NEW in Damage: Benjamin Fong leading the charge toward a Socialist Minimalism.
There is a path usually not taken... And that is simply to have no definite opinion about many issues that our media outlets tell us are very pressing.
NEW: Ibram X. Kendi's antiracist project was designed as a multilevel marketing scheme for white guilt. It was never intended to uplift working-class black people and it obscures the kind of class analysis that could point in that direction.
@J_Myles_TIR
:
NEW: the Left did a no growth. the Left did a capitalist realism. the Left did a technological determinism.
@CaleBroooks
on Degrowth’s flawed economics underlying its harmful politics:
NEW: Marxist politics is about class struggle, not simply mobilizing identities and subjective orientations.
@Matthuber78
on the latest crop of academics hostile to working class politics:
Print No 1:
Amber A'Lee Frost
Kay Rippelmeyer-Tippy
Ted Boettner
Megan Milliken Biven
Dustin Guastella
Fred Stafford
Matt Huber
Sam Kriss
Taylor Hines
Yakov Feygin
Kevin Zhang
George Hoare
Christie Offenbacher
Ben Fife
Chris Crawford
Christian Parenti
Anton Jäger
"That such a book was lauded by so many sections of the left is a concerning display of the distance the left has travelled from the labour movement.... With friends like these, the labour movement hardly needs enemies."
“The sexual revolution, as
@bureaucatliu
describes in Virtue Hoarders, ‘was a revolution that made orgasm and pleasure objects of PMC moral and pedagogical refinement.’”
Psychiatric diagnosis limits complexity in order to arrive at clinically manageable and understandable entities. It is called upon in this day and age exactly for that limiting function.
"The anti-utopian utopianism of the twentieth century eschewed flights of fancy for concrete world-building. Now we are stuck between a dystopianism that promises an end and a utopianism that does the same."
@AntonJaegermm
's contribution to Damage Issue 1
This fantasy demonstrates that libs formally speaking have the exact same authoritarian delusions as Q anon. This desire for political opponents to be immediately liquidated/silenced by powerful state actors; emphasis on culture as true battleground (Twitter).
NEW: Democratic politics vs. blowing up pipelines is not a great debate. Militant disruption shouldn’t be written out of the tactical repertoire, but it matters who causes it, and to what end.
“The message of the film is all too obvious, and therefore almost impossible to grasp: that art is in thrall to money, and is thereby deformed.”
Out today is
@bureaucatliu
and Drake Tyler’s review of Tár.
“Tech workers gravitate toward things like banning Trump from their platforms and gender and racial equity within their companies, two demands to which many Silicon Valley executives are probably quite sympathetic—unlike, of course, higher wages”
PMC unions suck. They're not fighting for better wages and conditions, they just want to impose their dumb ethical codes.
Netflix employees join wave of tech activism with walkout over Chappelle controversy
The dissolution of voluntary organizations, the decline of Fordist job stability & trade unionism, the death of religious life—all were forces that generated the demand for social media long before there was a product like Facebook to supply the consumer.
The turn to a “politics of building” is a welcome change, but the green Left is still at odds with the labor movement, which better understands what is needed for deep decarbonization and which has the power to help bring it about.
New from
@Matthuber78
There’s a lot of talk about “woke” and “anti-woke” left, but here at Damage magazine, we believe the only meaningful distinction is between the neurotic vs psychotic left, the depressive vs paranoid schizoid left. But people just aren’t ready for that conversation.
NEW: Those following the debate between Seth Ackerman & Aaron Benanav about the cogency of Robert Brenner’s theory of global stagnation might forget that it all started with a political question.
Benjamin Fong argues against us getting lost in the theory:
Cultural experience is no longer a personal journey of transformation but an endless stream of the ever-same that neither helps us develop nor inculcates in us a sense of discernment.
more here:
At a moment of deep economic and political crisis in American history, Damage Magazine has the hard-hitting news you need. Here's our four-part history of the anus in psychoanalytic theory.
This obviously doesn't happen overnight, but it would be nice to know with some precision when language became the most important thing about being on the left. It is strange that this corporate PR mentality not only does not grate against us, but is basically second nature.
"The logical endpoint of this development is that if tensions between the PMC and working-class voters cannot be resolved, then non-majoritarian justifications for policies and political decision-making will be required."
-
@bungacast
's George Hoare
If only we could find ready-made revolutionaries, there would be no need to do the dull business of winning people to the cause.
