Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

I talk about Marx, historical materialism, ideology and "socialism or barbarism"...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

Trinity College's library will no longer be named after Bishop Berkeley...

...because he owned slaves.  Unlike Aristotle, he did not justify slavery, so one might have thought that would count in his favor.  More seriously, at the time he owned slaves, it was hardly uncommon for individuals of his class.  (Contrast the case of honoring Calhoun!)  Will this de-naming make the world a better place?   Was anyone in doubt in Dublin that chattel slavery was wrong?  Will scholars of Berkeley now apologize for writing about him?

Marx, ever the optimist, thought that things would be very different when we live in a "human" world, in which there are neither chattel- nor wage-slaves, in which people were not locked in life-and-death struggles for existence, and in which the human interest in creative work was allowed to express itself.  That must surely be right, but one might imagine that in such a humane world no one would care about dishonoring those who were otherwise great intellectual innovators because they were creatures of their times, because they acted exactly as their class position required.

Marx was right, part 722

From Legislative Studies Quarterly:

This essay examines the relationship between legislators' class backgrounds and their votes on economic policy in the House of Representatives during the twentieth century. Like ordinary Americans, representatives from working-class occupations exhibit more liberal economic preferences than other legislators, especially those from profit-oriented professions.

 

Reed on Rustin

This certainly makes a nice contrast with this.  Professor Reed writes:

Bayard Rustin’s commentary between 1965 and 1975 on race, class, and politics in the U.S. was sharply insightful and can be read profitably for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the crucial period between the victories won by the civil rights movement and institutional consolidation of the ethnic interest-group regime generally known as “black politics.”1 To the extent that naïve, inadequate, simplistic, or simply wrong narratives concerning that political moment figure significantly into current formulations of black political life, engaging with Rustin’s critiques can be a helpful corrective to mistaken or shallow assessments regarding the present as well as the past.

Robots coming to restaurants

Just as Marx expected, robots are starting to replace human workers in restaurants:

“Every restaurant chain is looking toward as much automation as possible,” said Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin-based maker of robot servers. “People are going to see these everywhere in the next year or two.”

Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his Madison Heights, Michigan, restaurant, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics. The robot was so successful he added two more; now, one robot leads diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees pile dirty dishes onto a third robot to shuttle back to the kitchen.

Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save him money. A robot costs around $15,000, he said, but a person costs $5,000 to $6,000 per month.

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": a discussion with Adolph Reed and historian Barbara Fields

Here (it really starts around the 7-minute mark).   There are also some references to this utterly scathing essay by Reed on "black public intellectuals".   An excerpt from the latter below the fold.

Triumphs of psychological science

"Small Penises and Fast Cars:  Evidence for a Psychological Link."

The political economy of the academy and the decline of the humanities

This New Yorker essay on the decline of the humanities is getting lots of comment on social media; an excerpt:

According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before....

Not an analytic philosopher's conception of philosophy

"Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of religion and 'common sense."

            --Gramsci

Marx and Nietzsche would have agreed, albeit for somewhat different reasons.  But it is striking how utterly different this is than the highly conservative version of philosophy popular in the Anglophone world, which often aims to vindicate "common sense" and even religion.

The NYT tunnel vision about race comes up against reality

Perhaps someone there should look at the evidence:  "The fact that the five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder are Black complicates the anguish."  That's because in police killings, race is the not the primary variable, but rather class (as with Mr. Nichols:  a high school graduate and unskilled laborer with very little money)--class, plus the pathologies of police culture.

ADDENDUM:  As one reader points out, blacks are three times as likely as whites to be killed in police encoutners.  That is, alas, not surprising given the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America, with its history of apartheid:  "In 2014, about a quarter (26%) of blacks were poor, compared with 10% of whites. The black-white poverty gap has narrowed somewhat since the mid-1970s, when 30% of blacks were living below the poverty line – a proportion nearly four times the share of whites living in poverty (8%)."   The hard empirical question is disentangling the effects of race and class in police violence, a point the murder of Mr. Nichols by black officers drives home.

