Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on philosophy from the blog Base and Superstructure. My background is in academia, with a specific focus on feminism, philosophical issues in the social sciences, and social and political philosophy. I have also done work on historical figures such as J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These posts incorporate some or all of these issues. The influences may be more or less explicit, depending on the topic. Philosophy can be intimidating, and so these posts present issues in a way that’s open to many people. There is also discussion of specific philosophical issues, and specific issues from a philosophical perspective, such as feminist accounts of pornography, Marxist and socialist accounts of the state and political economy, and the search for the best explanations for social and material phenomena.
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.
This post is about David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules. But that’s not what comes to mind when most people think about Graeber.
Upon his fall 2020 death, many leftists rushed to define the work and legacy of David Graeber. The socialist left tended to focus on his work with Occupy Wall Street and his book Debt. By contrast, the mainstream press focused on the more popular book Bullshit Jobs. And both sides had a word to say about his final book The Dawn of Everything, which formed a kind of grand synthesis of his historical and political views.
That’s all well and good. I’ve read each of these books and written about a couple. Graeber’s work follows a familiar pattern – insightful, but problems tend to lurk.
But I think The Utopia of Rules is where we should go if we want to find Graeber’s most compelling work. In it, he goes after bureaucracy, especially its history and its shaping by the modern world. Though it wanders into the more speculative realms of social theory, it hits a key topic from several angles. And so, that’s our topic for today.
‘Radlib’? What’s that?
Let’s start here. Leftists turn to insults and name calling every now and then. And we have no shortage of names to call the people who disagree with us. We can (and do) call them ‘liberal.’ For the edgier among them, we can call them ‘ultra-liberal‘ (or even ‘ultra-left‘ if they’re leftists we don’t like). Or if we’re just feeling like pouring gas on a fire, we can use ‘shitlib.’
But I’m interested in ‘radlib.’ Let’s take a look at it. What might be compelling about it? Can it do any work those other terms can’t?
In his book Know-It-All Society, Michael P. Lynch claims that intellectual arrogance rules US politics. Along the way, he points out that people share the news not to get at the truth. Or even to engage with ideas. Rather, they share the news an act of expression – a case of what Lynch calls ‘expressivism’ (related to, but somewhat distinct from, ethical expressivism). ‘Expressivism,’ here, means they post news stories on Facebook and Twitter to say something about themselves rather than about the world.
I think Lynch makes a good point. And I want to extend that point a bit. I think the term ‘expressivism’ provides us with a useful way to look at how people talk about COVID policy and even the politics they want to see.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post on V.I. Lenin‘s essay ‘What is to Be Done?‘. I read it in a collection of essays called the Essential Works of Lenin. The same book contains his work The State and Revolution, which he wrote much later on the eve of the October Revolution.
In the other post, I noted some of the good and bad of Lenin. He thought a great deal about strategy and tactics. Along the way, he laid out a lot of insightful critique of magical thinking and bad strategy on the left. On the other hand, he clearly had an intolerant, authoritarian style and personality. This served him poorly, both as a philosopher and as a leader.
These same issues reappear in The State and Revolution. But we get something new in the later text: Lenin on the verge of power, now using a quasi-religious reading of the classic texts of Marx and Engels to justify his own views. One of Lenin’s uses of Engels struck me in particular.
With that in mind, let’s take a brief look at this line of thought in The State and Revolution.
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