Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
So, the summer’s coming to an end, and that’s kind of a bummer.
There’s not a lot I can do about that. But maybe I can brighten up your day with some new reading material.
What have I got for you this month? I’ve got a couple of books on Epicurean philosophy and history. And some things to go along with those books.
Read on to find out…
Kieran Setiya, an MIT philosophy professor, wrote a philosophically informed self-help book. It’s called Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. That doesn’t sound like it would work. But I found it helpful as a person who just turned 40 and wants to think and write about it.
Setiya approaches midlife from the perspective of diagnosing and solving the ‘midlife crisis,’ which, as he points out in the first chapter, isn’t a particularly old idea. At least in its explicit form. Rather than a crisis, midlife is really more of a vantage point. The person at midlife can see both a long past and a long future. Maybe the past worked out for them, and maybe the future will.
Or not.
I wanted to check in with a quick post laying out a few reactions to the 2023 DSA Convention. This isn’t meant to substitute for a more in-depth analysis of the Resolutions passed and the changes to the NPC. But I’m laying it out as an overview of the big picture.
1. By electing a ‘left’ NPC majority of 10-6 (with ‘left’ in quotes because it’s a contested term in DSA, to put it mildly), delegates signaled dissatisfaction with the 2021-2023 NPC. Particularly with the Socialist Majority and GND/Groundwork coalitions.
2. Delegates offered some clarity around key debates, e.g., BDS Working Group and Palestinian liberation, but they did so via compromise rather than by settling the issues for one side or another. This shows, I think, political maturity.
3. Finally, I think that by funding all current priority campaigns (Electoral, GND, Housing, International, Labor, M4A) and adding yet another priority campaign, i.e., trans liberation and reproductive rights, delegates punted on important political debates about prioritizing work. The org simply doesn’t have the money and capacity to run all these campaigns, so the NPC will ultimately have to decide which of these to prioritize. More importantly, the Convention locked in the current ‘issue’ strategy rather than switching to a more advisable ‘class’ strategy.
I suspect readers already know which campaigns I think we should prioritize: Housing, International, and Labor.
A couple years ago, Jacobin commissioned a study of working-class voters. I took a close look at the study in an earlier post, and in many ways the study went quite well for Jacobin. While it didn’t necessarily support the mag’s focus on elections and the national political narrative, it did suggest that working-class voters are attracted to a progressive, populist political message.
Jacobin continued the study with a second part, and so I’ll continue with a second post. Readers can check out the mag’s intro to the study here. And they can check out the full study here. While the first study provided social democrats with reason for optimism, the second study paints a much more challenging landscape.
Let’s talk about why.
It wouldn’t be a DSA Convention without endless rumors and drama! At least one faction has already appealed to made-up shenanigans and conspiracy theory to protest the removal of its (not especially popular) resolution from the conference program.
But enough about that. Here’s what I wanted to say a word about in this post: writing Convention resolutions.
I reviewed the 2023 resolutions in an earlier post. But when I was reading an objection to the ‘expand the NPC’ resolution, I brought a few points together.
Here’s how it goes.
Many resolutions suffer from a similar flaw. A group of very like-minded people get together. They push each other in the same direction until they turn a quite sensible proposal into an unbalanced, extreme, and poorly thought out proposal. In my earlier post, I identified three resolutions that did this. I suspect the one Red Star criticized is a fourth.
So, how do you prevent this from happening?
I’ll leave the reader with some advice. If you’re a DSA member thinking about writing a resolution, include at least one thoughtful and friendly critic on your team of writers. Run it past one of them. They’ll alert you to some of the problems. And you can address those problems before your resolution ends up taking heat for all those problems you ignored at the outset.
Who knows? If you ask nicely enough, I might even be your thoughtful and friendly critic.
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