Dear Angry White Men

Niko Shimada is right. Angry white men are right to be angry. But let's be angry at the right targets. While I can't say for sure, Niko doesn't seem to be taking us down a productive path here, though I could be wrong and hope I am. Perhaps it would be useful to break this tweet down and look at it in more detail.

"The media despises and belittles you."

Definitely. Hatred of white males is rife in the media. The more important question here is: why? (((Easy answers))) are attractive because they're, well, easy. Blaming some or another group of others comes naturally to us. We're hardwired for tribalism. But ease sacrifices accuracy in cases such as this. Sometimes the real enemy isn't some or another group of others from a foreign land, but rather our own elites - the people we naturally view as beautiful and even heroic - who are much more the real threat, and the situation much more complicated than reactionary conspiracy theorists who lay it all at the feet of "cultural Marxism" would have us believe.

Let's take a closer look.

The most crucial thing to understand about media is how it really works. This is best outlined by Noam Chomsky in his seminal work, Manufacturing Consent - two and three quarter hours of solid red pill - real red pill, if you're ever of the mind to invest the time - wherein he describes media as corporations whose real purpose is to sell audiences to other corporations. In short, it profits through advertising, and it attracts advertisers by offering them large and/or prosperous consumer bases.

So what does this have to do with white male bashing in the media?  If media needs to attract advertisers, it needs a relatively prosperous consumer base. This usually entails an educated consumer base, since education and income levels correlate.  It should be no secret by now that feminist theory and critical race theory, attributing oppression and inequality to racial and gender identity exclusively, have a considerable presence on college campuses.

So called "social justice" and identity politics are a safe, nerfed form of radical deconstruction and protest culture. Engaging in them allows otherwise privileged students to feel as though they're progressive, edgy, subversive, challenging oppressive power structures and on the right side of history. It also gives them an acceptable target on which to project any guilt they may feel over their very real privilege, given that they're able to attend elite post secondary institutions and the numerous benefits this entails, have access to influential media sources and so on. All of this without ever actually posing a real challenge to the real corporate and state power that really calls the shots, to the detriment of most. Were you in a seat of corporate power, what more could you want?

The narrative that white males have gotten where they are entirely off of sexism, racism and oppression is necessary to uphold because it helps make neoliberal economic policies that have devastated the white male working class more palatable. It eases the conscience of the political class. No need to look at who the real beneficiaries of deindustrialization and global capitalism have been, since those who've suffered from it deserve it because colonialism, patriarchy and white male privilege.

Not to say that racism, sexism, colonialism and patriarchy are not now (to some extent) and have not in history been very real evils, worthy of criticism, condemnation and opposition. But let's be honest here, that's not what this vain, pseudo leftism is really about. If these "woke" corporations such as Gillette Razors really cared about the well being of women and people of color, they'd start by looking at the wages and conditions in their 3rd world manufacturing facilities. The pseudo leftism so beloved by academia, Hollywood and Silicon Valley ends rather abruptly where corporate and state power begins.

Plus, white men do not help themselves by consistently being the most conservative, pro-corporate voting block when broken down by race and gender. Look at any internet libertarian, mad as hell about taxes and the "gibmedat" attitude of those stupid liberals and it's usually, though not always, a white male.

But then, what has the left offered him in return? The so called left abandoned the working class long ago. Looking at the US Democrats, this beginning even in Kennedy and Johnson's time and being more or less complete by the presidency of Bill Clinton. So when given a choice between a center right that pretends to sympathize with them, and a center "left" that openly scapegoats them, can white males really be blamed for opting for the former?

Plus, it's worth noting too that most domestic, consumer spending in the 1st world is controlled by women, though the precise figures vary. Some estimates are that women control or strongly influence over 80% of non-business consumer spending. This figure is not universally agreed on, however. But there's no question that the purchasing power is there. Moreover, women constitute a higher percentage of college graduates overall than men.  Most crucially, women are vastly more likely to be activist consumers, display a willingness to organize and participate in boycotts, liaise effectively with corporate media structures and criticize the media, all for its portrayal of their gender and concern, or lack thereof, for women's issues.

So why not pander to the vanity of this group and contrast them favorably against an inferior male of the species? Especially if this can be effectively disguised as social justice and female empowerment, offering up "thoughtful" criticism of "toxic masculinity" or the like? All for their own good, of course. Plus demonizing men makes them less attractive as partners for women, and we all know what happens when men and women get together: love, marriage and the baby carriage, as the child's jump rope chant goes. And from there maternity leave, prenatal health care, K-12 education, dependents to cover with expensive health plans, and so on. All very expensive. Better to outsource our reproduction to the 3rd world in the form of mass immigration. We outsource most everything else these days, so why not that?

Women are more valuable as workers and consumers than as wives and mothers, and since we can't fire them for hooking up with men anymore like we could in the bad old days of early capitalism, better to disincentive all of this heterosexual liasing as heterosexist, objectification and harassment. Men who protest can be dismissed as hypersensitive (even though lacking in sensitivity is precisely what is highlighted in these criticisms of masculinity - but then you don't need logic or consistency because the media won't scrutinize your claims when feminism is your marketing gimmick) or reactionary cranks, yesterday's men and so on. Who cares about them, right?

"Corporations seek to feminize and pacify you."

No argument here. But again, it's worth asking why?

Capital has been seeking to subdue labor since it first emerged out of the middle ages as a power unto itself. So it should not surprise us that a pacified work force is exactly what they want. Wages, benefits and amenities to improve working conditions tend to fall under the 'expenses' section of your average income statement. Since net income equals revenue minus expense, there's a powerful incentive to keep these figures as low as possible.

Historically, this was done in a rather messy and heavy handed way. If the workers got uppity, just send in the Pinkertons, the National Guard or maybe even the Ku Klux Klan to bust some skulls. Prior to Roosevelt's 1935 signing of the National Labor Relations Act, it was not uncommon for labor disputes in the US to result in an actual body count, almost always consisting of labor, not capital. Worker's rights were never genuinely accepted by the US policy making elite, and the presidency of Ronald Reagan is known for being an era of renewed hostility to labour. The 1981 firing of striking PATCO workers was merely the beginning.

This era of mass media presents both new challenges and new opportunities. New challenges in that violent union busting or even scabbing out striking workers poses a significant public relations problem. New opportunities in that mass media can be used to keep workers pacified in other ways. Union suppression and union avoidance is now much more psychological and relational, basically taking on the characteristics of a public relations campaign, although threatening to close the doors and relocate if workers do not accept rock bottom wages and remain non union is always an option, if you have the capital to pull it off.

Of course, you can go the Koch Bro's route and fund media and outreach projects that frame capitalist productive relations along libertarian and conservative lines. This has worked quite well in the internet age, and many young white men trade fast and free in Friedmanite talking points, and are quite understandably icy on working class identity and solidarity. Except when it can be used to attack feminism, of course.

A more subtle technique, alluded to above, is to reframe public conversations about inequality, power and privilege. Again, cast these as race or gender issues. Redefine power dynamics in the workplace, especially in the post me too and time's up era, along gender as opposed to class lines. Better yet to get your work force to internalize guilt-inducing narratives surrounding power and privilege. A white male working class that has been effectively neutered by internalized white male guilt delivered by incessant intersectional feminist propaganda is likely to lack the spirit needed to fight for their interests in the economic sphere. I mean, if you already feel that you have too much because what you already have is the result of unearned white male privilege, how motivated will you be to go on strike for improved wages and conditions?  The deconstruction of western patriarchal culture undertaken by the postmodern left may well have undermined religious and national loyalties, but in doing so has undermined class consciousness as well. Last I heard, white male workers have no need to unionize, since they already have white male privilege, and so would be taking union protection away from more marginalized people by doing so.

