Page 19 of 113

A wealthy person represented as a Roman emperor watching middle class people surrounded by lions. Intended as a representation of class constructivism.

Class Constructivism: A Dead End

July 17, 2023 / baseblogger

Sociologists Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan recently sketched out their response to the class reductionism debate. Their approach lines up rather nicely with the one I took in a post and article. But they also make conceptual space for views I think we can see floating around in various forms. I want to take a look at one such view: class constructivism.

I’ll start by saying a word about how McCarthy and Desan lay out the conceptual space. And then I’ll move on to sketch out class constructivism. While few views completely fit into the class constructivism camp, I think we can find appeals to something like it within common perspectives in both DSA and the broader left.

A depiction of Socrates, a disciple, and Diotema, three characters from Plato's Symposium.

Do Women Get All the Philosophy Jobs?

July 10, 2023 / baseblogger

I hit the academic philosophy job market in 2011 and stayed there – in some form or another – until 2015. Things really sucked back then. It was hard for anyone to get a job, but women and other under-represented groups faced special difficulties, both on the job market and in the years before hitting the market.

We talked about these things all the time in those days. But I mostly dropped out of those discussions after 2015. It’s not that I lost interest in the topic, exactly. I still think it’s an important topic. Rather, it’s that I’m no longer a part of the philosophy profession. Sure, I’ll always have a PhD in Philosophy, a publishing record, and an interest in the topics and issues. So I’ll always think of myself as a philosopher. But I landed a non-academic job in 2013. I published my most recent article in a philosophy journal in 2016. And I now sport a decade long career outside of academia.

But I recently found an occasion to peer back in. I’ll do so by looking at data showing a very different job market situation. Data now show that women do better than men on the philosophy job market.

What’s going on there?

Working While Sick

July 6, 2023 / baseblogger

I don’t have many lofty thoughts on the topic of working while sick. It’s just that I recently overheard someone coughing in public, and it made me uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as it would have in March or April 2020. But uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable in a way that it wouldn’t have made me in 2019, you know? And that takes me back to the world of the white-collar office before 2020. When people showed up to work, in-person, while sick. And they did it all the damn time.

What was with that?

Banner depicting 'socializing with socialists.' Intended as an illustration of the DSA critique of anarchism.

DSA Criticism of Anarchism

June 26, 2023 / baseblogger

If nothing else, we know DSA has lots of internal faction fights and rivalries. Many of these are expressed through the caucus system, which I’ve written about a number of times.

But we see another rivalry between more national-focused, centralizing factions and rival views those factions often call ‘anarchism.’ I use quotes for ‘anarchism’ because the view they discuss doesn’t appear, at least to me, to trace all that well to any historical or contemporary anarchist views. It seems to me more of a shorthand for a ‘let’s not do anything’ view.

To get a bit more specific, I think lots of people in DSA see a kind of anti-politics that comes from the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And they see a strain of the same kind of politics coming from Occupy Wall Street and related movements. We can trace critique of that to Jacobin and, even earlier, to its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara. See, for example, this article and this response to it.

Let’s briefly address these issues. What’s going on here?

After Black Lives Matter

June 22, 2023 / baseblogger

Cedric Johnson dropped After Black Lives Matter into an ongoing debate between a ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ left. It’s an older debate, but one running hot in the last few years. Unlike many other authors, Johnson tries, at least in some ways, to work around and between the two camps.

Not that he always succeeds. And it’s pretty clear which side he prefers (the ‘anti-woke’ side). But I think he wrote After Black Lives Matter in an effort to move the debate forward.

Let’s take a look.

Base and Superstructure

Page 19 of 113

Class Constructivism: A Dead End

Do Women Get All the Philosophy Jobs?

Working While Sick

DSA Criticism of Anarchism

After Black Lives Matter

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