#political theory

celest1amo:

lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers:

On reading theory:

A lot of people say reading theory is hard. I think a lot of people who say this are often quite young, and haven’t had much experience of reading difficult, academic texts. 

The solution is not making easier to read versions of theory, it’s not translating Marx or Kropotkin or Fanon or Gramsci into an easier format (although I do think a lot of modern theorists such as Davis are pretty readable).

The solution is to work at reading theory, until it gets easier, until you get better at it.

I truly believe that reading theory is important, it’s incredibly valuable. Even theory you ultimately don’t fully agree with. It helps you organise your thoughts and your philosophy and understand why these things are so important, and gives ideas of what the end goal should be. It’s hard to organise collectively when people only really have the vaguest idea of what they are trying to achieve.

But I do accept it’s difficult, especially if you’ve never done it before.

So, here is the first thing- if you start reading something, and you’re finding it so dense you’re not getting anything out of it, that’s okay. It’s okay to stop and try something else and then come back to it later on.

It’s fine to stop at any point, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You can still take something useful from reading part of a book. It’s fine to take what you’ve gained from reading half a book, or a few chapters or a preface and realise that actually you’re looking for something else right now! It’s not about success, or failure- it’s about learning and being able to take something from  what you read.

Equally, you might want to come back to that book in a few months, or a year, or two or five- and at that point you might get a lot more from it.

The second thing is that you need to treat it as a project, as “labour” or “work” if you will. It’s not necessarily a leisure activity. You don’t need to do it all the time. You don’t need to read the whole book in one go. You can work on something for weeks, or months, if you want. Even just reading extracts or chapters is really, really valuable. Remember, whatever you manage to read is likely to be helpful and is a success!

I find reading theory truly really valuable, and I don’t think I find it as hard as some people, but honestly, I probably only read 2-3 books of this kind per year, plus, usually some essays/short form etc. You’re not meant to devour entire reading lists in one sitting, or even one summer.

You may find it useful to take notes, or highlight specific sections or passages to come back to.

Find people to talk about what you’re reading with- this is, to some extent, what working class people did in the late 1800s/early 1900s when a lot of the “classic” people you might think of (Marx, Lenin, Engels, Luxemburg etc) were writing. It’s a good way to connect with other people, and it’s a good way to get more out of the text.

(I’ve just started reading “The Conquest of Bread”, if anyone wants to join me: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread)

The third thing is to start short, start with something relatively easy. I do think everyone anti-capitalist should read the Communist Manifesto at least once, for example, and it’s designed to be more readable than something like Capital. Pdf here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf (start with pages 14-32).

If that’s still a bit intimidating right now, then the forth thing is to remember there is definitely literature that is more accessible than pure theory, but still very useful. If you have never really read anything political before, then these things are daunting (or can be). Start with something that feels easy and accessible. Che’s Motorcycle Diaries are both travelogue and personal journey to communism- and truly, truly readable. Try some fiction. I honestly think there is a lot to be gained from e.g. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (pdf here: https://www.freeclassicebooks.com/Robert%20Tressell/The%20Ragged%20Trousered%20Philanthropists.pdf)

Read political memoirs that seem interesting to you (I personally got a lot out of reading a book I’ve now lost, but was the memoirs of a working class suffragette who was married to a Labour party organiser).

Read things that are short form- there are lots of useful essays out there that are only a few pages, or less!

You don’t have to start with Capital, or Mutual Aid, although I do think there is a huge amount to be gained from reading these- even in part.

But if you are reading things on Tumblr, or Twitter about anarchism/communism/general leftism and you want to know more, then at some point it is probably necessary to read some books yourself, if only to formulate your own philosophy, rather than just taking your ideas as packaged by other people. And I do think it is certainly essential before you start trying to espouse your ideas to other people!

one thing that has also helped me is using the footnotes and quotes in books to find other things to read that are directly connected. for example, there are a lot of passages in capitalist realism and i liked the topics of that book so i just worked back from there. it’s interesting bc it doesn’t feel like starting from scratch with every new text.

