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Ytlaya posted:The goal of getting rid of the wealthy isn't so much a matter of "getting rid of bad people" as it is needing to eliminate a class of people. Historically the goal for the left was not to abolish a specific class but rather to abolish the 'mode of production', understood as a social totality that encompassed both political economy and culture. This goal has become so difficult to envision that people now retreat into talking about eliminating the 1% when in reality it was the social relations of production that were supposed to be the problem. You can quite easily imagine a middle class populism that calls for restrictions on the 1% while simultaneously intensifying capitalist exploitation of the bottom 50-80%. Middle class professionals benefit from cheap labour and a liberal approach to trade and immigration but they struggle with the rising prices of education and housing. There are ways to articulate that political position that don't include improving the lives of the cheap labourers the middle class relies on. A sort of 'middle American radicalism' that conceives of itself as under assault by both the underclass and the 1% would hardly be an unprecedented development in American politics. To merely call for the elimination of the extremely rich is not an inherently leftist or progressive position.
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Dec 13, 2019 21:18
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Ytlaya posted:I think that the only way to reliably prevent extreme wealth concentration without it inevitably reverting is to achieve the sort of genuine change you're alluding to here, so you're basically saying the same thing I am. The sort of "upper-middle class exploiting the bottom 50%" thing you describe would probably inevitably lead towards higher wealth concentration, since that's just the natural result of letting people profit off of ownership of assets and the means of production. The problem is that no one seems to be able to actually articulate a plausible and compelling vision of how we could overcome the current 'mode of production'. In the absence of that unifying vision the left has decomposed into various competing interest groups and factions. The scale of the problem just seems too immense and there aren't any obvious models to emulate or strategies to attempt. Besides, the merger of 'the left' with various counter cultural groups and with students and academics over the last 50 years has produced a situation where many of the left's largest contemporary constituencies are extremely mistrustful of mass action and popular politics so even if a leftist mass movement somehow looked possible I think a lot of current leftist thought leaders and activists would probably be very uncomfortable with it. The majority current left just isn't oriented toward achieving tangible results in the real world and the reality of actually wielding any kind of power or influence would probably make them squeamish. Due to a mixture of adaptations by the right and also to some extent thanks to its own success the contemporary left, such as it is, faces really severe structural barriers that nobody has actually figured out a way to overcome. It's really not a great sign that contemporary leftist theories are so incapable of addressing the current situation that young radicals are scrambling around for ideologies from 100 years ago like Leninism because contemporary social democracy, left liberalism and anarchism (but I repeat myself, har har) are so visibly inadequate. A healthy and functional political movement should be able to generate its own analysis of the situation and its own tactics rather than rely on reproducing the symbols and forms of a literal century ago.
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Dec 14, 2019 15:40
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Ytlaya posted:Are you talking about the practicalities of "defeating" the status quo, or are you talking about even constructing a non-capitalist working society? The former is something that might be impossible without some complete societal collapse happening first, but the latter is something that it's at least easy to come up with some basic "rules" for, even if people might disagree on other details. Outlawing the ownership of things like land, buildings, or any other wealth-generating asset would go a long way. Otherwise it's obviously impossible to magically prove that a dramatic restructuring of society will be successful. But you can at least move in that direction and promote core values (like the idea that it's unethical to profit off of another person's labor, or that it's unethical to profit from merely owning things). The old left tried to link the current grievances of the masses to a historical project aiming at the reconstruction of society. Not just a new government but an entire new set of social relations that would fundamentally change the social order. I don't think that vision plays a significant role in the leftist imagination anymore. There are a few holdouts but very few people seem to believe that such a thing would be possible. There's also a widespread belief that any attempt to transform society would - assuming it didn't fail completely - simply unleash destabilizing social conflict eventually leading to some kind of dictatorship and probably an overall lower standard of living. I think one of the questions that must be asked if whether the left can survive and remain relevant in the absence of some shared values or goal or vision of the future that is genuinely appealing to people outside the narrow confines of activism and the academic left.