@JamesHeartfield
on the Agency Debates
Why are the esrtwhile hysterical Crybullies of Social Justice Sanctimony now extolling the virtues of stoicism, censuring those that would dare admit that this moment might be a bit—dare I say—“traumatizing”?
"From its initial task of rethinking mobilization for an age of demobilization, the aim of the remaining Left populists will be to manage mobilization in an age of potential remobilization."
- Aufhebunga Bunga's George Hoare on the future of left populism
@BuddyYakov
's contribution to the first print issue of Damage Magazine:
"To better direct its firehose of public investment, the modern state needs new microeconomic tools and its own mechanics to work with them."
The US was better when Hollywood was its main shop window for mass entertainment, before they nuked the borders between politics and showbusiness. Bring back the actual 'culture industry.'
It is because much of the Left in its current iteration is broadly inhospitable to critique that heterodox thinkers can be hived off by publications whose mission is to sow confusion about who is on what side. n+1 and Compact share an unconscious bond.
NEW: A serious socialist agricultural policy would reject the pastoral utopian dreams of organic agriculture.
@Daniel_A_Villar
makes the case for democratic ownership of industrial agriculture. More here:
Worst academic filler words/phrases? "In some sense" has to be up there. In some sense as opposed to all senses, or no sense? The obvious interpretation: anxious qualification gone awry.
"This clinical phenomenon is a response to the shattering of cultural and social structures as organizing agents of individual lives, which leads to a need to rigidly define the self in terms of identity."
“Antifa” is the boy who cried wolf—for four years. If an actual wolf shows up in the near future, it’s unclear if anyone will heed the warning. -
@Alex__1789
on the political function of antifascism today
"Harold Ickes’s career illustrates how crucial competent, principled administrators can be to the success of public programs. We’ll need many more bureaucrats like him if we want large, effective public programs again."
“Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things... There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.”
The globalization of wokeness obliterates national political cultures, and even their own traditions of anti-racism, in favor of a US template that hardly ever maps onto local antagonisms.
@Alex__1789
The Odyssey is a letter to you, a message sent from the very beginning of the literate age to its end. This is one of those little ironies the Greeks liked so much. By the time it reached its destination, there was nobody who could read it.
"Non-Americans are acting like they’re Americans, fantasizing participation in America’s problems, eagerly adopting the slogans and paraphernalia of a uniquely American protest."
@Alex__1789
on the fantasies & evasions at work in the intl BLM protests.
NEW: Today, rather than succumb to the dominance of money, we should resume an older conversation about the collective determination of needs.
Benjamin Fong reviews
@AntonJaegermm
and
@DanielZamoraV
’s history of Universal Basic Income:
The globalization of wokeness obliterates national political cultures, and even their own traditions of anti-racism, in favor of a US template that hardly ever maps onto local antagonisms.
by
@Alex__1789
NEW: Can we as artists, critics, and activists come up with counterpropaganda about the exploitation of human beings at the heart of service work?
@bureaucatliu
asks, what message are the recent service industry narratives meant to deliver? More:
"...the way in which every American child can devour an ice cream cone and thereby at any moment find a fulfillment of childhood bliss—something to which our children once vainly craned their necks—is truly a part of the fulfilled utopia."
"The cultural studies revolution has been a disaster for the humanities and social sciences, but enormously successful in obfuscating growing social inequality and inflating the importance of culture wars."
@bureaucatliu
in Issue
#2
, "Deinstitutionalized"
"The realities of the conflict between Israel and Hamas are discomfiting and do not fit into a neat whole, nor do they fit easily into inherited slogans or moral formulas."
@alexgourevitch
NEW today in Damage
Michael was always thoughtful and supportive, always thinking about ways to bring people onto the same page, highlighting the interests we all share in the struggle for a better world. His curiosity gave the rest of us an opportunity to learn. A very tragic loss.
We will see little to no mobilization, and probably no ‘counter-hegemonic’ subject. Instead, the West will witness the completion of the capsular civilisation constructed by neoliberalism.
NEW: While we may not drill for much oil and gas in the future, oilfield work will still be needed to clean up the many abandoned well sites.
@BayouTerrier
& Ted Boettner propose how an Abandoned Wells Administration could create essential, good jobs:
"More importantly, our increasingly jobless capitalism is not only incapable of automation, but also rests on a deeply atrophied civil society in which the institutions that could articulate needs beyond pure PR messaging appear ever feebler and mute."