I found John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power an incredibly useful guide to Marxist thought from a very anti authoritarian angle. Author-approved PDF here: https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/readings/Holloway_Change_the_World.pdf

If you wanna get 19th century, I think Bakunin is very readable and he has some short essays that are good places to start.

God, political theory is dry as fuck. I’ve obtained The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and multiple works by Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Fields, Factories and Workshops, An Appeal to the Young, and The Life of Kropotkin respectively) 

Quick Side note: You don’t have to read theory to be a leftist, dogmatism isn’t attractive and I’m well aware a lot of people don’t have access to these materials. 

But anyway, that’s all from me today. This has been @punkofsunshine .Have a good one and stay safe.

In light of two recent events, the Texas shooting in the US and the publication of the Sue Gray report in the UK, it’s worth re-emphasising one of the central demands of the communists: we want public control of public affairs. The people must rule themselves. We want to get rid of the unaccountable politicians, bankers, and industrialists who are destroying our world and our lives and replace them with a social regime that lives up to liberalism’s promise: of the people, by the people, for the people. We have good historical and theoretical reasons to think that the core of this social regime will be workers’ councils: the workers of a region coming together to collectively decide policy and enact it. No one above anyone else, and everyone accountable to everyone. And these councils will direct an economy that is planned and controlled, by the people, existing for common good and not private gain. Transparent government performed to achieve socially determined goals, not opaque government performed to achieve private interests; that is what we can and must deliver.

In an era of catastrophe and fatal governmental inertia, communism is a clear alternative: direct, practical government to meet social needs and raise quality of life; power for the powerless; the removal of those who have done so much harm and their replacement with those who they harmed. We must be adamant and unequivocal that communism will improve people’s lives, everywhere and always. If it doesn’t, and people can’t be convinced that it will, then it will never happen at all. We have a world to win, and at a historical junction when it can seem like the very earth itself can be lost, that is a striking promise. We can do better, we must do better, and we can only do better through communism.

An International Relations Theory Guide to the War in Ukraine

The world is infinitely complex, and by necessity we all rely on various beliefs or theories about “how the world works” to try to make sense of it all. Because all theories are simplifications, no single approach to international politics can account for everything that is taking place at any given moment, predict exactly what will happen in the weeks and months ahead, or offer a precise plan of action that is guaranteed to succeed. Even so, our stock of theories can still help us understand how the tragedy in Ukraine came about, explain some of what is happening now, alert us to opportunities and potential pitfalls, and suggest certain broad courses of action going forward. Because even the best social science theories are crude and there are always exceptions to even well-established regularities, wise analysts will look to more than one for insights and retain a certain skepticism about what any of them can tell us.

Given the above, what do some well-known international relations theories have to say about the tragic events in Ukraine? Which theories have been vindicated (at least in part), which have been found wanting, and which might highlight key issues as the crisis continues to unfold? Here’s a tentative and far-from-comprehensive survey of what scholars have to say about this mess.

(Link to full text, in case of paywall.)

susansontag:

“If you want peace, prepare for war” (Russia, Ukraine, NATO, EU)

Russia, Germany and the USA are states that derive their power from their national economies. To improve these and to use foreign countries for this purpose, they enter into international treaties at the expense of the interests of other states. Therefore, these treaties (and corresponding alliances) have to be secured militarily. These clashes of interests rise to the level of competition of arms, which in turn implies that the military alliances have to be secured by force. This is the general reason for the escalating war situation in Ukraine. It is a proxy theatre for rights in the world that the states claim for themselves and want to have recognised by the adversaries. Here, the opponents do not differ from each other, and partisanship is completely out of place. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said against societies whose mode of production requires attempting the subordination of foreign states.

Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion. This view has become part of the very essence of German Social-Democracy, which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits, their admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police methods of combating any particular religion. “Religion is a private matter”: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme (1891) summed up these political tactics of Social-Democracy.