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Dec 16, 2019 18:44
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Having a vague sense of the destination isn't the same as having a path forward and practical arguments aren't as separable from moral ones as we might like to think.
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Dec 17, 2019 18:02
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Ytlaya posted:It's literally impossible to provide a clear path forward for any goal that isn't accomplishable in the next few years, because to do so would require magically predicting the future (or at least to provide a path forward to the extent people are demanding it). The problem here is how to translate big picture goals into an actionable agenda that motivates people to fight. There has to be some guiding vision or set of principles that inform the left on how to use a victory and that allow it to survive temporary setbacks or defeats. Otherwise you're left with this idea that we should just sit around repeating the same ideas to the same tiny crowds and hoping that after the next crisis people will suddenly see the relevance and urgency of our ideas and that really there's nothing we can do to change anyway, we're already perfect and we just need to wait around for the rest of society to see the innate correctness of our analysis.
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Dec 17, 2019 21:08
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UnknownTarget posted:This I agree with, but that's also why I was advocating for my website earlier: local people create local objectives that are attainable by the people nearby. Once accomplished, it empowers that group which in turns empowers the overall movement ("Look, other people that are a part of this are changing things where they are, we can do it too!"). I think it's down to picking a destination ("We want the world to look like this when we're done") and then finding small things that build up over time. I don't think this strategy is going to scale up to anything past the local level. CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Once again this kind of strasserism has no real home. A bunch of whites carping about how everyone is welcome here is blatant performance given the extreme segregation in housing and employment. How do you think cramming down the flag will work when a huge portion of minorities know they are severely discriminated against in every facet of society? I think this is a more complicated issue than you're implying. "Rally around the American identity as a grand unifier and make it clear that everyone is welcome here and is to be treated with respect" sounds an awful lot like 2008 campaign Obama or any number of other mainstream Democratic politicians.
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Dec 18, 2019 21:00
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The fact nobody can conceptually separate "politics" from the electoral cycle is kind of illustrates the problem with "progressive" politics or whatever you want to call them. Even most of the goons in D&D advocating radical social democratic or socialist policies are still completely fixated on electoralism to the extent that it seems to largely eclipse any other discussion. Mobilizing around elections can be an effective tactic but a genuine political movement needs a deeper foundation.KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:The problem is that mainstream Democratic politicians have zero ideological credibility. There is no reason for anyone to trust them, unless you are a D.C. Sith Lord benefitting richly from the status quo. In fact, their flaccid and blatantly perfunctory nationalism is a big reason that the left has turned away from flag-waving. For the left, this has been a fatal strategic and ideological mistake, because of how it guts their own credibility with many of the people we need voting for progressive candidates and policies. What would constitute 'the left' in this example? Left liberals lost control of the Democratic party decades ago and while the DLC no longer exists the New Democrats effectively took over and transformed the party. Were the party to return to its comparatively pro-labour and anti-Wall Street stances from the 50s and 60s, or were the party to adopt a Sanders inspired left-populist agenda then that would be a serious threat to the incomes, not to mention influence, of Democratic staffers, politicians and especially donors. The Democratic party isn't just an organization that seeks to maximize its vote share. It is also a gigantic collection contracts and employment opportunities, as well as a career ladder. Of course winning an election can create more opportunities but only if you win the right way. If the Democrats ran and won on policies that actually started reversing the recent gains of capital over labour then that would much of job-and-contracts system under threat. For many of them it would be better to lose on a centrist ticket than to win on a leftist one. UnknownTarget posted:Thread right now: "we should fix the country" "lol the concept of country is literally meaningless". This is sure to present a way forward for progressive politics and is in no way bullshit leftist wankery that only serves the poster's egos. If you want people to take your criticisms more seriously then it would help if you could demonstrate a basic familiarity with the issues being discussed. Your dismissal right now comes off as something reflexive rather than something based on a genuinely informed or thoughtful opinion.
