question:Economic issues are not separate from “identity” issues « Systemic Disorder This entry was posted in Critiques & movements and tagged activism, longreads, racism, sexism, social movements. ← Any way you calculate it, income inequality is getting worse Eight people own as much as half the world → 53 comments on “Economic issues are not separate from “identity” issues” Critical Engagements: Intersectionality, Privilege, and Identity Politics | Full Opinionism says: […] Economic Issues are Not Separate from “Identity” Issues Pete Dolack (2017) […] “Dismissing all those who voted for Donald Trump as bigots, “deplorables” or ignorant is not only simplistic and mistaken, it is bad practice. Some who voted for him can be described in such terms, but plenty voted for him, however mistakenly, out of a belief that he would bring back their jobs and because he represented, in their minds, ‘change.’” Yes, but where’s the balancing language about Hillary Clinton and those who supported her? Until we on the radical left acknowledge, unequivocally, that a vote for Clinton was no more unwise or dangerous than a vote for Trump, we’re going nowhere. While the following article is far too generous toward Trump, it is unsparingly honest about his opponent. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/rfk-trump-2016-democratic-party-speechwriter-214270 To the extent that feminism would impel an otherwise leftist voter to back a neoliberal warmonger, identity politics is, indeed, an enemy of revolution. Ditto on race and Obama in 2012. I don’t know any feminist who would, or did, vote for a neoliberal warmonger simply because the warmonger is a woman. Feminists who voted for Clinton did so because they would be less on the defensive. However awful Clinton is, Trump is worse. Clinton wouldn’t be eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood or bringing to power nightmare religious fanatics like Pence. That doesn’t mean Clinton is worthy of a vote — far from it — it simply means that there would be better terrain on which to fight. I personally know feminists who are anything but an enemy of revolution but voted for her (reluctantly) because there was enough of a difference for them to do so. I personally did not, and could not, vote for Clinton but I am not going to indulge ideas that a billionaire egomaniac with the attention span of a seven-year-old who intends the swiftest possible dismantling of the past half-century’s social gains and who has a fascistic following is no different than an ordinary establishment figure, even one as detestable as Clinton. Let’s fight our enemies one at a time. socialjism says: I know plenty of feminists who like Clinton and think she was awesome. Just watch feminists in the media. Anyway, as for “identity politics” when Leninists and the far left at Jacobin Magazine are talking about taking down this bullshit, and Bernie Sanders is denouncing it openly, I see there’s hope for the left to shitchug this nonsense. I’m glad I’m not an activist and have never dealt with this shit though If nobody were an activist, then nothing would ever change. Activists never change anything though. That’s like saying if there weren’t any priests, children wouldn’t be protected To be more serious, this is when things change: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/richmond-progressive-alliance-elections-chevron-steve-early/ iamselma says: I agree with you Pete, that this setting up the 2 as being in conflict, when they are inextricably linked, is incorrect. And this video begs the question of what in Trump’s base allowed him to “literally meme his way into the Presidency”. It also begs the question, as have many on the Left, as to why the Right is so damn organized, and was able to mobilize voters with a superior message. The fact is that the Right, since Nixon’s presidency, has drawn upon the vast resources of market research analysis, advertising and PR geniuses, and others, such as right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, has plumbed the American psyche in a very thorough and profound way. “The Selling of the President 1968” was the first book that explored the intersection between advertising, PR, and the GOP’s victory. The GOP controls virtually every major advertising and PR firm in the US. All are GOP stalwarts. the GOP has utilized racist imagery for 30 years, in campaigns such as the Willie Horton ad that detonated Mike Dukakis’ 1988 campaign. Is it any wonder that they can mobilize quickly and convince people to choose their message or meme campaign? There is one more thing about the GOP’s base, and the voters who elected Trump, and it is the huge elephant in the room that nobody talks about: that is the fact that in addition to the heavy fundamentalist religious indoctrination that fuels the belief systems of people on the Right, there’s the fact that many of them come from military families or have had military training. The discipline, the belief systems, and the comradeship from the trenches, all contribute to the cohesiveness on the Right. I’d like to see a greater articulate of these factors in the analysis of the 2016 election. I think it would be useful to re-visit and incorporate the critiques of the advertising and PR industries, from Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” to “Subliminal Seduction”, the “Selling of the President 1968”, “Who Rules America” by Domhoff”, “The Power Elite” by C. Wright Mills, the critiques of the Heritage Foundation, and one of my favorites, from the 90s: “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Public Relations Industry”. Clinton’s foreign policy HISTORY, as set forth with specificity in the article I cited, was far more dangerous to the future of humanity (and to the entire ecosystem) than Trump’s obnoxious and obscene RHETORIC. Both were utterly atrocious candidates, but painful policy decisions like eliminating Planned Parenthood hardly rise to the level of creating the substantial risk of nuclear holocaust. Does the left