Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

"Identitarian psycho-babble" had its origins in Herbert Marcuse's third wife!

This is a truly weird story.

"Cancelling Professor Tenure Act" in South Carolina

That's  literally the name of the legislation sponsored by 22 Republicans that would end tenure going forward, replacing it with 5-year-contracts.   (At least some lawyers explained to them that revoking tenure for existing faculty would be a breach of contract!)   It would also require all faculty (except in graduate-only departments, like law schools or medical schools) to each 2 courses each semester, which is not the norm in the natural sciences, where most faculty run labs. 

When Thatcher eliminated tenure at the universities in the UK in the late 1980, Parliament enacted a law protecting academic freedom.  Don't expect that to happen in the South Carolina case, although faculty at public universities could still assert a constitutional right to academic freedom.  The argument against eliminating tenure that seems to succeed most often with legislatures is cost and competitiveness:  tenure is important non-monetary compensation for faculty, and it will be hard to recruit them without paying them a lot more if the state schools do not offer tenure.

What is "Critical Race Theory" and what does it have to do with "Critical Theory" (i.e., the Frankfurt School)?

The "Critical Race Theory Scare," a bit like the old "Red Scare," has conjured up a bogeyman from a minor movement in academic legal scholarship that goes by the name "Critical Race Theory," and that is associated with law professors like Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, the late Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and others.  As is no doubt well-known to readers of this blog, the current bogeyman "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) has only a little to do with the body of writing by law professors--indeed, as this profile of the creator of the current hysteria makes clear, the real targets are the half-baked "ideas" of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi that have been put into practice in many workplaces (and some schools):  e.g., treating race as the marker of moral and epistemic status, treating disparate impact as evidence of "racism," overgeneralizing about the supposed attributes of "whiteness" (e.g., "objectivity" is white), interpreting effects of the capitalist marketplace as "racial" effects, and so on.  The DiAngelo-Kendi schtick makes the other white victims of the capitalist marketplace into agents and instigators of morally reprehensible oppression.

DiAngelo and Kendi, in any case, cite some CRT articles, and the propagandists decided that CRT was a good stand-in for the enemy.  DiAngelo and Kendi should be consigned to oblivion, and most of the objections to the CRT bogeyman are really objections to their stupidity, as any Marxist would agree.  But CRT is not by any stretch of the imagination a "Marxist" theory (and has little to do with Frankfurt School Critical Theory), so what is it about?

Hope for the NY Times? A columnist discovers the Marxist analysis of racism...

...via a reading of the Marxist sociologist Cromwell Cox.  An excerpt:

Over the course of 600 pages, Cox provides a systematic study of caste, class and race relations, underscoring the paramount differences between caste and race, and, most important, tying race to the class system. “Racial antagonism,” he writes in the prologue, “is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits.”

Put differently, to the extent that Cox had a single problem with the “caste” analysis of American racism, it was that it abstracted racial conflict away from its origins in the development of American capitalism. The effect was to treat racism as a timeless force, outside the logic of history.

On the changes wrought by the neoliberal "identity politics" (fake) "left"

I agree with much (but not all) of this from the writer and critic Freddie deBoer (although the labels "universalism" and "particularism" are inapt):

If you don’t believe me, and your Twitter account occupies any kind of progressive space, go on there and tweet “I think Democrats and the left should work to improve conditions for poor white people as well. Their suffering matters.” The notion of the left working for poor people as poor people, rather than merely as an extension of some identity frame, would be totally uncontroversial among the vast majority of left-leaning people throughout the existence of the modern political spectrum. Today? Go ahead, tweet that out, if you have a lot of liberal and leftist followers. See how that works out for you....

Perhaps the most glaring change in the left, in my lifetime, has been the abandonment of civil liberties as a core left issue - or, at least, of civil liberties for anyone who does not fall into a protected identity class....Civil liberties have been a core element of liberal and leftist belief going back centuries, but have been abandoned by today’s social justice advocates, who have been educated not in organizing meetings or union halls but on Tumblr and in seminars at $80,000/year liberal arts colleges. They put free speech in sneer quotes every time they invoke it...

