Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

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great resignation striketober

The Great Resignation and Striketober

November 8, 2021 /

From time to time, I sort employees into three categories: those who suffer from angst, those who suffer from ennui, and those who suffer from neither. As readers might expect, I’m suspicious of that latter group. But this time, I’ll do something a bit different with the topic. I’ll say a bit about how all this relates to the ‘Great Resignation.’

For anyone living under a rock, lots of people quit their jobs this year. More than any other year on record! Are they bored? Did a collective brush with mortality last year push them to make a change? Or are workers simply getting tired of low wages and inadequate benefits?

So, what’s going on with the workforce? What spurred the Great Resignation? And does Striketober represent a reaction to the forces of the Great Resignation?

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consent choice

Complexities of Choice and Consent

November 4, 2021 /

By now I’m sure many of us know that the choices we make are far more complex than popular debate suggests. Almost everyone agrees on the need for consent, on at least some notion of ‘consent.’ But whether and how we consent – and what kind of consent we need – remains less clear.

I might approach these issues in a million ways. But here’s one way. I recently re-read a blog post on Feministing. The post covered a 2014 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly on gender and choices about body hair. It turns out that a woman’s decision to remove (or not remove) body hair is a pretty complicated one. In particular, the social pressures involved cloud the matter of whether and how women consent and make choices.

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A Socialist Stance on Reparations?

November 1, 2021 /

reparations

Lots of leftists – and people within racial justice spaces – discuss reparations. I’ve had some thoughts on it for awhile. And I revisited a solid article in Jacobin by Brian Jones. It’s called “The Socialist Case for Reparations.”

Jones gets one big thing right. He points out that as socialists we don’t need to adopt an either/or approach to issues of race and class. We don’t need to argue for either a broad social democratic vision that excludes race or a vision for reparations that caters to the black professional classes, ignores the role race plays in capitalism, and precludes a multiracial working–class coalition.

I’ll say a few things here about what I consider the best socialist case for reparations. In doing so, I’ll mostly leave open what, exactly, ‘reparations’ means. In the end, I think that adds up to the best socialist stance on the topic.

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Sacred Texts Marx

The Sacred Texts!

October 28, 2021 /

This is going to be a pretty light Thursday, everyone. Perhaps in recognition of Halloween? Anyway, the left has a complicated relationship with its ‘sacred texts.’ Marx for just about all of us. But also people like Lenin or Mao for some. Or even more recent figures like Angela Davis for others.

Some leftists want to throw the sacred texts out, while others want to revere them. I don’t find either approach especially helpful. So, read the sacred texts. Don’t ignore them. Don’t revere them, either. Learn, apply, and criticize them.

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The Refusal of Work

The Refusal of Work

October 25, 2021 /

For decades, the left has split roughly into a pro-work and an anti-work camp. David Frayne doesn’t exactly frame his book The Refusal of Work as a contribution to that debate. But lots of people on the anti-work side cite it in support of their views. And so, I recently read The Refusal of Work with an eye toward its implications for that debate.

I’ll lay out a few thoughts on The Refusal of Work in this post. I think the book makes some valuable contributions to moral and political debates about work. It lays out some of the problems with work and helps us imagine alternatives. But I don’t think Frayne does many favors for the anti-work socialist camp.

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