These tactics have by now become a matter of routine; they have managed to give rise to a new distortion of Marxism in the opposite direction, in the direction of opportunism. This point in the Erfurt Programme has come to be interpreted as meaning that we Social-Democrats, our Party, consider religion to be a private matter, that religion is a private matter for us as Social-Democrats, for us as a party. Without entering into a direct controversy with this opportunist view, Engels in the nineties deemed it necessary to oppose it resolutely in a positive, and not a polemical form. To wit: Engels did this in the form of a statement, which he deliberately underlined, that Social-Democrats regard religion as a private matter in relation to the state, but not in relation to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and not in relation to the workers’ party.

Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion” (1909)

The University of Chicago | Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer

A great lecture from 2015 by Mearsheimer, arguably the most important international relations theorist alive today, on the origins and potential solution to the ongoing conflict in/tensions over Ukraine. Obviously outdated now about some specifics, but the general analysis absolutely holds up.

Ukraine, he argues, is a region of “vital strategic concern” to Russia, and as such Russia will be willing to pay almost any price to keep it out of NATO; sanctions will not deter it. Russia’s strategy is that, if NATO will not accept the status quo ante and the existence of a neutral Ukraine, Russia will “wreck” the country, rendering it militarily and economically impotent and indefinitely trapped in internal conflict and instability. The solution lies in the acceptance of the reality of great power politics and the existence of spheres of influence, such that NATO stays out of Ukraine and does not threaten Russian security. He also has some really interesting things to say on the increasingly defunct nature of NATO as an organisation, which I think are especially pertinent post-Trump.

However, what is much more interesting is that, beneath all these diverging opinions, there seems to be a shared perception that 1989 [the collapse of the Eastern Bloc] marks the end of the epoch which began in 1789 [with the French Revolution] — the end of a certain ‘paradigm’, as we like to put it today: the paradigm of a revolutionary process that is focused on taking over state power and then using this power as a lever to accomplish global social transformation. Even the ‘postmodern’ Left (from Antonio Negri to John Holloway) emphasizes that a new revolution should break with this fetishization of state power as the ultimate prize and focus on the much deeper ‘molecular’ level of transforming daily practices. It is at this critical point that Wahnich’s book intervenes: its underlying premise is that this shift to ‘molecular’ activities outside the scope of state power is in itself a symptom of the Left’s crisis, an indication that today’s Left (in the developed countries) is not ready to confront the topic of violence in all its ambiguity — a topic which is usually obfuscated by the fetish of ‘Terror’. This ambiguity was clearly described more than a century ago by Mark Twain, who wrote apropos of the French Revolution in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; … our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? … A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Does not the same duality characterize our present? At the forefront of our minds these days, ‘violence’ signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence — violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the ‘objective’ violence inscribed into the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level of ‘civility’. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as being subjective violence. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.

Žižek, “The Dark Matter of Violence, Or, Putting Terror in Perspective” (2012). Foreword to Sophie Wahnich’s In Defence of the Terror(2003)

demoisverysexy:

Hot take: hating people is not just cringe, but is guaranteed to make whatever activism you fight for fail in the long run. If your activism is all about “hating the right people” and not about positive change and rehabilitation, your activism is meaningless in the long run. Yes, even thosepeople

I completely agree that good political organising shouldn’t be based around working out who the “right” people to hate are. That would be a hopelessly moralising endeavour, endlessly trapped in holier-than-thou virtue signalling. It’s a clear route to sectarianism and cliquism; a distraction from real material politics. But it definitely doesn’t follow from this that hatred is itself a bad tool in politics and something we should be suppressing. E.g.:

Above all, during and immediately after the struggle, the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses—instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated—the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction.

(Marx, “Address of the C.C. to the Communist League”)

Or the famous:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

(Marx,Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 136)

And besides, telling workers not to hate those who harm them seems at best misplaced. More likely it’s simply insulting and patronising. There’s such a thing as righteous indignation: it’s even a moral virtue (nemesis), if we care about such things. A worker’s hatred of those that oppress her is both a product and cause of class consciousness. Our class enemies have done us enormous harm, and perpetrated horrors in the preservation of their regime; it is eminently reasonable to despise them for it. Are the Grenfell survivors wrong to hate the parasites who killed their loved ones and nearly killed them, and who have faced no consequences other than ever-increasing, mind-boggling wealth? Are they wrong to demand their prosecution? To dismiss such a fundamentally human and powerful emotion because it’s “cringe” strikes me as wildly disconnected from the actual struggle of working people to survive, and to build a better world.

