Lefty Prof's List: Popular Marxism Today

• The double standards are so obvious--yet they can be found on all kinds of issues. Teachers are accused of selfishly putting their interests before schoolchildren when they try to keep class sizes down or stand up for their union or insist on decent pay. But the same disapproving voices go silent when it comes to the six-figure salaries of school administrators or the contracts that guarantee an income for private charter operators.

• Decades removed from the heady days of feminism’s “second wave” in the United States, it is distressing to acknowledge that the movement’s revolutionary moment is a dim memory, while key aspects of liberal feminism have been incorporated into the ruling-class agenda. Liberal feminist ideas have been mobilized to support a range of neoliberal initiatives, including austerity, imperial war, and structural adjustment
• Liberal feminism’s partial incorporation into the neoliberal economic, political, cultural, and social order is better explained by the emergence of a regime of capital accumulation that has fundamentally restructured economies in both the global north and the global south.
• In the global north, this new regime was ushered in by employers’ assault on the working class, on the welfare state, and on the historic institutions of working-class defense — unions and social democratic parties. This assault brought about neoliberalism, the political context for the successful backlash against the radical demands of feminists, anti-racist activists, indigenous peoples, and others.
• People have a sense that the old forms of left politics will not do. In this search for alternatives, socialist feminism has much to offer.

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• The only thing more predictable than riots in the United States’ dilapidated cities is the outpouring of moralizing pseudo-explanations that accompany them. In this, as in so much else, Ferguson has been no exception.
• the idea of a culture of poverty among black Americans.
• Racists began blowing on this particular dog-whistle as soon as the murder of Michael Brown began to attract national attention.
• As the sheer scale and brutality of racial inequality in the US comes, however hazily, into popular focus, conservatives across the country will, much like Zionists suddenly concerned with the fate of the Syrian uprising, suddenly evince an intense preoccupation with the lives of black Americans. We will hear how welfare has made blacks dependent on the government, has broken up the black family, and has encouraged a culture of criminality and violence (as evidenced by all that rap music).
• the influence of the culture of poverty thesis extends far beyond the ranks of Republican officials, Tea Party activists, and Fox News talking heads — apparent, for instance, in the near-universal tendency to turn any discussion of the pervasive inequalities and discrimination suffered by African Americans into a moralizing sermon about the cultural pathologies of black people.

• Every component of the culture of poverty narrative is a phantasm, a projection of racial fantasies on to the culture of African Americans, which has for several centuries now served as the screen on which the national unconscious plays out.

   

  Put more bluntly, they are lies.
• the claim that black youth inhabit a culture that venerates criminality, in which having been incarcerated is a matter of pride.
• In light of Braman’s work, the claim that young black men are happy to be locked up is perverse.
• There is no culture of criminality in black communities. Convenient as it may be to ascribe one to the victims of state violence, all of the evidence suggests that black families work incredibly hard to keep their members out of prison, and feel a profound sense of failure when they are unable to.
• The notion of a black disdain for school as a “white thing” has been given voice recently by Barack Obama himself. Giving an address for his neoliberal “My Brother’s Keeper” program, Obama took the opportunity to opine that in black communities “there’s been the notion of “acting white,”” where high-achieving black students are stigmatized by their peers.
• Other commentators have been even bolder in their use of the theory, trotting it out to explain that black attitudes, and not white racism, are the cause of black-white educational disparities.
• Despite its ubiquity in popular discussions, however, acting white theory has come under sustained criticism from education scholars.
• 95% of black female students reported that, if they did really well in school, they would be proud and tell all of their friends about it. Similarly, black students were most likely to report that their friends would be happier if they went to college than if they didn’t. Most white students said their friends wouldn’t care either way.
• Black students, understandably, place a higher premium on education than white students, because they know they will pay a higher price for lacking it than white students will. Yet the aspirations of black students, however well-documented, fail to make any impact on discussions of race and education in national media.
• Since the 1960s, it’s true that single-parent households have become far more common in black communities (though not only there), and this is the era commentators typically focus on, blaming the loss of a mythological united community under Jim Crow in more liberal versions of the story, or welfare programs in more reactionary ones.
• When the supply of employed, non-incarcerated men is controlled for, black and white marriage rates look more similar than different.
• When it comes to the notion of welfare dependency, the verdict is much the same. One study looking at black single mothers in Milwaukee found that these women’s families were a major contributor to the high value they placed on education and finding a career. Far from being the transmission belt of a “culture of dependency,” black families act as a support network encouraging their members to achieve as much as possible.
• Bill Cosby’s rant attacking black Americans for everything from the linguistic habits of black teenagers to the names given to black children was treated by everyone from Barack Obama to Bill O’Reilly as a serious call for self-reflection by the “black community.” Yet it would be impossible to imagine a situation in which the personal appearance and lifestyle choices of attendees at the annual Burning Man festival would ever inspire such anxiety.
• Given that the culture of poverty argument today is most strongly associated with the Right, it is surprising to learn that its provenance actually comes from the other end of the spectrum. The phrase itself achieved notoriety with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the black family (“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”), though he had himself drawn it from anthropologist Oscar Lewis’ work.
• In the decades since then, as “the Moynihan report” has, quite properly, come to serve as shorthand on the Left for a pathologization of the black family and a victim-blaming rhetoric, it has been easy to forget that Moynihan himself was no Strom Thurmond, but a Great Society liberal with impeccable credentials. The concept itself comes not from the Right, which was then still mired in explicitly biological racism, but from liberals cognizant of the injustice of inequality, but too attached to ideas of black deficiency to jettison them entirely.
• The importance of the culture-of-poverty approach is that it allows for recognition of the accumulated history of racism and inequality, but posits the ongoing effects of these as mediated through black cultural pathologies. It therefore permits American liberals to identify with opposition to racism while pushing them towards policy solutions geared towards the transformation of black people, and not American society.
• And yet the notion that the entrenched racial disparities of US society are, at least in part, the product of black cultural pathologies, retains enormous traction. Sharpton and Cosby are hardly alone among black Americans in identifying with versions of this narrative. A recent survey, for example, revealed that black men both tend to value education and work highly, yet thought that other black men spent too much time thinking about sports and sex. So pervasive is this ideology that people who know it to be false of themselves are willing to believe it of others. The argument can also take a more nationalist register, as in the contention that slavery damaged black American culture so profoundly that the resulting cultural deficiencies, often identified as a lack of community or self-respect, explain aspects of black inequality today, from educational disparities to economic impoverishment.

