Yeah, my impression is that Dore is a big of an inconsistent thinker because he still has angry dum dum energy, and it seems like if this was the core of his ideology he would think the whole "people's party" thing is kind of unimportant. He is basically presenting the state as though it is the enemy, and that there is this concept of a movement or of "average people" so to speak (working people) who must demand things of the state, and the state will not want to give them because it is hostile. The state is assumed hostile, because it is filled with careerists and big money and all the rest, so what "politics" really is in this situation is the recognition that the state is hostile, and the recognition that it will try to weasel its way out of giving you what you want. He sees proceduralism as an ideological weapon, a way for the state and its representatives to tell you that the things you want can't happen because of opaque rules and games that you don't understand, but rest assured the professionals are figuring it out for you. Basically weaponizing complexity and bureaucracy to ideologically tame you and make you believe that things can't happen. So he is saying the political shift that he wants is for people to simply not accept any of that. Don't think like a state, think like a person being abused by a state. Demand that the state gives you what you want, demand that it makes it happen. Maintain that mentality, fully inhabit it, so that if the state comes back to you wringing its hands saying "ah, sorry, we couldn't do it because blah blah" the excuse is deeply unacceptable.

I was trying to phrase some of that in Dore-speak but I kind of meandered back into language he wasn't using. But I get what he is fundamentally saying and generally agree with it. He is vague about it, but that is because he is a dum dum guy. He is saying that the people who are currently the supposed mouthpieces (the left media and the politicians like AOC) need to do what Bernie was originally doing successfully and make uncompromising demands of the system, and they need to tell the people that listen to them to have that mindset. This mass politics needs to be deeply ingrained into the ideology of the people currently aligning themselves with what they believe to be "the movement", but instead Jimmy is accusing them of just thinking like states, just giving cover for the system, just ideologically taming people and giving them excuses for why professional technocrats need to be allowed to maneuver for them through mazes of proceduralism that they know nothing about. They're basically saying leave it up to the experts, you may have passion for the revolution but you don't understand how to do it. He is saying NO, you shouldn't accept that. You and all of your friends and everybody who agrees with you need to group up and find ways to make the simple demand, and you need to have the full confidence that it CAN get done, and that you will MAKE IT get done.

EDIT: I say the people's party seems like it would be unimportant to him because he genuinely sounded like an anarchist in that stream. Like, it doesn't really matter whose ass is in the seat, you shouldn't care. He was placing a lot of emphasis on the idea that politicians are all your enemies and they'll probably always be your enemies because power warps them into team players, so you need to make them bend to what you want and never think of a politician as your friend that you are making excuses for. They make excuses for themselves, you tell them (and presumably show them) that the excuses aren't acceptable.

I don't usually watch Dore videos, so I could be wrong about this, but watching the ones related to this whole issue it seems like his idea is generally being misconstrued. It had two sides to it, primarily that:

1. Jimmy Dore already thinks that AOC and the other progressives are ideologically captured, that the Democratic Party is a pit, and he suggested the idea because he believed that they wouldn't do it and it would expose that they are unwilling to act. So on this level the utility was actually supposed to be disillusioning people with the celebrity of AOC and the progressives in the party.

2. He actually thinks you should push it to win, not to lose. He originally stated that the people who vote against it would be exposing themselves, ie the Democratic Party would let people know it doesn't want to pass a bill guaranteeing healthcare during a pandemic, but that doesn't seem like his focus. It looks like his primary rant is that you need to push it like you can win it, you need to want to win and believe you can win. Even if you know the odds are long, you need to stop believing in the procedural game and simply demand it in the most forceful and loud way that you can until it has to happen. He just had David Sirota on, and the thing he is criticizing his idea for is that he is saying it is the mentality of a technocrat. Basically, we need to get these correct people into the right positions (committees etc.) and then someday M4A will be granted to us. He is saying that that is the completely wrong framing, and it just apologizes for the technocratic proceduralism of electoral politics. He is accusing that entire framing of being an ideological pied piper right back into conceding all power to the party. He is saying people need to have the mentality that they demand things of politicians, no matter who is in power. Politicians as good individuals are not going to save you, rather the movement needs to force the hand of the state, it needs to be so overwhelming that politicians are afraid of turning against it.