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Dec 19, 2019 19:21
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UnknownTarget posted:No. My criticism is that this is all just intellectual wankery at the expense of proposing action. At least drive towards something, rather than meta-statements on whether nationality is valid or armchair political machinations. State something like "I think we should do this and this is one way I can do it locally" or "this is one concrete item that, once removed, I will be able to do something". I dare you. Having a coherent and operational theory of society and social change isn't the irrelevant distraction you seem to think it is.
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Dec 19, 2019 22:17
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UnknownTarget posted:Ok, how will this directly help to create path forward for progressive politics? When you developed your idea for a website to organize around political issues you were obviously relying on some ideas about how society works and how political change happens. I'm saying that you need to be explicitly aware that you're doing this so that you can actually examine the hidden assumptions you're relying on. I'd also suggest that learning the record of the past and how previous attempts to carry out similar political projects will forewarn you about some of the obstacles you're likely to encounter. Ytlaya posted:How are you supposed to answer this, though? It is literally impossible to somehow prove that a particular strategy will be successful. Like I said previously, you could say the same thing about abolitionists - someone in that position wouldn't be able to magically prove that any particular political strategy will result in accomplishing the goal of freeing slaves in the future. The problem here as I see it - and I apologize if I've misunderstand you - is that you seem to be thinking of politics as mostly be a matter of convincing a sufficient number of people that a policy would benefit them, and then mobilizing those people to turnout and lend support to the policy. I think this is a narrow and sterile view. I would argue that politics tends to be rooted in people's deeply felt identity. Politics is not usually a matter of individuals rationally assessing their material interests and then selecting from a menu of policies. It is organized group conflict in which people's deeply held feelings of attachment and solidarity (or in other cases resentment and cruelty) play a paramount role. People will see the success or failure of their self identified tribe as linked to their own welfare and in that sense they are motivated by self interest, but it's not a strictly rational and evidence based assessment its more of a gut feeling. Take the abolitionist movement. They did make rational appeals to people's self interest and the 'free soil' coalition was based around an alliance with midwestern farmers who were anxious about competing with the plantation system. However, notice how closely rooted opposition to slavery was in alternative geographical and economic identities. Also notice how while there were abolitionists in the south and pro-slavery voices in the North, the conflict still ultimately broke down along regional lines. Ultimately the conflict came down to a question of each side trying to mobilize its own resources to win rather than convincing fence sitters that one or the other side had a more rational set of objectives. So when I speak of identifying a path forward and an actionable agenda I should clarify that I'm not talking about coming up with some utopian scheme for reforming all of society. I am speaking about political organizing. Identifying constituencies, thinking of ways to organize them and increase their self consciousness, imagining potential coalition partners, identifying salient issues that are particularly useful for agitprop purposes, etc. In other words, I'm talking about trying to identify how you would actually build up a political power base. Policy goals are part of this conversation but not the most important part. Now on a related but separate note, it is also helpful to have a clear analysis of society at large here. This is what I meant when I referred to "some guiding vision or set of principles that inform the left on how to use a victory and that allow it to survive temporary setbacks or defeats". By this I do not mean some narrow list of policy priorities but rather a guiding set of beliefs and large scale goals that transcend any specific situation but which provide a sort of fixed point around which to navigate. Think about the fundamental differences between a liberal and a Marxist, not just in terms of policy commitments but in terms of assumptions about the possibilities and limits of politics (or even what should be included under the label of 'politics').