Lord Devlin's elderly daughter accuses him of sexually abusing her as a child

Story here.  Devlin is best-known in philosophical and jurisprudential circles for defending the view (against H.L.A. Hart) that the criminal law should concern itself with "immorality," even when no one was harmed.  At issue then was the criminalization of homosexuality, which was legalized shortly thereafter in Britain.  In  light of this revelation, one might surmise that there was more than a little reaction formation going on with Devlin's side of the debate.

A. Philip Randolph and Vernon Jordan: an anecdote

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was the great civil and labor rights leader of the last century, whom I've occasionally mentioned here before.  When I was a high school student, my father had given me a biography of Randolph by Jervis Anderson, which made a profound impression on me at the time:  this was a great man.  Randolph had organized, in the face of many obstacles, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the first half of the last century, a union that represented the overwhelmingly Black porters who tended to passengers on interstate trains (when trains were still the primary form of long distance transport).  During WWII, Randolph forced FDR to outlaw racial discrimination in the defense industries; after WWII, Randolph forced Truman to integrate the military.  He and Bayard Rustin, another great figure of the last century, organized the 1963 March on Washington, at which  Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous "I have a dream" speech.  Randolph, like Rustin, always emphasized the intersection of labor and civil rights, a view that MLK came around to as well in the years proceeding his assassination. 

"Democrats Sick Of Being Blamed For Cowardice On Issues They Actually Just Don’t Care About"

The Onion, of course:

“I’ve had it with being labeled spineless simply because, at the end of the day, I really don’t give a shit whether we tax the rich to help poor families or hungry children or whatever,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), stressing that his complete lack of interest in passing tough regulations for the financial services industry, supporting a Green New Deal, and ending the War on Terror hardly meant he was weak-willed or timid. “That’s so unfair. If these were issues Democrats truly cared about, then we’d fight the Republicans tooth and nail on them. We’d even have the guts to risk the lucrative relationships we’ve formed with powerful corporations, defense contractors, and billionaire donors. But for something like an eviction moratorium, Medicare for all, or a fracking ban? No fucking way.”

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

The prudent wing of the ruling class behaving badly...

...or behaving, in any event, like the ruling class.  Greenwald rightly lambasts "the normalization of maskless elites attended to by faceless servants."

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

"Against Effective Altruism"

Philosopher Alice Crary (New School/Oxford) comments. What Professor Crary calls "the institutional critique" is the really decisive one it seems to me; here is her useful summary of it:

This critique attacks effective altruists for operating with a damagingly narrow interpretation of the class of things that are assessable as right or wrong. It targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term. Advocates of the institutional critique are on the whole concerned to decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering. EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’. A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change

Philosopher Peter Singer to donate all of $1 million prize to charities

This, of course, is what he should do, given his ideas and arguments, so kudos to him.  If he were not a proponent of "effective [i.e., measurable in the short-term] altruism," he might choose different beneficiaries for the money, but that's a separate debate.  

Is radical political action like brain surgery or a landslide?

Robert Paul Wolff comments; an excerpt:

Let me begin with the distinction, which I am sure I have several times drawn before on this blog, between two very different images of progressive or transformative political action: brain surgery and a landslide. If you think that radical political action is like brain surgery, then you will suppose that it is a precise and delicate matter in which it is desperately important to perform the operation in precisely the correct manner – one wrong move can leave the patient paralyzed or, worse still, dead. For the past 200 years, a good deal of debate on the left seems to have been motivated by this image of political action. I saw this up close at the University of Massachusetts almost 50 years ago when five young Marxist economists were hired simultaneously into tenured positions in the economics department and almost immediately split into three factions.

"The whole country is the Reichstag"

A bracing essay from Adolph Reed, Jr., who really is our most astute socio-economic critic these days; a couple of excerpts, below, but I encourage folks to read it all.

