Black Dollars Matter

If you spend any time watching television ads, you will have noticed all the up-scale Black people with oodles of money to spend. Or at least great credit. Every national ad features Black folk buying stuff or driving around in a new luxury vehicle or going out on the town with friends to wine and dine. And here we thought Blacks were worried about being shot by racist cops! You've come a long way baby. I just started watching some TV (NFL games) recently, so maybe this is old news. And why I'm not much of a cultural critic. But this feels new. In any case, Madison Avenue has apparently decided there is a huge market share just waiting to be exploited. And so they are bringing the bling. Snoop Dog is selling iphones at the rate of seven per second. You do the math. This is how you know you have finally been assimilated into American society; when you've got the shoes, the Mercedes, the 12 year scotch to share with all your well-dresssed, smiling millenial friends. I assume all these successful Blacks voted for Kamala but you don't know, right? They might see the great businessman Trump as being better for their portfolios. Reducing their tax burden. De-regulating their private credit firms. The bottom line is the bottom line no matter your color. The Market has no bigotry when it comes to accepting Gay dollars, Jew dollars or Black dollars. It's all about the circulation.

More Class Struggle

Lots of parties and pundits courting the "working class" lately. They generally mean wage workers, maybe blue-collar, or "people who shower at night rather than in the morning." They might not have any college, they might work at a trade or craft. You know em when you see em.They might be ready to challenge the boss with collective action or they might kiss the boss's ass in hopes of favors. According to the radical Left there remains: the "possibility of forging a creative, non-sectarian “socialism from below”, in contact with the stirrings of the forces of labour." Quote from an article titled The late, late Capitalism Show by Joseph Choonara in International Socialism This "stirring" probably refers to calls from the UAW to coordinate contract renewals among organized labor so as to create the threat of a general strike across sectors. This would be a powerful gesture were it to come to pass, inspiring others to organize. The question remains however; organize for what? Greater levels of production and economic growth? A more just distribution of the surplus? System change that might preserve the biosphere? This working class also finds Trump and MAGA something to rally around. What Seymour calls "disaster nationalism" has sparked a fervor for disruption and patriotic desire to kick China's ass. With more fossil fueled growth they can have more treats and the CO2 can be sucked up by carbon capture and whatever. Meanwhile the liberal view is that the old antagonism is a relic. " Perhaps most strikingly, the old class divide between rich and poor and capital and labor has seemingly vanished." Nate Cohn NYTimes political analyist. According to this cohort, the friction is between competing superpowers and proxies, it's about who can out innovate who with new technology. Competition between the best and the brightest. Workers only exist to buy the gizmos the clever ones invent while somehow staying ahead of the machines wanting their jobs. What happens when all you have is "dead labor"? The one thing these workers know is that whatever keeps them from living like folks "out there", that is Syria or Bangladesh or Madagascar or Haiti or you name it, the plethora of gangster-controlled or imploding states around the globe, they support it. Keep America Great. Whatever it takes. Fuck the rest of them.

Private - Public Partnerships

The Biden de-carbonization plan is all about the public subsidizing the private through de-risking. We struggling taxpayers will fund the research to make sure the technology is viable AND THEN private capital will step in so they can make guaranteed profit. It's post-late-capitalism, not quite China, but plenty of industrial policy disguised as free market. You might ask: since the State ( the taxpayers) takes all the risk, why wouldn't they just do all the investing and planning and reap all the rewards? Because that would be socialism. Rewards have to not just trickle but gush upwards to the 10%. Those who own Capital. If I can get a billion dollar loan from the government, why should a bank or venture capitalist take a risk on me? They'll send me to the government, wait for the technology to prove itself, THEN step in with a loan. This brings us to the Loans Program Office, where hundreds of billions are doled out to the Smart Expert People so they can leverage private capital for their high-tech schemes. The head of the program was interviewed by Robinson Meyer and the dude is the penultimate Techno-optimist and true believer in American Can Do. He also loves nuclear. And venture capital: "I don’t think that American innovators and entrepreneurs have a political party. They want to take their technology, they want to work with their venture capitalists, their private equity firms, their growth capital companies, and they want to build big things.Because let’s make no mistake: American innovators and entrepreneurs are an unstoppable force." So the only way to save the planet is through international capitalist competition for market share, through high returns on investment, through the same profit system which caused the polycrisis. And America will win. At least, some Americans, those not downstream from the uranium mine.

The Ecological Class

Climate activists stare listlessly into space and wonder where the momentum went. Covid, of course, and the Democratic Party took their toll, but so does defeat, howling into the void, pissing in the wind. As more and more fossil fuels get pumped and burned. As more and more data centers consume more and more energy. As the commanding heights of industry become the state, eliminating the unnecessary middlemen. The politicians who aren't politicians, the elite who aren't the elite. The Fourth International remains determined and just produced a manifesto that promotes de-growth ecosocialism. So that's cool. I attended the unveiling and found the concerted effort inspiring and indeed, the text does reflect some real shifts in theorizing. The analysis of our historical juncture is spot on but being mostly old school Trotskyists, there is some hold-over dogma which I believe needs to be re-examined. One critical point is around class: class and subject formation, class struggle, class consciousness etc...There is lots of ambiguous text about the exploited and oppressed and all the intersectionality of all the various "layers of the working class, the youth, the women, the indigenous...", in other words, kind of everybody? Anybody? Peasants, queer folk, ethnicities, all part of One Big "eco-unionism." Well not anybody. They explicitly dismiss what Bruno Latour and Nicolaj Schultz have termed "the ecological class", calling it "imaginary". Readers of this blog might know that I'm a pretty big fan of Latour (RIP), and while their essay, or "memo" titled On the Emergence of an Ecological Class gets a little dense and a little flowery at times, I for one appreciate the effort to re-examine the orthodox Marxian class analysis, something needed and way overdue. Capital has moved along with our accelerating history and so should socialist thought. Remember the line about "all fixed, fast-frozen relations" being swept away? These include relations of production. Work and workers have also changed and our theories of change need to reflect that. Latour asks us to re-think production itself, hoping to replace it with engendering. A whole blog post in itself. But he realized we would need many earths to accomodate all the production and development that the Moderns have planned. And that "transition" is also an illusion. The shift is going to be abrupt and scary and painful. While the manifesto's authors acknowledge that "productivism is destructivism", they still center production as the site of struggle and producers as the agents of change. If anything is "imaginary" it is the old proletariat, the organized, collective working class sharing a sense of class belonging. Ready to become the revolutionary subject, the agent of radical change. Sure, they could form a section of the ecological class, same as "youth" or "indigenous". But we don't want to wait for them to lead anything. That's waiting for Godot.

