Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
It’s the summer, and fewer people read blogs over the summer. It’s true, and that means my traffic is down a bit. Fine. It happens. I promise I won’t pander or write fluff, but maybe things will get a bit more casual between now and August.
Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about which Democratic candidate is the worst. For awhile, it seemed to me it’s obviously Joe Biden. But let’s try to be more systematic about this.
20 or so Democrats are headed to the debates. Is it more? Maybe, but I’m not counting. I’m sure we’re all plenty confused. How should we evaluate all these presidential candidates? In some sense, you can evaluate the presidential candidates however you want. I’m not your boss. But here are the key questions I ask when I’m evaluating presidential candidates.
The question is simple enough. Should the Democrats impeach Trump? And yet it’s not a simple question. It’s really two questions. The first one is: has Trump done anything impeachable? And the second one is: if so, is impeachment the best strategy for handling this?
So that’s the background. To impeach is not the solution to all impeachable offenses in all situations, just as to convict is not the solution in all cases where a person has committed a crime. In the latter case, it’s a question of whether conviction is the best way to address the crime. Is it not?
Lots of people in the US have the idea that there’s something vaguely 1930s about our current politics. And not only in the US, but across much of the world. Mostly these conversations revolve around the potential re-emergence of fascism. But another component is the uses and abuses of propaganda in the Internet age. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself in her recent book What Happened, are particularly interested in the idea that Russia funds right-wing propaganda to influence politics in the US and elsewhere.
Is there anything to this?
I’ve never published any articles on propaganda, though I’ve developed material on it over the years. And I’ve delivered a few presentations. Mostly notably at the Iowa Lyceum, a summer program on philosophy and critical thinking for pre-college students.
What stands out to me most about propaganda, and what most people misunderstand about it, is the issue of who it targets. You can learn a lot about propaganda by discerning its audience. And so, I’ll say a bit about that.
Last spring, the Iowa DSA chapters held an event called the Socialist Feminist Convergence. It was a great event for lots of reasons, but one thing we talked about is the idea of a housing co-op. The idea is simple enough. How do we create more democratic (and more feminist) spaces outside the system of financialization of basic goods and services? A housing co-op is one possibility. (A tenants union is another.)
Housing co-ops are great, and I want to be the sort of person who wants to live in a housing co-op. In Iowa City, we have the River City Housing Collective, which has operated since 1977.
But even though I love the idea of a housing co-op, I don’t want to live in one. Let’s talk about why.
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