The right-wing political alliance anchored by the Republican party and Trumpism coheres around a single concrete objective—taking absolute power in the U.S. as soon and as definitively as possible....

It wasn’t such a big step from Rick Santelli’s faux populist 2009 meltdown calling, from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, of all places, for a Tea Party rising to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. McConnell’s openly declared strategy of stalemating Democratic initiatives of whatever sort made clear that the Republicans have no commitment to democratic government; every move they made was directed, consciously or not, toward takeover via putsch or putsch dressed up as election. The outcome of the 2000 presidential election was an early augury, as the George W. Bush campaign strongarmed a victory by means of actively partisan intervention by Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, mobilization of corporate goons to storm the Miami-Dade recount, and turning to a reactionary bloc of Supreme Court Justices to place a fig leaf of legitimacy onto theft of the election....

Some of the reactionary, authoritarian tendencies that condensed around Trump and Trumpism have been festering and growing in American politics at least since the end of World War II. First Barry Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan brought them out of the shadowy underworld populated by such groups as the John Birch Society, the World Anti-Communist League, various McCarthyite tendencies, Klansmen and other white supremacists, America Firsters, ultra-reactionary groups with ties to shadowy international entities like Operation Condor that has specialized in state-centered terror and death squads in Latin America and its equivalent in other regions, Christian Nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes....  They’ve been joined in the Trump years by a cornucopia of more or less organized thugs, militant racists and misogynists, open fascists, reactionary libertarians, delusional conspiracists, damaged true believers, and utterly venal grifters—a category that cuts across all the others—and they’re bankrolled by the American equivalent of German Junkers....

There is no such thing as “right-wing populism;” it is an invention of bourgeois propagandists in the punditry and academy. Its principal intent is, on the domestic front, to discredit the left by association with a putatively dangerous irrationalism, e.g., by equating Sanders and Trump....

Nina Turner did well among working-class Black voters in Cleveland and environs...

...which, according to this genius at Jacobin, shows that a progressive candidate can do well with working-class Black voters.  Not once does the author mention that Turner is Black, a rather large confounding variable.  These folks should read Achen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists.  As long as the Democratic party traffics in mindless identity politics, the economic identity that matters most will not become a locus for political mobilization.

The actual left in America has always supported robust civil liberties...

...unlike the New Infantilist left in the universities, on social media today, and even in some of the leftist media.  This piece is a useful reminder; an excerpt:

The founders of Dissent were fiercely anticommunist, yet you’ll find them repeatedly, heatedly, defending the free speech rights of Stalinists.

I’ll cite just one example. In an article about the state of liberalism in 1955, Irving Howe criticized Americans for Democratic Action for passing a resolution that supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals.” Why would Howe have objected to this? He objected because the ADA had changed the wording of a previous draft, which supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals, including communist ideas.” They’d taken out “including communist ideas.” In other words, he was attacking them for the failure to explicitly affirm the free speech rights of communists.

The early editors of Dissent, defending the free expression rights of a political group they loathed and feared, were in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, who said, “Freedom is always and exclusively the freedom of the one who thinks differently . . . all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political life depends on it"....

Contemporary skepticism about the idea of free expression seems to rest on two pillars.

 

Adolph Reed on Robin DiAngelo and the political economy of "race" politics

Amusing interview; an excerpt:

Reed:  One of the interesting things I think that we’ve experienced over the last half century or so, and our reasons for this too and get into maybe, or maybe not maybe later, that racism as a category has expanded. The currency of what counts as racism has inflated like the Deutschmark in the late 1920s. So anything can be racist, and racism becomes the sole explanation, or sole explanatory category, for making sense of any inequality or seemingly inappropriate or unjustifiable inequality that involves black people or other non whites in any way....

Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it....