now care more about sensitivity than survival? Do we worry more about who sits on the Supreme Court than about innocent people being blown to pieces in the Middle East? So many are lamenting the Trump victory as if he defeated a decent human being rather than a bloodthirsty vampire. If my words are too blunt, here’s a toned-down take on the election that may be more palatable: http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/ Clinton wants war against Russia; Trump wants war against China and global nuclear proliferation. So, really, nothing to choose between here. The only reason Trump doesn’t want war against Russia is because he has business interests there and if those interests don’t go well, maybe he’ll want war there, too. Given Trump’s astounding ignorance and willingness to provoke anybody who gets under his extremely thin skin, and his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons, the chances of a destructive war are higher with Trump than Clinton. Trump is also a global-warming denalist, increasing the possibility that humanity will see the climate spiral out of any control with catastrophic consequences for the entire planet. There are people who are facing losing health care, and may die because of that. That’s life and death, too. I certainly understand your antipathy toward Clinton; her miserable neoliberal warmongering record speaks for itself. But we shouldn’t let ourselves get so worked up for hatred for Clinton that we blind ourselves to Trump, who is the most dangerous reactionary we’ve yet seen in the White House. This is not about whether Clinton is or is not “a decent human being,” it as about the reality of the administration about to take power. It is a dangerous mistake to make the election a referendum about personalities instead of looking at the world through sober political analysis, and that analysis includes the effects on the day-to-day realities of millions of people. I actually like Trump a bit more than Clinton. At least he’s not killing us blue collar workers like the Clintons did Now how, exactly, was Clinton killing blue collar workers? Wait until Putzer is Secretary of Labor and he dismantles OSHA and MSHA, and Trump fills the NLRB with union-busters if you want to see workers dying. NAFTA. I rest my case You do know that all the shutdown of the steel mills and coal mines and related manufacturing industries – and the associated suicides and deaths by alcoholism and the like – occurred during the Reagan recession in the 1980s – 10 years before NAFTA, don’t you? At least that was what it was like here in Pittsburgh. You realize the Clinton’s were/are enthusiastic about”free trade” and that NAFTA was a critical blow to labor, while Trump is against such things, at least rhetorically. Hell, he’s actually done positive stuff in that direction. Your mention of reagan is a red herring. Newtonfinn writes of what a Clinton presidency would have meant: “It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.” Actually, it would have meant that those of us fighting her would be able to do so because they had the health insurance that would allow them to maintain their lives to be able to participate in politics; that they would have the Social Security as seniors, to be able to put a roof over their heads and not be at immediate risk for homelessness; that they would not have to worry about being beaten up or killed by a newly energized demographic of virulently racist and homophobic supporters; that they would not have to worry about dying from a back-alley abortion, or during an unwanted childbirth, or having unplanned for children to support instead of getting an education. Or as a trans person, worrying about having medical care cut off and being beaten to death; or as a person with HIV or AIDS having their Medicaid or support services cut; or anyone who is poor not being able to afford to eat, because food stamps have been cut. You are giving lip service and vastly minimizing the 70 years of life that 4 generations of people have had since the New Deal’s social services safety net was established from the 1930s through the 1960s, and that in order to fight to preserve it, you’ve got to at least have a roof over your head. You’re ignoring the fact that Donald Trump’s cabinet is out to destroy every civic institution that made the middle class and a thriving working class originally possible. They’d like to turn the clock back to 1910. Re: your recap of misogyny in the 1960s left: not only was there that famous incident, but many others, where women did not get to participate in analysis or speak at demonstrations. There was an unwritten rule that as a woman, your analysis or speaking style was not as forceful, sharp, or effective as that of your male comrades. Or that they would reject you as partners were you to take a leadership position. That certainly impacted me, when I ceded the podium to my college boyfriend at age 17, after organizing a citywide rally against the Anti-ballistic missile system, and had researched the issue fairly thoroughly. At the last minute, I felt that I had nothing to say, and that no one would listen to me. The women who were leaders in the 1960s were often marginalized or ignored, and many have been ignored by those who wrote the history of that era. It came as a shock to me to read in the NY Times book review section about 12 years ago, a review of the biography of Dr. Pauli Murray, a black feminist who was an out lesbian in the 1940s, who graduated from Hunter College around the same time as my mother, whose brilliant legal work made her one of the architects of the civil rights era. Thurgood Marshall referred to her 1950 book on racism and the law to be the “bible” of the civil rights movement. She was a co-founder of NOW and was a major speaker at civil rights demonstrations. