Category: Language (Page 6 of 9)

These are posts on language from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include political terminology, language use among politicians and political analysts, and the terminology of social movements.

Two Concepts of White Privilege

July 3, 2019 / baseblogger

Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)

The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.

But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.

How to Handle Conflicts With Fellow Activists

May 16, 2019 / baseblogger

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.

Is Class an Identity? On Class-Identitarianism

April 29, 2019 / baseblogger

Lots of people now think about class in terms of identity. But this is a peculiarly modern idea. We find it in terms like ‘Nascar Dads’. And we find it in weird, quasi-ideological attachments to Carhartt products. We might call the politics of class-as-identity ‘class-identitarianism.’ It’s an ugly term, but let’s not shy away from ugly. At least not yet.

I’m working on answering two questions in this post. First, is class an identity? And, if it is, does class-identitarianism offer an explanatory framework that helps us make sense of the world and/or formulate a better political path?

Chomsky-Foucault Debate: Live from 1971

April 22, 2019 / baseblogger

Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foucalt.png)

Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down for a debate in the early 1970s. You can watch the whole thing here. The transcript, along with some related essays from both Chomsky and Foucault, is available to buy as a book. It’s known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate.

I wasn’t new to either Chomsky or Foucault when I watched and read the Chomsky-Foucault debate. And the short debate format has its clear limits. But I did come away with a few impressions and lessons learned.

I’ll lay those out.

Polyamory and Neoliberalism

April 15, 2019 / baseblogger

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.

Category: Language (Page 6 of 9)

Two Concepts of White Privilege

How to Handle Conflicts With Fellow Activists

Is Class an Identity? On Class-Identitarianism

Chomsky-Foucault Debate: Live from 1971

Polyamory and Neoliberalism

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