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.
Sarah Smarsh and I both grew up in the rural Midwest. But she’s the only one of us who’s written a book about it. Good for her! Her book is called Heartland, and I’d recommend reading it.
I wrote a bit about the book in an earlier post. But here are some more detailed thoughts I had as I read along.
I’ll begin from this insight: certain kinds of personal relationships seem to ‘fit’ better with certain economic forms. That’s one (possible) implication of the ‘base and superstructure’ thesis, after all. But that’s just a starting point.
I think of this in roughly the same way Marx did, so long as we interpret Marx in a way that avoids any kind of hardcore historical determinism or teleology. The relationship between economic relations and personal relations isn’t one way and deterministic. The notion of a causal feedback loop is better, though that, too, has its shortcomings.
Rather, it’s a dialectical relation. As David Harvey points out in his Companion to Marx’s Capital, we’re talking here about a highly fluid and transformative relation. One that’s always in motion. The base and superstructure co-evolve, as it were. The base perhaps sets a basic tone, or a set of limitations, and/or an ‘easier’ path. But it’s much more open-ended than any deterministic relation or feedback loop allows.
And so, let’s start with some basic questions. What kinds of relationships best fit our current situation in the United States, which we might describe as ‘neoliberal capitalism’ or ‘financialized capitalism’? How do those relationships differ from those that fit the Keynesian consensus? Or the even earlier stages of industrial capitalism?
I’m writing here about polyamory in light of this background.
Samantha Allen is a trans woman and ex-Mormon who lived for a time in Provo, Utah. She recently wrote a book called Real Queer America. The basic idea is to take a road trip through red states, chronicling the LGBT communities therein. She drove from Utah to Texas to Indiana to Tennessee to Georgia.
Her premise is that the red state American crucibles produce unique LGBT spaces. These are spaces where LGBT people have to overcome differences and find common ground, avoiding the kind of arcane squabbling found in New York or San Francisco, where communities are large enough to divide into warring subgroups.
The book itself is pretty good. It’s a worthwhile travelogue, and it does show how smaller places can be as radical and beautiful as larger ones. Not that I don’t have any quibbles. She organizes the book more around legislation than movements, and there are thorny issues of gentrification and homonormativity that she sometimes overlooks.
But this post is less a review of Real Queer America than a reaction to one of the stops on Allen’s road trip. She visits Bloomington, Indiana, where I lived for 6 years.
We hear a lot of grumbling about the so-called ‘liberal bubble’. The idea seems to be that many Democrats live in a certain state of political and social isolation.
The details vary, but we can sketch out certain features of the liberal bubble. It’s supposed to look like this: major urban area or college town, highly educated population, mixed income but higher class standing (i.e., not proletarian), strong cultural amenities, and strongly Democratic at the ballot box.
What are these places like? If they exist, so what? Are they a problem?
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