What is to Be Done

 From this morning after the Dobbs decision was handed down:

On way to the court pic.twitter.com/XrE9ExAzhm

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 24, 2022

Humanity faces numerous existential crises at the moment.  Climate change is the overarching issue, but others like nuclear war, growing risk of pandemics, and general political instability all overlap with each other and threaten us all the same.  The common link between all of these is that we absolutely can not come close to mitigating (let alone solving) any of these problems under capitalism.  All these dilemmas require an international movement of solidarity to properly address them, which the political economy of capitalism is diametrically opposed to.

The Dobbs decision, along with all the other dogshit rulings this week, are all crises in and of themselves.  The inability to obtain a legal abortion, or boycott an apartheid state, or rely on a public education will all cause direct, material harm to millions.  Viewed through the existential scope of the previous paragraph these decisions serve a larger, even more nefarious purpose of making any sort of movement towards solidarity more and more impossible.  A person jailed for an unjust law, a woman injured or dead from an unsafe abortion, a Palestinian driven off their land—the clear second-order effect of these rulings is that people victimized by the law will not have the liberty nor the means to help in the fight to build a new future.

If nothing else please let this be the moment that cements your commitment to prison abolition. They are going to incarcerate people for miscarriages. They are going to incarcerate mothers and aunts and big sisters for helping teenage relatives abort.

— Charlotte Shane (@CharoShane) June 24, 2022

The means with which capital will enforce these rulings is clear.  They will use their soldiers (cops, ICE, border patrol) and their materiel (weapons, prisons, surveillance) to punish people to suit their ends.  Which means the immediate goal of anyone looking for a livable future is clear: The marginalization, defeat, and dismantling of these systems of oppression once and for all.  If you need a hit of optimism right now, I will add that I tend to think that if we can achieve this first step towards liberation, then the second step (abolition of capitalism) will be relatively easy.

Which makes the "how" part of this the million-dollar question.  I don't know what the ultimate answer is but I know what it's not.  This struggle requires a mass movement, which is anathema to both our bourgeois democratic institutions as well as our legacy institutions.  The organization that will overcome this is either in its infancy or has yet to be started.  Let's build it together.

"For many in the United States, it is easier to believe that Cuba is lying about their democratic achievements than to come to terms with the fact that our own government is choosing to deny us those same rights"https://t.co/mH8jhgozN0

— JR Giha (@jotaRgiha) June 20, 2022

Combat Purity

This is a good article.  I recommend reading it in its entirety and then coming back here.  I would quibble with a point or two, but I generally agree whole-heartedly with the analysis and prescription contained within.  The gist of it below is very good and echoes a lot of what I write on here:

"In America, by contrast, the dominant common sense is essentially anti-solidaristic: It is the notion that one must look out for himself, for his own; and that others — especially alien or unfamiliar Others — are a natural threat to one’s individual achievement. These are the ideas that feel instinctively true to many Americans, that feel realistic and sensible. And thus, “wokeness,” as I have idiosyncratically defined it, is hostile to the basic logic of leftist organizing. Solidarity requires an invitation, a warm and friendly offer to collude in a risky proposition. It doesn’t work as a sanctimonious entreaty to identify with an existing set of self-evident values. As leftists, we must make this offer — of interdependence in exchange for shared liberation — again and again, in different places, to different people, in different ways and hope that it begins to make sense. That’s the whole game. Won’t you join me?"

While I and many others liked the article, not everyone did.  In fact a lot of people hated it!  With much vigor!  Which is funny given both a) the purposefully apologetic tone of the article and b) the very concept of solidarity it argues for.  This would not be notable except for the specific counter-argument proffered by most of the critics.  Here is an incomplete sampling of these critiques for those of you that aren't constantly guzzling them in on Twitter like I am:

The throughline I get from these (and other) reactions is best summarized as this: The critique of "wokeness" in the article entertains and/or sounds vaguely like right-wing critiques of the same thing, so the critique itself must be reactionary.  I think this is silly.  I will expand on this assertion below, but it's important to note that the author anticipates this reaction and addresses it in the article:

"And so, the loudest critics of “wokeness” are usually either (a) reactionaries who would despise left-wing values regardless of the idiom in which we expressed them or (b) liberals who have made such a fetish of electoral margins and campaign messaging that they don’t recognize as legitimate those forms of political activity which are not reducible — or in every instance conducive — to the goal of Democratic electoral gains. Those of us who believe in a more egalitarian racial and economic order (and who doubt the Democratic Party is the only or best vehicle for achieving it) have no particular reason to trust either of these factions. Their critiques of our political strategies are impossible to disentangle from the incompatibility of our political visions.

That all being said, I want to suggest that the critique of “wokeness” may point to a real problem for socialists, feminists, and other radicals, one obscured by our disdain for its messengers and their motivations. This real problem is obscured because it overlaps, at times, with our opponents’ tendentious complaints. So we dismiss it."

This is good analysis, but I would like to take it a step further.  Our political opponents, wrong as they may be, are still people who live in the same reality as we do.  And even though our increasingly atomized world explicitly encourages arcane views of said reality, it has yet to completely divorce the observed from the real.  As such, people with a warped sense of what our society will is or should be still interact with it and experience it in a manner that is at least somewhat concordant with how us on the left do.  Accordingly, our political opponents will still be able to observe and identify the same fundamental problems with society, even if their subsequent expression of these problems may be warped to an almost unrecognizable degree.