Too Much, Too Many, Too Fast

Remember the term "sensory overload"? Being bombarded with information and events and opinion is not what most human brains are developed for. There is such a thing as too much coming at us with too little time for processing. The MAGAs have adopted this as a strategy, simply flood the field and watch as people's filters become overwhelmed and breakdown, causing a profound spike in anxiety, fear and basic incoherence. One such event is global migration and ecological breakdown. A notable reaction to this disorder is the turn to a Malthusian critique, grasping at a simple mathematical explantion and saying there's simply too many people. Check any comments section of any article on any aspect of the polycrisis and you will see the calls for fewer humans. Not explicit advice on how to reduce the population...that gets a bit dicey. This goes hand in hand with a generalized nostalgia for what never was. Of course conditions were less dire back when there were fewer people but let's not confuse correlation with causation. Lots of things are different now. But the tendency is scary, because if you believe there are too many (black, brown Others) you will have little motivation to protect them when they are threatened. As many are and many more will soon be. Then there is too fast. The AI guys are telling us to be ready for a speed up, emblamatic of the way every technology affects our lives. Back to information, which is coming at us constantly and at warp speed. Cultural shifts are coming at us every few years, rather than generationally, leaving no time to process. Think of challenges to patriarchy and white supremacy and Geo-politics, with the rapidly changing maps as we break into smaller tribes. Emblamatic of all this exponential change is Sand Hill road in Palo Alto. As a teenager, I used to drive up that windy road into the foothills to drink cheap wine and smoke Mexican pot when I was cutting class with friends. This is late sixties, early seventies before Silicon Valley kicked into high gear. Steve Jobs and Wozniak were one year behind me at my high school in Cupertino. Palo Alto was still a lot of grassland, orchards and open space, although the bulldozers were running all day to flatten it out and mow it all down. Now Sand Hill Rd is home to the most powerful venture capital firms in the world. These people exist to convert the too much too many too fast into profit and their version of progress and super-modernity. So it goes.

Shooting CEOs

As a famous author and pundit of The Left, I'm required to weigh in on the murder/ heroic act of retribution of the Insurance exec last week. Depending on if you are a morally outraged believer in law and order or a wanna be revolutionary, you can see the shooting as an act of dangerous anarchy or liberatory revenge. The basic justice warrior take is that CEOs who profit from immiseration and death and make immoral choices,and, well, what comes around goes around. At my book group last night the point was made that having these CEO's watching their backs wasn't a bad thing. Fine. But it isn't the revolution. Until there is a mass movement, any type of radical flank, much less lone wolf action will go nowhere and have no effect. If one goes down, a new CEO is waiting in the wings. The same argument can be made about the Palestinian attack of Oct.7. Hard to justify on moral or tactical grounds. Things haven't exactally improved for the Palestinian people or the movement for liberation. There is a long history of this kind of political murder but it is telling that the suspect was reading old Ted Kaczynski. Look at the revolution he fomented. Don't like your healthcare? You can always rage against the machine! You can denounce the system! Then order something on Amazon. Or go get a Starbucks coffee. But until you can define "the machine" or "the system" you are fighting a ghost, an abstraction and emotion. Until you see how the CEO you hate is related to Capital, your hate will remain displaced. And you can't shoot Capital.

Promise Me Anything

The NY Times did an opinion poll with fourteen "working class" Trump voters and it shows total incoherence, as you might expect. They look to him for "common sense", "patriotism" and "change". Probably hope as well. "He runs the country like a business" , one blue-collar guy said. No one admires the boss more than the worker. This is what the liberal press will never understand. They still think you have to make sense, be reasonable, conform to the old "reality". Take this perfect example: "But as he prepares to move back into the White House, his penchant for extravagant ungrounded claims will challenge his ability to translate bravado into reality." Reality? Really? When did reality have anything to do with it? Despite all we've witnessed, they still think "the public" will notice this "challenge". It's a bias and blindness that can never be cured, because in a liberal capitalist "democracy", power must reside in "the people". And "the people" are the ones with common sense. Unfortunately, as the same paper reports, "American workers lack basic skills such as reading a thermometer." Or finding Syria on a map. Or Argentina. Speaking of, look at Milie's approval rating in Argentina as he slashes social spending. There the working class is bullish on austerity. They too love their "wild man". That's the new "common sense", or, as the Talking Heads advised, Stop Making Sense. Abandon the old failed logics and embrace the simulation. AI can solve all the problems. Billionaires have your best interests at heart. The future looks bright. It's reality if you believe it.