I'm honestly not some kind of Dore fanboy, I really don't ever watch Dore, but as far as I can see he is being more radical than all the people accusing him of being an idiot. He is truly suggesting mass politics. He is saying that all the electoral proceduralism is a sham, that THAT is the real performance of politics, but what politics really is is the power that exposes what a sham all of that is. The state doesn't make reality, it conforms to it. The bourgeois state conforms to the needs of capitalism, and even in times of immense crisis it will conform to the needs of capitalism by attempting to tame insurrection, to the degree it is really threatening. It will never abolish itself of course, but he is basically saying that the mentality should be fuck caring about all of this esoteric bullshit no normal person knows or cares about, what you need to do is get people energized and demanding something, and to expect it and not take excuses. If that energy can really grow and be threatening, the state will suddenly contort itself to deliver the goods just to avoid being butchered by an angry mob who are starting to question whether it is useful to keep it around at all.

WORDS

This actually seems like a very muddled article. It seems to start out by suggesting that the reason we should push for higher wages is because it is an inherent good in itself. That is an interesting angle, you wouldn't really expect it to be present in much but a marginal, feel good op-ed. But then the NYT claims that those arguments are only the familiar ones, and the argument they want to focus on is how it helps growth. Like, these two paragraphs are right next to each other:

Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers and the measure of economic performance under the Biden administration. We’d all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and focusing instead on the growth of workers’ paychecks.

Set aside, for the moment, the familiar arguments for higher wages: fairness, equality of opportunity, ensuring Americans can provide for their families. The argument here is that higher wages can stoke the sputtering engine of economic growth.

Doesn't the first one seem like it is repudiating the view of the one that follows it? "We should stop caring about growth and GDP, but forget that sentence you just read, I'm going to tell you why you should still care about GDP." I feel like I got hit across the head.

But aside from that weird editorial choice which kind of continues throughout the article (it seems to hop back and forth on whether high wages are just good, or whether they need to be justified by growth), I'd actually say the article is just badly framed and wrong regardless. It isn't surprising because it is the NYT, but I feel compelled to criticize it because they're clearly trying to diffuse leftist energy by placating it or reconstituting it into their brand of liberalism. Unfortunately it isn't the case that high wages "boost the economy". To the extent that they do, it is temporary. The new economic consensus was more in response to this reality than anything, even though the NYT seems to suggest the market fundies and neoliberals were arguing for tax cuts because it would help wages. Profits drive reinvestment, and weakening returns make it seem riskier. From a Marxist perspective, wages cut into profits, because the surplus is actually created in the production process, only realized at the point of exchange. Profit is a cut of the pie, and when you keep increasing the relative share of the social surplus going to labor you decrease the share going to capital, which can have the tendency to slow growth and lead to crises in the long run because the profit signal driving reinvestment is being dampened. All surplus comes from labor, the difference between what labor gets paid for its ability to work and the actual value of the stock of commodities they produced.

Which of course is not to say it is then bad to advocate for higher wages, but it is a dead end that also leads to consequences in reality which beget the counterargument that there is a ceiling to wages which is impossible to break through without maintaining growth. The maintenance of the myopic view of the economy is counterproductive, in terms of its supposed goal it directly defeats the NYT's meandering point that it is valuable to reframe the understanding of the economy to the public in order to produce better policy, because that road leads to confusion and capitalist realist resignation to market forces. In fact, the NYT itself gives a glimpse into what I'd unironically call the radical liberal solution to the problem that is consistently hidden from view or simply considered too unrealistic, even though it is not totally unknown:

For decades, mainstream economists insisted that it was impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflected the unerring judgment of market forces. “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” in the apt summary of John Snow, the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.

That quote is the actual economic orthodoxy on the question. The belief of the neoclassicals is basically that economic production is made of inputs that go into a box and when mixed together the box ejects output. "The enterprise" is the private entity that efficiently allocates each input such that output is maximized. They think that labor is just another input, like land or capital, and so it is only the private enterprise in concert with myriad other private enterprises calculating their own production functions that can determine the optimal allocation for maximization of social wealth. In the normative sense, such models are treated as though they justify the distribution of income to the inputs in the manner John Snow said, that people get paid exactly as much as is required to maximize economic output, and so they're paid "what they're worth".