Sigh. Yeah.

Moreover, a left wing preoccupied with racial and gender identity politics will care a lot less about class and economic issues and lend less support to working class political and workplace efforts. If all else fails, dismiss working class leftism as "Bernie bros" "brocialists" or "class reductionists" or something like that.

In any event, most politics aimed at working class white males will not be friendly to their political or economic interests in the long term. Besides demonizing immigrants and feminism, these kinds of reactionaries are also anti-union and favor leaving all to the wolves of the free market, often equating anti-white and anti-male politics with socialism and Marxism. The "globalism" they so love to deride is a corporately driven phenomena, motivated by profit and was criticized first by organized labor, who rightly saw the threat it posed not only to the working class, but to the economic and ultimately the social fabric of the nations who so eagerly embraced it back in the 1990s.

Finally, while I do disagree with a lot of feminist deconstructions of masculinity, we would do well to ask ourselves how good this go-it-alone tough guy mindset has really been for us. Machismo and right wing politics have a long history of being in alignment with one another. Unions, social welfare and regulations are for wusses. Real men, with barrel chests and square jaws, don't complain or whine, they roll up their sleeves and power through anything and everything, all by themselves, long as it takes. Gee, I wonder who the long term beneficiaries of that end up being in a capitalist economy?  Oh well, just ball up your fists and punch anyone who asks questions like that.

"Immigrants seek to disempower you, rape your women and murder you."

Now come on. Really? I'd say this is true of a small portion of the immigrant population. But the general sentiment here is just silly. And on top of that, it's mean spirited and distracts, perhaps intentionally, from the real issues.

I'm no fan of open door immigration and am no opponent of "borders." Don't misunderstand me here.  Some militants will exploit loopholes in the refugee system, and the grooming gangs in Europe are not exactly a secret now, and failing to vet immigrants for things like membership in militant organizations for fear of looking "racist" is definitely an act of political irresponsibility. But is it reasonable to think that most immigrants are coming to the west with the intent of destroying our culture and raping our women?

I mean, fair's fair here. If it's wrong to hold all males collectively responsible for the crimes perpetuated by some men against women, as reactionaries and "red pill" types rightly assert, why is it okay to then do precisely this to Muslim, minority and immigrant communities? If it's okay to profile people, it's okay to profile everybody. If it isn't okay, it's not okay to profile anybody. Of course, progressives merely reverse this mistake when they cry racism against protests over grooming gangs, but then attribute rape to a culture of toxic masculinity and privilege which benefits all men, and therefore render all men morally culpable. Double standards are fine because power plus prejudice, apparently.

Realistically, most immigrants come to the west for a better life. Why might that be? Notice that no one asks why they're migrating in the first place? It couldn't be because neoliberal austerity measures imposed on the third world by the globalists stymie economic development in the global south and farm them for cheap exports to be consumed in the west and the profits hoarded by global multinationals? Couldn't be that, could it? It couldn't be because neoconservative foreign policies topple governments not friendly to the aforementioned neoliberal austerity measures, and reduce targeted nations into rubble heaps and war zones? Could it be that also, maybe?

Never! They're coming to the west to burn our churches and rape our women! Yeah, has to be! I read it on 4chan, I heard it on a redpill YouTube channel, and they're never wrong!

"Your leaders want another war for Israel"

I really, really hope this is rooted in a reasoned criticism of Israeli foreign policy and valid concerns over the strength of pro Israeli lobbies in Washington, and not just a stupid anti-semetic dog whistle. Because when reasoned analysis of complicated geopolitical situations that take into account a bevy of historical, economic, religious, ethnic, military and cultural factors runs up against baseless and long debunked conspiracy theories, we all know that people are reasonable and appreciate a factual analysis, right? I mean, we know that people will also take energy politics and the petrodollar into account when looking at western middle east foreign policy, right? Right?

Nah! Our leaders want more war for Israel in the middle east because Elders of Zion. You know, the same Elders of Zion who want the very same Muslims they want our aid in fighting against in the middle east to flood our own nations and convert our populations to Islam because they just hate white people that much. Or something. Who needs logic when you have a good, old fashioned conspiracy theory to make you feel self righteous about being victimized and persecuted!

"Billionaires give your jobs to machines"

Yes they do. And why might they do this, I wonder? And what should we do about that? Increased education and job training? A guaranteed income or maybe even a job guarantee? A sovereign wealth fund, to enable western governments and peoples to share in some of the profits so generated by these newly automated industries? Hell, dare I say it ... nationalize industry and/or place it under some form of worker's or social control? You know, seize the means of production and all that?

Never! That stuff is all communism, and if that's what you want, soy boy, how about moving to Venezuela! Those billionaires legitimately earned all of that money. Every cent of it. Workers should consider themselves lucky they had their overpaid jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon to begin with! Jeff Bezos and the Waltons would not have been successful had then not been both geniuses and saints, and they and they alone deserve every last cent earned by their respective corporate empires, because nobody else did anything at all to contribute to or enable their success. That'll trigger the libtard snowflakes!

So what we really need to do is show these feminists, immigrants, cultural Marxists, liberals and George Soros - who somehow isn't like other billionaires because he apparently hates white people and the west because reasons - who's boss and elect a strong, traditionalist right wing government. Who can then deregulate these automated megacorporations, and give their c-suite executives lavish tax cuts while they're at it. So that they can, in turn, off-shore more industry to further increase their profits, because capitalism and that will somehow make the west great again. Or something.

So I'm going to be serious and honest now. White men, you have every right to be angry. Your leaders have betrayed you. Absolutely they have. But let's be angry at the right people here. While you don't have to tolerate white bashing and male bashing from the pseudo left, and you have been tolerating far too much of that for far too long now, please don't see women, immigrants and minorities as your true enemy. Their anger at white males is likewise engineered and misguided, and by the same people as the people who betrayed you. Surely by now you know who they are, right? At least let's be clear about (((who they are not)))

Perhaps one day, angry women and minorities and angry white men can come to realize that they stand to gain way more together than by flying at one another's throats in a contrived, for profit culture war, and eventually create a world where we all have a good deal less to be angry about.

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Ignorance of Capitalism Also Risks “Absolute Catastrophe”

Articles like this - written by Paul Joseph Watson quoting Jordan Peterson, are why I've lost much sympathy for these fuzzy-vaguely right leaning Intellectual Dark Web types - the ones who simply shill for rightist ideas, at any rate. I never agreed with them on most substantial issues, but I sympathized with the push to diversify the ideological landscape, at least in mainstream media and academia. And of course, who could like the SJWs these days? Arrogant, dogmatic and narrow minded. I sympathized as much with anger towards them in 2016 as I did with anger against the Christian right in 2006.

Then as now, I also temper that anger with a warning: Don't lose sight of the bigger picture, and don't adopt your enemy's bad habits. Because if you do, you won't be truly victorious even if you do win in the short term political sense. That's how the SJWs happened, and that seems to be happening with the "cultural libertarians" as well.