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Dec 20, 2019 18:23
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This is a repost of something I wrote up in another thread in September but I think it is relevant here. Apologies for the wall of words but I think a survey of some of the scholarship on social movement organizing might be a helpful addition to this discussion. ---- I'll preface this by pointing out that there is a substantial and helpful literature on what causes new social movements to emerge and what factors can predict their relative success or failure. In what follows we'll see some examples of how this question is modeled. As with many realms of social science you get the familiar breakdown of macro and micro factors. As a general rule micro analysis focuses on the behaviour of individual agents and how they interact with each other (i.e. how does a firm decide whether to hire more workers or invest in more production). Macro analysis concerns systemic interdependence (i.e., how does the aggregated buying and selling of all the firms in the marketplace create systemic patterns that translate into things like booms and busts). There is a less common but important in-between level of analysis, the meso, which focuses on specific community or organization within a larger system (i.e. the dynamics and decision making within a specific firm; if micro looks at individual decisions and macro at larger scale interactions then the meso is the intermediate layer in which these two forces meet and are expressed via some specific institutional configuration, like a specific workplace or union or organization). We tend toward macro analysis in this thread. We see the overall state of the country and how hosed up our politics are and think of what macro factors have caused this to happen. As it happens this is paralleled in the dominant literature on social movements. They too have various macro oriented models that try to explain when, how and why people choose to get involved in a social movement. On the off chance this is compelling enough to anyone that they want to check out the full book for themselves you can access it here. At the core of this literature is the idea of a "Social Movement Organization" (SMO), Daniel Stockemer, The Micro and Meso Levels of Activism: A Comparative Case Study of Attac France and Attac Germany, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 1-3 posted:The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, anti-nuclear protests, and the pro-peace mobilization of the 1980s, as well as gay and lesbian activism of the 1990s and 2000s, are examples where common people opted for engagement that goes beyond the process of ordinary politics (Morse, 1993). They displayed a deeper commitment to a political goal – political motivation that cannot be measured simply by casting a vote for a party (Mouriaux, 1983, p. 53). Citizen engagement has taken shape in the form of social movements, as defined by Sidney Tarrow. He understands social movements in the classical sense as “collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in a sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities” (Tarrow, 1998, p. 3). Collective action defined in this way not only takes many forms, brief or sustained, institutionalized or disruptive, humdrum or dramatic, but also occurs within institutions on the part of constituted groups, which fight for clearly defined goals. These constituted groups are social movement organizations (SMOs),1 which are the meat and backbone of all social movements (Mayer and Ash, 1996). They attract and recruit people who want to fight for a cause via unconventional means; they are responsible for the organization and coordination of most unconventional political activities; and they provide the financial resources necessary to stage events and to train participants in creative forms of action (Rucht, 1999, p. 207). The three dominant ways of interpreting social movement formation reference above are. These explanations are not mutually exclusive and can be viewed as complementary. On the other hand, they are all pitched primarily at a macro-level of analysis, which is to say they don't offer very good explanations for why some groups succeed and others fail under more or less the same conditions. Such an explanation requires a more nuanced micro and meso level explanation. The three broad approaches for explaining the appearance and success of social movements is: 1. relative deprivation theory 2. resource mobilization theory 3. opportunity structure theory To briefly cover each of them: Relative Deprivation Theory Stockemer, p. 14-15 posted:Over the past 50 years, grievance or relative deprivation theories have been the dominant, classical explanation for why some people have engaged in contentious political activities while others have not (Geschwender and Geschwender, 1973). Grievance theorists (Forger, 1986; Runciman, 1966) see feelings of relative deprivation, which result from perceived discrepancies between peoples’ value expectations and their value capabilities, as the root cause for unconventional political action (Klandermans et al., 2001).1 The underlying assumption in this approach is that citizens do not normally protest when they are satisfied with their daily lives. Rather, people are more inclined to engage in collective action when facing dire economic, social, or political conditions, whether real or perceived (e.g., Choi, 1999; Seidman, 1994). As Klandermans (1997) puts it, a demand for change often begins with dissatisfaction, be it in the experience of illegitimate inequality, perceptions of a loss