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/19/387200033/the-black-queer-feminist-legal-trailblazer-youve-never-heard-of; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_Murray. Yet, despite her prominence, I don’t remember reading a single word about her life until that NY Times book review. I remember reading about Eldridge Cleaver’s treatment of Kathleen Cleaver, as well as other sexism in the Black Panther movement. There was also the use of women as decoys in demonstrations (“chicks up front”), or Stokely Carmichael’s famous quote, that “A woman’s place in revolutionary struggle is on her back”, a quote that said boyfriend adored repeating to me at regular intervals. Women’s role in the revolution was to provide the revolutionary equivalent of the adoring housewife and supportive companion, and source of comfort in the struggle. I’m glad that women said “fuck that shit” and took to the streets in 1970, and began to form consciousness-raising groups. Had we not done that, nothing would have changed. One thing that women realized, was how little emotional intelligence or understanding there was in the white male leadership or individually, in relationships. This manifested itself not only in personal relationships, but in the very ways men expressed themselves, or responded to women expressing ourselves. Our awareness of power dynamics and emotions was very different from theirs, as well as our sense of process. It’s now 40 years after Second Wave feminism, and according to many women I speak to in their 20s and 30s women are still having to reinvent the wheel. “No woman ever sat on the Politburo during the Soviet Union’s 74-year history.” I think this is like bitching about Antila the Hun’s fashion sense. Talk about messed up priorities, lol I think the whole point of Professor Lerro’s essay was to say that the emphasis on identity politics for the last 50 or so years has been a huge distraction that has blunted whatever power the Left may have had at one time to eliminate capitalism. The turning point for the working class was when the union bosses sold out and refused to engage in a battle to defeat the Taft-Hartley Act, which you wrote about a long time ago. It isn’t a “choice” between identity politics or “class politics.” It is simply time to turn away from identity politics and unite in a struggle against capitalism. It is time for the Left to cut its ties to Liberals of all stripes, because Liberals are strong proponents of capitalism, too. I have long had a problem with the victimization meme so popular among Leftists – it’s all the fault of the capitalists. That victimization meme conveniently removes any blame from Leftists for their being capitalists, too. It’s all their fault!! No, it’s our fault, too, and the sooner we admit that, the better off we all are. As Walt Kelly famously had Pogo say: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Liberals and almost all Leftists, particularly those engaged in identity politics, are hacking at the branches of evil instead of striking at the root. How dare you say my non conformist intersectional transhuman queer artificial anti binary non gender gender identity is a distraction! Only clueless academics cloistered away on U. campuses and liberal yuppies gentrified upscale neighborhoods talk like that. Here on the streets, there is only racism and anti-racism, and of course, the savage assaults and murders of transgender people of any race, and those who protect the transgender people at considerable risk to themselves. Uh..you just contradicted yourself Extrapolating from your remarks, I would say that politics, in the usual sense of compromising to form coalitions, is initially antithetical to revolution, be it violent or nonviolent. If one is to sacrifice one’s life, or at least one’s comfort and security, for a cause, then that cause better damn well be the right one. Thus, the radical left must be focused like a laser on the proper diagnosis of our social devolution and its effective cure. Overall, this web site has done an admirable job in pursuing that end, and its author deserves our gratitude and respect. But sometimes a corrective is in order in even the best of efforts, as it is IMO with regard to this latest post. It’s preferable that the truth about our situation be embraced by a few than that the many flail about in pseudo-rebellion, which, in Thoreau’s metaphor, merely trims some ugly branches from the poisonous tree of global capitalism. Revolution, unlike a coup, cannot come without some sort of mass movement, but even more fundamental is that the movement be made in the right direction. If losing the support of those wedded to identity politics is the price the radical left must pay for speaking the truth as we see it, that’s a price worth paying. In light of the liberal hysteria and Russophobia triggered by one pathetic presidential candidate losing to another, I fear the loss of wisdom and courage on the left much more than the loss of popularity. I’ve never been one for vanguardism. The “truth about our situation” must be embraced by many, not just a few. It is my hope that those who embrace identity politics will climb down out of the tree and begin to look at what is in the ground. It wouldn’t hurt those of us on the Left to revisit Marx’s writings on the base and the superstructure and the dialectical relationship between them. “Revolution, unlike a coup, cannot come without some sort of mass movement, but even more fundamental is that the movement be made in the right direction.” Newton, you’ve summarized here the necessity of what must needs to be done very well. And we must have the courage to risk near-term unpopularity to be able to put ourselves on the road to long-term, permanent change. But if there are people (women, African-Americans, immigrants, others) who are oppressed, and that no revolution is going to be made without full participation of these oppressed peoples, then how are we to say to them “Wait you turn; we don’t have time for that.” We have to struggle for everyone’s liberation in the here and now, not in some mythical future. Alcuin argues that “it’s time to turn away from identity politics and unite in a struggle