PJW's article is a complete mess. Its only saving grace is its brevity. Yet it manages to contain everything I've come to dislike about the current crop of online reactionary anti-SJW thinkers. Indeed, as far as ideology goes, they're scarcely preferable to the SJWs at all any more. There is, thus far, no accompanying authoritarian drive for censorship, but the self awareness now seems to be so lacking that I can't help but wonder if even that isn't just a matter of time.

Watson reports:

During an event hosted by The Heritage Foundation this week, the clinical psychologist and best-selling author said that millennials are embracing far-left ideology because they weren’t taught about its disastrous outcomes at school. 

“People are unbelievably ignorant of history,” said Peterson. “What young people know about 20th-century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left. How would you know? They are never taught about it so why would they be concerned about it?”

Observe firstly that in other contexts, Jordan Peterson has repeatedly denied being a rightist partisan. Yet here he's quoted as addressing the Heritage Foundation - a right leaning think tank last time I checked, repeating oft-heard talking points on the evils of socialism. Not that Stalinist communism is a good system, mind you, but I'd find Peterson's shtick of not being a right winger a bit more convincing if this was a takedown of laissez faire capitalism delivered to a genuinely centrist audience, since that's what we in the west have actually been living under and suffering under for the last half century now. Not socialism.

A warning that people could turn to revolutionary socialism if the extreme inequalities in capitalism are not addressed as they were via Roosevelt's New Deal could be issued, and that would be a good reason to undertake a new new deal, but that's not what we have here. Just talking points that I could copy and paste from nearly any right wing internet source.

Yet here we see an ongoing preoccupation with the dangers posed by socialism and equality of outcome. Not massive inequality, which is much closer to be beast we quarrel with these days. Wealth inequality in the US has never been greater than it is now. I'll sympathize more with the destructive potential of equality of outcome - which I don't honestly doubt - when that's the destructive potential we're actually really staring down the barrel of.

PJW continues:

He also explained that the simplistic socialist notion of caring for as many people as possible was very alluring for people who had an emotional view of humanity. 

Young people are “emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism, say, or the left, because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion, and that is always there in human beings,” said Peterson.

Seriously? And people are not also emotionally drawn to classical mythology or biblical narratives? The kind Peterson specializes in teaching to his audiences? There's no emotional appeal there? There's no emotional appeal in right wing politics? There's no emotional appeal in alpha male hero worship, which we're being asked by the right to engage in, so as to look the other way as far as massive wealth inequality and abuses of power are concerned?

I'll grant the idea that the left should rely a bit less on emotional appeal and also be prepared to back itself up with, for lack of better terms, facts and logic, is one I think they'd do well to heed. The left has ceded too much to the right over the years to let them have facts and logic also. The tendency of a feminized left to rely on moral outrage to emotionally extort agreement from audiences has been catastrophic for progressives over the last several years. It's fed directly into the perception of the left as a cult of self righteousness and moral supremacy that's turned out to be a gold mine for reactionaries of all stripes.

Having said that, just why is it wrong to have an emotionally derived desire to care for the downtrodden and less fortunate in any event? Why are such sentiments bad? Were I Peterson, I'd be much more concerned with the lack of empathy for the poor and sick that I often see in right of center online spaces. Yes, social justice activism on the far left can drive self righteousness and dogmatism. But that's not what's being critiqued here.

This is exactly the kind of Petersonian double talk that David Pakman does such a good job of taking down here, where Pakman critiques an address delivered by Peterson at Liberty University, founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell to teach fundamentalist biblical ideas. Because I suppose those are the kinds of hosts you have when you're totally not a right winger:

I find it quite astounding that Peterson's attacks on the "postmodern left's" lack of respect and value for free speech gains applause in a "college" established by none other than Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority were calling for all kinds of censorship, ranging from metal music to table top role playing games and porn to anything deemed not sufficiently "Godly" back in the 1980s.

Is this what the anti-SJW free speech cultural libertarians have sunk to? The same whose criticisms of the regressive left not so long ago centered around just how like the religious right it was? Down the memory hole with that, I guess. We were never at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia, by the sounds of things.

It's especially galling for Jordan Peterson to be this dumb. He's not an unintelligent man, when he's in his element, which is Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. Unless, of course, that's the plan here. Is a man whose area of expertise is the study of heroic mythology not creating a mythos of his own, with which to bind and cement the loyalty of a fan base?

From PJW's article:

Peterson also blamed the “unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion” for the breakdown in social and family unity, a process which has produced an “absolute catastrophe”

The foundation of every mythologized belief system is the creation of a bad guy. For the SJWs, it's the white male patriarchy. And for Peterson, it's "postmodern Marxism." Which are not complex philosophical views with deep and nuanced, sometimes flawed and sometimes insightful observations and theories, but rather simply EVIL! They hate the west and capitalism and success because ... well, because reasons. Or something. The same reasons that SJWs assert that conservatives and Trumpians just hate hate HATE black people and women. Because reasons.

And the reasons are that political mythologies begin with a villain. A dastardly "them" for "us" to fight if we're to be the heroes that our mythical systems cast us as. Every ideological system, my own included, does this.

It's unfortunate that a man of Peterson's true intellectual caliber has chosen to go down the path he has, and I honestly wonder if he's not taking Koch Bro's cash at this point? After all, it did more or less the same thing to Dave Rubin - turn him into a pseudo libertarian right wing shill who gets notoriously evasive and vague when his alleged "centrism" gets called out. Not that the left is without flaws or undeserving of criticism mind you, but as David Pakman puts it, don't say you're not a rightist when you are one.

What I try to do differently, what I urge those who follow me on social media to do differently is to base my political mythology in the material realities of today's world. While I wouldn't argue with Peterson in that Soviet communism was terrible, I'd also urge everyone to look deeper at where the appeal of revolutionary socialism might come from in this day and age. Why might millennials have a better view of socialism than of capitalism? Hmm ... I just don't know! What could it be?

Maybe it's growing up after the great recession? Maybe seeing the banks get bailed out while main street continues to languish? Maybe seeing a long term trend towards stagnant wages and structural unemployment alongside ever skyrocketing profits for a tiny few? Maybe not having health insurance, paying exorbitant prices for pharmaceuticals and premiums for health plans with high deductibles and co-pays to boot? Or being put in serious financial jeopardy by a $500 car repair bill, something that would merely be an inconvenience for someone like myself?

Maybe it's the fact that there's never money for college or basic infrastructure but always money for wars and high income tax cuts? Maybe seeing the benefits of trickle down economics not trickle down for year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation? Maybe it's knowing that they'll be damn lucky to even have a shot at working their way out of a cubicle and into a job with a median income, benefits and some semblance of job stability?

Could it be that?

NO! It's "Ignorance of history!" Which isn't entirely wrong, mind you. Plus, let's not pretend that a lot of anti-Trump hysteria coming from the mainstream left hasn't been prone to excess and hyperbole, to put it mildly. However, it's also ignorance of history when politicians and pundits don't look back on periods of economic downturn and instability - the great depression for instance, and witness an accompanying rise in interest in fascism and socialism. Even though the economy has improved somewhat since the great recession, the damage has been done.