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• As such, it will also have to consider the kinds of violence that can be regarded as compatible or more compatible with its emancipatory politics from below. Take, for example, terror. As V. I. Lenin and other socialist leaders repeatedly pointed out, the use of terrorist tactics tends to replace the organization of a collective mass struggle with an individual act of self-sacrifice. Also, terror often tends to deliberately convert random civilian bystanders into targets, a tactic that is both politically and morally unacceptable because it sends the political message that the random civilian victims are as much part of the enemy as the oppressive system, its leaders, and repressive agents themselves. A similar objection applies to revolutionary governments that in the face of counterrevolutionary resistance repress people on the basis of who they are (e.g., class membership) instead of what they do (e.g., to take up arms against the revolutionary government.)³ 
• the fact that there are many complicated and impossible-to-anticipate situations that may have to be quickly resolved in “the heat of the battle,” does not negate the need for guidelines regarding what is and is not acceptable.
• It is significant that Breines’ definition of “participatory democracy” emphasizes its opposition to hierarchy and centralization. “Participatory democracy” of a nonhierarchical and noncentralized kind may work reasonably well only in the simplest types of organizations, like a local commune. But as soon as it becomes necessary to coordinate various local units of self-government, formal representation inevitably comes into play and with it hierarchy.
• In this sense, it is worthwhile to look at the institutions considered as classic examples of “informal, direct” democracy, established by the Paris Commune and the Russian soviets (before they lost their democratic character during the 1918–1920 civil war.) In order to ensure their representational character, they established clear “formal” procedures for the election and recall of their delegates. In the case of the pre-1918 Russian soviets, these formal procedures included multiparty elections to be held every three months, along with procedures to enforce the right of recall that could be exercised at any moment. Formal means were also adopted to ensure that local differences of opinion were represented in the higher decision-making bodies (a feature that counters the widespread notion that these institutions were examples of “direct nonrepresentative” democracy.) Thus, the delegates chosen by the local soviets went on to represent their electors in higher bodies. Clearly there was a hierarchy.
• The issue is, and was, to make the existence of this hierarchy open, and its functioning explicit (rather than hidden and manipulative) and to develop the kind of democratic mechanisms to control it and, when necessary, to replace those higher up in the hierarchy. 
• An ecologically “good society” would also require centralized efforts to implement economic priorities and to effectively coordinate production and distribution among different sectors of the economy that avoid duplication of effort and waste of precious resources with their deleterious effect on the quality of life. For example, the outputs of one factory are often inputs for another firm and must be coordinated by some more inclusive entity, and electrical and water services require extended networks to work efficiently and avoid the waste of resources. The same applies to the operation of railways, the most ecologically sound means of long-distance transport. While it is true that a self-managed society would by definition require a substantial degree of local decision-making, the real issue would not be centralization itself, but the type of relationship that existed between the rank and file and the leadership, and whether measures were implemented to ensure that the indispensable centralized efforts and institutions were subject to controls from below that are both democratic and rational in their use of relatively scarce resources.
• The best responses to these obstacles are often far from obvious and require tactical and strategic plans and tasks for which the organizational practices of prefigurative movements such as Occupy have been inadequate. These tasks would require, at a minimum, the democratic election of representative bodies with the right of immediate recall, to develop political analysis and tactical/strategic plans of action to be brought back to the movement as a whole for discussion, approval, amendment, or rejection.
• Occupy’s conception of “direct democracy” has also tended to limit its actions to particular locations and to recruit people with unlimited time to obsess about process. A democratic representative model concerned with the development of meaningful democratic choices that prioritize what is important is a fundamental requirement for strategic political action; it would also broaden recruitment to include the great majority of people who have work and family obligations.
• The extraordinary positive response to Occupy from wide layers of the population provided the opportunity for the recruitment of tens of thousands of activists who could have met in hundreds of places and elected representatives to plan, strategize, and coordinate with each other for actions at a local, state, and national level.