Evanston public school teacher sues school district for race discrimination based on its curriculum and "anti-racist" [sic] training

A friend who is a Chicago lawyer sent me the complaint. Evanston is the town just north of Chicago, where Northwestern University is located.  The "training" and "teaching materials" described in this complaint are rather insane, and consistently confuse race with class in a way that will miseducate the students.  It is less clear to me how precisely the plaintiff has been injured, although the "hostile environment" claim may be the strongest.  It will be interesting to see what the courts do with this.

(As an aside:  while very little of the insane materials and training described in the complaint have anything to do with Critical Race Theory [CRT] as it evolved in Amercian law schools in the 1980s and 1990s, the connection to the hucksters Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi is clearer.  I'll say a bit more about CRT next week.)

Anti-"Anti-Racism"

Some interesting material in this article; an excerpt:

Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, calls much of the anti-racist movement “a kind of group narcissism … that promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in elite spaces. … It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians.” The Columbia scholar John McWhorter, a linguist well-positioned to make sense of what is largely a rhetorical movement, calls anti-racism a “religion,” complete with the power to excommunicate those who fail to speak in canonical ways. But anti-racism is more than a religion; it has had real and dispiriting political consequences. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has noted, it arguably helped defeat the Bernie Sanders brand of social-democratic populism in the battle to define the left wing of the Democratic Party.

"Nietzsche Against Marx on the Causes of Suffering"

An early and rough draft of a project I'm still thinking about.  Here's the abstract:

Marx and Nietzsche, the two lodestars of modern philosophical anthropology, differ most interestingly not in their moral outlooks--which are indeed contradictory--but in their explanatory methods. Marx has, as it were, no psychology, only an anthropology and economics, while Nietzsche relies almost exclusively on explanation in terms of individual psychology, appearing at times willfully blind to social and economic causes. This difference is most apparent in their contrasting approaches to human suffering. Marx understands suffering to be primarily a consequence of socio-economic circumstances, while Nietzsche traces it primarily to defects in individual psychology and physiology (the latter manifesting themselves at the psychological level). To put it crudely, for Nietzsche, most people are by nature “sick” and thus disposed to suffer, regardless of socio-economic circumstances, while for Marx, people’s suffering is an artifact of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus amenable to amelioration.

If only there were a theory that could explain why both political parties and the media complain more about shortages of cheap labor than about poverty and bad working conditions

It's a damned mystery, that's for sure:

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

A Marxist movement within the Democratic Socialists of America

Hard to quarrel with this:

[T]he DSA is far from a mass workers’ party: our membership is dominated by the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials. In too many chapters, this skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism. The result is an aesthetically radical liberal politics masquerading as socialism, where moralism displaces materialism, prefigurative politics displaces serious organizing, and an insular scene politics displaces class solidarity.

This must change. Socialism isn’t liberalism covered in red paint and roses. It isn’t a lifestyle, a subculture, a church, a social club, or a vehicle for career advancement. Socialism is about taking our wealth and power back from the capitalist class and giving it to those who created it. And to accomplish that, we need a true mass party where America’s diverse working class will feel at home....

The actual contents of the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" reviewed...

...by Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's/Canada).  From his apt conclusion:

There are immoral and outrageous ideas that cause no controversy whatever, raise no twitter-storms: ideas that not only don’t put your job at risk, but that actually lead to promotions, chairs, salary increases, and fellowships in our academies. As we learned from Gramsci—and Mill—there is as much danger in these as there is in transitory, popular controversies. Perhaps we need a Journal of Hegemonically Uncontroversial Ideas.

Peter Singer interviewed...

...in The New Yorker.  Some interesting bits, although I was sorry to see Professor Singer took the bait on this absurd question:

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally [then goes on to name some of them from outside the Anglophone world].

The correct answer would have been:  "No, it's not on my radar, and it has nothing to do with equity.  My citing more Black writers would not contribute to equity; reparations for the descendants of the victims of slavery and de jure segregation would contribute to equity.   Scholarship is not about equity, it is about engaging evidence and arguments that are relevant and worth engaging.  If you have in mind some evidence and arguments relevant to my work that I have neglected, I would be interested in them, independent of the race or nationality of the authors.  But it is pernicious ideological obfuscation to act like keeping a tally of the race of authors you engage contributes anything to equity or human well-being."

