Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Class (Page 4 of 24)

Class Constructivism: A Dead End

Sociologists Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan recently sketched out their response to the class reductionism debate. Their approach lines up rather nicely with the one I took in a post and article. But they also make conceptual space for views I think we can see floating around in various forms. I want to take a look at one such view: class constructivism.

I’ll start by saying a word about how McCarthy and Desan lay out the conceptual space. And then I’ll move on to sketch out class constructivism. While few views completely fit into the class constructivism camp, I think we can find appeals to something like it within common perspectives in both DSA and the broader left.

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Working While Sick

I don’t have many lofty thoughts on the topic of working while sick. It’s just that I recently overheard someone coughing in public, and it made me uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as it would have in March or April 2020. But uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable in a way that it wouldn’t have made me in 2019, you know? And that takes me back to the world of the white-collar office before 2020. When people showed up to work, in-person, while sick. And they did it all the damn time.

What was with that?

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After Black Lives Matter

Cedric Johnson dropped After Black Lives Matter into an ongoing debate between a ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ left. It’s an older debate, but one running hot in the last few years. Unlike many other authors, Johnson tries, at least in some ways, to work around and between the two camps.

Not that he always succeeds. And it’s pretty clear which side he prefers (the ‘anti-woke’ side). But I think he wrote After Black Lives Matter in an effort to move the debate forward.

Let’s take a look.

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DSA Strategy: Issues vs. Classes

As the 2023 DSA Convention approaches, let’s try to answer a strategic question. The question concerns a big picture issue, one that I think people tend to lose in the details of the various Resolutions on display.

So, let’s talk broad, national strategy. I have in mind DSA’s ‘decision’ – quotes because it’s perhaps more a starting point than a decision – to run priority campaigns around issues rather than people. DSA builds its recruitment model on attracting people to issues like Medicare for All rather than reaching out to members of target classes and building campaigns around their ideas. An org can do both, of course. But DSA probably doesn’t have the resources to do both well. And, at present, it only does the former.

I’ll argue in this post that DSA should run grassroots organizing campaigns built around classes first, rather than issues.

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May Day

Way back in 2018, I wrote a short post explaining the U.S. holiday ‘Labor Day,’ focusing on its differences from the international holiday May Day. Among other things, I posted out to readers that both holidays originated in the United States! Before, of course, the U.S. decided to eff things up and try to stamp out May Day.

Which it failed to do. Sort of. I’ll refer readers to the Labor Day post I linked above for the full details. But, suffice it to say, the U.S. government – with a notable helping hand from right-leaning, anti-communist unions – played its part in the stifling of a workers’ tradition that started in our own country.

It’s a bummer. But it does teach us the lesson that we of the left have started deep traditions before. We can do it again.

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