 

Class, not diversity

Kenan Malik comments at The Observer:

If debates about poverty have become warped by a longstanding view that attributes blame to the individual, debates about inequality have become distorted by a more contemporary trend: the increasing tendency to look at equality in terms of “diversity”. “When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity,” observes the American academic Walter Benn Michaels. “But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.”

On the neoliberal identity politics of the fake "left" in America

This essay makes a number of good points (although readers will notice echoes of Adolph Reed, the essay overall lacks his more sophisticated theoretical framework); an excerpt:

[Ne]oliberal identity is u]sing one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” What’s implied is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse— dismissed....

Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise

A propos this, a telling observation from a longtime reader:

Remember how our generation was the “What are you going to do with that?” era, if anyone ventured to say that their major was in the humanities? Hardly anyone is now tempted by the humanities since the message that economic life in America is fundamentally precarious has been one of the few messages about reality that has been successfully imparted to young people.

Economic life in America is, in fact, precarious, so the students have gotten the correct message.  Add to that the huge cost of higher education, and it shouldn't be surprising that 1 in 4 undergraduates at the University of Chicago major in economics!  I suspect the numbers are even more skewed away from the humanities at other schools.  

UPDATE:  Some amusing observations from another longtime reader, S. Wallerstein:

Ideological delusion watch: NY Times thinks "anticapitalism" is coming to American business schools...

...because some are adding "anti-racism" and "socially conscious" investing blather to their curricula, without noticing that both are currently profitable.  When they cease to be, they will also cease.

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

"Effective [sic] Altruism," Longtermism...and now the FTX crypto-currency disaster

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the now disgraced FTX founder, was perhaps the most famous proponent of "Effective [sic] Altruism."  His financial and legal troubles--he may even face criminal liability--don't show much about E[sic]A beyond what we already knew:  that it appeals to the super rich (vide the right-wing Elon Musk) because it seems like they're doing something "good" while basically leaving the economic system in which they profit (or plunder) untouched.  (You can see how seriously SBF really took his philosophical commitment to utilitarianism and E[sic]A here.)

One of the parochial oddities of "effective [sic] altruism" is that it has migrated from promoting fairly typical charitable giving to prevent disease in poor countries (which at least is a current problem) to a putative concern with the very distant future (which of course makes it even more appealing to today's billionaires).  This "longtermism" turn was usefully discussed on a long twitter thread awhile back (and a more recent essay).  (The author of that twitter thread, Emilio Torres, also has a more ad hominem thread, that does raise some questions about the honesty and character of some of the "leading lights" of EA--see also.  This is irrelevant to the merits of the positions, although given the FTX fiasco, it may attract more interest now.)   Philosopher Kieran Setiya has penned a philosophical critique of longtermism (as set out by the philosopher William MacAskill), showing that it is implausible.  Some excerpts:

The...shock is how much more MacAskill values survival in the long term over a decrease of suffering and death in the near future. This is the sharp end of longtermism. Most of us agree that (1) world peace is better than (2) the death of 99 percent of the world’s population, which is better in turn than (3) human extinction. But how much better? Where many would see a greater gap between (1) and (2) than between (2) and (3), the longtermist disagrees. The gap between (1) and (2) is a temporary loss of population from which we will (or at least may) bounce back; the gap between (2) and (3) is “trillions upon trillions of people who would otherwise have been born.” This is the “insight” MacAskill credits to the iconic moral philosopher Derek Parfit. It’s the ethical crux of the most alarming claims in MacAskill’s book. And there is no way to evaluate it without dipping our toes into the deep, dark waters of population ethics.

Population ethicists ask how good the world would be with a given population distribution, specified by the number of people existing at various levels of lifetime well-being throughout space and time...

Why billionaires love "Effective [sic] Altruism"...

...at The New Republic.