What the hell did these online reactionaries think was going to happen? Not so long ago, after Trump won the White House, it was all the rage to attribute the Democrat's loss to how out of touch they were with the people they were supposed to be representing. About how stupid it was for dumb leftists to beat unemployed white males over the head with vague academic notions of power, privilege and patriarchy. And rightly so.

But too little time has passed for the right wing of the intellectual dark web to get a pass on making their own version of the exact same mistake. Lecturing millennials with limited job prospects, crushing student debt loads and who've seen every form of preferential treatment extended to the wealthy and corporations on the evils of socialism is, if anything, even stupider than lecturing the same for being privileged white males. Damn, you'd almost think the reactionary right and the regressive left were two sides of the same stupid coin, or something.

Who knows, maybe they are.

In the mean time, maybe the rooms that most need to be cleaned are in the White House, in Congress and the countless offices of defense industry contractors and corporate lobbyists in Washington DC. The dragon of chaos that threatens our culture is that of unregulated predatory global capitalism. It uses threats of investment strike and capital flight as its fiery breath, to extort tax free wealth and rock-bottom wages from the polity. And quite effectively. The handful of billionaires who own most of America's wealth have accumulated a hoard that would put even Smaug's piles of gold to shame.

Sooner or later, someone's going to have to slay that dragon. If a relatively reasonable and pragmatic social democrat steps into Bard the Bowman's role and takes up that black arrow in the near future, a bona-fide revolutionary socialist won't be the one to do it in another generation or two, or else the current oligarchical capitalism ends up going full iron heel, and democracy is ultimately and finally sacrificed on the altar of capital.

Absolute catastrophe indeed.

Also, view: The Problem with Jordan Peterson, also by David Pakman. A thoughtful and nuanced criticism, not an SJW smear comparing Peterson to Hitler, or the like.

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Libertarianism and Revolutionary Socialism: Hostile Twins?

Earlier I suggested a tepid acceptance of the Democratic Socialists of America - or at least of some of its proposals. But I grow less sure of this as time goes on, and the emergence of a tendency within the DSA that should be all too familiar to long term students of the American left. Your friend and mine, Vox, recently ran an article on the DSA, following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's surprise victory over before longtime establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary for the 14th Congressional District in New York.

What Vox revealed is genuinely concerning:

Like most socialist organizations, DSA believes in the abolition of capitalism in favor of an economy run either by “the workers” or the state — though the exact specifics of “abolishing capitalism” are fiercely debated by socialists. 

“The academic debates about socialism’s ‘meaning’ are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment,” said Frances Fox Piven, a scholar of the left at the City University of New York and a former DSA board member. 

If the concept has yet to have an agreed upon definition, despite nearly 200 years of being in existence in its modern form, perhaps there's some wisdom in reserving our support?

In practice, that means DSA believes in ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities,” which they say should not be left to those seeking to turn a profit. According to DSA’s current mission statement, the government should ensure all citizens receive adequate food, housing, health care, child care, and education. DSA also believes that the government should “democratize” private businesses — i.e., force owners to give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible.

Yikes.

But DSA members also say that overthrowing capitalism must include the eradication of “hierarchical systems” that lie beyond the market as well. As a result, DSA supports the missions of Black Lives Matter, gay and lesbian rights, and environmentalism as integral parts of this broader “anti-capitalist” program.

Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations; democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy; democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school,” said Jared Abbott, a member of DSA’s national steering committee. “Socialism is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.

So, it's the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the early Radical Feminists all over again, is it?  Rule by the women's studies department?

God help us all.

It's important to stop right here and make some things clear. I'm all for socializing certain essential services, so as to guarantee their universal access to the population. Health care is a good example. Social housing, food supplements and so on for those who need them I'm likewise 100% in favor of. I'm iffy on a universal basic income, but an expansion of the earned income tax credit to help out low income people is something I'm completely down with.

Unions or some other institution that advocates for the working class, both in the workplace and in the halls of power are absolutely vital, and the unions in America are, with some exceptions, generally much weaker than they need to be, at least in the private sector. I likewise have no quarrel with worker and consumer owned enterprises. I've lived in tenant owned cooperative housing most of my life and have been well served by it. Worker owned enterprises like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain are good examples of workable alternatives to typical American corporate structures. I'd applaud any scheme to launch such experiments closer to home.

That said, management over large manufacturing and distribution organizations is an incredibly complex undertaking, and one for which I wonder if "the workers" as a collective whole are adequately qualified, especially if governance over the cooperative is to be direct rather than via an elected body of professional directors with a fiduciary duty towards the worker/shareholders. We should expect direct democratic governance to be the preference of the American left, given its historical propensity for utopian idealism.

Professional, executive levels of management require many years of rigorous education to qualify a person for, and not simply to keep the rank and file out of those positions. One wonders whether "the workers" actually even want the added degree of responsibility and work load that comes with doubling as management, especially under the more utopian ideals of direct democracy so beloved by the American left. The practice of co-determination - labor being able to elect representatives to corporate boards of directors is another matter, and one I'm generally in favor of.

Likewise, a strong case can be made that wealth and capital are too strongly concentrated in America at present, but the idea that those who take the risk to invest capital in a business venture are all completely evil parasites who feed off the blood of the workers is much more revolutionary romanticist mythology than reality. This can be true if your economy lacks sufficient protections for the rights of workers, borrowers, tenants and the like and capital is permitted to accumulate into increasingly few hands due to a lack of at least some redistributive measures, but it's not necessarily true of all capital investment. Without some kind of capital markets, economic growth and expansion would be severely hamstrung and I suspect this is a big part of why successful economies based solely on mutualist or socialist principles are non existent both at present and throughout history.

Besides, why throw away so wonderful a tool when you can make it work for the benefit of all, via something like a sovereign wealth fund in which all citizens could have equal shares, or that the state could use to supplement public finance?

When there's serious talk of "abolishing capitalism" or "ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries" or "elimination of the market" or "forcing owners to give workers control over" private businesses, this is when, in my humble opinion, things have gone too far. Untrammeled socialism is no better, and may even be worse, than untrammeled capitalism, we just have far less experience with it in the west. While the need for regulatory safeguards should be obvious, the capacity of individual citizens to own productive capital and to buy and sell goods and services on a free market are crucial to human liberty and essential for social prosperity, and failing to recognize this has been a very grave failing of regressive leftism during its history.

By itself, the capacity for consumers or workers to "vote with their feet" as it were and find another product or employer is a capacity that libertarians and fiscal conservatives make far too much of - with little capital or purchasing power, working and middle class individuals have little influence this way and it would take an organized move of this sort - a strike or boycott essentially - to truly influence the policies of a large and powerful corporation, and such organized efforts have never been things that conservatives and libertarians have been fans of.

But historically, neither have been authoritarian socialists, at least while in power. And socialism, past a certain point, tends to default to authoritarianism, whatever the initial intentions of its theoreticians may have been. Transforming societies to the extent they propose naturally requires a government with very far reaching powers. The capacity to buy from or work for the competition is a right a lot of people died for back in the dark days behind the Iron Curtain, and not without good reason. It is one tool with which the working and middle classes can hold business accountable, and this option would be lost in the absence of the market as a means of distribution. Why would the defenders of worker's rights want that?