UPDATE:   Something I posted on Facebook in response to a comment from a colleague elsewhere might also be relevant here: 

My position is that racial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua--demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy, policing, and other contexts of course.

On the motives of academics and administrators in promoting faux "social justice" initiatives

Some interesting comments from the earlier thread, that might warrant separate discussion:

"Canadian philosopher" writes:

Professor Lowrey argues that there are three elements that together threaten to undermine the academy. The “new Ptolemaism” is one piece but is combined with: (2) the Foucault-inspired insistence that academics identify a hierarchically arranged binary and then work to invert it; and (3) the surprising alliance between two groups: (i) the professional managerial class currently running universities; and (ii) a large percentage of social science and humanities faculty, which both, for different reasons, see the traditional/current university as in need of reconstitution, if not outright dismantling. My experience, which includes multiple terms as chair of a department, suggests that all three phenomena exist to different but significant (and generally increasing) degrees, and may well add up to a non-trivial threat to universities as most people over the age of fifty understand them. A particular concern that professor Lowrey raises is how the public and its elected officials will view the value of supporting institutions of higher learning if they are remade in the way she fears.

The crisis of the New York City college prep schools

"Woke capitalism" isn't playing that well with the capitalists who pay 50k and up to send their kids to private high schools in NYC, schools which seem to have fallen through the Kendi-antiracist looking glass.  But the question is why?   The race fixation and posturing doesn't, of course, endanger capitalist relations of production, although I imagine it will endanger the privileges the parents are paying dearly for, as colleges rush to admit more racial minorities and fewer kids from "elitist" institutions.  (This Atlantic article captures the anti-private school Zeitgeist well).  Indeed, when the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class in America, publishes an article like this about the invasion of the bastions of ruling class privilege by non-elite students, elite prep schools surely have good reasons to worry.  Their rush to hyper-wokeness is probably an attempt to rebrand the schools so that elite colleges can resume admitting their students in suitably large proportions.

"Africana Marxism"

Philosopher Vanessa Wills (George Washington) discusses at the "History of Philosophy" podcast.

An inside look at how the "anti-racism grift" is undermining radical politics

A case study of the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

Yesterday's discussion of Marx...

...noted earlier is now online.  Thanks to Dr. Donna Lyons (Law, Trinity College Dublin) and Prof. Brian O'Connor (Philosophy, University College Dublin) for their questions, as well as members of the audience.

 

Talking about Marx tomorrow...

...with Dr. Donna Lyons (Law, Trinity College Dublin) and Prof. Brian O'Connor (Philosophy, University College Dublin).  Details.

"Defund the police" drove voters to Trump

Not a surprise, really, but here's some data and analysis:

What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

"Defund the police" is like "we need more charter schools" in urban areas:  it focuses on a symptom, rather than the causes of the problem (police violence, poor outcomes in urban public schools).  (Earlier discussion.)

Loury on "truths" about race in America

African-American economist Glenn Loury (Brown) has penned an essay that is generating, unsurprisinlgy, a lot of discussion.  As regular readers know, I think "diversity" blather is a fraud, and that racism, while obviously real, is mostly an epiphenomenon of the class politics of capitalism.   And while Loury has sometimes been scathingly accurate about the absurd posturing of the academy about race issues, this latest essay seems to me more deluded than illuminating, many of its "truths" being falsehoods, predicated on a quasi religious faith in autonomous or moral agency (no doubt this faith was important to his own recovery from personal traumas and missteps).  

"Wokism" and the theory of ideology

Yes.

America is doomed, part 478: Oligarchy edition

I can't find a lot to disagree with in this assessment, alas.  An excerpt (but read it all):

The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by President Joe Biden, however welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately revoked.

It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists who support him, from social media.

