Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
So, I’ve been listening to (and greatly enjoying!) Mike Duncan’s podcast Revolutions. In particular, I’ve been listening to his series on the Russian Revolution(s). Along the way, Duncan provides a great deal of background on Marxist theory. That makes sense, given the central role Marxism plays in 1917.
Overall, Duncan very skillfully explains Marxism 101, especially thorny terms like ‘means of production,’ and so on. I’d recommend his podcast, along with my own tips for reading Marx.
I’ve written a few posts on this blog laying out a basic reading of fascism as a political and broader social movement. In short, I see fascism as the ’emergency management’ mode of capitalism. Serious crises and leftist threats to capitalism produce the conditions that allow it to flourish. And fascism tends to arise in specific kinds of countries – peripheral capitalist states facing political and economic crises, credible threats to the capitalist system, et al.
However, competing accounts of fascism tend to emphasize the peculiarities of specific fascist systems, especially Nazi Germany. They point to, for example, some of the mystical elements of the Nazi system. As well as its persecution of religious and ethnic minorities. And they draw from that various general conclusions about fascism as a system.
So, I recently read W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous 1935 history of the Civil War era, Black Reconstruction in America. Like most leftists, I’ve read a million excerpts from the book over the years. Not to mention many other Du Bois texts – Dusk of Dawn is a personal favorite. But I hadn’t read Black Reconstruction until now. Let’s say a word or two about it.
Leftists hate means-testing. If we’ve learned nothing else from listening to leftists talk about policy in the last 5 or 6 years, it’s that. They heap scorn upon it. They claim to avoid it when they work on their own advocacy and mutual aid projects. And they criticize politicians who put it into programs, especially liberal Democrats.
But I think the term ‘means-testing’ carries a lot of ambiguity. Leftists, in particular, tend to use the term interchangeably with ‘paperwork.’ That is to say, they seem to think applying a means test amounts to requiring people to submit (often extensive) paperwork proving they have a low income and thereby ‘deserve’ support.
Let’s talk about that.
In an earlier post, I discussed the distinction between mutual aid and charity. Among other things, I pointed to this distinction as a false dichotomy. In truth, mutual aid and charity operate more as end points along a spectrum. Non-profits even sometimes engage in mutual aid, while mutual aid orgs sometimes do charity. I want to expand on all that in this post by bringing in the notion of prefigurative politics.
But, more than anything, I want to bring in the issue of how people set up a mutual aid org from the beginning. So, as a starting question, why do mutual aid orgs form? What do they want to accomplish? What do they look like?
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