Right now, one of the biggest problems is that the left is divided into what I call actual leftists (those who want to help poor people) and the woke elites obsessed with a particular brand of identity politics that 80% of the country loathes. This faction thrives on being unpopular; widespread adoption of their politics would be utterly deflating for those who profit from the movement. Just yesterday, BLM (well, whoever runs the website; I'm sure lots of folks on the ground disagree) came out in support of Jussie Smolette. Association with these people can tank the entire movement.
Sensible liberals should seek alliances with the actual left, the socialists who care about material help for working people. And both sides should explicitly distance themselves from the fake left that everyone hates.
Those who claim the liberal or progressive label to describe their societal views and positions on governing need to cease using the term socialism or socialist incorrectly. The view that government should provide economic, regulatory, and other support to social services such as education, affordable housing, healthcare, nutrition support, and others is not socialism. This is merely a choice on the allocation of government expenditures some nations’ governments choose for themselves. Socialism is defined as state ownership of the means of production of goods and services. There is not today, nor has there ever been in history a single nation that was purely socialist. Every country chooses where to draw the line on state ownership versus private ownership. Even in countries that have proclaimed themselves socialist large portions of the economy remain privately owned and controlled.
Describing programs incorrectly as socialist only plays into the hands of conservative elites and the foolish and misinformed.
I saw this when I was part of the Cornell Coalition for Divestment in the 80s. We would never have had as much impact with out the Anarchist House and the Marx Lenin Institute folks pushing for direct action. But they had no strategy and did some really counterproductive things like turning up at a candlelight vigil and burning the University President in effigy. I see it in my Indivisible group.
In Mike Duncan’s excellent history podcast “Revolutions”, he describes two great questions of the age that drove the revolutions of the 1800s, and how you answered both of them dictated your place on the political spectrum.
The first was the Political Question- what kinda government you gonna live under? Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, parliament, republic, what? Does legitimacy descend from up above, with God anointing the Emperor or king with unquestionable authority, or does it bubble up from the consent of the governed?
Then there was the Social Question- the Industrial Revolution is reducing free men to wage slaves, decimating the artisan class, threatening serfdom, inducing economic downturns that leave millions at risk of starvation, generally making life shittier for the 90+% of the population that owns no capital. Do we, you know, adjust how society runs so as to NOT wreck everything the captains of industry touch? Redistribute property? Hold the means of production in common? Eradicate the social hierarchy and organized religions and laws and political institutions and armies that reinforce the status quo?
Liberals and leftist agreed on the Political Question- fuck monarchy, expand suffrage, end aristocratic privileges that let the toffs dip into and take a cut out every grain cart that crosses their estate, make taxes legible and fairer, civil rights, freedom of speech, end of arbitrary imprisonments. Your basic Bill of Rights, you know?
But on the Social Question liberals and leftists found they were incompatible. Liberals were fine with keeping the proles where they were. They dug private property and law-n-order and legal contracts and so on. They hated strikes and bread riots and wealth expropriation with intent to distribute. Whereas the radical left, you know, opposite.
When the confrontation came with the powers that be, everyone was on the same page when it came to dealing with monarchists. But victory merely showed that the urban bourgeoisie wore the pants in the relationship- end of the day, the power of the radical left came solely from the day laborers and the small artisans of the cities, who were relatively few in number and possessed of no material strength. They were dangerous only because they lived and worked within walking distance of the halls of power, and a sudden hurricane of riots and insurrections could have outsized effects in spite of their inherent weakness. Whereas the liberal businessmen had material strength and staying power, and filled the power vacuum left by the absolute monarchists easily. Mobs disperse; think tanks and business committees endure.
The Marxist cope of this stark reality is that the more you industrialize, the more peasants would pour into the cities to become desperate day workers, thereby swelling the ranks of the proletariat until they stopped being weak lil bitches and started being the biggest and baddest gang on the block, able to seize power and keep it in the face of liberal and right wing opposition.
I broadly agree with the thrust of this article, but because I am an insufferable pedant I have to point out: The Friends of the ABC are led by /Enjolras/, not Marius. Enjolras was "an only son and wealthy", "a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible", and is explicitly compared with St Just, which gives you an idea of who exactly we're dealing with here. He also gets one of the most heartbreaking speeches in the novel, though mostly in retrospect ("Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.").
