Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Culture (Page 14 of 23)

These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.

senior executives talk about work elon musk

Do Executives Work Or Talk About Work?

January 4, 2021 /

Senior executives claim they work a lot. How much? On average, they report working 62 hours per week. If we expand to studies including middle management, we come up with average work weeks up to a whopping 72 hours. Talk about work!

Well, yes. As we’ll see, that’s the idea. Are senior executives and other managers some new proletariat, as they want us to believe? Do they toil away at work all day like real life hero-leaders from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Would the world fall apart if they quit doing what they do – if the people working under them took over their roles?

Not exactly.

Continue reading

COVID Christmas

A Very COVID Christmas

December 24, 2020 /

My partner and I live about 500 miles from our families. This leaves us in a position where we feel like two holiday trips in a month are too many, so we usually stay in Iowa on Thanksgiving and travel for Christmas. A death in the family – as well as, of course, COVID-19 – disrupted all that this year. So, we stayed home for Thanksgiving and we’re staying home for Christmas.

It’s kind of a bummer. Christmas hasn’t held any religious significance for me for years. Though I grew up Catholic, I’ve been non-religious for 20+ years. But Christmas held a different place in my life – checking in with family and with my hometown in Indiana. More generally, checking in with my history.

One of my favorite things to do over the Christmas holiday is just hopping in the car and driving around rural Indiana. This year, a part of me will even miss the inevitable December 23 airport snafus. On the plus side, staying at home is peaceful.

How are you handling COVID-19 related travel plans/delays/etc.?

Image Source
the mask miracle

The Mask Miracle

December 21, 2020 /

The effectiveness of masks? What a difference 7 months make! Back in the early days of COVID-19, evidence suggested homemade cloth masks probably don’t work. The CDC recommended against them. Now it seems like masks do everything. It’s a mask miracle.

Let’s take a look at this mask miracle.

Continue reading

free speech left

Free Speech and the Left

October 22, 2020 /

Earlier this week, I wrote a post on Marx and the ‘rights of man.’ I want to continue the theme by applying it to free speech and the left. Free speech is kind of a hot topic on the left. Some leftists come out pretty hard against something they call free speech. Other leftists, like Noam Chomsky, defend it (they mean something a bit different, as we’ll see).

Part of what makes this issue difficult is that the U.S. far-right poisons the well. It shrouds itself in the language of ‘free speech,’ but it does so dishonestly. It pretends to be persecuted. And we do find some hard anti-speech attitudes within certain ‘left’ identitarian movements. But these elements hold little real power. The left shouldn’t cede the ‘free speech’ label to the political right because of this.

How should we think about it, then?

Continue reading

Roseanne Season 10

Roseanne and the Working Class

October 12, 2020 /

Roseanne Barr is no stranger to controversy. She’s upset people on all parts of the political landscape, though more recently she’s leaned toward conspiracy theories and racism. And so, U.S. liberals didn’t enjoy the return of Roseanne – the TV show – for a 10th season in 2018. And by the end of that season, the show booted Barr and the network renamed it The Conners.

I recently watched Season 10 – along with a selection of episodes from the first nine seasons. My sense is that most of the show’s critics either didn’t watch it or didn’t get it. Many American liberals and progressives want their TV shows to practice prefigurative politics – they want TV to reflect their ideal visions of the world. In some rare cases, as with liberals and The West Wing, this degenerates into complete fantasy politics.

Roseanne never did that, and it certainly didn’t do that in Season 10. The show engaged with the world as it is, with the world’s biases, prejudices, and bad systems. And it often criticized those biases, prejudices, and systems in helpful ways.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Base and Superstructure

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