Bill Burr on dual power

Yes, that’s right, Bill Burr just came out as a Leninist — a real Leninist, not whatever twisted reactionary kind Bannon thinks he is.  Check out his interview on Monday with Conan O’Brien, specifically the part starting at 21:00, where he talks about what he didn’t like about the Women’s March.

But at the end of the day, they were still going to men!  That’s what I didn’t like about it.  You still had to go down to [Trump’s] house, and be like “hey knock it off”.  They should’ve been like, networking, handing out business cards, “you build websites, I wanna do this”.  I think the way to get people in power to pay attention is, you don’t go to them, you kinda have a meeting over here; then that freaks ’em out, like “oohh uh, what’s going on over there??!” and then they come over to ya.  You don’t walk up to their house!  That’s a weak move!

Okay, so he’s not really talking about dual power or Marxist political theory, but still, not bad for a blurb on a late-night show, eh?  It gets at why I personally don’t really have much of an appetite for going to protests and rallies, and prefer doing the quieter work of trying to develop institutions and networks that can slowly replace those of state and capital.  It’s probably because I’m a hardcore cynic — I just don’t believe that politicians and capitalists care all that much about protests, and don’t think it will change their behavior, and ultimately serves to legitimize their authority and power.  And also, the act of protesting — even when carried out by radical leftists — seems to rely on the idealist notion that power is won through the spread of ideas, rather than the more materialist/Marxist notion that power must be rooted in control over tangible, concrete resources (and the democratic and working-class governance of these resources).

Of course, the new proto-fascist era of Trump isn’t quite like the old, stagnant neoliberal era, and I buy the argument that fascists and their like ought to be met in the streets, and their organizing disrupted by direct action.  And more importantly, direct action (i.e. mobbing the airport and harassing/accosting DHS and ICE agents) intervenes immediately at the source of grievances, rather than pleading for politicians to do something.  More of that, please!

Perry Anderson’s crash course on India

If you’re looking for an in-depth but accessible crash course on Indian politics, check out Perry Anderson’s trio of essays published in the summer of 2012 in London Review of Books, covering the ideologies and roles of key figures like Gandhi and Nehru, the complex religious politics of South Asia and how they evolved over the course of the independence movement, the centrality of caste, the various postcolonial insurgencies, and so on.

• Gandhi Centre Stage
• Why Partition?
• After Nehru

Some of the general arguments I find questionable, particularly the idea that the exit of the British Empire from South Asia was “inevitable”.  But overall, the essays are a fantastic dissection and critique of prevailing tendencies of India’s political elites.  Gandhi is shown to have helped laid the roots of communal violence in the way he infused the anti-imperialist movement with religion, and the Indian National Congress is shown to be a party of mostly upper-caste Hindu elites, whose politicking undermined inter-communal solidarity and class politics.  A spotlight is shone on the protracted and extremely bloody military occupations in Kashmir and Nagaland.  The fractured landscape of caste and religion is dissected, as is the way this fracturing affects prevailing nationalist ideologies, and influences various electoral coalitions.

While not discussed in much depth, Anderson elevated Subhas Chandra Bose, casting him as the only pre-independence nationalist leader of widespread popularity who could have united the subcontinent across religious lines, and someone of much more intellectual prowess than either Gandhi or Nehru — all of which makes it even more tragic that he was ultimately pushed out of INC leadership in the late 1930s, and was killed in a plane crash in the 1940s.

Subhas Chandra Bose, the only leader Congress ever produced who united Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in a common secular struggle, and would have most threatened [Nehru], lay buried in Taiwan: the political landscape of postwar India would not have been the same had he survived.

Here are some of the books that Anderson referenced that I have thrown onto my reading list:

• His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (2012)
• Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (2010)
• India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2008)
• The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2009)
• Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (2012)
• Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2007)

Who are Trumpeters, really?

The standard mainstream explanation for the rise of Donald Trump and his brand of populist right-wing nationalism is that its a product of a disgruntled and marginalized “white working class” that has suffered heavy economic losses from decades of globalization and automation.  For example, check out this fantastic essay titled “I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump”, which gives a deeply personal reflection on race and class in the US, and the resentment of many white working-class people against the “liberal elites” of the coasts.  Or check out this article about how anti-Trump conservative intellectuals are now echoing the disdain of liberal elites by labeling struggling and impoverished white communities as “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture”, effectively generalizing standard racist narratives about black communities.

The data, however, seems to complicate this story.  Data processed by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight from exit polls and census data back in May shows that during the Republican primary, the median income of a Trump voter was higher than the median income of the state as a whole.