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

A philosophically substantial work on the history of Marxism?

A longtime reader writes:

I'm wondering if you -- or even your readers, if you think it'd be fitting to pose the below question to them -- could recommend a history of marxism that could serve as an alternative to Kolakowski's comprehensive yet superficial Main Currents.  Is there another work out there that covers as much ground but is more philosophically in-depth?

I can't think of anything, but will open comments for suggestions.  The best bet is probably to look at philosophically serious and informed treatments of particular thinkers/movements within the Marxist tradition.

Chomsky on Dylan

A propos this, reader David Lobina calls my attention to this apt observation by Chomsky:

Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I’d never heard him talk before — if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he’d been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to “mess around with other people’s lives” by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley “free speech movement” and said that he didn’t understand it. He said something like: “I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period.” If the capitalist PR machine wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn’t have made a better choice.

"Peter Singer is the philosopher of the status quo"

This is basically right (and I've written to similar effect previously), although parts of the piece are off base (e.g., Singer's terrible little book on Marx has not been influential).  An excerpt:

For Singer and his brand of moral philosophy, nothing fundamental can be changed. The forces that are in control of our lives and the manner in which we live and work are too powerful to be brought down. All that is left is to save those who suffer the most. Moral reflection, and philosophy more broadly, is reduced to an administrative role: do the most good you can do within a world that is broken.

G.A. Cohen talks about The German Ideology...

...in 2009:

(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Attack of the robots (on human labor), an ongoing saga

The latest, as Marx expected.

The monster-child, projection, and narcissistic collapse

On his private Twitter-like platform, one of the monster-child's latest outbursts has been attracting attention on Twitter:

The racist attack on Gauleiter McConnell's wife attracted a lot of the commentary, but it seems to me far more revealing is the absurd attribution of a "DEATH WISH" to McConnell.   

"How Are Ideologies False?"

This is a draft of a paper for an upcoming Social Philosophy & Policy conference; the abstract:

For Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some *beliefs* in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false: their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests: one can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest, or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (i.e., the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. Other topics discussed in this essay include: Geuss’s well-known typology of ideological mistakes and its poor fit with Marx; Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes (following an account developed with Prof. Jaime Edwards); Marx’s conception of interests (contrasting subjectivist and objectivist views, and attributing to the mature Marx a “thin” version of the objectivist view); and why Marx’s own moral judgments are not ideological.

Cedric Robinson's "Black [Anti-]Marxism"

Adolph Reed calls my attention to what reads like a  devastating critique of Professor Robinson's misnamed Black Marxism, which, unsurprisingly, has been popular with race-centric academics.  An excerpt:

What are the core underlying claims of Black Marxism?  In a nutshell, Robinson argues that Marxism or historical materialism is a European ideology that that has proven to be blind to racialism; that the epistemology of historical materialism, along with the political premium it places on proletarian struggle, does not apply to Africans and other non-European peoples. “It is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development which is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures."  Robinson’s follow-up work, published in 2001, An Anthropology of Marxism,[6] consummates the diatribe against Marxism.   In place of the alleged “grand narrative” of Marxism, Robinson gives us a “grand narrative” of the “Black Radical Tradition.” “Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people,” notes approvingly Robin Kelly in his oft-cited Foreword to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism, “and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilizations in which it was born or mass movements outside of Europe.”[7]

"Race reductionism" threatens to doom the left

This is the best piece I've seen in Counterpunch in awhile; an excerpt:

A debate rages on the left between the practitioners of identity politics and alleged “class reductionists,” but the latter seem to be decidedly in the minority. This is unfortunate, because in order to defeat the threat of the far-right—whether it’s called white nationalism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, neofascism, or proto-fascism—we’re going to have to build a movement on the basis of class struggle. This doesn’t mean denying the legitimacy of the grievances of groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, but it does mean incorporating them in a broader movement organized around the old Marxian dualism: the working class vs. the capitalist class.