So you see: to define the proletariat in accordance with its complete historical concept leads straight to a double conclusion which is of direct importance to us.

First: the development of the State power of the bourgeoisie, the reinforcement of its material means of intervention and the increased use of such intervention is in no way the consequence of simple technical and economic requirements, nor of the inevitable evolution of political power in general, but a direct function of the historical constitution of the proletariat as a class. The State of the imperialist epoch is not only the product of the class antagonism built into the capitalist production relation right from the beginning: it is the State of the epoch of revolutions and counter-revolutions; it is expressly organized as the State of pre-emptive counterrevolution.

Second: the process of constitution of the proletariat as a class is, for the fundamental reason indicated above, an unfinished process, counteracted by the very capitalism which sets it in motion. This process precisely cannot be brought to a conclusion without the proletarian revolution: the proletariat can only finally complete its constitution as a class in so far as it succeeds in constituting itself as the ruling class, through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But this suggests that the dictatorship of the proletariat must itself be a contradictory situation, in a new sense: a situation in which the proletariat can finally succeed in overcoming its divisions and form itself into a class, yet in which at the same time it begins to cease to be a class to the extent that it ceases to suffer exploitation. Thus we can understand why, as we are now seeing, the arguments about the dictatorship of the proletariat immediately involve arguments about the proletariat itself, and why the abandonment of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat immediately causes the concept of the proletariat itself to ‘disappear’. The circle is closed: the working people, if they do not constitute a proletariat, cannot hold State power as a class; they simply need the State to provide for their needs… It is a nice dream, but it is unfortunately only a dream.

Balibar,On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976)

Opportunism therefore consists in the belief and the argument that the State apparatus is an instrument which can be bent according to the will, the intentions and the decisions of a given class. It consists in the argument that the government is the master of the State apparatus. And of the actions which follow from this belief.

But this is complete idealist gibberish. A social class does not ‘decide’ anything at all; it is not an individual, even a million-headed individual. Which means that the State power of a class is not the product of a decision or of a subjective will: it is the organization, the objective practical activity of the State apparatus, a set of social relations independent of the will of the men who play a material role in the structure of the State apparatus. And since this is exactly the point made by the Marxist theory of the State, opportunism is obliged to ignore this aspect of Marxist theory, which is precisely the most important aspect.

Balibar,On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat(1976)

[D]o the ‘facts’ not show that the present-day bourgeoisie is quite different from its predecessors, that the present-day working class is quite different in structure and social status from the working class which Marx wrote about (or the one which we think he wrote about)? [Are Marxists], out of love for the concept [of class struggle] itself, refusing to accept the consequences of these 'facts’? The problem about this objection, which actually means that it immediately destroys its own value, is that it is based on a complete misunderstanding of Marxist theory, and of its dialectical character. Marx’s theory is not founded on the definition of some kind of 'pure’ proletariat (standing against a 'pure’ bourgeoisie): there is no 'pure’ proletariat, there is no 'pure’ revolution and there is no 'pure’ communism. [Marxist] theory does not depend on a picture of social classes with the fixed characteristics of a given epoch (the nineteenth century, or the beginning of the twentieth century, etc.). And for the excellent reason that the object of Marxist theory is not to paint such a picture, as a sociologist might do, but to analyse the antagonism itself, to discover the tendential laws of its evolution, of its historical transformation, and thus to explain the necessity of these transformations in the structure of social classes, ceaselessly imposed by the development of capital.

Balibar,On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat(1976)

ultraviolet-techno-ecology:

(Note: I’m writing this during a migraine, apologies if it seems incoherent.)

Discussions of cross-cultural moral relativism in the (mostly white) academic context remains heavily rooted in an orientalist style of thinking. 