Will the DSA take things to such extremes? Not likely. America's constitutional system of checks and balances and libertarian tradition would likely mitigate the worst excesses. The greater likelihood is that they'll end up being the Libertarian Party of the left: a loud, tight and small ideological grouping too obsessed with internal purity spiraling to become a serious contender for political power. But their rhetoric does concern me, and if you really are a believer in the rights of workers, consumers and above all individuals, it should concern you too.

The Vox article continues:

Examples may help clarify the difference. While both DSA and some left-wing Democrats agree that the government should provide universal health insurance, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize hospitals, providers, and the rest of the health care system as well. While both will work toward higher taxes on Wall Street, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize the entire financial sector. While left-wing Democrats believe in criminal justice reform, some DSA members are calling for the outright abolition of the police and prison systems. While both DSA and left-wing Democrats support reforms to get money out of politics, some in DSA see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with genuinely free and fair elections. In practice, however, the two wind up ultimately taking the same positions.

If the DSA would go this far, it goes too far. The DSA may see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with free and fair elections, and I agree there's a lot of tension between the two now and corporate influence in politics is far too great in America at present, I also see the above description of the DSA as being fundamentally incompatible with a free and democratic society. What would happen, after all, if the majority of voters actually wanted some semblance of a free market preserved, and wish only for protections against the predatory excesses of robber baron capitalism, as opposed to having their own capacity to make money be completely hamstrung?

Further confusing matters is Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist” but supports a policy program that would essentially leave capitalism intact. His candidacy spurred a dramatic growth in DSA membership, and DSA backed him, but the Vermont senator has also referred to himself a “New Deal” Democrat who views Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt — rather than Karl Marx or American socialist Norman Thomas — as his true ideological predecessors.

Let's hear it for Bernie Sanders then, and the kind of New Deal Democrat he professes to be. While I do believe Marx had some useful insights into the flawed nature of capitalism, revolutionary overthrow of it by either the ballot box or the gun carries its own huge set of problems, and there are certainly far better examples that we could be following.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Not what you expected out of me, perhaps? Maybe. But don't misunderstand me: I'm not channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand here. I merely point out that the equal and opposite stupid extreme to what Rand stood for is, well, also stupid. What's unfortunate is that the language of economic freedom has been appropriated by libertarians, and deployed to defend the equally misguided notion that "individuals" (read: capital) be above legally constituted sovereign organizations entirely. A useful line of rationale if one's intent is to protect capital from any and all populist demands for protection against its abuses.

What is very crucial to understand is the necessary role of the state in regulating and limiting institutional power so as to protect individual rights and freedoms from both private and public abuses.

Limited government does not necessarily equal small government. It means government that is subordinate to law, and insures that non governmental actors in society are also subordinate to law. It doesn't mean that government can't regulate or even own capital. However, it does mean that the government cannot stop individuals from owning capital all together, either alone or in tandem with other individuals in some or another kind of corporate entity. It may decide to nationalize and thus own some particular enterprise or industry or another. This is no violation of anyone's rights, since nobody has any right to any share in ownership of any business or industry, as any libertarian worth his salt would be more than happy to tell you. But it absolutely must not forbid its citizens any ownership over its productive capacity whatsoever. It's crucial now that these nuanced distinctions be properly grasped.

It means that whatever government does, it does via a procedure that is transparent and respectful of predetermined limits on its power, as set forth in a constitution or similar document. It means that those who hold government office must face the voters on occasion, and step down if defeated in elections. It means that what was once nationalized may also be privatized, and vice versa. Which is the better option is by no means consistent, and it's worth noting that the kinds of people and regimes that hew strongly to one extreme or the other tend to be violent and authoritarian. Having looked at both Castro's Cuba and Pinoche's Chile, I can say that I don't relish the thought of living in either one. The fact that just about every avid Marxist and avid Randroid I've ever engaged with personally are also horribly unpleasant and peevish people doesn't help either cause much either.

By using the mantle of "freedom" and "individual rights" as a moral rationalization for delegitimizing any role for the state in engaging in some regulation or even ownership of capital, redistribution of wealth and protection of the population from the harmful effects of untrammeled capitalism, the libertarians have opened the door for the 21st century's relegitimization of untrammeled capitalism's ugly socialist twin, and the far left's own equally spurious claims that individualistic conceptions of freedom and rights are mere apologetics for the power of wealth and privilege.

I'd like to think the excesses of the DSA can simply be chalked up to the sudden and dramatic reemergence of economic leftism - socialism even - into the mainstream of public discourse in the US body politic following Bernie Sander's 2016 presidential bid. Hopefully, the more extreme and untenable positions will be dropped from the program over time. This is what happened with other laborite and social democratic parties outside the east bloc during the 20th century, after all. One can only hope.

What this should make even more clear than it has been thus far why something akin to another New Deal is so gravely needed. It would be a huge mistake to think that the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes were crypto-communists hell bent on bringing Soviet central planning to the free world by democratic means. They weren't. Their interest was in saving the public from the excesses of capitalism. Because if that doesn't happen, there will be nothing to save the public from the excesses of socialism.

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Why I am Left Wing

This little gem turned up in my Facebook feed the other day.  The meme on the left - fittingly, and the response from the comments.  This was a typical response, most other critical responses said roughly similar things.  

Neither side really captures the essence of it.  Many leftists no doubt think of themselves in the manner described in the meme.  And there's nothing wrong with it.  Universal health care, education, housing and assistance to the poor are fine things in and of themselves.  The problem with standard leftist arguments is that they assume the right wing disagrees in principle.  Not necessarily.  The ends, as far as the right winger is concerned, do not necessarily justify the means.  That's the basis of the right's objection, and the impasse they find themselves at.

Fair enough, but the right winger is not conceptually framing this properly.  This kind of vulgar economism underlies a lot of right wing fallacies.  The problem with the right wing counterarguments boil down to this: The right winger thinks of socialism as robbing Peter to pay Paul.  This isn't what it is.  It is both Peter and Paul paying into something that both can use when both have need of it.  I bold and italicize this so that its importance can be impressed upon you.  It is crucial to understand this.  

The left has, in part, itself to blame for the right's successful misframing of social democracy.  Their own framing of social welfare is that they're going to make "the rich" and "the corporations" pay for programs that are intended to help the needy because they are "not greedy bastards."  They're setting themselves up for the right's "robbing Peter to pay Paul" counter criticisms.  A better way to phrase support for social programs than would be "everybody pays into what everybody benefits from."  

This kind of socialization of expense and benefit is not necessarily the best way to provide for all goods and services in an economy.  There are plenty of things for which people can and should provide themselves, government bureaucracies come with their own pitfalls and private incentives and capital markets matter in economic activities and can't be dispensed with without serious economic chaos.  In my experience, the advocates of pure revolutionary socialism do not understand what it is they're plugging for on anything but the most superficial level, and are usually intersectional social justice warriors beneath a thin red and/or black veneer for that reason.  So central planning is not what I advocate.  Full out worker's control would be fine if the working class actually wanted it, but in my experience they're content to have professional management run things.

But sometimes it makes more sense to socialize, both from an economic and a social point of view.  This is generally the case with core infrastructure that is widely if not universally used and makes other kinds of economic activity possible.  Sometimes, as with public health insurance, the wisest thing is to realize superior economies of scale and nationalize it in the form of a universal public healthcare scheme.  

That in mind, let's have a look at the comment's counter-claims against the original meme.