The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

Of course, if the standard narrative is about the “white working class”, then it would make more sense to look at white incomes rather than state incomes as a whole, considering the racial wage gap.  But the higher median income of Trump voters appears even when controlling for race:

Since almost all of Trump’s voters so far in the primaries have been non-Hispanic whites, we can ask whether they make lower incomes than other white Americans, for instance. The answer is “no.” The median household income for non-Hispanic whites is about $62,000, still a fair bit lower than the $72,000 median for Trump voters.

Even more telling is the results from a Gallup study done on the backgrounds and motivations of Trump supporters, published in September in SSRN  (emphasis added):

The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support. His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support. On the other hand, living in zip-codes more reliant on social security income, or with high mortgage to income ratios, or less reliance on capital income, predicts Trump support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status, namely health and intergenerational mobility, are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward Trump…

All of this is evidence to weigh against the argument that Trump is representing the resurgence of a “white working class” body politic that has given in to racist and nationalist arguments about their economic situation.  His supporters seem better off and personally insulated from the economic turmoil and social/demographic changes that have taken place in wide swathes of the US.  Sure, they still technically working class, and disproportionately blue collar, but they can hardly be confused with having a properly proletarian status; this probably has something to do with how the status and nature of blue-collar work has changed over the years in conjunction with technology, and the concurrent rise of a much more precarious labor market in the service and logistics industries.

Its particularly interesting to see that Trump supporters tend to live in homogeneous communities, which seems to indicate that the source of their racial resentment isn’t so much due to any kind of personal experience in competing with immigrants for jobs, but precisely because of their lack of experience with diversity and cosmopolitan communities — their only source of information about people of color, immigrants, Muslims and other “Other” groups is the sensationalist 24/7 media, conservative talk radio, etc.

So instead of viewing Trump supporters as representative of the “white working class”, perhaps it’d be more useful to view Trump merely as the political representative of those inane, racist, and fear-mongering comments that seem to inundate Internet news articles.  Those people are real, and they vote — but they seem to tend to be precisely the sort of people you’d expect would have the time and luxury to sit around all day and post nonsense online.

Sunday Interesting Links

• Essay on the connections (and lack thereof) between Althusser and workerism, the relationship between Marxist theory and practice, and the nature of the communist parties in France and Italy in the ’60s and ’70s, from Viewpoint Magazine

• Polemic by Matt Taibbi against the recent cover story in The Atlantic arguing that the US has too much democracy and not enough of an insulated political establishment

• Book review of Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012)

• Report on the increasing unrest in Kashmir and anti-police attitudes

• Analysis of renewable energy’s negative impact on nuclear power and carbon mitigation goals

The depoliticized ideology of tech work, then and now

The nature of technical, scientific, and engineering work seems to continually produce an ideology that alleges that technology workers have the supreme ability to govern and progress society.  From a talk at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics:

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.

The talk goes on to argue about the inherently political nature of technology, and the fact that modern technology workers tend to depoliticize their work, to dangerous affects, as seen in the rise of “surveillance capitalism”.

What’s interesting here is that the perceived “arrogance” of science and technology workers has been around for a rather long time–it stretches back at least since the mid-1940s.  David Noble’s Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1986) describes a proposed board of scientists and engineers, funded by the military, that would be totally autonomous and in charge of directing the nation’s research projects, that garnered fierce criticism:

…President Roosevelt killed the board by forbidding any transfer of funds to it from military appropriations. The sponsor of the executive action was Budget Bureau director Harold Smith, who had become concerned about the scientists’ attempt to circumvent Congress and insulate themselves from government oversight. He also viewed the entire plan as fundamentally anti-democratic, rejecting “the assumption that researchers are as temperamental as a bunch of musicians, and [that] consequently we must violate most of the tenets of democracy and good organization to adjust for their lack of emotional balance.” “The real difficulty,” Smith opined, was that the scientists “do not know even the first thing about the basic philosophy of democracy.” The New Republic agreed. In its own criticism of the ill-fated board, the journal noted wryly how “a good many well-known scientists…take their coloration from the conservative businessmen who are their associates.” Alluding to the “fantastic suggestion that in the long run the National Academy of Sciences should usurp the functions of the Executive,” the magazine argued that “the American people should no more acquiesce in the present scheme than to a proposal that the carpenters’ union [alone] should elect members of a board which is to plan public workers.”

