A great piece of news: today is the three year anniversary of Base and Superstructure! As with past birthday posts, I’ll point out that I started this blog in June 2018. I had lots of ideas bouncing around in my head on various topics, and I needed a creative outlet.
Category: Blogging (Page 4 of 7)
These are posts on blogging from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly these are meta-blogging posts, where I’ll be writing a bit about what it’s like to run a blog.
Oh, thanks for asking!
As many readers already know, I published my first book about six years ago. It’s called Classify and Label: The Unintended Marginalization of Social Groups. This book covers much of my early research focused on the social impact of classifications in the sciences and everyday life.
I’ve kicked around a number of book ideas since then, and I published an ebook on Trumpism (A Primer on Trumpism) before the 2020 election.
But lately my thoughts have turned toward foreign policy, particularly the idea that the U.S. left still doesn’t have much of a consensus on what a foreign policy should look like. I’ve written a series of posts on foreign policy on this blog, and I’m collecting that material and turning it into a book project! The basic idea here is that we need to build a left consensus on foreign policy. And we should organize that consensus around principles of international solidarity and working-class unity across borders. With that kind of consensus in place, we can do better organizing across borders.
The manuscript is pretty much done. I’m thinking now about publishing options.
In one sense, it feels a bit quick to already write one of these end of year reviews (see also 2019 and 2018). They always creep up. And yet 2020 dragged on. I mean, it really dragged. While the end of summer moved pretty quickly, I think it took about 5 years to get through March.
How long did 2020 take? If you recall, back in January we were talking about the Bernie Sanders campaign. Now that seems like it was…what, 10 years ago?
Anyway, let’s take a look at 2020!
Yes. Is that a problem?
After more than 2 years and a couple hundred posts, there’s a lot of content here on Base and Superstructure! Occasionally people ask me where they should begin. They want to know what to read first.
I’ve got enough anarchist in my political background that it’s a weird question. I think anywhere works. But that’s pretty unhelpful. Posts here cover related issues, and more recent posts build on earlier ones. Later posts where I use words in novel ways might be a bit disorienting to people who didn’t read the earlier ones.
And so, here’s my best recommendation. I’ve used the ‘categories’ function to sort the posts in this blog. I included a category called ‘Foundations‘ for those background posts I repeatedly build upon. Just click ‘Foundations‘ and then start reading from the beginning. Luckily there aren’t too many posts. I think only 7 or 8 at this point. So, it shouldn’t be all that large a reading load.