It will not be halted by locking up the Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on Jan. 6. and took selfies in Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement.

Which of the "top 25" PhD programs in the U.S. have Black faculty in tenure-stream positions?

Philosopher Jason Stanley (Yale) recently remarked on Twitter that in 20+ years, he had taught at four leading departments--Cornell, Michigan, Rutgers, Yale--and had only one Black colleague on tenure-track during that time (Howard McGary at Rutgers, who is now retired).   I'll return to the question of causation and racism (which seems to have overwhelmed the online discussion [and here]), but the facts are indisputable.   Very few of the leading PhD programs have any Black faculty, and even fewer have African-American faculty.  I list below the "top 24" PhD programs with the names of their Black tenure-stream faculty, when there are any.  Please e-mail me with any corrections.

NYU:                 Anthony Appiah

Rutgers:            Derrick Darby

Princeton:        ---

Michigan:        ---

Pittsburgh:       ---

Yale:                ---

MIT:                 ---

Ideology watch: the NYT on Milton Friedman, or how to whitewash the actual logic of capitalism

One of my sons called my attention to this New York Times essay purporting to commemorate and analyze a famous popular piece by Milton Friedman in which he suggested that businesses should have as their only objective what is, in fact, their only objective, namely, maximizing profit.  This can be their only objective on pain of extinction:  that is how capitalism actually works, as a German philosopher noticed in the 19th-century.  Friedman's error was to state openly the actual and entire raison d'etre of capitalism, something that the NYT, as the mouthpiece for the prudent wing of the ruling class, could not possibly commemorate without a full ideological whitewash.  Kurt Andersen, the author of the lead piece (linked above), is clueless (he did better work at Spy back in the 1980s!).   The NYT can't permit telling the truth about capitalism to occur without suitable moralizing illusions (including the new favorite one of the ruling class, "stakeholder capitalism"), and so it rounds up a bunch of them (and one or two outliers).

The Frankfurt School in exile in America

Interesting interview with the historian Martin Jay (emeritus, Berkeley), that also touches on Walter Benjamin, and the post-WWII return to Germany.

Why are the American stock markets elated with the election outcome?

Readers may recall they were also elated after 2016:  unified Republican government meant give-aways to corporations and the rich, and stock markets love that.   There was the downside that Trump was somewhat erratic and unpredictable and liked trade wars, all of which was bad for business.   Now the stock markets expect the best of both worlds:  a stable guy at the helm, Biden, who will be paralyzed from raising taxes by a Republican Senate.   Hence the booming markets.  Ain't capitalism grand?

A ballot initiative in a blue state and what it reveals about the electorate (plus a telling anecdote)

California voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin.  And yet California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have restored affirmative action in public employment and college admissions by at least a dozen points.

One might have thought that affirmative action (or "diversity" as it is now wrongly called) is a staple of the Democratic brand in American politics, yet voters can overwhelmingly prefer the Democratic candidate and yet also overwhelmingly reject this policy.  What might we learn from this?

Affirmative action is deeply unpopular, even with many Democratic voters, because admissions and employment are zero-sum games, and the outcomes of those "games" are perceived to be life-and-death matters, which to some extent they are:  under capitalism, everyone the market doesn't need is disposable, so not getting a job or a spot in a prestigious university can seem a serious matter.  And any perception of according an advantage in this life-and-death struggle to a whole group that one is not part of is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite unpopular with those adversely affected.

1987 NYT editorial appeals to a "consensus among economists" that there should be no minimum wage

A good reminder for whom the NYT really speaks. 

(I saw this gem via Alex Gourevitch's FB page.)

Trump offends the professional classes...

...but he is in most respects "business as usual" for the imprudent wing of the ruling class:

Accusations of fascism and assertions that “This is not normal!” belong to the hysteria of professionals, those for whom Trump’s poor taste and political incorrectness finds its criticism in late show monologues and The New Yorker cartoons. For them, a return to normal is merely not being forced to look at Trump’s spray tan. It is the return of feeling safe enough to not have to care. So long as they know the captain is competent, they can stop worrying about the ship going down and get back to reading White Fragility.