Marius, meanwhile, only showed up at the barricade because he thought his girlfriend had moved away.
Okay, I'm going to try to kill two birds with one stone here:
1. push back a tiny bit on your characterization of Marx/Marxism and
2. win the French history pedantry contest by invoking the following brief exchange from everyone's favorite Zola novel, Germinal (1885):
"But Étienne grew enthusiastic. A predisposition for revolt was throwing him, in the first illusions of his ignorance, into the struggle of labour against capital. It was the International Working Men’s Association that they were concerned with, that famous International which had just been founded in London. Was not that a superb effort, a campaign in which justice would at last triumph? No more frontiers; the workers of the whole world rising and uniting to assure to the labourer the bread that he has earned. And what a simple and great organization! Below, the section which represents the commune; then the federation which groups the sections of the same province; then the nation; and then, at last, humanity incarnated in a general council in which each nation was represented by a corresponding secretary. In six months it would conquer the world, and would be able to dictate laws to the masters should they prove obstinate.
“'Foolery!” repeated Souvarine. “Your Karl Marx is still only thinking about letting natural forces act. No politics, no conspiracies, is it not so? Everything in the light of day, and simply to raise wages. Don’t bother me with your evolution! Set fire to the four corners of the town, mow down the people, level everything, and when there is nothing more of this rotten world left standing, perhaps a better one will grow up in its place.'”
I think this passage is pretty interesting because it shows us how Marx was regarded in the actual context of mid-late 19th c. labor radicalism--not as a bomb thrower, but as someone trying to discover/articulate the "natural" laws that governed capitalism and would bring about its demise. This is unacceptably tepid to a fire-breathing (fictional) anarchist like Souvarine, just as it was to a real-life anarchist like Bakunin.
All this to say that judging Marx's intellectual contributions to 19th c. thought by the Communist Manifesto is like judging Rush by "Working Man"--at best wildly incomplete, at worst actively misleading.
I'm even annoying myself now, so I'm going to stop.
Right now, one of the biggest problems is that the left is divided into what I call actual leftists (those who want to help poor people) and the woke elites obsessed with a particular brand of identity politics that 80% of the country loathes. This faction thrives on being unpopular; widespread adoption of their politics would be utterly deflating for those who profit from the movement. Just yesterday, BLM (well, whoever runs the website; I'm sure lots of folks on the ground disagree) came out in support of Jussie Smolette. Association with these people can tank the entire movement.
Sensible liberals should seek alliances with the actual left, the socialists who care about material help for working people. And both sides should explicitly distance themselves from the fake left that everyone hates.
Those who claim the liberal or progressive label to describe their societal views and positions on governing need to cease using the term socialism or socialist incorrectly. The view that government should provide economic, regulatory, and other support to social services such as education, affordable housing, healthcare, nutrition support, and others is not socialism. This is merely a choice on the allocation of government expenditures some nations’ governments choose for themselves. Socialism is defined as state ownership of the means of production of goods and services. There is not today, nor has there ever been in history a single nation that was purely socialist. Every country chooses where to draw the line on state ownership versus private ownership. Even in countries that have proclaimed themselves socialist large portions of the economy remain privately owned and controlled.
Describing programs incorrectly as socialist only plays into the hands of conservative elites and the foolish and misinformed.
I saw this when I was part of the Cornell Coalition for Divestment in the 80s. We would never have had as much impact with out the Anarchist House and the Marx Lenin Institute folks pushing for direct action. But they had no strategy and did some really counterproductive things like turning up at a candlelight vigil and burning the University President in effigy. I see it in my Indivisible group.
In Mike Duncan’s excellent history podcast “Revolutions”, he describes two great questions of the age that drove the revolutions of the 1800s, and how you answered both of them dictated your place on the political spectrum.
The first was the Political Question- what kinda government you gonna live under? Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, parliament, republic, what? Does legitimacy descend from up above, with God anointing the Emperor or king with unquestionable authority, or does it bubble up from the consent of the governed?
Then there was the Social Question- the Industrial Revolution is reducing free men to wage slaves, decimating the artisan class, threatening serfdom, inducing economic downturns that leave millions at risk of starvation, generally making life shittier for the 90+% of the population that owns no capital. Do we, you know, adjust how society runs so as to NOT wreck everything the captains of industry touch? Redistribute property? Hold the means of production in common? Eradicate the social hierarchy and organized religions and laws and political institutions and armies that reinforce the status quo?
