Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Month: November 2021 (Page 2 of 2)

great resignation striketober

The Great Resignation and Striketober

November 8, 2021 /

From time to time, I sort employees into three categories: those who suffer from angst, those who suffer from ennui, and those who suffer from neither. As readers might expect, I’m suspicious of that latter group. But this time, I’ll do something a bit different with the topic. I’ll say a bit about how all this relates to the ‘Great Resignation.’

For anyone living under a rock, lots of people quit their jobs this year. More than any other year on record! Are they bored? Did a collective brush with mortality last year push them to make a change? Or are workers simply getting tired of low wages and inadequate benefits?

So, what’s going on with the workforce? What spurred the Great Resignation? And does Striketober represent a reaction to the forces of the Great Resignation?

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consent choice

Complexities of Choice and Consent

November 4, 2021 /

By now I’m sure many of us know that the choices we make are far more complex than popular debate suggests. Almost everyone agrees on the need for consent, on at least some notion of ‘consent.’ But whether and how we consent – and what kind of consent we need – remains less clear.

I might approach these issues in a million ways. But here’s one way. I recently re-read a blog post on Feministing. The post covered a 2014 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly on gender and choices about body hair. It turns out that a woman’s decision to remove (or not remove) body hair is a pretty complicated one. In particular, the social pressures involved cloud the matter of whether and how women consent and make choices.

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A Socialist Stance on Reparations?

November 1, 2021 /

reparations

Lots of leftists – and people within racial justice spaces – discuss reparations. I’ve had some thoughts on it for awhile. And I revisited a solid article in Jacobin by Brian Jones. It’s called “The Socialist Case for Reparations.”

Jones gets one big thing right. He points out that as socialists we don’t need to adopt an either/or approach to issues of race and class. We don’t need to argue for either a broad social democratic vision that excludes race or a vision for reparations that caters to the black professional classes, ignores the role race plays in capitalism, and precludes a multiracial working–class coalition.

I’ll say a few things here about what I consider the best socialist case for reparations. In doing so, I’ll mostly leave open what, exactly, ‘reparations’ means. In the end, I think that adds up to the best socialist stance on the topic.

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