Another interesting aspect of this, to me, anyway:

What kind of society/system change do leftists want? Where/when do we think it’s time to say, “We found our milk and honey. Let’s stop here and enjoy it”?

As in, do we want to push for social democracy as a stage on the way to getting rid of capitalism entirely? Pragmatism of one sort or another may come into play here.

Or is social democracy as far as we should go?

My own take, which a few recent reads have helped crystallize: If capitalism is the economic system, it will always require large sacrifice zones, domestically, internationally. It will always need places to go, geographically and into the future, to offload pain, to exploit, to keep profits and executive salaries high and business costs low.

So there really is no way, IMO, to have even a mixed economy serve all. If we have it in, say, Scandinavia, it can’t also exist all over Africa, Latin America, Asia or in the good old USA. There must always be that surplus army of unemployed and radically underpaid. There must always been rampant inequality or you can’t have millionaires, much less billionaires. You have to have metaphorical trash cans and very real dead zones strategically placed, or there is no “capital formation,” much less “wealth accumulation.”

Martin Hagglund (This Life) thinks social democracy is superior to what we have now. But he also thinks it’s not possible to sustain or extend all that far for some of the reasons above. Reading Jason Hickel’s The Divide, makes that even clearer. The Global North can enact this or that social program, protection, benefit for itself, etc. etc. because those are blocked elsewhere. It can do its capital formation because it rips off so much of the rest of the world.

To make a long story short, it’s complicated.

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

“you can define leftism as rejecting capitalism”

Is that true of social democracy? I don’t even think social democracy is anti small business. I think that social democracy–which is left/progressive, of course–supports a mixed economy where large wealthy interests don’t and can’t dominate public and economic life.

I have recently found myself in arguments many times with righties who assume social democracy is socialism and I then have to explain the difference.

It’s funny if some leftists don’t even make the same distinction.

I may be misreading you . . . but being anticapitalist isn’t “anti small business.” At least not necessarily. Capitalism, as you know, is just one form/mode of production, and fairly recent on the scene, relatively speaking. You can have small businesses thrive in non-capitalist settings, as we had all over America before the Civil War.

I’ve used the example before. If you build custom chairs, say, for a living, don’t have employees, take care of the entire process yourself, you’re not a capitalist. It’s not a capitalist business. It becomes capitalist, however, if you purchase labor power to make those chairs for you, appropriate all the money they generate — cuz that theft is legal under capitalism — and allocate it in any manner you want. M-C-M and exchange value . . . instead of something like C-M-C and use-value, which predated capitalism.

You can also scale up business and keep it non-capitalist if no one is an employee, everyone is a co-owner, you share the fruits of your labor, etc. etc. A basic co-op or Wolff’s WSDE are examples of that.

The difference between left and right anticapitalism tends to come down to this: Is the replacement egalitarian, democratic, eco-friendly? It’s a basic assumption for leftists that the business will be non-profit too.

A right-wing anticapitalist, OTOH, isn’t going to give a damn about those things. You could be a tyrannical sole proprietor, with no leftist values/vision/moral compass, and still be anticapitalist, etc. etc.

Good riff (by Max Stirner) on one of my favorite shows, Peaky Blinders.

Kinda rare for a TV series to deal directly with an historical figure like Oswald Mosley, the English fascist. But it does. And with some pretty interesting results, twists and turns.

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

The question remains though.

Define what is meant by “leftist/progressive.” Waterfield asked that a couple of times.

BT gave one try at it and I gave another. But…no one person is going to nail that.

I learn a lot from people giving that an effort.

================
I’ll get around to it eventually. Its a hard question to keep simple, and message-board-sized. Its also not the easiest thing to answer, in general. What is a leftist?

The basics havent changed for me since the 90’s but I think I’m more focused on Imperialism now than i was in my earlier-leftist-life. I dunno why.

w
v

Personally, I think you were a much better leftist when your focus was on Sarah Michelle Gellar. Matt Taibbi thought so too, back in the day, cuz he needed help slaying Vampire Squids.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

— John Keats

Some more on ZN’s question. The usual qualifiers apply. Just speaking for myself, etc.

As mentioned countless times before, there are lotsa differences within and among leftist indies, cohorts, camps, schools, or whatever the best word might be for a bunch of unruly folks who may be tougher to herd than cats, and harder to define than “beauty, wisdom, truth,” and so on.

Narrowing that down a bit (in no particular order or range): We got your anarchist-communists, anarchist-socialists, communists, socialists, libertarian communists, libertarian socialists, left-libertarians, democratic socialists . . . and, WV’s “mild leftists.” One possible interpretation of the latter, judging by WV’s examples, could be:

Folks in the democratic socialist camp (especially, but not exclusively) who don’t think America is ready yet for full-on democratic socialism — which would entail actual economic democracy — so they push for social democratic reforms and policies instead. IMO, social democracy isn’t leftist. But we’re good friends. We can hang out together, easily. Shoot the shit, etc. Contrary to all too much of the critique against “mild leftists,” they’re more than willing to dial back on vision/goals in exchange for important wins now. They won’t sell out. But they will be “pragmatic” when it’s needed.