What goes entirely unexamined by most people who just kind of imbibe this model of the economy, which many people have in an ambient way if not through an actual economics degree or something, is that while the ownership of the output is vested in the private enterprise, there is nothing in the models that inherently prescribes the ownership structure of the private enterprise itself. This is one reason why Marx and Engels considered the expansion of joint stock companies an interesting and progressive development, because it was making absentee ownership more common. Firms were becoming social institutions which were divorced of connection to big private owners directly making decisions. This idea was developed later in the term "Managerial Capitalism", that big corporations were being run by salaried professionals rather than owners. This would seem to reflect some of the developments that led to events like the French Revolution, in which the growing group of professional and educated members of the Third Estate felt themselves more capable if not already the true decision makers in French society, and the aristocracy was just an arbitrarily parasitic group of lazy assholes. But of course, the minority of managers of capital aren't a revolutionary class, their revolution so far has been using their power for nicer compensation packages.

Anyways, I bring up the development of Managerial Capitalism because it pointed to the fact of the matter already recognized by the actually existing market, which is that if private enterprises are black boxes that blend the inputs and maximize the outputs, operation vs. ownership is ultimately inconsequential. Therefore, minority ownership over the surplus actually isn't justified by economistic modelling, even if you accept that private enterprises are the engines that maximize growth. So there is a false dichotomy here between the determinants of growth and the wealth disparity. It is simply assumed that private enterprises are owned by private capitalists. In fact, they could be owned by the workers in the firm while maintaining the neoclassical production function, and you'd both secure the power of labor that the NYT article mentions as necessary for wage increases, as well as to an almost unthinkable degree right now end the inequality that exists in American society. Furthermore, it isn't even a communist position. The market and private enterprise are all maintained. But it would be decried as a communist position that the market should transition into cooperatives because the goal for either the NYT or for the liberal establishment is obviously not the prosperity of the American people as some kind of unity, it is to keep the peace between capital and labor such that capital can continue to exploit labor without any fuss.

Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.

Watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister to get the British satire of this process. Presidents and politicians in general aren't without agency, but they are at the center of vast machinery that is filled with intelligent and experienced people, people who are basically supposed to be the court advisors of the President, his eyes and ears, but can just as easily manipulate and guide his action. So far I think the Obama book is actually pretty good just because he gives what seem like authentic glimpses into his frustrations with this, even though he also obviously accepted it as indomitable reality a long time ago. He was surrounded by institutions and interests that he clearly felt incapable of realistically fighting because the web of relationships between those institutions and interests, their own spheres of control and power and how they overlapped, constitutes all of American society and government. Somebody like Obama, if you were even to suggest to him the aggressive path out of the insanity of that situation, which in a sense he himself does several times in his book by lapsing into regrets and curses at how powerless he felt, ends up simply feeling vulnerable. I'd guess that even regarding what was past the horizon of that possibility would make someone like Obama see himself as an imposter in his social role, because even as all of society treats his office as though it were the king of America, the uncertainty and isolation of going against the American machine from such a position would suddenly expose exactly how contingent its power is. You could flip from being adored and respected to being treated like Nero in an instant.

So out of self-interest Obama does what every responsible President in America does, what the system expects him to do, he becomes its spokesperson. He becomes the branded image of it, he takes responsibility for its failures and successes for a while. He simplifies the reality of the thing "for the good of the country" or something like that. I'm sure he is a self-conscious asshole too, they all are to some extent, they all must know in a cynical way that a part of the bargain is that in exchange for the prestige and wealth afforded by being a President of the US they have to be secretive and manipulative of the public. I'm sure they all take an amount of pride in being so savvy. But I also think someone like Obama still sees himself as a good person on a certain level, or a well-meaning one, and that he is just a realist. In that sense, being the spokesperson of America is a part of the well-meaning part of it. If he "exposed" the American state for what it was, that would cause chaos, and it would also end his career and maybe his life. He thinks nothing good would come of it. So the responsible thing to do is to pretend and follow the rules of conduct.

How much money do you make arguing in front of the SC that Nestle should be immune from lawsuits by its foreign child slaves? I guess your reserved seat on the Lolita Express is gone, so times must be kind of rough.