What this understanding of the world means for this particular debate is that even the most hideous and revanchist stopped clock is occasionally going to report the correct time.  Your average right-winger is still going to personally experience the deleterious effects of capitalism even if they've been trained to cast the blame on the day's chosen outgroup.  As such, this means that pretty much any meaningful critique of capitalism/society/etc is going to at some point echo something a non-leftist says, almost as though the Rand Corporation is sponsoring a thousand monkeys with typewriters not to eventually replace Shakespeare but instead shitposters.

What this means is that any pursuit of performing ideological purity (which I ascribe to the commenters above) such that you never so much as even broach the cant of your political opponents is inherently futile.  This does not mean you shouldn't try to avoid language/arguments that have been effectively captured by the right (for example, saying the more incisive "corporate media" instead of "mainstream media"), but it does mean you shouldn't be scared of invoking a right-wing demon by simply using the wrong words.  As long as you are clear in your logic and firm in your moral commitments, you will be fine.  And at the very least, you won't have to walk on pins and needles just to advocate for a better world.

How to Think about YIMBYs (and Everything?)

As I've been progressing through my reading list, I have often reflected on what I read through the lens of a piece that was fairly formative to me, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading."  The whole thing is great, but I keep coming back to the rhetorical question posed at the beginning:

"Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered or spread, whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus's origin. "Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate," she said. "But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things — what would we know then that we don't already know?""

Sedgwick goes on to pose the question of "what does knowledge do" and then expands on this at length to contrast between the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the alternative suggested in the chapter's title.  I've made clear that, in general, suspicion of others is bad, so Sedgwick's conclusions are right up my alley.  Yet the hypothetical above still sits with me on a slightly separate plane of thought.  Both a purposeful government plot or a catastrophic public health failure will induce the same suffering and material depravation on those affected.  But when it comes to fighting back, knowing who to fight back against and how absolutely depends on finding the root causes.  An apathetic force can (perhaps) be swayed and/or reformed; an actively malign force needs to be defeated.

As a lot of what I read concerns the machinations of capital and its lackeys like the CIA, this sort of dichotomy comes up all the time.  People who do the bidding of capital range from committed monsters like Allen Dulles and George H.W. Bush to cheerleaders who may not ultimately be aware of what they're cheerleading (see all of the reputable names that received CIA money in the name of "promoting democracy").  Furthermore, because this dominant ideology filters down into the general populace, there are going to be plenty of well-meaning people that then parrot talking points that ultimately support the status quo.  And so even though it very much matters whether or not someone is a CIA asset or on the payroll a lobbying group or whatever, from a purely rhetorical standpoint, that knowledge does not do anything.  The lowliest person arguing for capitalism is as wrong to do so as the most mendacious CEO.

Enter the dreaded YIMBYs.  With respect to housing policy YIMBYs are, generally speaking, people who support new housing development as the primary means of addressing the housing crisis.  To be clear, building new housing is indeed good.  But, the problem with the mainstream YIMBY position is that in reality, it leads to supporting private developers who almost exclusively build luxury units which are often immediately captured as stores of value by capital, which in turn dilutes the potential of increased supply to reduce rents elsewhere.  If this dry description doesn't do it for you, imagine the "drill, baby, drill" Republicans from yesteryear, except for building apartments.  Yep, it's that dumb.

I was on vacation this week, so I did not become aware of the latest dust-up involving YIMBYs and the left until I saw this tweet.  It should go without saying that poor people moving to a place is not gentrification, but that's besides the larger point.  Which is: Boy, this guy is a real shit-stirrer!

The people he's dunking on, both here and in the original tweet, are pushing back rightfully on the logical outcomes of YIMBY policies that I mentioned earlier.  Instead of further defending his own positions, he is treating everyone else with suspicion, suggesting that either a) people on the left don't actually want to build more housing?, or b) someone who owns a home can't be anti-capitalist?  It's almost enough to make me doubt his own commitment to the fundamental problems his politics are ostensibly meant to address.

But before I get too suspicious of others, I think this sort of conflict is a perfect place to apply the paranoid/reparative dynamic.  I prima facie doubt this guy is materially tied to the interested of developers/capital, and furthermore, I have no specific reason to believe he is.  But still, this is the exact sort of thing someone beholden to such parties would do.  And if your argument fundamentally supports the interests of capital, why shouldn't we engage with it as such?  At the same time, the reparative instinct should return us to the initial thought—this is just some guy, wrongheaded and combative as he may be, and we should try to build something positive out of this conflict.

Ultimately, I'm not sure how to perfectly square these two ways of viewing the phenomenon.  There is work left for me to do on that front!  But I do think that the rhetorical question at the beginning does provide a good way for us to avoid kneejerk suspicion in a case like this.  He's quacking like a duck, but he's probably not a duck, but 80+ years of American ideology has maybe made us all ducks in some way?  Maybe those of us who know of our government's misdeeds develop an instinct of suspicion that isn't necessarily wrong, but may not always be useful?  Maybe we know we weren't always this knowledgeable and there but for the grace of God, we could be this guy?  Whatever the answer is, I promise to write part two of this post when I find it.