Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
I recently saw the film Blinded by the Light. There’s a lot here: a young man’s love for The Boss, the struggles of South Asian immigrants to the UK, and a musical with a ton of Bruce Springsteen songs. Stayin’ alive, right? It’s a genuine story of stayin’ alive. But more than anything, it reminded me of a book called Stayin’ Alive. Jefferson Cowie wrote the book, and he also wrote a history of RCA called Capital Moves.
Isaac Asimov published his science fiction detective novel The Caves of Steel in 1954. One of the detectives was a robot. That’s the twist. Lots of sci-fi fans know Asimov for his robot stories, and Asimov invented the word ‘robotics‘. The Caves of Steel became Asimov’s best-selling book to that point in his career. Asimov followed up with the Robot Series: The Naked Sun (1957), The Robots of Dawn (1983), and Robots and Empire (1985).
But that’s just the history. It’s not what this post is about. The Caves of Steel is less a detective story, or a robot story, than a sociological story. Let’s talk about that.
Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)
The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.
But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.
Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently published his first book, The Socialist Manifesto.
He’s trying to do a lot with the book. But here’s the main goal as I see it. Sunkara wants to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. He draws this distinction primarily in terms of the political methods people use in their pursuit. And he argues that the best political vision for our times is one that helps us move from the former to the latter. He does this via a historical project, covering everything from the feudalist roots of capitalism to German and Swedish social democracy to the Soviet Union and China to the history of leftism in the United States. Again, quite a project.
I’ll lay out some of Sunkara’s key arguments in The Socialist Manifesto. And I’ll offer some agreement and criticism along the way.
In the US, leftist attitudes toward immigration vary. At least, they did for much of the 20th century. Now, ‘open borders’ is an idea on the table across the US left in a way it hasn’t been previously. Much of the reason for this is reaction to the US’s increasingly draconian immigration policies since 9/11.
But there are also key issues of leftist theory and practice involved. Suzy Lee’s recent article in Catalyst provides a helpful frame for thinking about this. You can find the article here. I’ll sketch out Lee’s leftist argument for open borders before laying out some of the further issues and challenges.
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