Socialism lite

This essay excoriates (from the left) what passes for "socialism" in certain circles these days, as reflected in the recent 2022 "Socialism Conference" in Chicago, which even included some philosophers (I missed it, happily).  Some excerpts, with some interspersed observations:

The vast majority of panels were on topics related to police/prison abolition, antiracism, reproductive rights, opening borders, and other progressive movements and causes with precious little to do with socialism proper. And while there were panels billed under the categories of “labor movement” or “socialist theory and strategy” (for example, “Class Struggle Unionism,” featuring union negotiator and labor lawyer Joe Burns, and “The ABCs of Marxism”), these topics received no more time, and often far less attention, than abolitionism or various kinds of identity politics. In other words, the Socialist Conference treated the labor movement—and even socialism itself—as just one of many progressive causes, and class as just another identity around which to organize....

[M]uch of the conference was devoted to making the case that any progressive cause or movement actually is socialism. Keynote speaker Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor and a center director at the City University of New York, claimed that abolition is communism, race the modality through which class is lived, and mass criminalization class war, pretty much all in the same breath.

An essay in the NY Times that uses the idea of "reification" (correctly)

Its general point about the "medicalization" of what are political problems is also correct.  An excerpt:

A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

Inflation, from the perspective of the working classes

The contrast with mainstream capitalist media coverage is instructive.

"Marx's Economics and the Transition from Capitalism to Communism"

A draft of Chapter 4 (which, at this stage, is all my fault!) of the forhtcoming Marx book I am co-authoring with Jaime Edwards is available here.  (This is revised since presentation last week at the NYU Colloquium.)  Here is the abstract for those who might be interested:

This chapter offers an overview and interpretation of Marx’s economics and his account of why capitalism should eventually yield to socialism. Topics covered include: the background of Marx’s labor theory of value in Smith and especially Ricardo; the failure of the labor theory of value as an account of production prices; the irrelevance of the labor theory of value to Marx’s most important claims about capitalism (e.g., the pursuit of more money [profit] as the raison d’etre of all capitalists [agreeing with Milton Friedman, among others]; the unparalleled power of capitalism to produce technological development; the constant displacement of human labor by technology, etc.); “exploitation” as a technical, rather than moral notion; the “fetishism” of commodities; the failure of the “falling rate of profit” account of the demise of the capitalism; the plausibility of the mass immiseration and underconsumption model of capitalist crises; the preconditions of revolution (massive productive power, mass immiseration), which have never obtained and still do not obtain; the role of self-interest in revolution and the irrelevance of moral philosophy or appeals to altruism; and Marx’s conception of “freedom” as work freed from the necessity of laboring in order to survive (“wage slavery”). We argue that socialism (i.e., the use of massive productive power to meet human needs and free people from “wage slavery”) is not, contrary to Marx’s teleological rhetoric, inevitable, and that the choice between “socialism or barbarism” (as Luxemburg framed it) could go either way.

"Contemporary race theory" and the question of class versus race

Another interesting piece from Nonsite.org, where Professor Reed frequently publishes as well.  An excerpt:

Because all of these theories take for granted that racism is not only permanent but also the fundamental contradiction of American life, they all proceed from the assumption that racial groups are coherent and discrete entities with easily definable and shared interests. In other words, they conflate racial categories with racial groups and racial groups with political constituencies. Bonilla-Silva’s “structural interpretation” of racism posits that racial groups are “social collectivities” with shared “life chances” that form the basis for their collective “racial interests” (RR 471). One of the foundational concepts in Critical Race Theory, developed by Derrick Bell, is “interest convergence,” which maintains that “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will only be accommodated when it converges with the interest of whites.”6

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives" by Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Verso kindly sent me Professor Reed's latest book, which is a very good read and illuminating.  (He discusses some of its themes in this podcast with his son, an historian.)  Reed, born in 1947, grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era.  One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era.  Here's how Reed sums it up near the end of the book (these excerpts are from pp. 139-140):

The Jim Crow racial order has been vanquished.  That is clearest at the level that defines daily life and aspirations.  Removal of the strictures of official apartheid has radically altered opportunity structures and patterns of work, quality of life, and social relations in small and large ways that aren't readily apparent to those who didn't know the old order.  Working together as equals encourages socializing together, which is also enabled by elimination of the petty apartheid of Jim Crow in public accomodations.  Occasionally, when I notice an interracial group of co-workers or friends out in a restaurant, bar, or the like, I recall how utterly impossible that would have been as late as 1960....