That is to say that within white demographics few hard lines will be drawn - there is virtually no discussion of moral relativism between German and French cultures, there is no discussion between Appalachian villages and Californian suburbanites.  

Hard lines are predominantly drawn parallel to perceived ethnic lines. Rather it is through attributing total “alien” status to an ethnic demographic (and consequently the nonsensical notion of ancestral mono-culture iconic of orientalism) that the ideologically untouchable status is deemed reasonable. 

In the context of leftist politics the notion of Internationalism is inherently against moral relativism. That is to say the slogan “No Gods, No Masters” cannot be compatible with BOTH internationalist revolution AND academic moral relativism. (I choose this slogan because it is an obvious and common self-contradiction in anarchist social-justice discussions.) 

Appeals to tradition are inherently reactionary cross-culturally. This does not mean that individual Traditions are bad, only that they must be justified without the tautology of “The tradition is good because it is tradition.” 

Yet establishing something as Tradition requires a type of authority - specifically a cultural authority. Across the world the right wing consistently positions itself as THE cultural authority within their general communities.

Ultimately I think that the abolition of any cultural authority is a structural requirement of internationalist revolution. Something that cannot be removed without the entire concept collapsing. Everything must be broken down and placed on trial, every tradition in every community must be torn asunder and have authoritarian components laid bare for all to see. 

However that discussion becomes very controversial - which is why so many leftists are against internationalist revolution without necessarily being cognizant of that fact. 

Rejecting the hard questions of internationalism allows an inoffensive hands-off approach to revolutionary thinking wherein all other demographics (as typically self-defined by their various reactionary traditionalisms) are permitted to engage in their practices without external (that is - you, the leftist outsider) question. 

Ideological consistency of a moral relativist leftism requires an almost isolationist framework clearly defining it’s own borders and remaining within them. It is up to you if this is better then internationalism, but such a faction must avoid spineless self-negation where perceived purity is acquired through absolute tolerance of counterrevolutionary cultural authorities and the refusal to declare a platform worth fighting for.

Regarding cultural relativism as a moral theory

Discussions of cross-cultural moral relativism in the (mostly white) academic context remains heavily rooted in an orientalist style of thinking […]. Hard lines are predominantly drawn parallel to perceived ethnic lines

Who does this? I’m not being rhetorical or dismissive here, I’d be interested in some names of philosophers who emphasise perceived ethnic distinctions as the root of divergent moral truths. Because, and cultural relativism isn’t something I’ve read up on much because it doesn’t particularly interest me, so I’m fully prepared to have simply got a misrepresentation introduction to the theory, the discussions of relativism I’ve read often do talk about “hard lines” between white demographics. The clear moral difference between pro-slavery whites in the US south and anti-slavery whites in the US north, or between German fascists and French anti-fascists, is a fairly common point of discussion over cultural relativism, for example in Westacott’s IEP entry.

And of those who do use examples of supposedly drastically different societies, it’s often only to argue that cultural differences are more questions of degrees along a spectrum rather than of a binary contrast; pointing to extreme ends of the spectrum rather than close neighbours is more convenient for illustrative purposes, but doing so doesn’t need to imply anything significant or of substance just by virtue of doing so. I’m thinking of Mary Midgley’s use of Japanese samurai culture in contrast to “European” culture in her paper “Trying Out One’s New Sword” here: the point is to find cultures with radically different moral intuitions so as to showcase (extreme) relativism. (As it happens, I suspect Midgley’s example is invented, but I have no idea.)

More historically speaking, Pindar spoke of customruling all, not ethnos, and Herodotus likewise talked of the cultural and religious differences of different nations within the Persian empire, not different ethnic groups, for example contrasting a specific Indian tribe, the Callatiae, with Greeks over their funerary practises, rather than Indians in general. That’s a notable degree of specificity from a culture that had a single word—“barbarian”—to act as a literal synonym for “non-Greek”.