• Unfortunately, this broad political strategy is not helped by the common tendency among some of the post-Occupy Left to “privilege check,” where they “call each other out” on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and sensitivities about body image among others, without any sense of how to build a movement that will champion a politics of solidarity with the oppressed (an injury to one is an injury to all). These are the politics of a pure “sect” (to use left-wing political theorist Sheldon Wolin’s term), as against those who want to champion a politics of solidarity.⁷
• An important consequence of the prefigurative rejection of “strategic thinking” is an approach to historical causation that concentrates on issues of representation and hierarchy at the expense of the larger picture of the social roots of political phenomena. For example, they explain the persistence of reformism in unions and left-wing parties, an issue of concern to them, as the result of centralized hierarchical leadership, instead of the outcome of a dialectical relation between the bureaucratic leadership of those institutions and popular and working-class consciousness, which in turn is influenced by changing material conditions. Serious analyses of the nature of reformism are intrinsic to “strategic thinking” and “strategic politics” that movements ignore at their peril.
• Questions involving the relationship between reform and revolution are simply wished away by redefining revolution as no longer involving the actual overthrow of the capitalist system through a set of discrete and relatively short-lived events. As John Holloway, the Irish social scientist teaching in Mexico, and one of the best exponents of prefigurative politics, argues in his Crack Capitalism, “the revolutionary replacement of one system by another is both impossible and undesirable,” and that the only possible way of conceiving revolution is as an interstitial process⁹ that involves the creation, expansion, and multiplication of cracks—such as the Zapatistas in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and the Argentinian workers takeover of bankrupt factories abandoned by the owners.
• While the Mexican government has decided, perhaps for the sake of political stability, to permit the continued existence of the EZLN self-governed communities in the Lacandonian jungle—one of the poorest and most isolated parts of the country—these communities continue to be subject to the same powerful pressures of capitalism. As the veteran Latin American leftist Guillermo Almeyra points out, they are still immersed in the market, forced to sell their labor for most of the year, to buy tools, fertilizers, and agricultural products unavailable in the Zapatista zones, to sell or exchange their products in town markets outside of their own region, and even to turn to the official health and education systems.¹⁰ 
• Paradoxical as it may sound, Holloway’s notion of revolution as evolution through struggle is also central to the thought of revolutionary anarchists like anthropologist David Graeber.
• If, on one hand, Graeber takes a self-styled radical stance supporting the notion of “diversity of tactics” that entitles small minorities of activists to break windows and engage in other similar “trashing” activities,¹³ even against the express wishes of the sponsors and the great majority of participants in demonstrations, on the other hand, like Holloway, he rejects the notion of a “clean break,” that is, a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
• by negating state power, Holloway is able to avoid the realities of power. For example, the fact that the state will tolerate “cracks” only up to the point when they threaten its power and the power of capitalism. For Holloway this problem simply does not exist. The very examples that he chooses to illustrate his vision are very revealing: the Zapatista movement and its self-governing community in the Lacandonian jungle; a social center in Edinburgh, Scotland; or going to an all-night rave in Berlin.
• For Holloway, and also for Graeber, who also looks at the Zapatistas as a model to be applied everywhere, including civil-war Spain of the 1930s, this state of “dual power” could go on indefinitely, with the Zapatistas being able to survive in their communities and serve as an example to be cumulatively reproduced elsewhere. He sidesteps, however, the fact that the Zapatista communities survive so long as the Mexican state is willing to live, for conjunctural political reasons, with pockets of power outside its control in what are, from the state’s point of view, areas of marginal political and economic importance.
• Jane Jacobs,¹⁹ who revolutionized the field of urban studies with her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, strongly criticized planning oriented towards the creation of a “togetherness”
• Jacobs insisted on clear boundaries between public and private spaces, and advocated mixed and diverse urban uses to strengthen neighborhoods composed mostly of strangers, meaning people who “do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion” but who, through the creation of mixed and diverse urban uses, short blocks, wide sidewalks, and other indirect methods that encourage a rich and active street life, can behave in remarkably cooperative ways.