But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy.  Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks.  And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology.  Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests.  At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it....

Adolph Reed: "Black Studies as a Class Project"

The latest from Professor Reed; an excerpt:

Inattentiveness to racial inequality’s embeddedness in capitalist political economy links directly to the fact that antiracist discourse posits “racism”—rather than historically specific political-economic and legal institutions, relations, and practices—as the causal source of (unjust) inequality affecting black people past and present. Racism, however, notwithstanding efforts to represent it as something more concrete via modifiers like “structural” or “systemic,” is an abstract idea, an attitude or belief, and is therefore incapable of causing anything.4 Insofar as the idea is regarded as the motive force determining blacks’ position in society across time and context, persistence of black people’s disproportionate representation among the most vulnerable, marginalized, and impoverished populations today can appear continuous with slavery and Jim Crow. According to that idealist reasoning, which also underlies Afropessimism’s ontological devil theory and is the essence of race reductionism, racism is the cause, rather than the result, of slavery, of the Jim Crow regime, and of contemporary inequality as well.

As usual, the whole essay is worth your time!  I'll also be posting before long about his book The South:  Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, which I also commend to readers.

Sociologist Randall Collins on the "big picture"

An interesting and wide-ranging interview about the social and economic developments associated with the period of the "Great Acceleration" (roughly the post-WWII period that has brought about the climate change catastrophe); an excerpt (with some resonaces with this):

[B]efore 1940, high school graduates were a small elite and a sufficient degree for management jobs; as high school became mass rather than elite, in the 1960s the same jobs now required a B.A; by the 1990s, an MBA. The sociological argument had been that mass schooling created social equality; but statistically it became clear that extending the length of schooling continued to give more credentials to the children of educated parents. In my 1979 book, I argued that equality would never be achieved along this path; better to decredentialize by banning credentials in hiring....

Class is not an identity

Instructive discussion by Daniel Burnfin, a recent PhD in Philosophy and German from University of Chicago, with whom I've had the benefit of discussing many issues in Marxist economics over the last couple of years.  An excerpt from the beginning:

Ascriptive identity is a category that names different types of relatively immutable properties of individuals, whom it then groups according to those properties. Ascriptive identity concerns the properties with which individuals identify, ‘as’ which they identify themselves, or as which others identify them. That is, ascriptive identity concerns what individuals consciously think that they ‘are’ or what others think that they ‘are’. It concerns gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and so on. Moreover, ascriptive identity is primarily discursive. And it is the basis for so-called “identity politics”. Many leftists today treat class as though it were one identity among others; as though class politics were a subset of identity politics. For example, the “working class” understood as an identity might designate white, heterosexual male, denim-clad manual laborers, who listen to rock and roll and prefer lite beer. Of course, this is a caricature. But it illustrates the way in which class is distorted beyond recognition when it is understood as though it were an identity.

The Marxian concept of class does not concern the properties of individuals, or what they or others think that they ‘are’. Rather, it classifies individuals according to what they ‘do’ or the functions that they perform in a socio-economic system such as modern capitalism....

Modern mysteries: "Why" would a tech billionaire (Larry Ellison) become a leading donor to the Republican Party?

Utterly mysterious that someone fabulously rich would align themselves with the imprudent wing of the ruling class party.   What a puzzle.   Maybe Marcuse could help?