against capitalism.” We certainly should unite in a struggle against capitalism; we have no alternative if we are serious about creating a better world. What I am arguing is that these are not mutually exclusive. A struggle against capitalism includes struggle against the oppressions that arise and continue to exist within capitalism. These do not magically go away in a post-capitalist society; the record on that is quite clear. We are going to have to learn to effectively integrate these struggles, just as we are finally learning to integrate environmentalism in anti-capitalist work. We wouldn’t argue that clean air and stopping global warming are “distractions” — these are products of capitalism. So is discrimination against women, people of color, immigrants and others. These can, and must be, components of the struggle for a better world. Lol if you need “full participation” then don’t demonize entire sectors with your feminist gooble-de-gook First of all, the author was arguing that identity politics within capitalism can never be a successful strategy to overturn the system. I totally agree. And, he never said in the article that he was against the issues promoted by identity politics–it’s just that they are not revolutionary. I totally agree. “In criticizing identity politics I am not proposing that race and gender issues should not be discussed or that they don’t matter.” Capitalism is the issue for our times; and if we don’t overturn its existence, we humans along with many other species will stop existing. It is quite literally a matter of life or death. Political agents of the capitalist ruling class certainly recognized this flaw in identity politics. They encouraged it simply because it was not revolutionary, and it offered an excellent way of diverting left political energies away from class politics that so threatened their rule during the 1930s. “It is part of a long-standing liberal ideology that spans over a century to promise that under capitalism all ethnicities and genders will be able to compete for a piece of the capitalist pie. Gradually we are told that with education and an expanding economy capitalism will welcome all. After the 1960’s liberals gave up on supporting their color blind ideology, and have been sliding to the right ever since. The New Left, never having taken their own working class very seriously, happily took over race and gender inequalities that should have been the domain of liberals. For 45 years leftists, instead of developing and expanding a socialist program, simply took over the New Deal program that the old liberals abandoned.” This is precisely why they promoted the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president. And mostly middle class left activists were suckered into promoting exclusively identity politic because it was more “respectable” because the middle class in general are always concerned about being respectable in the eyes of the capitalist class. “The extent to which identity politics still governs the liberal and social democratic left, the answer is because Obama, after all, is an African-American president. From the point of view of identity politics, what more can we ask for? He is the first African-American president. For identity politics advocates, the fact that Obama is a Harvard lawyer is no reason to be cynical of his true class interests. Rather, we should be impressed with his credentials. “But as soon as a rich white male is elected, these crypto New Leftists at last gladly see a familiar target. People pour into the streets.” As activists, either we are serious about the overthrow of capitalism because it is the root of most of the evils we experience today, or we think the system is just fine, and that we should concentrate on other issues. But the latter should not pretend otherwise as they often do. All this talk of “identity politics” seems to be conflating the post-modernist babble on campuses with plain old-fashioned anti-racism. As a reality check, anyone who thinks that racism is not central to economic relations in the US need to get off their university campus and take, say, a bus or the RTA line eastward from downtown Cleveland, across a broad blighted area, then through the leafy and affluent Case Western U area, then into blighted and dirt-poor east Cleveland, then further no into the leafy and affluent and pure-white Coventry Road and Shaker Heights, and watch the changes in the dominant skin color. Also while downtown, watch the variations of skin color with occupation as indicated by attire. The color of poverty in the USA is black, period. I live in western Pennsylvania and spend a lot of time on my job in West Virginia. I have yet to meet a white Appalachian Trump voter who is close to the level of poverty of a black person in Pittsburgh’s Homewood, East Cleveland, Baltimore and many other many other places. We need to fight that. No, we need to fight capitalism. Slavery is a product of capitalism. There were more than a few very sophisticated and advanced cultures in the southern part of the continent of Africa before capitalism introduced a particularly vicious type of slavery, the product of which was racism. “All this talk about ‘identity politics'” is about separating the results of capitalism from the causes of those results. Tell a poor black USAn that all we need to do is fight capitalism. Seriously! Please go to your nearest blighted neighborhood, and tell the first black person you meet that racism is not important and that black people need to stop their complaining and fight capitalism like the white leftists tell them to. You first – I’m not African-American. Couldn’t agree more. But it’s the capitalist system that perpetuates black poverty, as it perpetuates poverty in general, by means of increasing scarcity, debt, exploitation, etc., so as to render so many people superfluous–especially those who suffered, and still suffer, the ultimate exploitation of slavery. Replace that profit-oriented system with one where people and planet are