It’s also the case that cultural relativism as a normative theory is intimately related to cultural relativism as a descriptive theory, and the descriptive theory is of chief use to an anthropologist. And anthropologists, especially a hundred or more years ago when descriptive relativism was first being affirmed as a prerequisite of anthropological study, are more likely to be studying non-white societies than white ones.

it is through attributing total “alien” status to an ethnic demographic […] that the ideologically untouchable status is deemed reasonable

Moral relativism is just the theory that moral statements are true or false in relation to some particular standpoint, with cultural relativism being a subset of the theory that locates cultural viewpoints as the relevant criterion. (That they are true or false is the far more significant thesis, by the way; the relativism comes long after the realism.) It doesn’t at all commit its adherents to some notion of the ideological impunity of different cultures— this strikes me as something you’ve invented and accused the relativist of when they just don’t believe it. Consider that some of the first modern cultural relativists were ideologues of the French Enlightenment, building the ideological tools for revolution. Hardly people who want to say that cultural differences are ipso facto beyond criticism. If you cannot conceive of a normative social critique that isn’t a moral critique then that’s on you, not the relativist. Which brings us to political concerns.

Regarding cultural relativism in a socialist context

Appeals to tradition are inherently reactionary cross-culturally.

I’d (hesitatingly: see my Frenchman/Austrian example below) agree, yes.

This does not mean that individual Traditions are bad, only that they must be justified without the tautology of “The tradition is good because it is tradition.”

So why doesn’t this apply cross-culturally? Why can’t a culture point towards one of its own traditions, justify it non-tautologically (let’s say with reference to pleasure), and then appeal to that tradition cross-culturally, saying “look, our tradition is clearly just better, it’s hedonically more valuable than yours”? (Imagine a culture with a tradition of ritual sacrifice and another with a tradition of ritual massage, say). What makes that belief non-inherently reactionary within the culture, and inherently reactionary outside the culture? This seems to be doing exactly what you’re accusing the relativist of: creating idealised notions of “whole”, “unitary” cultural blocs divided along immutable grounds that deny either the possibility or the permissibility of cultural exchange. It’s your position that strikes me as reactionary, and reminiscent of fascist rhetoric about the need of nations to preserve “their own” values against a foreign influence. (Cf. Tosaka Jun’s critique of Japanese imperial ideology.)

Surely the inherently reactionary nature of appeals to tradition is that they are appeals to the ruling ideology, and maybe not even to the ruling ideology of the currently ruling class at that. An appeal to a tradition is an appeal to a reigning ideological state apparatus, and so inevitably an appeal to the ruling class. The only reason I can think of why appealing to “your own” (an already reactionary concept) traditions in your own cultural context may be different to appealing to it in cross-cultural contexts is that they may have different class relations. For example, an Austrian appealing to a Frenchman during the Revolutionary Wars that the Austrian tradition of hereditary monarchy is good is reactionary because the Austrian is appealing to an aristocratic ideological state apparatus, something with a different class content to the bourgeois ideological state apparatus of the National Assembly, or Directory, or what have you. In contrast, the Frenchman appealing to his tradition of representative government elected under universal suffrage is progressive, because it relates to a revolutionary ruling class in France in contrast to the reactionary ruling class in Austria. This is a convoluted example but I hope it’s getting the point across. That France and Austria are different nations (that it is “cross-cultural”) is irrelevant; that they have different class relations is critical and superlatively relevant.

Finally, your point about the need to destroy cultural authorities is right to a large degree, but only insofar as it’s reinventing the Marxist theory of ideology (albeit using the ideological concept of a “cultural authority” rather than the scientific concept of a social structure). It’s also mistaken in thinking that we can just destroy the existing ideological apparatus without then replacing them with something else; for one “cultural authority” to fall another must be erected in its place. This is exactly what a revolution is doing.

But regardless, the entire framing is wrong because it considers moral questions to be operative in the success or failure of structural change and shifting class relations, when they’re not. The moral shifts occur after, and as a result of, not before or during and as a cause of, revolution and social transformation.

nikator:

Six Principles of Political Realism

Moral Right and Political Motivation

Two new essays: the first, a preliminary attempt to synthesise political realism with partisan, class-based politics, and thereby advance both to a higher stage; the second, a brief article on a key difference between Machiavelli’s humanism and Thoukydides’ strict amoral realism.