The reality is that Trump’s presidency has been anything but “not normal.” It has continued the same brutal worldview of his predecessors, albeit with unorthodox theatrics that has made the mockery of our two-party system transparent. This became evident when the neutralization of Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic message was celebrated even more by Democrats than Republicans, the former of whom could never get beyond Sanders’s fatal error of using the term “working class.” Unsurprisingly, these same people have nostalgically pined for the “decency” of George W. Bush and rallied behind Joe Biden, a man whose entire political career has been spent championing the very policies that made a figure like Trump appealing to so many in 2016....

There's obviously something to this, but like some on the left (I mean the actual "left," not the neoliberal-identity-politics-pretend-left), he underestimates the real threat posed by Trump's authoritarian instincts.  One would not want to repeat Ernst Thälmann's world-historic mistake of identifying the "social democrats" as the bigger threat!

Class and responses to Trump's rudeness and Biden's gaffes

In 2016, Democrats made the mistake of focusing on Trump's rude, crude and vulgar mouth (on display, I gather at last night's "debate" [sic], which apparently some sentient people actually watched!).  Alas, Democrats may be doing it again.   Many people don't care (and those who do aren't on the fence), which is rather important in an election!   This NYT piece from about a week ago, focusing on Biden not Trump, is instructive.  (Law professor Joan Williams addressed related issues a few years ago.)  It addresses the "cultural sensibilities" of voters in those "working-class Democratic communities that put Donald Trump over the top in 2016. They include more than 200 counties that supported Barack Obama twice before voting for Mr. Trump."  What these working class communities have in common--call it the "New Yorker sensibilty"--is that they respect those who stand up to insults and abuse, and punch back and punch hard ("don't take yourself so seriously" is foreign to those who have self-respect):

In the communities we visited, some of their most beloved Democratic politicians have a Trumpian sensibility: They are macho, quick to engage in political conflict and relentless counterpunchers. One is Ottumwa’s Jerry Parker, a former mayor and a current county supervisor. He supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primaries; during one local primary meeting, he threatened to take a conflict with a Bernie Sanders supporter “outside.”

Similarly, Mayor Joe Polisena of Johnston is popular even though he is a self-described political “street fighter.” Mr. Polisena doesn’t hesitate to verbally rough up citizens who openly criticize his rule — during Town Council meetings, for example, he calls them “malcontents” and “misfits.”

People in these communities admire the president because he seems familiar. As someone in Johnston told us, Mr. Trump seems “more human, more like us, the working person.” Mr. Trump’s incessant counterpunching, called a sign of a thin skin by many observers in professional circles, is often interpreted as common in many working-class communities.

 

Breonna Taylor and George Floyd

The media, unfortunately, have linked these cases of police killings, even though they have almost nothing in common.  And now, unsurprisingly, a Louisville grand jury has failed to indict any of the officers involved in the no-knock raid that led to Ms. Taylor's death (by contrast, the officer that killed Mr. Floyd was quickly and rightly indicted, although he is planing an aggressive defense).  The failure to indict any officer for the killing of Ms. Taylor is unsurprising because:  (1) a judge had authorized the raid and the warrant to search the apartment because of Ms. Taylor's sometime-boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, and (2) when the police entered the apartment, a different boyfriend (then at home with Ms. Taylor) fired on the police (he did not know they were police), wounding one officer; the police returned fire, resulting in Ms. Taylor's death.  On these facts, it's hard to see how any officer was culpable for Ms. Taylor's death.  Louisville subsequently banned no-knock raids, which undoubtedly contributed mightily to the cascading calamity resulting in her death.

"The Microfoundations of Marxism"

Philosopher Jaime Edwards (St. Norbert College) talks with philosopher Robert Gressis (Cal State/Northridge) about some of the ideas and arguments growing out of his important dissertation on this topic.  (Edwards and I are writing the volume on Marx for my Routledge Philosophers series.)