Of course, looking at the present situation regarding climate change and state interference in climate science research, its worth re-thinking these criticisms…

“Imperialism and the Construction of Saudi Arabia”

I’ve finally finished writing a lengthy essay, that I’ve been working on for some five months, titled “Imperialism and the Construction of Saudi Arabia”, that discusses the formation and consolidation of Saudi Arabia as a state, postwar Middle Eastern geopolitics, the dialectic between global capitalism and Saudi-Wahhabi elites in both Saudi state formation and the stabilization and restructuring of the world economy in the 1970s, and the role of oil and fundamentalist Islam in all of this.  From the introduction:

The very foundation of Saudi Arabia as a political power, and its conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, was dependent on foreign powers, particularly the British Empire and American oil companies.  As the region developed and the Arabian working class grew in size and consciousness, new political tendencies and movements took hold.  Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the conservative religious royals of Saudi Arabia were besieged by diverse and vibrant political trends—particularly socialist and republican movements—that sought to overthrow the monarchy, expel the imperial powers, and seize control of the region’s energy resources.  These movements had a real chance of success, but ultimately could not overcome the political, military, and economic support that the House of Saud garnered from the West.  It was only with the defeat of progressive forces that Saudi Arabia was able to consolidate its control over the Gulf oil fields, begin the export of fundamentalist Islam, and help recycle oil rents into the international financial markets—underwriting the neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism that began in the 1970s.

The essay mainly covers the postwar era.  I still have some 20 pages of unedited writing, covering the period from 1979 to the present day, that discusses the evolution of US-Saudi relations, the militarization of Wahhabism during the course of the 1980s Afghanistan war, the way the end of the Cold War and the September 11th attacks affected the US-Saudi axis, and the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the Arab Spring.  Hopefully I’ll be able to compile those into two or three more essays eventually…

What will it take for Sanderistas to energize a real social-democratic movement?

I thought this opinion piece in Washington Post from last October did a pretty good job of answering that question.  The article points out that previous very progressive presidential candidates (i.e. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the ’80s, which featured significant participation by former hardcore Marxist-Leninist groups) failed to translate their campaign into a longer-term movement, and the volunteer energy fizzled away after election season was over.  The only way that such campaigns can translate into real movements, the article argues, is for volunteers to create their own, independent organizations.

But forging a movement from a campaign, and building it in tandem with the many progressive constituencies that for any number of reasons have not flocked to Sanders’s standard and are not likely to — that’s the hard part. Devilishly hard.

This formidable task requires, first, that Sanders’s legions understand the unique historic opportunity that their coming together presents: That their victory in all probability won’t be putting Bernie in the White House, but creating a surging and enduring left. That, in turn, requires them to give as much thought to forming or joining autonomous post-campaign organizations, and envisioning post-campaign mobilizations, as they now do to advancing Sanders’s candidacy. Indeed, they need to start forming such organizations today, while they are together campaigning for Sanders, and in the process even reach out to other progressives who may not be for Sanders. These endeavors can’t and shouldn’t be undertaken by the Sanders campaign itself. They fall exclusively to the volunteers.

Unfortunately, its not clear whether Sanderistas will be able to put thought and energy into forming “autonomous post-campaign organizations” while the campaign is running hot; nor is it clear how many Sanderistas do actually see the campaign as a potential to build a larger movement, rather than a one-off chance to elect a progressive Messiah.

More difficult is the question of what more radical leftists (Marxists, socialists, anarchists, etc.) ought to be doing.  What would have been ideal is if we had strong, vibrant organizations that could reach out and relate to Sanderistas for recruitment or coalition-building; but as it stands, the radical left is in even worse shape than America’s social democrats, and existing radical organizations that try to absorb an influx of Sanderistas will likely turn into social democratic organizations themselves, rather than act as a radicalizing pole.

Monday Interesting Links (On Jeb!)

• Obituary and autopsy of Jeb! Bush’s campaign, tracing its rise and fall, from Washington Post

• Compilation of the 17 saddest moments for Jeb!’s sad campaign, from Vox

• Article defending Jeb! as “not a joke”, from Slate

• Refutation of the Slate article arguing that Jeb! was indeed a joke and a horrible person, from Vox

• Another refutation of the Slate article, with more swearing and ad-hominem attacks on Jeb!

Wednesday Interesting Links

• Marxist theories of the Great Recession: Michael Roberts vs. David Harvey vs. Anwar Shaikh

• Article based on interviews with anarchist veterans of the US military

• Argument on how CIA military aid to Syrian rebels is largely benefiting al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch

• Donald Trump poses less of a threat to the Republican Party establishment than Ted Cruz

• Explanation for the lack of military dictatorships in India’s postcolonial history

• [PDF] Vivek Chibber on American militarism

Sunday Interesting Links

• Cindy Milstein reflecting on anarchism and the lack of substantive movements in the US, when compared to Europe

• The New Inquiry on “community policing” and apartheid in South Africa

• Long, in-depth article on Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, via The Daily Beast

• Black food cooperatives are fighting racism

• A new gun uses targeted radio waves to disable drones