the new bottom line, not profit, and blacks along with the rest of humanity will prosper. THAT should be our goal, not making bigoted white people think or feel differently about black people. The same goes for all forms of bigotry and prejudice. We should be revolutionaries, not shrinks. The strength and beauty of the Black Power Movement, as it evolved out of the Civil Rights Movement, was that black people no longer were seeking subjective white acceptance or approval. They wanted agency and autonomy and, frankly, couldn’t care less about whether white people liked them or not. And they also knew that they could not be given agency or autonomy by whites; they had to claim it for themselves. By the way, I’m reading a most unusual, insightful book that was a public sensation at the end of the 19th Century, but has since faded into forgetfulness. It’s a utopian novel called “Looking Backward,” and I highly recommend it to my sisters and brothers who follow Systemic Disorder. Not a bad blueprint here to ponder, update, and build upon. No. Racism and the resulting discrimination in hiring, housing, education and law enforcement leads to black poverty. Even the worker collectives running some future socialist syatem in the USA can, and probably would, engage in racial discrimination. And there is no connection whatsoever between racism and capitalism? I don’t see any connection, if by connection you mean a causal connection. Capitalism, in its seemingly infinite ability to take advantage of every natural and social resource, has used and continues to use racism to its advantage, but to say that racism is a product of capitalism is like saying that millions-year old copper ore deposits in Utah are the product of the Kennecott Mining Corporation. One way predates the other. There are a lot of people on the Left who believe that part of the working class who voted for Trump did so merely out of a desire for “change” and because he promised them jobs. That line also notes the demographics of the white electorate who voted for Trump as having included many Obama supporters, who voted for him because of his platform of “change”. What the takeaway seems to be here is that any candidate promising “change” is something that the majority of white voters will elect, irrespective of the fact that the “change” that Trump is promising is the antithesis of the “change” that Obama was promising during his campaign. So I have come down on the side of not buying this rationale, because any group of people who are that ignorant and that fickle are not making informed choices, and are responding as consumers in the marketplace with ADD who pick whatever is shiny and new. I feel that the Left does this because of a Marxist analysis that fails to take into account the vast body of research on the impact of television, mass communications, advertising, public relations, and the manipulation of public opinion. You can’t have it both ways- acknowledge that the dumbing down of Americans is in fact a very real thing, and then claim that the people who have been dumbed-down have in fact made choices coming from a valid perspective. I read an article in NY Magazine right after the election, that presented an in-depth portrait of 10 white women who voted for Trump, and it was staggering to see their reasoning (or lack of it). They strung together completely unrelated things as cause and effect. They seemed to have minimal knowledge of foreign affairs, the economy, or basic issues. They made their choices based on a feeling about Trump as a strong leader, based upon his presentation and his speeches. They should not be let off the hook when those speeches were virulently racist, misogynistic, nativist, racist, and also staggeringly ignorant about the basic facts of our economy, our government, our foreign policy, and the environment. They voted for a candidate whose henchmen routinely beat up and ejected people of color protesting at his rallies. It was not possible to hide from Trump’s racism. It was also not possible to deny that Trump openly mocked a disabled NY Times reporter in conduct so unbecoming a candidate for office that it should have kept him from running for dog-catcher. Trump’s appeal was to anti-intellectualism just as strongly as was Spiro Agnew’s emanations. Anyone here remember “An effete corps of impudent snobs”? That was the working class base that Agnew appealed to as Nixon’s bulldog, and it’s the same base that Bush appealed to and now Trump. These are people who are brainwashed by decades of advertising, by parents who grew up in the conformist ’50s, who were in turn brainwashed by advertising, and who if they had a labor organizing past in their family, have in many cases, turned away or rejected that past. I think it is also inaccurate to say that all of Trump’s support, or the majority of it, came from the white working class in the Rust Belt. That is true, but he got a substantial percentage of support from white people in the suburbs as well as from the Orthodox Jewish community in NYC, which is solidly middle class. Trump’s own team acknowledged that they were appealing to the “low information voter”. People can be manipulated when all they ever know is the information they see on Fox News, and the heavily redacted education they receive in most of our country’s public schools, and most certainly in private religious schools, where any scent of radicalism or skeptical analysis by teachers is quickly weeded out. Another phenomenon that proves my point are the “person in the street” interviews that Jay Leno used to broadcast on his show, where most white people who were obviously middle class, if not prosperous working class, did not know basic questions about American history that used to be known by the average 4th grader. I’m referring to them not knowing whether FDR was President during the Civil War, not knowing who freed the slaves, and many more facts. As long as these “low information voters” continue to obtain their information from Fox News and