• Is this critique of “prefigurative politics” related to the critique of utopianism that Marx and Engels developed? Yes, and no. 

  Yes, because it rejects the building of schemes of what the future society may look like and the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the strategies and tactics adopted to fight exploitation and oppression—including the right of the oppressed to resort to force and violence—and those followed by the future society. 

  No, because the betrayals of social democracy and the murderous disaster of Stalinism that Marx and Engels did not foresee, have forced us to draw the lessons of these major failures of the Left since Marx and Engels in order to prevent their repetition in the future.
• There is an extensive socialist and Marxist literature showing the many ways in which competition and capitalism undermine the motivation, responsibility, and efficiency of workers, and how its systemic waste and irresponsible use of resources is bringing the world closer to ecological disaster. But that is not the same as showing, as other socialist analysts have tried to do, how a self-managed and democratic planned society could avoid many of those problems. Arguing in general terms that a socialist society with real workers control and democratic planning would not run into the problems and contradictions that afflicted Soviet-type societies, is too general and abstract. The classical Marxist warning against the construction of detailed blueprints of the future society, while generally appropriate, needs to be modified to address these issues. 
• The critical issues of the future society are not likely to involve the deliberate creation of community, which is in some ways a contradiction in terms, much less a specific cultural style of life, or the elimination of hierarchy, but the institutional viability and ecological sustainability of a socialism that is truly democratic.

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• Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, Capital is an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address the real limits on growth—namely our ecological crisis—it can’t be a roadmap for the next.
• Piketty prescribes a few remedies. But he does not take into serious consideration the limits to growth. He is a traditional Keynesian in this regard, which may be his biggest flaw.
• What this means is that it doesn’t matter if we implement a progressive tax on capital because our planet will not sustain forever a growth rate of even 1 percent annually. A dead planet will support neither high earners nor tax collectors.

• The traditional approach to inequality is to bring down those at the top while raising up those at the bottom. But to what level should we bring people, considering our finite planet?

   

  Do we want everyone to live a mythical American middle-class lifestyle? Where every family of four lives in a two-car-garage home with a TV in every room, and every family member has a smart phone, tablet, and computer? Where they take a vacation to the other side of the globe once a year, and send their children away to a university and buy them a car when they are of age?
• Is this the standard of living we want for every person on the planet? Obviously it can’t be—it would require at least five Earths.
• But while we should aspire to create a society that shares its prosperity, we need to address a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor. We need to address the gap between what’s demanded by our planet and what’s demanded by our economy.

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• If it is your case that a Dalit writing about Ambedkar will have a different reading from a non-Dalit, a privileged caste Hindu, then I agree with you—though I would still exercise caution against essentialism of this sort. But to say that every Dalit reading is automatically 'authentic' and every non-Dalit reading is 'misleading' is not something that I agree with. The point is, whatever my privileges are—or yours for that matter—are we fighting against Brahminism or strengthening it?

• What happened on February 11, 2011, was actually even more of a coup than what we saw on July 3, 2013--in the sense that the military removed Mubarak from power and took power directly in its hands. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took power as a military junta, so this was a coup in the most classical sense, set against the backdrop of a huge mass mobilization.
• In fact, Mubarak's removal was aimed at preserving the continuity of the state. It was a conservative coup in that sense.

