Okay Takes

Somehow we've found ourselves categorizing groups of people in the most reductive ways first. People aren't anti-racists; they're protesters. They aren't male chauvinists; they're trolls. They aren't Kurdish leftists; they're terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on who you ask.

This is a result of the ideology of tactics essential to liberalism. This ideology says  that tactics are ethical only when they are legal. So of course Antifa are on the same moral footing as Neo-Nazis. They're both Protesters.

When we talk simply about rioters, guerrillas, or terrorists, and fail to ask about their context or perspective, we reproduce the language of liberalism. This hegemonic language is not just biased toward liberalism. It is politically reductive, and impinges on the analytical, contextualizing, and humanistic possibilities of discourse at large.

Popular media largely treats the Middle East as an ideology-free zone, excepting Islamism and racial nationalism.

Two big reasons for this spring to mind.

The first is US foreign policy. Our allies in the gulf are dominated by political ideologies that US media elites can only turn a blind eye to, except when kissing ass for MBS. To talk about the fact that the Kurdish movement in Syria, who besides being our allies (a fact that is widely bandied about) are working vigorously for women’s empowerment, pluralism, and local governance, would be a betrayal of our cohort in NATO, Turkey. Let alone the left resistance in Turkey itself. And regarding Iran, I have this funny feeling that toward socialism (c.f. Mosaddegh) is not the direction the US is hoping that someday regime change might go.

The other is the lingering flavor of Orientalism. It’s a discourse that reduces humans and peoples to narratives on a few longstanding themes. Islamism and racial nationalism are ideologies that admit readings as fanaticism or tribalism, which neatly fit these themes.

This tendency to ignore meaningful political differentiations in the Middle East played out particularly tragically in the Syrian Civil War. As mentioned before, now that Turkey has started making motions to invade North Syria, any mention of the profound humanism of the North Syrian project is off-limits for the popular presses. But beyond that, this tendency elided, and by elision eroded, the left wing of the Syrian revolutionary movement, as chronicled beautifully and tragically in Burning Country by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami. The war may have panned out differently if the media hadn't painted Syrian revolutionaries as homogeneous Islamists.

This is not a very original analysis, and not very deep. But I figure I should state it somewhere.

I’m going to use “fascism” and “socialism” in very loose terms. I’m going to be excessively general. If this all seems obvious to you, read something else. If it's surprising to you, read this blog more.

Bad times yield disillusionment with the status quo. At present, the status quo is liberal capitalism. This, the aftermath of the Great Recession, is a bad time.

In the history of liberal capitalism, this disillusionment has yielded two strong movements in reaction, pulling opposite directions: fascism and socialism.

Trump won because he spoke to this disillusionment, with the spirit (if not the letter) of fascism. Hillary lost because she did not speak to this disillusionment at all. Fascism and socialism speak to disillusionment and dispossession. Neoliberalism and centrism are incapable of doing so.

Since the Red Scare, the US political establishment has being fighting to suppress socialism. There are now few countries in the world where communism is less understood and taken less seriously than in the US. So now that we arrive in a moment where people are looking for radical change, and public discourse is weighted toward fascism.

The worse everything gets, the more people will look for radical answers.

The Earth is warming. Mass environment-driven migration is on the horizon. The future is not looking rosy.

So there’s a race to see how the remains of our ravaged planet will be divvied up: so that everyone can survive with some kind of dignity, or so that the übermenschen can achieve all the power they will themselves to. A humanistic ethic against a Nietzschean one. Right now, as socialists, as humanists, we’re both losing and fighting an uphill battle.

If Democrats continue trying to pose as the bastions of normalcy, defenders of the respectable and moderate, they will either continue to lose or trend rightward. The only answer is the reintroduction of socialism as a real political possibility. Its discourse is already finding purchase. We have a choice: we can make the Democratic party the political vehicle of socialism, and in doing so normalize this discourse. Or we can watch it spiral in a miserable death-embrace with Republicans into Bolsonaro-esque neoliberal fascism.

I have never heard "you're denying them agency" used in a way that deepened analysis.

Imagine, you're sitting around with friends attempting to describe a system of oppression. You're sussing out the forces that impact the lives of the oppressed. Suddenly, someone who's had very little to say busts into the conversation to let everyone know that they're "denying the agency" of the oppressed.

Are they suggesting that oppression is irrelevant to those oppressed by it? No, that would be silly. Are they saying that your analysis views the oppressed as fully determined by their oppression? They might be, and you should consider whether it does, but it probably doesn't, because you're not a shithead, and it's actually kind of hard to accidentally say that the free will of the oppressed is muted entirely by the oppressor (and because you've read Domination and the Art of Resistance by James Scott, and it was dank).

Are they engaging in some vacuous moral posturing? Probably.

This is a personally challenging one. I was reading All About Love by bell hooks yesterday. During a passage on the dominance of the culture of greed over a culture of love, I started to feel uncomfortable about having just bought some fancy pu-erh tea.

My pu-erh habit is an artifact of foodie culture. Foodie culture prioritizes connection with food-as-commodity over connection with human beings. Foodie culture is in this way a specifically capitalist culture.

I got this feeling even though I bought the pu-erh explicitly toward a fantasy of sharing it with friends. This doesn't break with foodie culture, either— it's often said that what matters most about fine dining is who you go with.

But this seems troubled. How do we reconcile an ethic of love, which prioritizes human connection, with our knowledge that consuming nice things can be profoundly pleasurable? I suggest three routes.

One is to say that there can be some meaning in pleasure. The epicurean answer. Any approach to thinking about meaning in life ultimately reaches an experiencing subject. This is the direct route.

Another is to say that the pleasure of a friend's cooking or a partner's lovemaking participates in love. I think hooks would agree if we're careful about how we define "participates." Applying this to Marx yields that commodification, the abstraction of goods from the labor that produced them, tears pleasurable things away from a context of love. Commodities are things that have lost their ability to participate in love.

But perhaps commodities can be re-imbued with meaning and again participate in love, as gifts. Perhaps sharing an experience of the same commodity, the same amazing food, can participate in love. This is our third route. People-oriented foodies would be vindicated.

I suspect that each has some truth to it, in different measures. I still have the feeling that connecting with a friend over some pu-erh is less loving than making them lunch, and that tasting pu-erh with a friend comes at the expense of connecting with that friend, themselves. Maybe there's value in variety among these things, and each has its time.

Sorry for more rambling than usual. I can't promise that it'll stop.