Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Month: September 2024

A picture of a child holding a candle with Time to Re-tire as the headline.

When is it Time to Retire from Activism?

September 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I never asked my friend Dick Leitsch when it was time to retire from activism. But he did tell me when he decided to retire.

Dick was 40 years old and the gay liberation movement had changed in ways he didn’t like. It went down a radical path to which Dick himself had opened the door, but didn’t want to pass through. By the time he turned 40, Dick felt that he was part of a different generation from the young activists who arose in the wake of Stonewall.

Generations theorists would agree with Dick. They’d call him a Silent Generation guy, while activist groups were led by young, upstart Boomers.

As for me, I recently turned 41. And I’m thinking through some of the same issues Dick worked through about a half century ago. When is it time to retire from activism? Is it time for me to do so? If so, what does that look like? Is there no place in activism for people over 40?

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The painting American Progress by John Gast, which depicts an angelic figuring rising from the American countryside.

The 2024 Election and U.S. Exceptionalism

September 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

In his account of the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Guy Laron lays out a framework we could apply to the politics of many countries.

Laron describes how Netanyahu gradually fused together a coalition between business interests, religious fundamentalists, and disaffected working class people. He did so by using state power to tie these groups together under his leadership. For instance, he used the promise of housing and resources under a settler colonialist regime to tie ultra-Orthodox religious people to his political project.

Israel thereby stands out as but one example of a politics that has degenerated into a rivalry between technocratic liberalism (e.g., the Labor Party in Israel, Labour in the UK, the Socialists in France, and so on) on one hand and a xenophobic far right that occasionally represents the interests of a segment of the working class, on the other. We find many such examples.

But that’s not how things work in at least one country – the United States.

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A photo of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Intended to represent socialists who chase the 'progressive' label.

Why Do Socialists Fight Over the ‘Progressive’ Label?

September 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

By the end of the 1980s, Reagan Republicans successfully turned ‘liberal’ into a dirty word. In their vision of America, liberals stand for the opposite of wholesome American values. In response, liberals ran away from the word. Those who won public office even dreaded having a photo taken next to the likes of Ted Kennedy.

Those days are long gone. Liberals, at least those who don’t live deep in GOP territory, embrace the term. If anything, more people attack the word ‘liberal’ from the left than from the right.

So, happy ending, right? We can call it a day?

Not exactly.

For some reason, socialists approach the fight over the ‘progressive’ label from the opposite end. As socialists, we keep calling ourselves progressives. We do so though the progressive label doesn’t fit and we’d be better off rejecting it.

Why?

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A portrait of philosopher George Berkeley, intended to represent the left's linguistic idealism.

The Left’s Linguistic Idealism

September 2, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The contemporary left repeatedly tries to solve all the world’s problems through linguistic idealism. It’s one of the more discouraging aspects of left politics today. And almost anyone with organizing experience born before 1985 knows we can’t ‘language’ our way to a socialist world.

In the DSA, for instance, we see repeated appeals to the ‘multiracial working class‘ as a target base. And in activist spaces across the progressive and left worlds, we see pronoun introductions and attempts to get people’s pronouns right as an end in itself, rather than a means to open up further work.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with either of these things, in the abstract. We should target a working class across base racial lines. And, of course, we should get people’s pronouns right. These count as very basic background things we should do.

However, the left adopts a bizarre sort of linguistic idealism by treating these things as an end, rather than as a means. We slide into the idea that by getting the language right, we magically also fix the world.

But you don’t build a multiracial working class base just by saying you’re doing it. You build it by getting out into communities, talking with people, and inviting them to join you.

And that’s where most activists just haven’t succeeded.

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