• The tactics of agitation in  relation to some special question, or the tactics with regard to  some detail of party organisation may be changed in twenty-four  hours; but only people devoid of all principle are capable of  changing, in twenty-four hours, or, for that matter, in  twenty-four months, their view on the necessity—in  general, constantly, and absolutely—of an organisation of  struggle and of political agitation among the masses. It is  ridiculous to plead different circumstances and a change of  periods: the building of a fighting organisation and the conduct  of political agitation are essential under any “drab,  peaceful” circumstances, in any period, no matter how  marked by a “declining revolutionary spirit”;  moreover, it is precisely in such periods and under such  circumstances that work of this kind is particularly necessary,  since it is too late to form the organisation in times of  explosion and outbursts; the party must be in a state of  readiness to launch activity at a moment’s  notice. “Change the tactics within twenty-four  hours”! But in order to change tactics it is first  necessary to have tactics; without a strong organisation skilled  in waging political struggle under all circumstances and at all  times, there can be no question of that systematic plan of  action, illumined by firm principles and steadfastly carried  out, which alone is worthy of the name of tactics.
• But can we issue the call  for such  <!-- vol=05 pg=020 src=v05fl61h type= -->     a decisive assault at the present moment?  Rabocheye Dyelo apparently thinks we  can. At any rate, it exclaims: “Form assault  columns!” But this, again, is more zeal than reason. The  main body of our military forces consists of volunteers and  insurgents. We possess only a few small units of regular troops,  and these are not even mobilised; they are not connected with  one another, nor have they been trained to form columns of any  sort, let alone assault columns. In view of all this, it must be  clear to anyone who is capable of appreciating the general  conditions of our struggle and who is mindful of them at every  “turn” in the historical course of events that at  the present moment our slogan cannot be “To the  assault”, but has to be, “Lay siege to the enemy  fortress”. In other words, the immediate task of our Party  is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now,  but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation  capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual  practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready  at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use  it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for  the decisive struggle.
• We have spoken continuously of systematic,  planned preparation, yet it is by no means our intention to  imply that the autocracy can be overthrown only by a regular  siege or by organised assault. Such a view would be absurd and  doctrinaire. On the contrary, it is quite possible, and  historically much more probable, that the autocracy will  collapse under the impact of one of the spontaneous outbursts or  unforeseen political complications which constantly threaten it  from all sides. But no political party that wishes to avoid  adventurous gambles can base its activities on the anticipation  of such outbursts and complications. We must go our own way, and  we must steadfastly carry on our regular work, and the less our  reliance on the unexpected, the less the chance of our being  caught unawares by any “historic turns”.

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• The gini index ranges from 0 – when everybody has the same income – to 1, or 100 (expressed as a percentage or an index), when one person gets the entire income of a city (province, nation, world)—whatever is the relevant population over which we calculate inequality.
• Milanovic concludes:”Take the whole income of the world and divide it into two halves: the richest 8% will take one-half and the other 92% of the population will take another half. So, it is a 92-8 world.  In the US, the numbers are 78 and 22. Or using Germany, the numbers are 71 and 29. “  So it’s 92-9 world now – even more unequal than he measured before.  Milanovic notes that global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country.  The global gini is around 70, substantially greater than inequality in Brazil, the highest for a country. And it is almost twice as great as inequality in the United States.
• the 60m or so people who constitute the world’s top 1% of income ‘earners’ have seen their incomes rise by 60% since 1988. About half of these are the richest 12% of Americans. The rest of the top 1% is made up by the top 3-6% of Britons, Japanese, French and German, and the top 1% of several other countries, including Russia, Brazil and South Africa. These people include the world capitalist class – the owners and controllers of the capitalist system and the strategists and policy makers of imperialism.
• those who have gained income even more in the last 20 years are the ones in the ‘global middle’.  These people are not capitalists.  These are mainly people in India and China, formerly peasants or rural workers have migrated to the cities to work in the sweat shops and factories of globalisation: their real incomes have jumped from a very low base, even if their conditions and rights have not.
• biggest losers are the very poorest (mainly in African rural farmers) who have gained nothing in 20 years.
• Using a Theil coefficient of global inequality in two baseline years: 1870 and 2000, Milanovic shows that overall global inequality today is greater than in 1870 (the bar on the right for the year 2000 is higher).
• Global inequality can be decomposed into two parts (see the figure above). The first part is due to differences in incomes within nations
• If one adds up all of these within-national inequalities, you get the aggregate contribution to global inequality. Milanovic calls this the traditional Marxist “class” component of global inequality because it accounts for (the sum) of income inequalities between different “income classes” within countries.
• The second component, which he calls the “location” component, refers to the differences between mean incomes of all the countries in the world.
• Milanovic concludes from this that the Marxist class analysis has been proved wrong.  “Karl Marx could indeed eloquently write in 1867 in “Das Kapital”, or earlier in “The Manifesto” about proletarians in different parts of the world—peasants in India, workers in England, France or Germany— sharing the same political interests. They were invariably poor and, what is important, they were all about equally poor, eking out a barely above-subsistence existence, regardless of the country in which they lived. There was not much of a difference in their material positions.”  But not now.
• real inequalities are between all Americans and all Africans, not between capitalists and workers everywhere.  Thus Trotsky’s international proletarian revolution is out of date: “This was the idea behind Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”. There were no national contradictions, just a worldwide class contradiction. But if the world’s actual situation is such that the greatest disparities are due to the income gaps between nations, then proletarian solidarity doesn’t make much sense….Proletarian solidarity is then simply dead because there is no longer such a thing as global proletariat. This is why ours is a distinctly non-Marxian world.”