Why the right needs to pretend the "left" is more powerful than it really is

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) comments.  Her point about the Gramscian pedigree of the right's rhetorical strategy is amusing.  (Her focus is Britain, but most of the points apply in the U.S. too.)

Introducing Marxism and critiques of capitalism to high school students

A high school teacher writes:

I'm a longtime reader of your blog and former philosophy student. I teach advanced high school students in English, debate, and philosophy at a public high school. 

I'm curious if you or your readers have any recommendations for essays or books I could excerpt that would (i) help the kids take Marxist thought seriously and/or (ii) help them appreciate why one might see so much infighting on the left between those supporting race-based identity politics and socialists. I plan on teaching some of Reed's articles and a few other articles you've featured on your blog, but many of those pieces don't do the more basic work of unpacking capitalism's flaws. I've taught some of Chomsky's On Anarchism and a few other short essays with some success, but they are all a bit too complicated given the straightforward and relatively easy task of outlining capitalism's flaws. 

Thanks for any help.

I'll open this for suggestions from others, but here are some thoughts of my own.  A colleague elsewhere told me he used to good effect my opening remarks at a recent debate about capitalism, socialism, and social democracy with undergraduates in an introductory PPE-type course at his university (here is a typescript version of my remarks:  Download Capitalism social democracy socialism).  Less basic, but generally accessible, is Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today (Oxford, 2002)--you'd want to pick some selections.  The essay by Randall Collins in Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford, 2013) is also useful, and free of Marxist jargon although making essentially Marx's point.

Suggestions from readers?

Ibram Kendi eviscerated

This is a somewhat wild polemic, alternately perceptive and then baffling, but quite amusing as well.  An excerpt:

Ibram Kendi reasons through conservative ideologies such as Evangelical Christianity and Afrocentrism. His theories are a confused kaleidoscope of sociological nonsense and unverifiable historical claims.  His assertions have no resonance in the long history of antiracism scholarship, research, commentary and writing. Kendi fills the book with definitions. However, his definitions are not definitions at all, but mere tautologies, where he uses the term he’s defining in the definition, sometimes several times. He makes empirically unsubstantiated claims such as we’re all racists, including most Black people and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois. He disconnects power relations from his understanding of racism; he separates racism from its economic foundations and from the exploitation of labor for profit; he uses the term inequity over structural, systemic and institutional racism....

Kendi was raised as an Evangelical Christian. Thinking through absolutes of, for instance, good and evil, God and the Devil, organizes his understanding of phenomena. Confession, the practice of atonement, admission of sin, recognizing you are a sinner and rejecting denial are Evangelical Christian tropes he draws on to understand racism. He applies these tropes to teaching others how to be anti-racists. While perhaps good for conservative Christian eschatology, it’s really bad for anti-racism scholarship and research.

How does this play out in Kendi’s intellectual practice? He says a racist is “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” And on the other side an antiracist is “One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their racist action or expressing an antiracist idea.” Stated in another way, good people are people who do good things and bad people do bad things....

Kenan Malik on "white privilege" and class

Sensible, as usual (he is responding to Chris "I make things up" Bertram:  in this case, Bertram invented a straw man position that no one holds, as Malik rightly notes).

Anti-racism is not what's needed in America

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels take another stab at countering the mass delusion that has gripped the nominal "left" in America over the last few months; as they argue (correctly), " because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it."   An excerpt (I've put a few bits in bold):

What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people....

Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

"Democratic Socialists of America" is not a Marxist organization...

...as the recent Reed Affair showed.  (Earlier coverage.)   Even so, DSA should do better.

Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S....

...in The New Yorker.   I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively.  But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago):

According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."

Discussion of "police reform" is a bit like the blather about "urban school reform," it largely avoids the actual issue that drives the problems (police killings, poor performance in urban public schools), since that actual issue would demand systematic changes that neither ruling class party cares to tackle.