Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
Beware Silicon Valley and its tech dreams. But you (hopefully) already knew that. What else? Or, perhaps, what (aside from the obvious) falls under the Valley’s scope? For one, the eerily dystopian utopia of its Ted Talks and its free beer and free dinner in recently gentrified utopian spaces. And for another, the young, disaffected men currently embracing Andrew Yang‘s UBI snake oil. Any discussion of coworking spaces starts here.
But it hardly ends here. What comes next?
Most conversations about race and capitalism quickly degenerate into a chicken-or-egg discussion. You know the one. Which came first, racism or our beloved ‘free enterprise system’? I say we’ve had enough of that. The debate is played out. It’s monotonous and tired. But there’s a Marxist term from the debate still relevant to us. I’m referring to ‘primitive accumulation‘.
Does ‘primitive accumulation’ solve these issues? If so, how far does it take us? More broadly, does primitive accumulation account for the role of race in the capitalist system? Or if you approach these issues like, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates approaches them, does it account for the role of capitalism in the racial hierarchy?
Lots of people talk about class reductionism. Most people seem to agree it’s a bad thing, and that some other group of people does it. But few people talk about what ‘class reductionism’ means. It’s simply assumed or unstated. I, on the other hand, find the term extremely unclear. And unclear in both its parts. That is to say I think it’s unclear what ‘class’ means and what it means to reduce something to it.
What we have, then, is a useful project for an analytic philosopher. What does ‘class reductionism’ mean? Is it a political or explanatory project of some kind? What’s it all about? Some thoughts on that…
And it’s time for another end of the year review post! I started the year off with a bang and a New Year’s Resolution: Tenants union activism. My first post of the year was Why You Should Join a Tenants Union in 2019. I was working on a tenants union with our local Iowa City DSA chapter, and we successfully formed in July. Not a bad start to 2019.
How’d the rest of the blogging year go?
Foreign policy is pretty central both to why I first became interested in politics and how I think leftist politics should work. And I think issues in Latin America are among the world’s most interesting and important. Yet I haven’t written much about Latin America in this blog. I’ll aim to correct that a bit with some discussion of Bolivia.
But, first, I want to say a bit about the special difficulties of writing about US policy in Latin America, generally, and in Bolivia, specifically. In the social media-inspired era of having an opinion about literally every little thing, I might bring a bit of a retro attitude toward Bolivia: fear of making a mistake. Fear, perhaps, that my own methods aren’t well suited to Bolivia.
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