  • Trotsky speaks of a global proletariat with no national contradictions? Where? What's missing is imperialism.
• The history of solidarity action between the ‘rich ‘ workers of the West and the ‘poor’ people of the ‘Third World is really quite rich.
• Milanovic also misunderstands the Lenin-Trotsky view of ‘permanent revolution’.  It was precisely the development of imperialism and with it the uneven and combined development of modern global capitalism that led to the theory that a growing proletariat in the neo-colonial economies could move to power even before the advanced capitalist workers.
• Using the gini coefficient, Atkinson finds that in the OECD economies there has been a rise of about 3% pts in the coefficient from about 28 to 31 since the 1980s, or a rise of about 10%.
• Milanovic outlines the way out of this huge inequality, short of world-wide proletarian revolution – which won’t and cannot happen, according to him. “There are three ways in which global inequality can be reduced. Global inequality may be reduced by high growth rates of poor countries. This requires an acceleration of income growth of poor countries, and of course continued high rates of growth of India, China, Indonesia etc.”

  • Paryavaran bhadd mein jaaye.
• “The second way is to introduce global redistributive schemes although it is very difficult to see how that could happen. Currently, development assistance is a little over 100 billion a year. This is just five times more than the bonus Goldman Sachs paid itself during one crisis year.
• “The third way in which global inequality and poverty can be reduced is through migration.

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• THE GREAT labor mobilizations in Wisconsin showed that unions have the potential to win. So how come labor's still losing so badly?

   

  Certainly the spirit of the Wisconsin protests continues to resonate across the U.S. After labor resisted union-busting Republican Gov. Scott Walker with the biggest series of union protests in decades, union members in Ohio and Michigan poured into their own state Capitol buildings to protest similar legislative attacks.
• In Wisconsin, public-sector union leaders rushed to sign contracts with most of the economic concessions sought by Walker in order to delay the impact of his anti-union law, which eliminates meaningful collective bargaining for public-sector employees and bars the collection of union dues through workers' paycheck deductions.

• THE LESSON of Wisconsin for the unions should be straightforward enough. Republican governors and legislators are intent on crippling or destroying public-sector unions unless and until labor is willing and able to use all its power to stop them.

   

  Nevertheless, union leaders continue to sound the retreat, limiting the fightback against the Republicans to the ballot box, while bowing to more "reasonable" concessions pushed by Democrats.
• Two days before the big Los Angeles labor demonstration, for example, a coalition of six unions representing more than 14,500 municipal workers reached a tentative agreement on a contract with an estimated $400 million in concessions, including cancellation of scheduled pay raises and a measure that would almost double workers' contributions to retirement benefits from 6 to 11 percent. That's close to the pension contribution of 12.8 percent mandated for Wisconsin public-sector workers in Walker's anti-union bill.

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• Central banks’ policy of quantitative easing (QE)-buying government and corporate bonds by “printing” money-is not delivering a sustained economic recovery, as the Keynesians expected. So the strategists of capital are trying to combine QE with more “structural reform”; Keynesian monetary policies with neoliberal action to cut debts, shrink the welfare system and weaken the power of organised labour, thus raising the rate of exploitation to restore profitability.
• the second reason for the depression. The recovery after the great slump has been hampered and curbed by the dead weight of excessive debt built up in the so-called neoliberal period after the early 1980s and particularly during the credit and property bubble from 2002 (figure 14). The level of debt in the world economy has not fallen much despite the Great Recession, the banking crash and bailouts. Deleveraging has much further to go.
• Indeed, developed economy non-financial sector leverage continues to rise.²⁵ Non-financial sector debt in the US, Europe and Japan (the “G3”) is now over 285 percent of GDP compared to 275 percent at the start of the Great Recession

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• The fact is that too many young male athletes are taught to see women as the spoils of being a jock. These young men are treated like gods by the adults who are supposed to be mentoring them—like cash-cows by administrators who use their on-field exploits to extract money from politicians and alums.

   

• Marx’s materialism was thus an activist one; it neither disappears back into the subjective understanding of the Young Hegelians, nor does it take ‘what is’ to be all that is possible.

• since “intersectionality theory” primarily developed in response to second wave feminism, we must look at how gender relations under capitalism developed.  In the movement from feudalism to capitalism, the gendered division of labor, and therefore gender relations within the class began to take a new form that corresponded to the needs of capital.