of integration in society, feelings of injustice and moral indignation about some state of affairs, or a sudden imposed grievance (see also Abeles, 1976). Stockemer, p. 15 posted:To explain changes in sources of frustrations in industrialized countries, new social movement scholars (Melucci, 1989, 1998; Touraine, 1981, 1988) claim that the type of society may predispose people to certain grievances and demands. For example, Touraine (1985, p. 774–781) argues that industrialized societies were prone to class struggles as well as to struggles for political and civil rights. However, as Melucci (1998, p. 13) contends, the era of industrial conflict ended in the 1950s or 1960s. With the fulfillment of material needs and the granting of (basic) political rights, individuals no longer wanted more material goods but were seeking self-realization (Buechler, 1995, 2008). After 1968, other forms of postmaterial values (e.g., peace or the environment) became more central as well.2 While this is an intuitively appealing theory it runs aground on the fact that "most of the time, most aggrieved people who are not represented neither mobilize nor form any movement structure" because "whether those aggrieved and inadequately represented create SMOs within the civil soceity subsystem of the political system seems to depend on other conditions, such as a subset of aggrieved individuals with resources, who are able to build an organization, and the opening up of political opportunities that allow these aggrieved individuals with resources to act." (Stockemer, p. 17). That naturally leads us to the second theory: Resource Mobilization Theory Stockemer, p. 17-18 posted:Only small subsets of aggrieved individuals can initiate SMOs. The resource mobilization approach alerts us to four necessary personal conditions, which aggrieved people must fulfill in order to create an SMO. These factors are financial and personal resources, time, energy, and experience (Edwards and McCarthy, 2004). First, a start-up of an SMO requires monetary funds. Most small and local start-ups require moderate amounts of capital, which can often be provided by initiators and their friends. However, larger SMOs often need outside funding. This funding can come from foundations, existing SMOs, interest groups, parties, or wealthy individuals (Walker, 1991). Opportunity Structure Theory Stockemer, p. 18 posted:The opportunity structure theorem purports that the likelihood of aggrieved people with resources to launch an SMO rises and falls with perceptions of successful mobilization. In this sense, political opportunity structures (POSs) refer to constraints, possibilities, and threats that originate inside or outside the mobilizing group and affect its chances of mobilizing. Structural characteristics of political systems, the behavior of allies, adversaries, and the public; societal tendencies, economic structures, and developments – all these factors can be sources of mobilizational opportunities (McAdam, 1982; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 1989a, 1989b, 1991; Tilly, 1978, 2005.) For example, the ability to appeal to a wide variety of interests, the emergence of a sponsor, or the possibility to push through a policy demand might entice possible initiators to spend both time and energy to launch an SMO Bringing that together we get the following synopsis for how SMOs come into existence and then succeed or fail: Stockemer, p. 19-21 posted:Three factors account for the development of protest structures within civil society. These are (1) the existence of grievances in society; (2) the So to briefly sum all this up: there are multiple factors that need to be present for a successful social movement to launch itself and have any reasonable expectations of success. There has to be a set of identifiable grievances that can be targeted, there needs to be a critical mass of individuals with the necessary resources (monetary, social, personal) to launch a new organization. In situations where you have a large population of aggrieved individuals, a group of political entrepreneurs ready to capitalize on those grievances, and a plausible looking plan for putting this into action then you can get the emergence of a new social movement organization. While these SMOs are not sufficient for enacting policy change they are necessary for it. So while they're not a panacea for all that ails us they are a crucial part of the puzzle if you're someone who is confused about why neoliberalism is such a seemingly monolithic political tendency.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:29
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"Elites" are difficult to avoid altogether because there are built in hierarchies of skill and experience that seem to be more or less necessary for an industrial or agricultural society. However, there's a tendency to conflate "elites" with the holders of extreme wealth who are better termed oligarchs.
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Dec 26, 2019 23:46
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Alchenar posted:I absolutely understand this, but you are still sidestepping the retort that any option that replaces market forces allocating labour with people allocating labour is a literal regression under your model to a pre-capitalist system which has even more inbuilt inequality. The idea that a market somehow allocates resources without involving people is more or less a textbook example of what a Marxist would consider commodity fetishism.
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Dec 29, 2019 19:53
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