Your parents never taught you to respect private property ... A straw man and an ad-hominem.  There is nothing about belief in social welfare that would imply this, unless its advocates also insist they be exempted from the taxation required to pay for it.  A person willing to pay their share into a public insurance scheme or for social infrastructure that all people make use of, and when socialization really is the better way to provide said infrastructure, is not showing a lack of respect for private property, but is giving it a higher valuation than the "annoying kid" who does not recognize his own responsibility to pay into what all make use of.

It means you are an ideologue, who wants things based in wishful thinking rather than rationality.  This is no less true of the fiscal libertarian, who thinks unbridled free markets the solution to all ills and an axiomatic moral principle that is beyond question.  If you are not such a libertarian, then congratulations!  You are a pragmatist who doesn't insist upon either privatization or socialization on principle, but rather on the basis of what is most fitting for the market under consideration.

It means you don't see the difference between education and indoctrination.  And that concerns public health care and education how, precisely?  Again, this can be said of any ideologue.  While there is a lot of dogmatism on the left, especially on the cultural left these days, dogmatism is not an inherently leftist characteristic.  Again, free market fundamentalists in their think tanks are no less guilty of this.

It means you care enough about the sick and disabled to give them other people's stuff, but not enough to help out yourself.  Go back and reread the bolded and italicized text in my third paragraph above.

It means you are less fortunate and want others to care for you instead of working hard to get out of it.  It means being wise enough to know that misfortune can happen to anyone, and collectively insuring ourselves against at least the worst catastrophes might not be a bad idea.  It means that in the real world, no one "gets out of it" or even comes at all into fortune and wealth entirely of their own efforts - though this is important - but rather with the assistance of a support network.  Perhaps the objecting commentator is fortunate enough to have a private support network that can help him out when things go off the rails in his world, and thereby takes for granted his relative wealth and fortune.  Perhaps having safety nets in place can mean the difference between the misfortunate being able to get back on their feet again via hard work, and being completely mired in poverty and hardship due to the lack of leverage in the marketplace that marks those clustered at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  

It means you want to use buzzwords to signal your virtue while not doing a thing about the things you say you want to stop. This is sadly true of many on the left, again especially surrounding social and cultural issues.  But again, willingness to pay into a social program intended to combat a social evil hardly constitutes "not doing a thing."  

Good for you, you understand there is suffering and want to change it. Problem is, you are going about it all wrong. "Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you have fed him for life". The left knows only how to give fish, and doesn't bother with the teaching part, until it runs out of fish and collapses. After all, teaching people to help themselves would be "blaming the victim" or such other nonsense.  Rubbish, for the most part.  

If the left "didn't bother with the teaching part" then why do so many of them advocate for free college (which I don't personally support), universal public education or for full employment.  The left can thrive on learned helplessness, and yet again, I think they do this more where cultural issues and identity politics are concerned.  This is why I'm alt-left rather than mainstream left and oppose these kinds of politics.  

Reasonable people on the left are all for "teach a man to fish and feed him for life."  They also know he has to eat in the meantime.  They also know that trawlers are too capital intensive for even the most industrious of fishermen to procure for themselves by their own efforts alone, and mere nets and fishing rods cannot compete with them, especially after the stocks have been depleted.  

For a relatively small portion of the population to own entire fleets of trawlers to then tout the morality of self reliance to those who do not seems a tad disingenuous and self serving, to put it mildly.  Doubly so if it was much more by fortune than by effort that they got to become part of the majority shareholding class to begin with.  Perhaps it is they who have been the true beneficiaries of fiscal policy that has robbed Paul to pay Peter.

It is not always for lack of knowledge of how to fish or the willingness to do so himself that it is necessary to give a man a fish and feed him for a day.  You can teach a man how to fish and feed him for a lifetime if fishing rods and nets are as far as the need or ability to fish can practically go.  In a capitalist economy, however, a share in the fishing fleet might just be what's required. 

If You Are Going to Be Anti-Capitalist, At Least Be Smart About It.

If You Are Going to Be Anti-Capitalist, At Least Be Smart About It.

The Resist Capitalism hashtag has been circulating on Twitter lately.  Not surprisingly, a lot of what's been appearing under this hashtag has a lot more to do with women's studies talking points than with any actual analysis of how capitalism actually works.

Some people apparently haven't taken their other red pill recently.

So how does capitalism actually work.  When you're confused, look at the facts.  Merriam-Webster offers this definition:

An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market,

The most historically prevalent critical analysis of capitalism comes from Marxist theory, whose definition of capitalism isn't all of that much different than the Merriam-Webster definition.  The Wikipedia article on Marx's theory on the "Capitalist Mode of Production" attributes to capitalism the following characteristics:

• Both the inputs and outputs of production are mainly privately owned, priced goods and services purchased in the market. 

• Production is carried out for exchange and circulation in the market, aiming to obtain a net profit income from it.

• The owners of the means of production (capitalists) are the dominant class (bourgeoisie) who derive their income from the surplus product produced by the workers and appropriated freely by the capitalists.

• A defining feature of capitalism is the dependency on wage-labor for a large segment of the population; specifically, the working class (proletariat) do not own capital and must live by selling their labour power in exchange for a wage.

Thus, definitions of capitalism that actually understand that capitalism is an economic system are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of the characteristics that capitalism actually has.  Whether capitalist profit constitutes "surplus value produced by the workers" is, perhaps debatable. I think it does after a point, but a strong case can be made for profit constituting compensation for the risks capitalists take when they invest.  How much is too much is a fair point to consider.

But that capitalism is marked by private ownership of capital is undebatable as its key feature.

So let's look at some of these tweets to come out of what's passing for anti-capitalist thought these days.

Because Capitalism is inherently sexist, racist, classist, ableist and ageist.  It is universally the most oppressive force.

Okay, classist. We'll definitely give her that.  But where does any of the rest of this come in at all, at least as being fundamental to the nature of the capitalist system.  Of course, capitalism is not completely incompatible with racism, sexism and so on, though it does produce a kind of social levelling in that it systematically erodes the importance of relations based on kinship, blood and soil in favor of relationships based entirely on financial transaction.  This was actually a part of Marx's critique of capitalism.  But the above quote explicitly claims that capitalism is inherently sexist, racist, etc.  Well, what happens if the means of production are owned by women or minorities and white dudes are selling their labor power in order to scrape by?

Raising children, domestic chores, and caregiving for the elderly/disabled are all forms of undervalued or unpaid labor.

This is frankly as close as we're going to get to a good and valid criticism of capitalism here.  A lot of social services are not easily commodified and sold for a profit, unless the people on whose behalf these services are being performed are wealthy enough to pay for them.  And even then, they will naturally wish to pay as little as possible for these services.  In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels did make what was at the time a valid comparison of women's role in the home vis-a-vis the male breadwinner with the relationship of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, particularly if she's inhibited or barred from having an independent source of income, which a lack of childcare would inevitably contribute to.

Nevertheless, this is not a damning indictment of capitalism.  What happens when, as they do a minority of the time, men perform these duties?  Child and eldercare and household maintenance are not imposed by capitalism, but rather would be necessities regardless of the mode of production.

Meanwhile, forcing men into the role of breadwinner contributes to heteronormativity, cisnormativity and toxic masculinity.

What characterizes periods of untrammelled capitalism, such as the industrial revolution and the present day, is an erosion in gendered differences in the home.  Women worked in the dark Satanic mills of the Dickensian era as well as in the dark Satanic cubicles of the information age.

