Aesthetic Materialism

I have, in the past, identified as an anarchist.  Really, none of my opinions or positions on any major issues have changed since then.  But I think the label "anarchist" is misleading and unhelpful for a lot of people and so I usually avoid using this label (see my essay on the "Eminem strategy").  But for exactly the same reasons, I think it's mostly unhelpful to use terms like "communist" or "socialist".  If I need to sum up my political opinions, I can do so in a three word phrase: Own Your Job .  I've asserted before that I believe in worker ownership of the means of production.  But this is a bunch of jargon.  What does it mean?  What is the "means of production"?  Most people picture buildings, machines, and raw materials.  And that's true, in a way.  When Marx writes about the "sublation" (Aufheben) of private property, he distinguishes private property from personal property.  In a just social order, peopl...

  I don't think capitalism is evil.  I don't.  I think it's essentially neutral, or that there is no essence.  Because it's so decentralized and uncoordinated - not completely, but to some extent, capitalism is just people doing things.  Different people, all over the world, doing all kinds of different things, somewhat spontaneously, on their own - not completely, to some extent that's an illusion, but to some extent it's real.  It's sort of anarchic, not anarchic, anarchists would be very mad at me for saying that, and they're right - but chaotic, sprawling, huge, not chaotic either, because definite patterns emerge.  And some of those patterns aren't so good.  And then there definitely eventually is planning, because people start to see the patterns and plan for the patterns.  But there's no one person in control.  It's very difficult to control, it's very difficult even to categorize, to understand what is going on here - it's so ...

  Years ago, I wrote about the prospect of fascism coming to the United States.  At that point, I was unsure.  But recent events make it more and more clear.  People like Steven Crowder are now openly saying that "We need fascism."  To some extent, of course, that's just trolling/bait/empty gestures in the desperate hopes to get people to click on his videos, but it's also a calculation that this is no longer something that will instantly end his career.  That, in itself, should be concerning. But now I have to reiterate what I said then, even more forcefully: that if the fascist threat is real, then we must form a broad coalition to defeat it.  No potential ally should be prima facie turned away.  Now, some people are convinced that the "political compass" is garbage.  Fine.  I myself can think of ways that it's not well-defined.  But it serves as clear enough means of communication for my purposes today. Personally, I'm deep in ...

  When the Hartsburg Empire crumbled, the various ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups that had lived there all asserted their right to national self-determination, as was the fashion at the time.  The problem was that these "nations" massively overlapped, geographically, economically, and sometimes in the very same person, who might have, say, Slovenkian, Kirkosian, and Dragestani anscestors.  The result was the brutal, 31 year long Pekmeniy Civil War, followed by another, 8 year long war whose name is itself a matter of much controversy.  But by the end of this second conflict, the young Yvgeny Przenk, a rising star in the diplomatic corps, came up with a remarkable and unique solution, which managed to restore what was then presumed to be a temporary, fragile peace, but which has since proved surprisingly durable, in a way.   The Przenk Compromise was as follows: there would now be 108 sovereign nation-states, all of them with exactly the s...

   Lenin as Petit-Bourgeois Socialist   In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give 5 examples of proletarians: doctors, lawyers, poets, priests, and scientists - in that order.  Of course, they don't claim that these are the only kinds of proletarians - they're just the only ones specified.   It's interesting that, today, people tend to think that, in Marx's class analysis, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and so on are often thought of as "petit-bourgeois".  This is quite inaccurate.  (Perhaps a doctor who owns his own practice would be petit-bourgeois, but a doctor, who, let's say, works in a hospital - even if she is head of surgery - should be classified as proletarian.) So who are the petite bourgeoisie, then?  Of course, there's a section of the Communist Manifesto that concerns that, as well.  "In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating betwe...

  Woke: 1. v. past tense of wake. 2. adj. (inf., AAVE) alert, aware, vigilant. 3. n. disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism. 4. n. the legal theories that derive from this disbelief. Here is as brief a definition for that third definition of "woke" as I can muster: woke is disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism.  That would include (but not be limited to) disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination. I can understand why people find this confusing - for one thing, it contains a double-negative: disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination.  (And by the way, yes, double-negatives exist in English, and a double-negative doesn't always equal a positive .)  This is one more example of a double-negative that is not equivalent to a positive (so, disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination is not the same as belief in the ideal of discrimination). Wokeness can therefore be seen as a kind of di...