(PDF available here.)

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.

Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion—between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws. Hence, novelty is not necessarily a virtue in political theory, nor is old age a defect. The fact that a theory of politics, if there be such a theory, has never been heard of before tends to create a presumption against, rather than in favor of, its soundness. Conversely, the fact that a theory of politics was developed hundreds or even thousands of years ago—as was the theory of the balance of power—does not create a presumption that it must be outmoded and obsolete. A theory of politics must be subjected to the dual test of reason and experience. To dismiss such a theory because it had its flowering in centuries past is to present not a rational argument but a modernistic prejudice that takes for granted the superiority of the present over the past. To dispose of the revival of such a theory as a “fashion” or “fad” is tantamount to assuming that in matters political we can have opinions but no truths.

Morgenthau,Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace(1954)

about done with my conference paper for APSA. from the intro:

What, then, makes Sotomayor’s dissent so remarkable? Numerous commentators noted Sotomayor’s citations to James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, critiques of police practices, and potential allusions to #BlackLivesMatter. In this paper I read Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff as a mode of black political thinking, or at least put her dissent in conversation with black thought. To do so, I take up the aspects of her dissent picked up on by media outlets, but also theorize her writing as a form of political phenomenology, and as in loose connection to Afro-pessimist scholarship on blackness, antiblack racism, and social death. These potentially radical dimensions of her dissent exist in tension, however, with the structural and institutional position of the Supreme Court as an entity often effecting dehumanization and depersonalization, especially when it comes to people of color and/or those convicted of a crime (Dayan 2011). On one hand, Sotomayor’s dissent operates as political thought and phenomenology concerned with the question of racial injustice and in conversation with black political thought. On the other hand, as Colin Dayan notes, one way of making sense of American jurisprudence on confinement, punishment, and race is to conceptualize it as the “obscene made lawful,” a “state-sanctioned degradation” through which “personality is recognized, threatened, or removed,” all constituting a “legal history of dispossession” (2011, xii). Monica C. Bell argues that Sotomayor’s dissent in Strieff does indeed “understate” the problems of racism vis-à-vis Fourth Amendment jurisprudence (2017, 2057–58). The majority of the paper concerns itself with articulating the multidimensional critique and political theorizing of the dissent, turning to the substantial restrictions on her radicalness toward the end of the paper. I thus intend a dual movement of both pushing Sotomayor’s dissent into the register of political theory and critical race theory and exploring the considerable limits on the critical potential of her dissent. 

My approach to Sotomayor’s writing in Utah v. Strieff takes a cue from Dayan, who conceptualizes her project as “seek[ing] to know what happens to conventional historical and legal sources when they are pressed to answer unconventional questions,” especially in relation to issues of personhood (xi). She does this by pressing case law into conversation with issues such as slavery, the legal fiction of civil death, jurisprudence surrounding prison conditions and confinement, and the legal status of dogs, as well as numerous apparitions and ghosts in and around the law. I take Sotomayor’s dissent and press it to answer questions such as: how does #BlackLivesMatter circulate in and influence the discursive economy of law?; can Sotomayor be engaged in a project of black political thought?; how could a Supreme Court opinion construct a phenomenology theorizing racial injustice and lived experience?; are there connections between Sotomayor’s writing and Afro-pessimist thought on social death and the political ontology of race? Sora Y. Han notes in her critique of the strict scrutiny doctrine that “the fundamental relationship between state racism and democratic principles is most intimately drawn in the judicial life of law—the institution of law’s written interpretation,” which produces the near-impossible “difficulty of describing in juridical-political terms a position of suffering for which there is no justification—being subject to state action motivated solely by race, subjection under racial animus” (2011, 109–10). I claim that that Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff partially overcomes this institutional interdiction to actually articulate race-based subjection in judicial terms. My approach throughout the paper focuses on taking seemingly minor aspects of Sotomayor’s dissent—citational practices, specific phrases, sentence construction, rhetorical moves, and so on—and expanding outward from the specificities of her writing to broader legal, political, and social theorizing. I thus work to engage in a close reading of her dissent and to take that dissent in unexpected yet generative directions. 