  • The "gendered division of labor" takes on a "new form" under capitalism. Okay.
• (1) The development of the wage.  The wage is the capitalist form of coercion.
• workers are not paid for their sensuous living labor, the act of producing, but the ability to labor.  The labor-labor power split gives rise to the appearance of an equal exchange of value; it appears as though the worker is paid for the amount of value she produces but in essence she is paid only for her ability to labor for a given period of time.
• The development of the wage is key because it enforced a gendered division of labor.

  • Earlier, we were told that capitalism changes the "form" of the "gendered division of labor." Here we learn that it "enforced a gendered division of labor." The two statements aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but you can see here a slipperiness as to the historicity of forms.
• (2) A separation of production and reproduction.  Along with commodity production came a separation between production and reproduction.
• This separation, characterized by the wage, took on a specific gendered form under capitalism.

  • Earlier: The separation between productive and reproductive labor "came along with" commodity production. Now: This separation took on "a specific gendered form under capitalism."
• This gave men a certain amount of power over women, and created antagonisms within the class based on a gendered division of labor.  Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, calls this the “patriarchy of the wage” (97-100).
• (3) The contradictory development of the nuclear family.  With the development of capitalism and large-scale industry, the content of the nuclear family took a contradictory turn.

  • Here, the "content," not the "form" is affected by capitalism.
• (4) The development of “identity” and alienation.  John D’Emilio runs with this concept of the contradictory development of the nuclear family, arguing that “gay identity” (and we can infer “female identity”) as a category developed through this contradictory movement of the nuclear family.

  • This is misleading. I don't think D'Emilio would have us "infer" that "female identity" emerges in this fashion, in this historical context.
•  In distinguishing between “behavior,” and “identity,” D’Emilio is touching on what could be broadened out to the Marxist categories, “labor” and “alienation.”
• Life-activity, or labor, is an abstraction that transcends a specific form, or a specific mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, tribalism, etc.).
• So what appears under capitalism as a mere means to satisfy our needs (work), is in essence the activity of life itself (labor).
• Because of this schism between our labor and our conscious will, our labor under capitalism is alienated, meaning it is not used for our own enrichment, instead, we give it away to the capitalist.
• we could say that homosexual behaviors are an expression of labor, or self-activity, and homosexual identity is a one-sided, alienated form of labor unique to capitalism.

  • Absurd.
• contradictions and antagonisms within the class cannot be overcome in isolation, and individual expressions of patriarchy are impossible to overcome without a broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor.  We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labor itself.

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• Learning from Lenin and the experiences of the Bolsheviks has nothing to do with ignoring changed circumstances or making a fetish out of particular texts or quotations, as some dismissively claim. To this day, after another century of industrial capitalism and many attempted revolutions, October 1917 is the only revolution where workers succeeded in establishing their rule for a number of years and attempted to construct a new society.

• If  matters had come to such a pass that Orjonikidze could go to the  extreme of applying physical violence, as Comrade Dzerzhinsky  informed me, we can imagine what a mess we have got ourselves  into. Obviously the whole business of "autonomisation" was  radically wrong and badly timed.
• It is said that a united apparatus was needed. Where did that  assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian  apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding  sections of my diary, we took over from tsarism and slightly  anointed with Soviet oil?
• we must, in all conscience, admit the  contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite  alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there  has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of  the past five years without the help of other countries and  because we have been "busy" most of the time with military  engagements and the fight against famine.
• It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to  secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a  mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the  onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian  chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the  typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the  infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will  drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a  fly in milk.
• It is said in defence of this measure that the People's  Commissariats directly concerned with national psychology and  national education were set up as separate bodies. But there the  question arises: can these People's Commissariats be made quite  independent? and secondly: were we careful enough to take  measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard  against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such  measures although we could and should have done so.
• I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure  administration, together with his spite against the notorious  "nationalist-socialism" [Stalin critised the  minority nations for not being "internationalist" because they  did want to unite with Russia], played a fatal role  here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.
• I also fear that Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who went to the Caucasus  to investigate the "crime" of those "nationalist-socialists",  distinguished himself there by his truly Russian frame of mind  (it is common knowledge that people of other nationalities who  have become Russified over-do this Russian frame of mind)
• What is important for the proletarian? For the proletarian it  is not only important, it is absolutely essential that he should  be assured that the non-Russians place the greatest possible  trust in the proletarian class struggle. What is needed to  ensure this? Not merely formal equality. In one way or another,  by one's attitude or by concessions, it is necessary to  compensate the non-Russian for the lack of trust, for the  suspicion and the insults to which the government of the  "dominant" nation subjected them in the past.
• nothing holds up the development and  strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as  national injustice; "offended" nationals are not sensitive to  anything so much as to the feeling of equality and the violation  of this equality, if only through negligence or jest- to the  violation of that equality by their proletarian comrades.
• an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in  general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be  made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of  an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of  a small nation.
• In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a  big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic  practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence;  furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of  times without noticing it.
• That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or  "great" nations, as they are called (though they are great only  in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only  in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in  an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that  must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual  practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped  the real proletarian attitude to the national question
• The need to rally against the  imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist  world, is one thing. There can be no doubt about that and it  would be superfluous for me to speak about my unconditional  approval of it. It is another thing when we ourselves lapse,  even if only in trifles, into imperialist attitudes towards  oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled  sincerity, all our principled defence of the struggle against  imperialism.
• as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a  typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes  profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a  matter of necessity for us.
• The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect  of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of  "nationalist-socialism" (whereas he himself is a real and true  "nationalist-socialist", and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully),  violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class  solidarity
• What practical measures must be taken in the present situation?
• Thirdly, exemplary punishment must be inflicted on  Comrade Orjonikidze (I say this all the more regretfully as I am  one of his personal friends and have worked with him abroad) and  the investigation of all the material which Dzerzhinsky's  commission has collected must be completed or started over again  to correct the enormous mass of wrongs and biased judgments  which it doubtlessly contains. The political responsibility for  all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of  course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.
• Fourthly, the strictest rules must be introduced on  the use of the national language in the non-Russian republics of  our union, and these rules must be checked with special  care. There is no doubt that our apparatus being what it is,  there is bound to be, on the pretext of unity in the railway  service, unity in the fiscal service and so on, a mass of truly  Russian abuses.

