Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
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.
About ten years ago, Alain de Botton wrote a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It’s a perfectly fine book, not a great book. From the great tradition of writing about working, I far prefer the live interviews of Studs Terkel. And so, I’d greatly recommend his book Working.
But there’s something I do find admirable about de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Especially insofar as it says something about working in a corporate office.
Lots of people in the US have the idea that there’s something vaguely 1930s about our current politics. And not only in the US, but across much of the world. Mostly these conversations revolve around the potential re-emergence of fascism. But another component is the uses and abuses of propaganda in the Internet age. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself in her recent book What Happened, are particularly interested in the idea that Russia funds right-wing propaganda to influence politics in the US and elsewhere.
Is there anything to this?
I’ve never published any articles on propaganda, though I’ve developed material on it over the years. And I’ve delivered a few presentations. Mostly notably at the Iowa Lyceum, a summer program on philosophy and critical thinking for pre-college students.
What stands out to me most about propaganda, and what most people misunderstand about it, is the issue of who it targets. You can learn a lot about propaganda by discerning its audience. And so, I’ll say a bit about that.
Last spring, the Iowa DSA chapters held an event called the Socialist Feminist Convergence. It was a great event for lots of reasons, but one thing we talked about is the idea of a housing co-op. The idea is simple enough. How do we create more democratic (and more feminist) spaces outside the system of financialization of basic goods and services? A housing co-op is one possibility. (A tenants union is another.)
Housing co-ops are great, and I want to be the sort of person who wants to live in a housing co-op. In Iowa City, we have the River City Housing Collective, which has operated since 1977.
But even though I love the idea of a housing co-op, I don’t want to live in one. Let’s talk about why.
Image Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/12/18221752/2020-democrats-biden-bernie-sanders-beto-poll)
Quite a few people seem surprised by Joe Biden’s lead in the polls. Some of this is because their friend circles aren’t representative of the Democratic Party electorate. But some of it’s deeper than that. Democrats say in generic polls that they’d prefer women to men, non-white candidates to white candidates, and younger candidates to older candidates. Given the fact that Democrats are more or less evenly divided between moderates and liberals, we could form some hypotheses about who ought to be leading right now.
The best hypothesis would be Kamala Harris. She’s a black women who’s probably neither too liberal nor too moderate for the Democratic electorate. She’s youngish and serves in a political office that’s a common launching pad for presidential campaigns. And we’d expect candidates like Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar to be doing OK. We might even think candidates like Julián Castro could take off.
To put it lightly, that’s not what we’re seeing. The two leading candidates, as of May 2019, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Two white guys older than any president-elect in the history of the US. Biden is arguably too conservative for the Democratic electorate, and Sanders is well to the left of the electorate. Even moving beyond Biden and Sanders, we have Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren as four of the top five. Warren isn’t as far left as Sanders, but she’s still well to the left of most Democrats. And Buttigieg is a white guy.
What’s going on here?
Leftist activists disagree with one another. In other news, bears shit in the woods, the Pope is Catholic, etc. This disagreement is the cause of Twitter conflicts ranging from polite discussion to dumpster fires. How should we handle these conflicts? Should we try to get along? When? How can we tell when we’re taking conflicts too far?
Without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?
I’ll address some of these questions in this post. Probably not the one from The Simpsons.
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