The first section of the paper provides an overview of Utah v. Strieff, summarizing the facts of the case, the majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, and some of the more conventional legal reasoning found in Sotomayor’s dissent. From there, I examine the invocation of black thinkers and evocation of #BlackLivesMatter in her dissent, working outward from her citational practices and two key passages to contend that Sotomayor is centrally concerned with questions of race, racism, blackness, and antiblackness. Next, I read Part IV of the dissent as a phenomenology of being stopped and searched, one that brings lived experience and embodiment into Supreme Court discourse, and focuses attention on the systemic racialization of police conduct and of stop-and-searches. Putting Sotomayor in conversation with Sara Ahmed (2006) and Colin Dayan (2011), this section contends that Sotomayor’s phenomenology enlivens her legal writing, in opposition to the tendency of legal writing to evacuate liveliness and experience. The subsequent section proceeds from Sotomayor’s two mentions of “civil death” in the dissent to an investigation of historical and contemporary modes of civil death, all vis-à-vis the political ontology of social death and antiblack racism. Here, I depart some from Sotomayor to examine the analysis of the “new civil death” by Gabriel Chin, whom Sotomayor cites twice, juxtapose Chin with contemporary discussions of social death, and eventually turn back to Sotomayor and the indirect entry of the concept of social death into her jurisprudential discourse. I conclude by working through some of the tensions between the racial justice critique Sotomayor constructs and the structural limitations imposed by that critique’s situatedness in an institution complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy, conceptualizing Sotomayor’s dissent as a “phantom opinion.”

the abstract:

Can black political thought challenging racial injustice emerge from the legal writing of a Supreme Court Justice? To explore this question, this paper analyzes Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff (579 U.S. ___ (2016)), a Fourth Amendment case regarding police conduct. I argue that through multiple rhetorical and theoretical moves, Sotomayor’s dissent gives legal life to racial oppressions in a way that is potentially in conversation with black political activism and black political thought. My interpretation of the dissent makes three claims. First, I examine the phrases and citational practices that connect Sotomayor’s writing to #BlackLivesMatter and black political thought. Second, I work with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to theorize Sotomayor as constructing a phenomenology of being stopped and searched that brings the habitual lived experience of people of color to the center of legal discourse. Third, I work from Sotomayor’s invocation of “civil death” to put her dissent in conversation with recent Afro-pessimist theory on social death and the afterlife of slavery. These radical dimensions of her dissent exist in tension, thought, with the structural and institutional position of the Supreme Court as an entity often effecting dehumanization and depersonalization, especially when it comes to people of color and/or those convicted of a crime. I thus intend a dual movement of both pushing Sotomayor’s dissent into the register of political theory and critical race theory and exploring the considerable limits on the critical potential of her dissent.

Back in the spring, I read and did a critical comparative analysis on both Cressida J. Heyes’ Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies, and Dr. Sami Schalk’s BODYMINDS REIMAGINED: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Each of these texts aims to explore conceptions of modes of embodied being, and the ways the exterior pressure of societal norms impacts what are seen as “normal” or “acceptable” bodies.

For Heyes, that exploration takes the form of three case studies: The hermeneutics of transgender individuals, especially trans women; the “Askeses” (self-discipline practices) of organized weight loss dieting programs; and “Attempts to represent the subjectivity of cosmetic surgery patients.” Schalk’s site of interrogation is Black women speculative fiction authors and the ways in which their writing illuminates new understandings of race, gender, and what Schalk terms “(dis)ability.

Both Heyes and Schalk focus on popular culture and they both center gender as a valence of investigation because the embodied experience of women in western society is the crux point for multiple intersecting pressures.

Read the rest of Bodyminds, Self-Transformations, and Situated SelfhoodatTechnoccult