Herbert Marcuse interviewed by Bryan Magee in 1978

Via Robert Paul Wolff's blog, I came across this interesting interview with Marcuse not long before his death.  His criticisms of the "New Left" are particularly striking (and apt).

Reed on Black Lives Matter

Here; bracing, no-nonsense stuff as usual.  An excerpt:

There never was a coherent politics there; nor was there any objective reason to assume there could be—especially considering that it was always a wan replay of Black Power in its faith that a generic slogan and some, often Potemkin, street action could generate a mass movement, and with what agenda exactly? To be sure, BLM helped to focus public attention onto police brutality and killings of black people, but no broader left politics necessarily follows from that. And to the extent that BLM projects and insists on a race-reductionist account of that injustice, its critique does as much to obscure the systemic foundations of the police behavior as it does to illuminate the behavior itself. Moreover, BLM, and contemporary antiracist politics in general, was always ripe for articulation toward entrepreneurialism, etc., not least because the personalities most visibly associated with it were careerist race ventriloquists and corporate media operatives. Did you see Van Jones collapsing with tears of joy after Jeff Bezos gave him $100 million? Or Kimberlé Crenshaw’s declaration, in yet another attack on Sanders, that “every corporation worth its salt” had done more to support antiracist causes than the Democrats or the left?...

More signs of the times: actual left policy analyst leaves Center for American Progress for AEI...

...because the Center for American Progress is suffering from neoliberal wokeness (much like the academy in this regard, and recall this and also this):

“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class"....

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says....

 

On "left" and "right" neoliberalism and the diversity industry

An interview with Walter Benn Michaels at Jacobin from 2011, but still timely; some excerpts:

The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

One of the first major works of neoliberal economics by an American is Becker’s [The] Economics of Discrimination, which is designed precisely to show that in competitive economies you can’t afford to discriminate....

"Some Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy"

A draft now on SSRN; the abstract below the fold:

"Why should capitalism self-destruct? Marx's account reconsidered"

This paper will be presented at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in late June; some of this material will migrate into the book on Marx I'm co-authoring with Jaime Edwards.  Here is the abstract:

Marx, partly due to the malign influence of Hegel, often expressed the view that capitalism would necessarily collapse. One of his arguments for that conclusion, the supposed tendency of the rate of profit to fall, fails. I focus mainly on the more important argument: the incentive for all capitalists to promote and embrace technological innovations means that human labor power will become less and less necessary in capitalist societies. Since most people depend on the ability to sell their labor power, consumption will inevitable decline in capitalist societies. Since profit is only realized when commodities are consumed, capitalists will have less and less reason to utilize their productive power to generate what humans want and need. Although this state of affairs--which is gradually being realized in the era of global capital--will result in economic depression, it need not, contrary to Marx, result in capitalism's collapse.

Adolph Reed on "antiracist" politics: neither left, nor egalitarian, nor democratic

His latest here; an excerpt:

The class character of antiracist clientelism is even more transparent than its fin-de–siècle progenitor’s. Its proponents can defend the assertion that racism is the fundamental determinant of life chances for black Americans only via a sleight-of-hand that divests slavery and Jim Crow of their historical specificity as discrete systems of economic and social relations and construes them as almost incidental extrusions of a transcendent racism or white supremacy or, even more tendentiously, in a devil theory positing that all human history has been driven by an ontological anti-blackness. Having transmogrified material social relations into attitudes, putative evidence that such attitudes persist supports assertions that “nothing” has changed since 1619 or 1919.18 It is telling that commitment to that argument subordinates providing concrete causal accounts of how current inequalities are thereby produced and reproduced to taxonomizing apparent racial disparities as instances of the workings of trans-historical racism or white supremacy. This perspective minimizes the significance of political-economic changes since 1965, including deindustrialization, the panoply of regressive policy developments associated with neoliberalization, and the significance of the marked increases in occupational, income, and wealth stratification among African Americans.19 The point of this politics is not to identify and pursue strategies to attack inequalities or injustices affecting black Americans but to make certain that they are understood as stemming from an evanescent racism. An implication is that only inequalities that can be attributed to specifically racial sources are a proper matter for concern. Combined with the central focus on addressing racial disparities within the existing capitalist class hierarchy, those characteristics of contemporary antiracism underscore the extent to which it is a class program.