advertising, as well as the mythology conveyed in TV and film, they will continue to vote against their own best interests. Any voter has the ability to access a politician’s position on a wide range of issues. All you need to do is to check with groups such as Americans for Democratic Action, or People for the American Way, which publish lists of where politicians stand on the issues. Of course, that educational role used to be fulfilled far more by unions and union culture, and now is gone from the lives of millions of American workers. I would wager that the average radical leftist worker during the 1930s was more educated and aware than the average American with a college degree in the 2000s. The nature of media and advertising has shaped 3 generations of Americans, and produced the made consumerist society we now have. Even when Trump’s supporters receive the inevitable bucket of ice water on their heads, they are going to be lacking the perspective, the facts, and the ability to think critically that would give most of them to have a handle on their situation. Many will understand that they are being screwed, but everything surrounding them and informing them will tell them that the solution is to blame the weakest and most vulnerable scapegoats. Your last paragraph is a killer. Your statement that there is a lack of Marxist analysis of the role of “the impact of television, mass communications, advertising, public relations” is very interesting – I had not thought of that but the dialectical relationship between the base and the superstructure should certainly lead to that kind of analysis. I’m of the opinion (and I’d love to be proven wrong!) that an awful lot of Marxist analysis is stuck in a worldview whose basis has long since disappeared. The tools are there but they are not being used. This whole issue of “identity politics” should be a rich vein to exploit for Marxists, but it does not seem to be happening. Instead, we are treated to the same old tired story from 75 years ago. But prove me wrong, please!! Anyone! And once I’ve been proven to be wrong, why is it that so many people, on the left and the right, still don’t get it? It seems as though we are destined to see a superstructure which destroys the material basis for life in its greedy and selfish goal of the accumulation of surplus value. Rome is burning and the proles are captivated by how high the flames are. I agree with a good part of what you say, but there’s a contrary viewpoint with more than a grain of truth in it. In my 60-plus years of awareness of social issues, I can’t remember a candidate who was more vilified in the MSM (and in much of the alternative and social media, as well), than Donald Trump. Similarly, all the big guns of the status quo designed to shape public opinion in the UK were blasting away relentlessly at Brexit. Yet, these plutocratic opinion shapers were unable to get through to vast number of voters this time around, both here and in Britain. For what are surely a large variety of reasons, these voters rejected the immense pressure put upon them and went precisely in the opposite direction. Condemn the motivations of many of them if you will (with ample justification), but both Brexit and Trump have loosened what heretofore had been the stranglehold of the communication system of global neoliberal capitalism. To me, that is, pregnant with possibility for radicals of both right and left–the decisive end of “the end of history.” Rebecca Solnit just posted this on Facebook, and I like the points that it makes: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2017/01/fuck-you-rural-elitists.html I loved this: “You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don’t you explain liberalism to them? Why don’t you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won’t matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant. “The whole thrust of these “let’s learn about the yokels” articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We’re all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.” “Republican economic policies” = policies that promote capitalism. I don’t think, though, that calling Trumpists racist, sexist and Islamophobic helps matters. The ruling class has always been very good indeed at dividing and conquering. When we “liberals” utter such epithets it doesn’t do anything to unite all of us in a struggle against capitalism. Neither does yelling at such people that “if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.” I don’t deny that it feels good to vent, but venting at Trumpists is like standing in the rain without an umbrella and thinking you’ll stay dry. Not very smart. Isn’t that what Bernie Sanders is doing? What is Bernie doing besides being a sheep dog to herd alleged Leftists into Hillary’s camp? Sanders is no socialist – he’s a garden variety neoliberal. He’s just not as bellicose as Clinton. He’s a greenwashing capitalist. Uh you mean like effectively challenging the leadership of the party after the Clintons were essentially kicked out and leading an active progressive movement? If that’s “neoliberal”, then the term has lost all meaning. [Remainder of comment deleted due to personal attack on another commenter] Socialjism, let’s watch the personal insults. Keep the debate on issues and ideas, not on personally attacking other readers. Personal attacks are verboten here, period. This is not right-wing talk radio. Gladys Knight & The Pips – Neither One of Us | Rock Salted says: […] were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.” Or as Pete Dolack put it, “liberal ideology tends to fight for the ability of minorities and women to be able to […] I was just reading a piece about ML King and it strikes me his personal political growth mirrors some of what is being discussed. After all the struggle around race he realized toward the end of his life that you can’t vote yourself the white man’s wealth or productive property. And that even the “dream” of black middle-class life forced you into complicity