And now we’re moving from summer into fall. I can’t say I organize my reading too much around season, but maybe it has an impact.
Let’s find out. Looking down at the list, I see a bit more on politics. As well as one leftover summer novel.
Page 53 of 113
So, back in 2019, I wrote a post on the different DSA caucuses. In that post, I looked only at caucus ideology as caucuses described it.
I thought about doing a similar task before the 2021 DSA Convention. But I decided against it. Why? For one, someone else already did a good job of it. Two, I thought readers might benefit from a fresh approach.
Let’s look at the DSA caucuses by how they react to problems. One specific problem, in fact. So, that’s what I’ll do in this post.
The business literature often tells us that most people don’t like their jobs. Business leaders take a mixed attitude toward this. But what they don’t like – and what the literature also shows – is workers who are actively disengaged from their work. Among other things, disengaged workers show less productivity.
This doesn’t interest me much. As a leftist, though, I’m a lot more interested in the kind of advice the literature provides. It usually recommends a kind of propaganda campaign aimed at workers. These campaigns try to tell workers they have good jobs. They try to get workers more excited and engaged.
Maybe. But, as we know, work won’t love you back. A recent book even tells us as much. Many of us – especially white-collar workers – might consider a different strategy. Why not work a merely tolerable job, complete it quickly and efficiently, and then organize in our own time?
I think lots of people run some version of this playbook. They work a regular job and then organize with the DSA, for example.
Any readers have luck with this strategy?
Image Source
We see lots and lots of coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of it’s clickbait. Some of it can inform us, sometimes in great depth. We can find, for example, many in-depth accounts of what hospitalization or ‘long COVID‘ is like. But very little of it – almost none – gives us much in the way of practical, useful information for risk assessment.
In particular, the news coverage doesn’t give us a good sense of the proportional danger to specific groups of people. This goes even more so for the delta variant, where the vast majority of the coverage presents misleading information. In that last sentence, I linked to the CDC’s overview, which is much more informative than the news coverage. With delta, the news veers between COVID denialism and gross exaggeration of the risk to specific groups, children prominent among them.
So, I’m going to take a crack at risk assessment here. I’ll present CDC data and draw tentative inferences about risk by age and vaccination status. Let’s see if I can provide some of the missing risk assessment info.
Most leftists know the pandemic kicked up a lot of interest in mutual aid. And most of us like mutual aid, even if we hesitate on it. Not all of us, though, which raises a few issues.
When we debate mutual aid, either pro or con, we almost always start by distinguishing it from charity. Supporters say it’s better than charity, while opponents say it’s just charity wrapped in leftist rhetoric. In other words, both sides agree that mutual aid is (mostly) good and charity is (mostly) bad. They usually disagree only on which box – ‘mutual aid’ or ‘charity’ – in which we ought to place certain projects.
I’ll take a new route here. I’ll argue that the distinction between mutual aid and charity doesn’t help us decide what to do as leftists. Why? It’s a false dichotomy, and it doesn’t cleanly map onto ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ anyway. In practice, most projects flying the ‘mutual aid’ banner use both mutual aid and charity. Often they’re a mix of the two, and at other times they’re something in between. This false dichotomy, then, leads us astray when we decide what to work on.
Let’s talk details.
