Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
And it’s time for another end of the year review post! I started the year off with a bang and a New Year’s Resolution: Tenants union activism. My first post of the year was Why You Should Join a Tenants Union in 2019. I was working on a tenants union with our local Iowa City DSA chapter, and we successfully formed in July. Not a bad start to 2019.
How’d the rest of the blogging year go?
Foreign policy is pretty central both to why I first became interested in politics and how I think leftist politics should work. And I think issues in Latin America are among the world’s most interesting and important. Yet I haven’t written much about Latin America in this blog. I’ll aim to correct that a bit with some discussion of Bolivia.
But, first, I want to say a bit about the special difficulties of writing about US policy in Latin America, generally, and in Bolivia, specifically. In the social media-inspired era of having an opinion about literally every little thing, I might bring a bit of a retro attitude toward Bolivia: fear of making a mistake. Fear, perhaps, that my own methods aren’t well suited to Bolivia.
There’s been a lot of interest lately in the question of whether we need a socialist party in the US. Perhaps to put this in a way people might ask it: Do we need a socialist party in our time, and, if so, what would it look like? In one sense, it’s a surprising question. We have a socialist party in the US! In fact, we have lots of them.
And Star Wars is…finished? I watched the very first showing of The Rise of Skywalker in Iowa City. On the heels of my post earlier this week on Holdo and Poe Dameron in The Last Jedi, here are a few thoughts on the big ending.
In case any readers are hermits, let me start with a reminder that The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters this week. The end of the Star Wars story, and so on. But I’m interested here in one of the plot lines of The Last Jedi. Vice Admiral Holdo and Poe Dameron went at it several times, from a minor skirmish to a mutiny. I think the conflict reveals deeper ones about gender and politics. It also shares a feature with the Killmonger character from the Black Panther film, namely it’s a Rorschach test! Whichever issues Holdo and Dameron reveal to you probably says as much about your views on gender and politics as the film itself says.
So here are some thoughts about it. Maybe it reveals my own views in some Rorschach-like manner. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
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