An interview with Adolph Reed about Jim Crow, race and class

A well-informed interviewer makes for an excellent, substantive interview.

(Thanks to Merlin Chowkwanyun for the pointer.)

Adorno et al. on "The Authoritarian Personality"

An informative piece from the CBC.

"Class struggle unionism"

This is interesting, and probably right.

Self-driving trucks to replace 500,000 human jobs

The latest.  These are well-paying jobs too, thanks to the Teamsters union.   As Engels observed:

[T]he perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous.  If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves…Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer....

This isn't, as the kids say, a "bug" in capitalism but one of its essential features, which is why things can only end badly.

CORRECTION:  They were well-paying jobs, prior to deregulation of the longhaul trucking industry!

Right-wing "cancel culture" watch: study room at University of Florida named for Karl Marx has the name removed

Zieg Heil, baby, we're ideologically pure in Florida!   The case study in the Dunning-Kruger Effect that initiated this bit of petty tyranny in the service of ideological delusion is one Jennifer Carbrera who objects--obviously on the basis of no study or knowledge--to Marx being described as a "philosopher, radical economist and revolutionary critic" (all true, of course), adding that the description "neglects to mention the millions of people who have died as a direct result of his ideas."   Direct result?   Some people have funny views about causation, but I guess she's opposed to the Bible too for similar reasons.

Dolan reads Pinkard reading Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason"

Interesting, especially considering how spectacularly difficult Sartre's late text is.

The Frankfurt School critique of "science" is not shared by Marx...

...but this author doesn't realize that. He writes:

Influenced by Karl Marx, Frankfurt School philosophers such as Adorno and Horkheimer were alarmed at how industrial capitalism had undermined the Enlightenment....

Disciples of Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed the failure of Enlightenment, evidenced by the dark events of the twentieth century, as stemming from a division of reason into objective and instrumental reason. Objective reason involves an autonomous assessment of the intrinsic value of the ends we pursue. Instrumental reason involves figuring out the most effective means to achieve those ends. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that instrumental reason eclipsed objective reason in the age of industrial capitalism. People no longer asked themselves whether the ends they were pursuing were intrinsically valuable.

This is not a bad gloss on Adorno and Horkheimer, but it has almost nothing to do with Marx:  A&H were certainly influenced by Marx, but they weren't disciples, in part because, unlike Marx, they had not overcome Hegel.  The idea that the "dark events of the twentieth century" arose from "a division of reason into objective and instrumental reason" is the kind of nonsense only a Hegelian could believe, but certainly not Marx after he cured himself of Hegelian idealism in favor of a naturalistic method (eschewing Hegelian internal critique in favor of something like inference to the best explanation) for doing philosophy.   Althusser had a crude and obscure version of something like these ideas about Marx, but Anglophone philosophers have, quite reasonably, ignored that; what will be the decisive reading along these lines is now due to Lawrence Dallman, a recent PhD from here, which will reframe the philosophical reception of Marx. (Of course, one cannot fault a writer for the online Areo Magazine for having a simple-minded understanding of these issues.)

"Asset Manager Capitalism"

Via Alan Thomas, I come across this short talk by political economist Mark Blyth (Brown), which also discusses the "Wall Street Green New Deal" and mentions this striking Rand Corporation report on the effect of the "Reagan Revolution" from the right on wealth inequality.

Curious to hear from those knowledgeable about the economic literatures he discusses how sound this analysis is.  (In his brief discussion of "legal" literature on who really owns corporations, I note he sides with what is a minority view in the academic literature, without much discussion.  Of course, the minority view may be correct.)