Liberals and leftist agreed on the Political Question- fuck monarchy, expand suffrage, end aristocratic privileges that let the toffs dip into and take a cut out every grain cart that crosses their estate, make taxes legible and fairer, civil rights, freedom of speech, end of arbitrary imprisonments. Your basic Bill of Rights, you know?
But on the Social Question liberals and leftists found they were incompatible. Liberals were fine with keeping the proles where they were. They dug private property and law-n-order and legal contracts and so on. They hated strikes and bread riots and wealth expropriation with intent to distribute. Whereas the radical left, you know, opposite.
When the confrontation came with the powers that be, everyone was on the same page when it came to dealing with monarchists. But victory merely showed that the urban bourgeoisie wore the pants in the relationship- end of the day, the power of the radical left came solely from the day laborers and the small artisans of the cities, who were relatively few in number and possessed of no material strength. They were dangerous only because they lived and worked within walking distance of the halls of power, and a sudden hurricane of riots and insurrections could have outsized effects in spite of their inherent weakness. Whereas the liberal businessmen had material strength and staying power, and filled the power vacuum left by the absolute monarchists easily. Mobs disperse; think tanks and business committees endure.
The Marxist cope of this stark reality is that the more you industrialize, the more peasants would pour into the cities to become desperate day workers, thereby swelling the ranks of the proletariat until they stopped being weak lil bitches and started being the biggest and baddest gang on the block, able to seize power and keep it in the face of liberal and right wing opposition.
I broadly agree with the thrust of this article, but because I am an insufferable pedant I have to point out: The Friends of the ABC are led by /Enjolras/, not Marius. Enjolras was "an only son and wealthy", "a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible", and is explicitly compared with St Just, which gives you an idea of who exactly we're dealing with here. He also gets one of the most heartbreaking speeches in the novel, though mostly in retrospect ("Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.").
Marius, meanwhile, only showed up at the barricade because he thought his girlfriend had moved away.
“Tommy likey! Tommy want wingey!”
Okay, I'm going to try to kill two birds with one stone here:
1. push back a tiny bit on your characterization of Marx/Marxism and
2. win the French history pedantry contest by invoking the following brief exchange from everyone's favorite Zola novel, Germinal (1885):
"But Étienne grew enthusiastic. A predisposition for revolt was throwing him, in the first illusions of his ignorance, into the struggle of labour against capital. It was the International Working Men’s Association that they were concerned with, that famous International which had just been founded in London. Was not that a superb effort, a campaign in which justice would at last triumph? No more frontiers; the workers of the whole world rising and uniting to assure to the labourer the bread that he has earned. And what a simple and great organization! Below, the section which represents the commune; then the federation which groups the sections of the same province; then the nation; and then, at last, humanity incarnated in a general council in which each nation was represented by a corresponding secretary. In six months it would conquer the world, and would be able to dictate laws to the masters should they prove obstinate.
“'Foolery!” repeated Souvarine. “Your Karl Marx is still only thinking about letting natural forces act. No politics, no conspiracies, is it not so? Everything in the light of day, and simply to raise wages. Don’t bother me with your evolution! Set fire to the four corners of the town, mow down the people, level everything, and when there is nothing more of this rotten world left standing, perhaps a better one will grow up in its place.'”
I think this passage is pretty interesting because it shows us how Marx was regarded in the actual context of mid-late 19th c. labor radicalism--not as a bomb thrower, but as someone trying to discover/articulate the "natural" laws that governed capitalism and would bring about its demise. This is unacceptably tepid to a fire-breathing (fictional) anarchist like Souvarine, just as it was to a real-life anarchist like Bakunin.
All this to say that judging Marx's intellectual contributions to 19th c. thought by the Communist Manifesto is like judging Rush by "Working Man"--at best wildly incomplete, at worst actively misleading.
I'm even annoying myself now, so I'm going to stop.
What we need are liberals who have a Leftist Beast Mode when we get REALLY pissed. Actually, forget that. That's how we got the current NYTimes.
"Mexicans/Normans/Cro-Magnons/Vertebrates"
One of Stewart Lee's best bits:
https://www.facebook.com/veryBrexitproblems/videos/1044077395979528/