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• What’s the deal? Is same-sex marriage advocacy a progressive cause? Is it in line with Left political projects of racial and economic justice, decolonization, and feminist liberation?
• Nope. Same-sex marriage advocacy has accomplished an amazing feat--it has made being anti-homophobic synonymous with being pro-marriage. It has drowned out centuries of critical thinking and activism against the racialized, colonial, and patriarchal processes of state regulation of family and gender through marriage. It is to such an understanding of marriage we first turn.

  • Is this an overstatement?
• In short, people are punished or rewarded based on whether or not they marry. The idea that same-sex marriage advocacy is a fight for the “freedom to marry” or “equality” is absurd since the existence of legal marriage is a form of coercive regulation in which achieving or not achieving marital status is linked to accessing vital life resources like health care and paths to legalized immigration. There is nothing freeing nor equalizing about such a system.
• Since the founding of the US, regulating family formation has been key to anti-Black racism and violence. Denying the family ties of slaves was essential to slavery—ensuring that children would be born enslaved and maintaining Black people as property rather than persons.
• Anti-poor and anti-Black discourse and policymaking frame poverty as a result of the lack of marriage in Black populations. Clinton’s 1996 dismantling of welfare programs, which disproportionately harmed Black families, was justified by an explicit discourse about poverty resulting from unmarried parenthood.
• Colonization often casts invasion as rescuing colonized populations from their backward gender and family systems. We can see this from the land we’re writing this on (Washington, D.C. & Washington State) to Afghanistan. Forcing indigenous people to comply with European norms of gender, sexuality and family structure and punishing them for not doing so has been a key tool of US settler colonialism in North America. Marriage has been an important tool of land theft and ethnic cleansing aimed at disappearing indigenous people in many ways.
• III. Against Inclusion
• We have been told that same-sex marriage is a grassroots movement, but this is not the case. The decision to produce the giant machine of same-sex marriage advocacy that crowds out from public view all the other anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic grassroots work happening in the US came from the top. The world of well-resourced gay rights organizations and the few wealthy foundations and donors who fund them is tiny--the gay 1%. Its agenda is made behind closed doors, and queer and trans 99%-ers only get to be reactive to these strategies, as their lives and demands are framed by corporate media and the gay elite. Some eat it up, others talk back, but ultimately, we get no say.
• We have seen what some say started at street rebellions against police violence at the Stonewall Inn and Compton’s Cafeteria turn into advocacy for prosecution and partnership with police. We have seen a movement birthed during and because of the radical politics of anti-war and decolonization resistance of the 1960’s and 70’s become focused on the right to serve in the US military. And we have seen the eclipse of queer, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial critiques of government regulation of sexuality and family norms evolve into a demand to get married under the law. It is stunning to watch, in such a short period,
• As the same-sex marriage fight draws to a close in the coming years and conditions remain brutal for queer and trans people without wealth, immigration status or health care, it is vitally important that we support and expand the racial and economic justice centered queer and trans activism that has never seen marriage as an answer.

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