I dare you, dear reader, to beg, borrow or steal (don't buy - it will make the capitalists rich!) a copy of The Condition of the Working Class in England, again by Frederick Engels, published all the way back in 1845.  It has page after page of lurid details of the effects of rampant industrial capitalism on the family structure of working class families unfortunate enough to live in the quintessential Dickensian time.

Remarkable is a passage regarding a male who was unemployed while his wife was condemned to fifteen hour days in a textile mill.  Following this passage, Engles asks, "Can anyone imagine a more insane state of things than that described in this letter?  And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness ... this condition which degrades in the most shameful way, both sexes, and through them, humanity ... "  It would seem that the Lehman Bro's meltdown wasn't the first "Mancession" we've ever experienced.  Again, capitalism, if anything, erodes gender roles because it reduces all relationships to buying and selling, which gender is not an essential prerequisite to engage in.

The Patriarchy needs capitalism.  White supremacy needs capitalism.  Capitalism reinforces and maintains systemic oppression.

White supremacy and patriarchy predated the capitalist mode of production, sometimes by milennia.  Are we to believe, based on this, that feudalism or antiquity were times and modes of production marked by gender and racial equality?  How would this be, if patriarchy and white supremacy needed capitalism?

It is possible in a capitalist mode of production to resort to ideologies such as white supremacy or male supremacy to rationalize the relegating of women and minorities to lower positions in the class hierarchy.  This did happen.  But racist and sexist ideologies would be part of the superstructure - which refers to a set of external, cultural traits which can be, and usually are, a consequence of the dominant productive forces, which are the base.  The accompanying chart illustrates this.  The important thing to remember is that the superstructure is "downstream" from the base and is dependent on it, not vice versa, though the superstructure and help to reinforce the base.  So capitalism is not dependent on racism or patriarchy, and in fact may be the force that eventually undermines non-economic social inequality.  Marx and Engels explain how in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” … The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 

This means that the nature of capitalism is to erode the importance of all factors save one in human relations: economic transaction.  The march of globalization and the push for race and gender based social equality occurring at the same time are not accidents.  Women and minorities are much more valuable as workers, consumers and taxpayers than they are as second class citizens with limited rights to be any of these, once the market for white males is saturated.

Poverty isn't a sign that capitalism is failing.  It is a sign that it is working.

Another claim that may actually be more true than false.  Marx theorized that a gradual immiseration of the working class and poor would gradually occur as capitalism reached the end of its ability to profit off expansion of markets.  We have not seen this in the west because the global division of labor has exported most, though not all proletarian roles to the third world, and social safety nets help with the rest.  Not that there isn't poverty in the first world, but we're generally spared the worst of it.  The real inequalities in wealth between capitalists is unprecedented - we now live in a world of multi billionaires and potentially trillionaires.  Eight billionaires now hold as much wealth as half the world's population.  And this is very much the result of capitalism working precisely the way Marx and Engels said it would.

Capitalism and systemic oppression have a symbiotic relationship.  They feed into one another.  We must dismantle both.

Depends what we mean by systemic oppression.  If this relates to identity politics, then no it doesn't, for reasons already discussed.  If by systemic oppression we refer to class differences reproducing economic inequality, than unregulated capitalism would certainly reproduce this.  I somehow doubt that's what this tweet meant, though.

Capitalism is innately ableist.  I am disabled and unable to work.  Do I not still deserve food, medicine, any quality of life?

I would suggest that nature is innately ableist.  If you are disabled and unable to work, you aren't going to be able to provide for yourself regardless of the mode of production.  Whether charity or social welfare steps in to assist is another matter, and again, one not dependent on the mode of production.

Capitalism is sexist.  It devalues the labor that women/mothers do, and are expected to do, in our society.

Capitalism doesn't care one way or another about your vagina, as I think has been demonstrated by now.  What is incentivized under capitalism is buying low and selling high in an effort to make a profit.  If the work that women/mothers do is unpaid or poorly paid, this has a lot more to do with the fact that the work typically associated with female gender roles is not easily commodified or is not productive from the standpoint of converting paid labor time into profit.  That capitalism fails to adequately remunerate such work when it is socially useful, essential even, is a very real market failure.  But this failure is not contingent on the people doing the work having vaginas.  If men did it, it would still be devalued work.  This is largely why birthrates are falling, and women are increasingly eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of careers. Looked at this way, it is capitalism that is really behind feminism.

Sexism and capitalism work together to reinforce gender norms that are harmful to women, men and gender non conforming folx.

See above.

There are places to go to learn about capitalism, both for and against.  The women's studies classroom is not one of them.

I discuss Marxist theory, identity and capitalism in my Other Red Pill series.

The Other Red Pill, and I do Mean Red
Living in a Material World
Tense Relations
The Desert of the Real
Class Dismissed!
No Class
Race to the Bottom
Engendered Failure
A Touch of Class
Wake up!  Class is Back in Session

The Other Red Pill: A Touch of Class

Friedrich Engels wrote:

The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." (...) In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. 

In short, historical materialism is not a master key to understanding all of history and society, and is not a shortcut to understanding the complexities and nuances of each individual society and era.  Marx and Engels, though they had insights sufficient enough to merit rescue from "the more savage travesties of his critics", were not infallible or omniscient.  No one ever is.

The usefulness of historical materialism as a means of analyzing the way societies worked, and just how powerful a critique it was (and to a considerable extent still is) in criticizing capitalism, combined with with the almost apocalyptic nature of Marx's predictions on where capitalist society was headed (predictions that were overwhelmingly wrong the vast majority of the time) and the resulting romanticization of revolution for its own sake, led to Marxism becoming a kind of surrogate religion for many of its most devoted followers.  Especially since Marxism naturally entailed kicking one's opium (of the masses) habit, and a similar kind of belief system was needed to fill the void.

This resulted in all of the evils of religious fanaticism that were carried out under the cross or the crescent over the centuries being carried out under the hammer and sickle in the 20th century.  These "communist" states carried out countless atrocities and disastrous policies which were driven in large part by a religious fervor towards Marxist ideology, or what these fanatics thought Marxist ideology was, which is very often very different from what both its supporters and opponents thought it was.  Think critically at all times, even towards otherwise good ideas.

It's worth touching upon the age old debate of whether or not the USSR was actually socialist.  This depends on how one defines the term.  What we do know, however, were that the "soviets" - democratic councils of workers established to manage factories and local economies - for which the USSR was named, were taken over, often by force, by the central Bolshevik state as soon as they had the power to do so.  Like the "state priests" of the "Bonapartist State" of the early 19th century that Marx himself criticized, and like the regressive left SJWs in media and academia in our time, the Bolsheviks regarded themselves as a kind of "intellectual" elite who, by virtue of their superior insight into the one true faith, had the right to capture popular democratic institutions and use them to rule over the plebs with an iron fist.  For their own good, of course.

In materialist terms, what we know is that the Soviet state had utter and complete control over the means of production.  Compared even to monopoly capitalism, ownership was more rather than less concentrated under the USSR system.  Of course, even totalitarian states knew the value of good PR, and so described themselves in ideal socialist terms.  The arrangement was also useful, if in an ironic way, to the capitalist elite in the west, who could then point to the monstrosity that was the Soviet state and claiming that was what socialism really was all about, kill any interest in the materialist outlook that its working classes may have had.  Even western leftists were drinking this Kool-Aid, especially after the Soviet state unraveled, with results I've discussed elsewhere.  