with an empire bombing poor people in SE Asia. Because of this developing structural analysis he lost the support of LBJ and the black moderates who were fine with capitalism (and mostly still are). And he lost his life. As for class being the basis for revolutionary agency, what class-belonging/consciousness does a black women who works as a nurse but owns two rentals and a modest portfolio of stocks have? Or the white janitor who has a small on-line business he runs from home? Obviously is not an egalitarian ownership society, but capitalism is dynamic and has responded to the old synthesis. I believe the one issue which could possibly unite these two around an anti-capitalist critique is climate change. Explaining how the profound failure of the energy market (task of the Left) has created an existential crisis threatening their progeny will help them transcend identity and see the true ideological adversary. I think this is what Naomi Klein was getting at with the title: This Changes Everything. As in Every Orthodoxy, materialist, idealist, naturalist. This is not a rejection of the abstract or of “isms”, but a re-thinking of the playbook. Anyway, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it. While Charles Eisenstein is working on a new book about the issue, which will flesh out what I’m about to say in much greater depth and detail, let me chime in with my own misgivings about the overwhelming emphasis, currently so prevalent on the left, on the issue of climate change, an emphasis which has IMHO become almost a form of religion. If in reading this opening sentence you are already beginning to damn me, that’s Exhibit A of my position. The vast majority of us leftists are not climate scientists nor scientists of any kind. Climate science itself is in its infancy. While many of the climate and other scientists in the “denial” category are funded in whole or part by the fossil fuel industry (and thus should be taken with more than a grain of salt), there are a number of scientists of sterling reputation and accomplishment who question the so-called consensus view. I say this after spending a great deal of time reading about this issue, so if I’m mistaken, it’s not from lack of information but lack of judgment. Here’s some of the scientific voices who give me pause. But while I’m not certain that human action is causing what will soon be catastrophic climate change, I firmly believe two other things: (1) that we are polluting and plundering our precious, beautiful planet to a dangerous and obscene extent, causing rampant species extinction and threatening ecocide; and (2) while we have begun to learn more about ecology and other life sciences, what we still don’t know dwarfs what we do. So yes, I’m all for reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses, but I’m also for doing all in our power to save species, oceans, reefs, rivers, lakes, groundwater, soil, seeds, mountains, forests, wetlands, grasslands, etc. etc. etc. Indeed, I would wager that if we took this more balanced approach to reducing environmental damage, we’d find that symptoms like global warming would ameliorate, as the overall health of the earth improved and the resilience of life rebounded beyond expectation. However, if we put all of our eggs in the basket of climate change, and it turns out that this particular issue is not the standalone monster we thought it was, or if we go to ineffective war against it like we did with poverty and drugs and terrorism, haven’t we both wasted valuable and limited time and perhaps weakened, if not undermined, the larger environmental movement (which you are quite correct in citing as the most effective anti-capitalist weapon, along with being an ultimate matter of life and death)? Many, probably most, who read this website will disagree with me (even violently), but we all might want to stop and consider, if only for a moment, what Eisenstein is pondering and in the process of writing: https://newandancientstory.net/book-progress-off-the-spectrum/ I look forward to reading reactions to this post but have no interest in another internet argument, having learned the hard way that they usually go nowhere. So as far as this comment is concerned, thanks for reading my two cents, I’ll read yours, and over and out. That’s an interesting comment, newtonfinn. I would respond by saying that I think your position of being in favor of “reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses, but I’m also for doing all in our power to save species, oceans, reefs, rivers, lakes, groundwater, soil, seeds, mountains, forests, wetlands, grasslands, etc. etc. etc.” is an anti-capitalist statement that is in keeping with Charles Eisenstein’s thought that climate change is a symptomatic fever. Eisenstein’s writing, it seems to me, is in the same vein as that of Naomi Klein. Capitalists see climate change as an opportunity to profit from while Eisenstein and Klein are calling for a new way to view the world. Wikipedia is not a credible source for citation and if the article on the scientific assessment of climate change is read critically, its weaknesses will become obvious. To tie your comment back into the original theme of Systemic Disorder’s post, climate change is yet another example of identity politics. Only a razor focus on the damage that capitalism has done, across the board, will suffice. We need to tie everything back to capitalism and not get distracted by identity politics. Once Eisenstein’s “symptomatic fever” is addressed and cured, all the symptoms, by definition, will disappear. I believe that both Klein and Eisenstein would agree with me when I say that capitalism will not work without commodification. Commodifying life and everything on the planet is how we have arrived at our present situation. Only by adopting a new view will we have a chance for survival. That new view is an anti-capitalist stance that asks how humanity can exist by being separated from Nature, a view that arose simultaneously with Modernity. I would share