media attention at all. People don't want to criticize people who claim to be doing good. It sucks.
What organization? Be the light bringer, bro!
I've tried being the light bringer, I sent the public tax forms that mentioned the embezzlement to a bunch of news sites, activists and journalists. Some of them actually got angry at me. To be honest, I think that my fixation on this might be a bit unhealthy and that's one of the reason I gave up on sending it to people.
No way!!! I’m sorry to hear that.
I’m frustrated by the women whose careers I’ve followed (in my case it is specifically women) who equate waning support for BLM with the “inevitable” white backsliding they expected. I’m like, there’s a difference between supporting (or not) a specific political organization and continuing to support social and political goals. Not anymore, apparently.
yeah I have a friend who regularly posts "shake the tables, its still BLM" eyeroll* anyone who is looking and who cares sees right past BLM...
Can't believe you're such a racist, Erin
(this was a joke, btw)
First of all, screw you.
The extremely weird thing about this is, anything a white person says to defend against charges of racism, or even just to illustrate that you're not in some white supremacist bubble...is racism.
I didn't even realize until I actually thought about it last week, that of the 17 children who live on our block, only 5 are "white." I value the diversity of cultures that have come together in the US, and specifically in my neighborhood. But the white kids aren't even "the same." One's mother is eastern European, for example. I'm half not-American, and my kids technically have dual citizenship in another country. We are ALL different. But expounding on the virtues and beauty of my neighborhood is "erasing" other experiences, I guess, instead of proof that something better is possible.
"The extremely weird thing about this is, anything a white person says to defend against charges of racism, or even just to illustrate that you're not in some white supremacist bubble...is racism."
Yup, it's full epistemic closure. It's like a conspiracy theory. To the conspiracy theorist, providing additional evidence of the moon landing is just proof that more people were in on the job.
It's called a Kafka trap and it's both pernicious and dehumanizing. I would hazard that it is a key reason so many progs and libs have turned against woke ideology. Nobody likes being dehumanized.
I know, dear. But the screw you holds.
As long as we all prefer the strategy of paying indulgences over meaningful action and sacrifice, there will be fraudsters who show up to take advantage. I don't know if corporate media has much incentive to call it out and risk nudging people toward actions that might actually afflict their comfort.
Critical solidarity is a great term. This is so important especially when thinking internationally about left-leaning governments. There's such a tendency on the left to either write them off for their imperfections, or defend them as perfect and dismiss all criticism because they are under attack by the US (militarily, economically, or through propaganda).
Also adding to the mess is the abuse/misuse/overuse of standpoint epistemology. Its too often a conversation ending catch phrase to shutdown anything unwanted. "YOU DONT HAVE MY LIVED EXPERIENCE SO SHUT UP"
Totally agree. I remember this being basically how the BLM organizer who had four houses responded when confronted. Not an exact quote, but her response amounted to, “Fuck you for asking nosy questions about a struggling black person who made honest money and is using it to take care of herself and her own.” Being black and “struggling” was the entire justification for needing four houses. The lived experience made it ok for *her* to be a rich property owner.
(Disclaimer that I don’t care if a rich community organizer has four houses, just that I’m with Freddie that the lack of accountability and mainstream unwillingness to call out this weird hypocrisy is bizarre.)
I don't think any of it really is hypocrisy. None of these people really have any robust critique of capitalism or private property. Their toughest line is that white people's property is built on theft and is therefore illegitimate -- but that accepts the premise that private property built on "one's own" labor is actually good!
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think – and I’m completely guilty of this – people ascribe concrete political and economic stances to these people that they never actually express, because we just assume that they must have endorsed them at some point based on a vague sense of the movement’s uniting politics. It is in its way very capitalistic – not actually about a desire to eliminate massive racial wealth gaps, but to ensure that black people get to join the one percent on the same unequal terms as white people.
Which is precisely what some of the Left was saying about the Obama-to-BLM-to-Clinton axis back in 2014-2015, but then that branch of the Left was basically "politely requested" to shut the fuck up until Trump was out of office and racial liberalism was saved from his "fascism".
Show me the money! The chattering class will lose their jobs if they don’t tow the line. Lying for a good cause is justifiable.
Corruption in a major organization... that's generally the kind of thing investigative journalists live for. Except, oops. It's a liberal organization. Gotta stay quiet about that. Can't empower our political opponents.
Good Lord our binary-thinking culture sucks ass.
Presumably they also don’t want to feed into a stereotype. I’ve noticed that a lot of talk about racism is about people using the wrong words. That’s not what it is.
I'm just glad Patrice Kahn-Cullors and her partner are using the money to buy houses instead of on some program/group that harms white men
:D
The intimidation into forced silence is a sign of an unhealthy society. I suspect one day we'll look back on this period in America with the same sense of shame as the Blacklist era of the 50s Red Scare