Any Soviet citizen who complained about any aspect of it could expect to find themselves sent to that part of it known as the gulag.  If socialism or communism can be defined as kinds of democratic citizen's or worker's control over the means of production, the USSR and its copycats and sock puppets were as far away from that as you can get.

Perhaps more significantly, is full blown democratic citizen's or worker's control over the entire means of production feasible or even desirable?  Perhaps they were when Marx put pen to paper in the mid 19th century, but are they now?  Are they now that the joint stock or limited liability corporations have become the primary organization in capitalist production and distribution, doing away with the strict dichotomy of bourgeois tycoon vs. propertiless proletariat that so much of Marx's theory depended on?  What would Marx, or Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes for that matter, make of an incorporated entity in which the employees, customers, parts of the broader community or even the state were in part or in whole, the shareholders?  These all seem to be vastly superior models to classic Marxist-Leninism if you ask me.  If we were opt to "in whole" as opposed to "in part" ownership in the above cases, how would these organizations raise capital?

Marx's critique of capitalism relied heavily on the labor theory of value, and the claim that profit resulted from surplus value: the workers receiving less than the value of what they produced, and the difference going into the capitalist's pocket.  I doubt that this is always necessarily true, though it can be, and without a proper regulatory structure, economic forces most likely will result in the kinds of economic meltdowns that Marx believed would eventually destroy capitalism, such as the market crashes of 1929 and 2008.  

If the capitalists compensate themselves for their own work in organizing production, if they compensate shareholders for the risk the run in investing in the business in the first place, if they invest in capital that increases the productivity of the business, resulting in more revenue and allowing for higher salaries across the board, wouldn't this admittedly ideal (meaning not always the really occurring) scenario be, in many ways preferable to the physical laborers simply taking it all as income, while allowing the capital assets to deteriorate?  I've often suspected that this is why real existing socialist societies - from Russia a century ago to Venezuela today, start out so well for the commoners, but the standard of living then deteriorates to a point where capitalist systems surpass them in terms of living standards.  

And don't get me started on the economic calculation problem, demonstrating the almost total lack of feasibility for any system of planned economics.  Societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists pay a heavy price for doing so.  The thing to aspire to, I think, is not a retread of revolutionary socialism, but a capitalism wherein all, or at least most can profit, not just a few.

The Other Red Pill: Engendered Failure

In 1993, Warren Farrell, Ph.D. exposed us to many poignant truths about the reality of being male in America at the time.  Among them are:

• 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men.
• Every workday hour, one construction worker in the US loses his life
• Men have been the overwhelming majority of the cannon fodder in every major war ever waged.
• Most successful suicides are male, and unemployed males commit suicide at twice the rate of their employed brethren.
• 96% of the adult homeless in San Francisco are male.  The national median at the time of writing was 85%.

And more besides.  Things have not improved either.  Not for most men anyway.  Eighty percent of job losses in the 2007 to 2009 time span were male.  This led to the coining of the term "mancession", which did not end until 2015, according to some sources.  Except for black males, which must doubtlessly be the fault of white privilege.  

Some men have done quite well through it all, however.  Which ones?   Probably not the ones reading this, despite what the feminists are no doubt telling them about their male privilege.  Which all men have, regardless of race, sexual orientation or physical ability.  Or, you know, anything else that might impact social inequality.  If you're still confused, go and take a cl ... I mean course on it.  The important thing is that men as a cl ... as a group supposedly have all the power and women have none.

And the statistics bear that out, as any woman will tell you.  Women still suffer from a very real wage and wealth gap compared to men.  Which can only be explained by men, all men, hording all the money to themselves.  But not evenly.  White men, quite naturally, have the most.  Even the homeless white men referenced above?  Well, yes I suppose.  The historical reality, after all, is that blacks were slaves and were discriminated against in the Jim Crow era while whites were not.  That's the only real explanation open to us, since race and gender are the only social axes upon which wealth and power are distributed.  So all white males benefited, and benefited equally.  Or so the best social commentators of our time will tell us.  The ones who graduated at the top of their cl ... I mean, got the best marks while in college.

The Myth of Male Power was a book not lacking in power.  It quite effectively takes a wrecking ball to notions popular at the time of its writing, and still popular today, that men have gone and made everything wonderful for themselves at the expense of all women.  Which needed to be said.  It apparently still does need to be said, and even I've said it.  But not nearly as well as Dr. Farrell said it.  In some respects, The Myth of Male Power is in a cl ... a category by itself.

Men continue to be the disposable sex, and growing numbers of men continue to be mad about it.  And so they should be.  Though the mancession is over, most men are finding job prospects limited and wages stagnant.  If you take the "red pill" and go into the online "manosphere", you will find that feminism has been responsible for most of men's woes over the years.  We can only guess that all of those military and workplace fatalities and the economic struggles that working cl ... I mean just men face are due to feminism also.  Even though feminism is scarcely more than two hundred years old and men have been dying in wars and working in drudgery for a lot longer than that.  

And I don't blame the manosphere types.  They do have legitimate gripes with feminism.  No, really.  They do.  Because many feminists have been blaming all men, at least collectively, for their own struggles, which are sometimes different but quite frequently look the same as well.  Lagging wages, declining opportunities, all too frequently outright poverty.  Whose fault could all of this be?  After all, corporate profits are up again.  Who could be making it if not white men and their centuries of privilege?  It's not like there's any other cl ... I mean category of people who could be benefiting at the expense of women?

Well that's obviously preposterous, and you'll learn that quite quickly the deeper into the underworld of the internet you go.  You'll find that it goes beyond feminism.  The deeper problem is "cultural Marxism."  Or should I say, (((cultural Marxism))).   You see, this "Marxism" has to do with this guy in the 19th century who must have figured that white western civilization was a bad, BAD thing because it oppressed and colonized women and people of color.  And what's funny about it is that if you go to college and take a cl ... course on critical theory, for example, or women's or black studies, they will indeed teach you that those terrible things did happen.  And the only reason they happened was because racism and sexism.  For the benefit of white males, just for being white males!  After all, it's not like there's any other way that any other cl ... group of people could have benefited from the dispossession of indigenous people and African slavery.  

Or so the cultural Marxist colleges will teach you.  But it's all a lie, don't you know?  A (((lie!)))  Any fool worth his salt knows that white males are struggling to get by these days.  Well, most white males, anyway.  The real blame lies with the Jews, or so I've read, because I can't imagine any other cl ... category of people who might benefit from stagnant wages and unemployment among the white male working cl ...

One other thing that I've run into with all of this study of the politics of race, gender, culture and oppression.  And that's this idea of linguistic reclaimation -  a once dirty, derogatory or forbidden word being brought back into acceptable use by the communities that experienced oppression under that word, or perhaps by the absence of that word.

Right off hand, I'd say there's one word that people of all races, genders and sexual orientations have been far too afraid to say for far too long now, and our racial and sexual politics have been distorted almost beyond reason and recognition as a result.  The first task of the Alt-Left should be to reclaim that word.

A good place to start might be to take a look at what that Marx guy (Karl, not Groucho, in case you were wondering) really had to say.