MLK did that. Orwell and Camus did that later in life. I think AOC and Bernie do that as well. All the time.

Just a hunch? I think AOC is actually to Bernie’s left, and wants to go much further than he does (thank goddess!). I’m hoping she never, ever gets co-opted or stops fighting for real justice, equality, peace, human rights for everyone, actual democracy for everyone, and an end to empire.

wv wrote:

A simple way to think of Progressivism (or mild-leftism) vs Not-Leftism would be:
—
Biden vs FDR.
or
Hillary vs Bernie
or
Pelosi vs AOC
or
Obama vs MLK
—-

Not perfect analogies but its nice hack-sized.

Progressivism is about helping poor people.
Democrat-ism is about helping middle-class and wealthy.

w
v

That’s excellent, WV. Especially the “mild-leftism” part. I think it’s safe to say the leftists here aren’t “mild.” Thank goddess!!

;>)

I’d put myself in the category of “harsh” leftist, but with a big old heart and still-functioning moral compass. Another smile symbol added, etc. etc.

That said, how would you place the Republicans in this mix? If you added to your Hack-sized post, setting up a kinda tripartite comp, perhaps — or would it need a coupla more ites?

Leftist -> mild-leftist -> left-liberal -> liberal -> moderate -> centrist -> conservadem -> moderate Republican -> old school conservative -> Gingrich conservative -> Tea Party conservative -> right-libertarian -> Trumpist (“mild”-fascist) -> outright fascist.

The above diagram is just an approximation, and everyone’s mileage may vary, etc.

Anyway, how would the Republicans fit your scenario?

This one moved me too. At least from high school on, I’ve known this is a deeply personal issue for black Americans. Damn personal. Obviously, I can’t possibly know all the whys and wherefores from their perspective, but I’ve always known it matters.

Am proud of Virginia for doing this.

Marwa Eltaib stands in front of the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. The Crown Act was passed unanimously and was signed into law in 2019. Photograph: Dee Dwyer/The Guardian

‘Wear your crown, because change is coming’: Virginia joins states banning hair discrimination

(Lotsa cool pics online via the article)

Excerpt:

Virginia’s Crown Act goes into effect on Wednesday – and other southern states could follow

Kenya Evelyn in Richmond and photographs by Dee Dwyer Jonts
@LiveFromKenya

Wed 1 Jul 2020 07.46 EDT
Last modified on Thu 2 Jul 2020 03.05 EDT

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Carmen Davis went natural in 2004, motivated by her mother to do the “big chop”, a phrase commonly used to describe cutting off chemically straightened Black hair in favor of naturally textured kinks, coils or curls.
Cut and run: the underground hairdressers of lockdown
Read more

Standing in front of the recently defaced statue of the Confederate leader Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, she recalled the backlash against her decision.

“My roommate in college stopped talking me,” she said, noting how even in college at the time, being natural was rare. “She told me it was embarrassing to be seen with me and that I’d regret it.”

Today, Davis is a natural hairstylist, helping women in the Richmond area transition from chemical processing. Her former roommate eventually became one of her many clients.

Business is growing for Davis, but she admits change is slow in the “conservative, southern” state where, in many places, wearing natural hair could mean being denied a job or socially ostracized.

“Society overall frowns upon Black hair, but here it can still be uncommon for people to embrace it because of judgment or just the every day exhaustion of having to explain your Blackness,” she said.

Now they won’t have to. Virginia became the fourth US state, and the first in the south, to pass legislation banning hair discrimination based on racial identifiers including hair texture and hair type, as well as “protective hairstyles such as braids, [locs] and twists”. The law, known as the Crown Act, goes into effect on Wednesday.

For those who can’t get to the NYT:

By Caroline Randall Williams

Ms. Williams is a poet.

June 26, 2020

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
Instagram Live
Caroline Randall Williams will be doing a reading of this essay and answering questions on Instagram (@nytopinion) on Tuesday, June 30 at 7 p.m. Eastern.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

I change my mind about this, all the time. I changed it several times today, in fact. The differences between the two major parties. Are they significant? Are they meaningful, meaningless, relevant, irrelevant?

It depends. For me, it’s all relative and context is everything.

Struggling for useful metaphors, it’s kinda like comparisons seen up close versus those seen from distances . . . and those distances, between valleys, mountains, and further skyward. Up close, on most issues, if we just compare the two parties to each other, just them, to each other, as opposed to a certain set of standards for what should be the case . . . . as opposed to comparing them to higher ideals, the representation of all citizens and our best interests . . . adhering to those higher standards for helping us achieve the best quality of life (and society) possible, protecting the environment, embracing, extending, enhancing democracy and inclusion, etc. etc. . . . if we compare the two major parties not to each other but to “higher things,” they fail utterly, year after year.