Alucin’s critiques of Newton’s statement on global warming, and so won’t add to it. But assuming the Wikipedia list is accurate (and I’ve found in fields in which I have knowledge Wikipedia tends to be full of inaccuracies), I note there is precisely one climatologist (who’s retired) on the entire list of dissident scientists. There is also one “retired research professor of environmental science” who is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute — rather a conflict of interest! I also see Willie Soon, listed as an “astrophysicist,” on the list. Soon was the subject of a New York Times report a few years ago — he accepted more than 1 million from petroleum and coal companies to produce what he called “deliverables” supposedly debunking global warming, and not disclosing his financial sources when submitting his biased “reports” to journals. The very epitome of junk science. Scientists in other fields don’t count. I have to point out that 97 percent of climate scientists (as opposed to “meteorologists” who simply predict tomorrow’s weather) concur that humans cause global warming. Many among the other three percent, I’d wager, are on energy-company or other corporate payrolls. Capitalism is the cause of global warming and it can’t be stopped under capitalism, as I’ve argued before. Moreover, it seems that putting a halt to ecocide is inseparable from a reversal of global warming. In reading the link to Charles Eisenstein that Newton provided, I can see readily that he is a serious thinker, someone trying to tie together the multitude of environmental problems humanity faces. In defense of this approach, he writes: “I see the world careening further and further out of balance and I want to do something about it. It hurts, what is happening to the horseshoe crabs, to the Amazon, to the rhinos, the mangroves, the sea grass, the tuna, the Monarch butterflies. … Oh, but we don’t need the Monarchs as long as we stop emitting carbon dioxide, right? A pity for them, but we’ll be fine. Right? Right? Wrong. But that is what the carbon narrative suggests, and that is how it tends to shift environmental priorities. In the mentality of carbon accounting, you could pave over the last Monarch wintering ground, and as long as you offset the loss by planting a forest somewhere else, you could claim zero impact.” I don’t see the typical climate activist isolating in the way that Eisenstein suggests here. Certainly the sort of isolation he is critiquing would be a wrong approach. But is he perhaps critiquing a chimera? I can’t say with certainty; I would have to assume that he has encountered this critiqued attitude sufficiently that has become a motivating factor for him. He says his book “is using climate as a window onto a process of change that encompasses everything. A typical book on climate change says, ‘Here is what is happening and here is what we should do about it.’ This book is different. It will visit that place, yes. It will go into some nuts-and-bolts about things like seagrass sequestration capacity and regenerative agriculture, even about greenhouse gas emissions, but it will disassemble these threads and use them to weave a much broader tapestry that includes the accelerating transformation of consciousness, society, and the mythology of civilization.” In his book, he writes, he intends to encompass a broad spectrum of ideas: “Some of these are ‘on the map’ of conventional environmentalism, suggesting a shift of focus, strategy, languaging, and tactics. Some of the responses, though, are entirely off the spectrum of what we know as ecological activism. My hope is that you will find yourself on that tapestry, and realize your passion for, let us say, local food, prison reform, racial justice, or herbal medicine is part of the healing of the climate.” I would argue that overcoming capitalism is essential to solving these problems, but on the other hands we have to find ways of solving them right now. So all these struggles are inter-related and not neatly separable. It is impossible for me to know what this book will say, but I find this intriguing enough to be on the lookout for it when it is published. It’s true that an overwhelming amount of climate scientists (btw, I don’t get your dig against meteorology, which is actually a valid science, ya know) agree that climate change is happening, they don’t agree on what the effects and severity of it will be. I’m very much a climate change affects skeptic, if that’s a term. Not a dig at all. Meteorology is a personal interest of mine and I’m something of an amateur meteorologist. But it is often confused with climate science, a different branch of study. A lot of, I suspect most, television meteorologists have no degree in that field, must less in climate science, so they are not qualified to contradict scientists who specialize in climatology. Neither am I. They, and you and I, can give opinions, but people who do not have expertise in a field can’t properly be cited as “dissident scientists” equal to those in the field. The text discusses liberal ideology over the past century regarding capitalism and minorities/women. What does it say liberals claimed capitalism would do?

question:Hi David, I'm glad you're happy with the revisions! I'll go ahead and submit them to the editor today. The journal's editor said our paper is tentatively scheduled to be published in the June issue, which comes out on June 15th. That's just a few weeks away! I'm so excited. I'll keep you posted on any updates. And yes, it's been wonderful collaborating with you too. I really value your expertise and insights. Let's touch base once the paper is published and discuss how we want to promote it. We should definitely share it on our websites and social media channels. Best, Emily

question:If a solid right pyramid with a square base with side length 4 has a height of 12, what is the volume of a tetrahedron formed by connecting one of the base corners to the 3 other corners of the base of the pyramid?

question:(continued)