If we’re going to meet the electorate where they’re at, that requires at the very least a strategic willingness to drop some of the litmus tests, and perhaps even actively seeking out and supporting candidates who don’t fit a 'monolithically left' profile
@TrueAnonPod
@Liz_Franczak
The way in which Stephen Kinzer phrases this makes it seem like Allen Dulles confessed to being a pedophile and then killed James Kronthal for knowing he was
Four Seasons Total Landscaping is a liberal's dream, fitting perfectly on one side of the "dumb" <-> "smart" spectrum that dominates their worldview.
But props to whoever picked up the phone at FSTL and calmly replied, "Yes, I'd be happy to reserve an event space for you."
"The Covid Blackmail reinforces at a deep moral level the atomization that creates that collective powerlessness... Acting in concert or collectively is morally irresponsible; politics is a superspreader event."
In the first released article from Damage Print Issue
#2
, "Deinstitutionalized,"
@Matthuber78
and
@fredstaffordcs
defend the utility model against the climate activists who seek to dismantle it
New episode of American Prestige with the great Aziz Rana is up! We really go into it in this one, examining everything from the insular cases to Cold War politics to Biden’s foreign policy.
NEW: The epoch of millennial socialism and national conservatism is fading fast.
@McilhaggaSamuel
reviews
@AntonJaegermm
& Arthur Boriello’s book on the failure of both the Left and the Right to use populism to capture political hegemony:
This story and the one about the managers of the Tyson plant betting on how many employees would catch Covid both capture how America is manifestly a horrifying capitalist dystopia, but they won’t generate one fraction of the rage generated by a single Trump tweet.
The unsubstantiated accusations that the US government and corporate media make against China are pure projection of Washington's own crimes:
Texas prisoners are being paid $2 an hour to risk their lives moving the bodies of people who died from Covid-19.
Are you enjoying TV right now? I hope you are, because we’re nearly at the end. These are the dregs we’re watching. That quiet rasp in the background of your favourite new drama: it’s the sound of a barrel being scraped.
Really interesting study out from Jacobin/YouGov today. Matt Karp does a good job summarizing key findings, but everyone should take a look at the details as well. Hopefully more surveys like this will begin to turn up as the left continues to build.
It's the defining problem of our age: No social-democratic project can succeed without a working-class base, but progressives have been losing workers' votes for years.
What to do? A new survey of 2,000 working-class Americans, out today, has some ideas:
For liberals living in the vain hope that this pandemus ex machina might resuscitate evidence-based policy, now might be a good opportunity to embrace political change and rediscover leadership through persuasion, rather than through scientific diktat.
2021 through Damaged eyes:
1. The PMC Gets Organized
"Tech workers gravitate toward things like banning Trump from their platforms and gender and racial equity within their companies—unlike, of course, higher wages.”
"In thinking of them as fascist strongmen rather than weak placeholders, the Left avoids its real task of filling the political void with a concrete, alternative program."
@Alex__1789
in a new article on antifascism
If legislation that indicates some meaningful structural shift passes, even the modest labor protections of the PRO Act, let’s reassess, but until then we should dispense with the comforting illusion of having sway over a fluid and depressing situation.
New essay by
@mirrorstage_
on the Taylorization of mental healthcare. Deskilling, automation, task-shifting. When therapists and researchers take the for-profit model as the only horizon, these trends are not just inevitable. They are marks of progress.
The Truman Show, Office Space, Fight Club, eXistenZ, Abre los ojos, and, of course, The Matrix. For a few years, Hollywood was constantly begging us to consider that our entire reality was one vast illusion. They are hiding the truth. But what truth?
Looking forward to reading the latest issue of Critical Historical Studies on the work of Moishe Postone. Here is the first part of an interview with Moishe from last year.
Because when you are powerless to actually solve social problems, you have to settle for making the language you use to describe them more woke. Without this move, whole swathes of left publishing and politics would have nothing to contribute.
FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps was a remarkable solution to the overlapping crises of the Depression. The basic idea was to put men to work on land conservation projects.
More from Kay Rippelmeyer-Tippy’s print article here:
"The idiot is not merely the stupid person but the private person. In other words, idiocy, as opposed to foolishness, is a social or ethical failing as well as a cognitive one."