But there’s a difference in the failure and the failings, and the differences can matter, on the ground. It can even be a life and death sort of difference, as in the case of Covid-19 responses, Climate Change, Civil/Workers/Women’s/LGBT rights, etc. etc. Following or fighting the science. Fighting or following authoritarianism to its logical ends. If we allow for the fact that they both fall so incredibly short of meeting the Higher Things . . . Yeah, there are differences between them that matter.

Have had a rough day so I’ll leave it there. Will try to elaborate on the above tomorrow, give examples and so on. It got “personal” today and yesterday as well. Not sure how it will all shake out over time, but it got personal for me.

Hope all is well, everyone.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

I am going to ask a personal request, if I can. I typed up an answer to Waterfield’s question about what is left/progressive and the ways the 2 mainstream parties are the same. I wonder if I could get people interested in adding to that discussion. I am always wondering about how to put that and what it includes. Other perspectives would help, it’s always enlightening to hear well-informed people muse about this. It’s here: http://theramshuddle.com/topic/are-dems-and-reps-really-the-same/

Will respond there later today. Good idea for a thread.

WV,

I think your “agnostic” stance is a good one. It’s smart to avoid instant judgments. Hesitation, skepticism, being circumspect, waiting for more evidence, etc. That’s just being smart.

Probably why you’ve been so effective at helping your clients for so long.

Thing is, unless I read them wrong, when it comes to Russia and Trump, especially, the Mate, Greenwald, Blumenthal folks aren’t agnostic at all. They just start out assuming it’s all nonsense and try to build their case from there. And they never admit to their errors afterward.

Time and time again the Trump administration, his cronies, and subsequent investigations all end up proving he/they actually did the things our MSM reported. Boiled down, it ends up being the case that 95-99% of what the MSM reported about Trump and company was true. If anything, they tend to undercount the atrocities.

How do we end up knowing this, in most cases? Trump himself, or his cronies, finally end up admitting this or that happened . . . of course, after going through various defensive/offensive stages, from angry denials, to bullying, to lashing out at the media and his political opponents (which tend to never stop); to saying, Yeah, some of that happened, but not the other stuff; to, Yeah, it all happened, but it wasn’t illegal; to, Yeah, it happened but it doesn’t mean anything cuz everyone does it!!

In the case of the Russian Bounties, Trump’s own spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany said this week that Trump was briefed on the subject, but that there wasn’t a consensus among the Intel community. That’s supposedly why they haven’t acted yet.

That already makes Mate and Blumenthal wrong on this issue.

If Russia is in the news, especially if the news is about Russia and Trump, it can’t be true, apparently — if we’re to believe Mate and company. It must be yet another (unsubstantiated) plot of the Dems, the Intel community — which Trump controls — and media all over the globe. It can never, evah be factual, and the only motives we should ever question are Democrats, their donors and the non-Trump-besotted media. We shouldn’t ever question the motives of far-right Putin or the far-right Russian state. They’re angels!! They’re always perfectly innocent!! They would never think of doing anything like this!!

;>)

Me? I think it makes far more sense to keep the skepticism meter on high for everyone, including Mate, Blumenthal and company. I don’t trust them automatically, either. I’m skeptical of mainstream and Internet niche sources . . . etc. etc.

Gotta corroborate, verify, use our own common sense, see the patterns, etc. etc. IMO, the (decade’s long) pattern of Trump’s connections with, and exploitation by, Putin, are too numerous and consistent to dismiss.

Related:

AMERICA’S RACIAL RECKONING Trump promotes video of a supporter saying ‘white power’ The video of a pro-Trump golf cart parade in the Villages, a retirement community in central Florida, includes counterprotesters calling the president a bigot.

And this, from America’s most dangerous AG in generations:

Home Share 2.7k National Security Barr forms task force to counter ‘anti-government extremists’ Attorney General William P. Barr speaks during a meeting at the White House on June 15. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) By Matt Zapotosky

June 26, 2020 at 5:15 p.m. EDT Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday directed the formation of a task force that will be dedicated to countering “anti-government extremists,” escalating federal law enforcement’s response to the violence that has sometimes marked nationwide protests against police brutality and racism, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. In the memo, Barr wrote that amid peaceful demonstrations, anti-government extremists had “engaged in indefensible acts of violence designed to undermine public order.”

Obviously, when Barr talks about “extremists,” he’s referring to we leftists, not right-wingers who actually commit nearly 99% of the violence. Egged on by Trump and right-wing media, he’s referring primarily to “antifa,” which Trump and company could decide is pretty much any dissenters they don’t like.

We’re in political hell, folks, along with pandemical hell.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by zn.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Billy_T.