I know it is a pretty typical consequence of war being romanticized, but aside from the fear of your own death why the fuck would you think “the thing I’d want to experience most in history is going to the greatest atrocity festivals of all time to kill random people”. So bored of being a rich YouTuber that you want to lob a grenade at some 20 year old and feel satisfied as their viscera rains back to earth?

Edit: like seriously, fuck, how many people’s minds actually go there? What about wanting to live through the 30s for something innocent, like designing airplanes, or playing jazz with musicians you admire, or something like that?

That seems like a common US history class experience. I was in high school in the mid 2000s and we had the same story told to us. I think a lot of people have that totally unexamined justification still floating around in their heads. But I also had a history teacher around 2005 that unironically shouted at a girl in the front of the class that terrorists wanted her to die because she had a refrigerator.

Medicating appears to be like magic for some people, but just to deflate your expectations in my experience using stims is helpful, but still requires a set of techniques meant to avoid just getting distracted and feeling great about it. The drugs effect people differently of course, but particularly amphetamines (vyvanse, adderal) seem capable of just making you feel fantastic while doing anything in particular. I've seen them mostly associated with a burst of motivation, which I agree with but I just experience as euphoria + alertness. They felt a little too easy to abuse for my taste, I was constantly listening to techno playlists from Berlin clubs while doing work on Vyvanse, feeling fucking great, and if I fucked up on what I applied myself to while taking my pill I'd have the desire to take another pill or something to keep the energy going and try to shift it to whatever I needed to do. But I've never had big problems with motivation, I feel like I've just had problems with distraction. I can be highly motivated to do something, even things that require being more engaged than something like mindlessly scrolling the internet, but it is rarely what I need to be doing. I've met other people who have huge problems with energy or motivation in particular to do things, and it seems like those people can benefit from amphetamines more.

Methylphenidate (ritalin) on the other hand felt like it provided mental clarity, but less of the euphoria. It was easier to direct it for me, helped stop impulsive behavior, but seems there are more people who dislike ritalin because they either "don't feel anything" or it gives them worse side effects. Still hasn't solved all of my problems unfortunately. I do best on days where I just refuse to do anything that I haven't already kind of planned out for myself as acceptable tasks or rewards. When I start veering off, it is just incredibly hard to decide when to stop. Since I know when something I'm about to do is not something I should be doing, I tend to do best when I allow myself to recognize that and just pause for a second to either ask aloud or think to myself if I really want to do whatever it is right now, and that gap seems to allow the impulse time to dissipate.

Little known, but when you enter America the customs agent tells you "welcome to America, we will never build another train".

Sam has been sounding schizophrenic when I tune in recently. I don’t know how he believes what he believes about the Democrats.

There is a price for labor, which is the market price, and there is a price for capital, which is an interest rate. Firm ownership is an arbitrary thing that can't be reduced to some kind of initial labor or risk. It is the ownership in perpetuity of all the surplus of a firm. Nothing is unique about capital being advanced, there are classes of loans with risk premiums that attempt to price the risk involved. There is nothing unique about doing R&D or market research, many people are paid a salary for it. It's just arbitrary, even within the logic of liberalism. There is a contract that is allowed which says you can own all the surpluses of the labor and capital owned by a firm, owned by you as your property. Nothing in particular justifies this, it is just a social fact, like the outright ownership of a person's labor for the duration of their life was at one time a legally sanctioned contract.

On one hand this isn’t totally surprising, I had a girlfriend who got a visit from DHS at her parent’s house, and they informed her and her family that she was on a watchlist after taking pictures near a refinery. But on the other, I’m pretty baffled by what draws the focus of the national security state. There are dozens of books and articles and videos out there about the CIA, I was just re-listening to Death is Just Around the Corner’s episodes on JFK. Why go intimidate some random YouTuber? Feels like being some poor asshole getting audited by the IRS. They just went to their database of “published criticism of the CIA online” and draw a random name.

Good article. As usual, down with Democratic entryism etc.

Don Delillo's Underworld Hal Draper's Marx's Theory of Revolution Myron Levine's Urban Politics

The Chinese government hasn't heard about bodies and spaces.

We are all business owners now!

Or if you want the PDFs of the collected works, go to b-ok.

Starting to feel like the only way to convince people in a way that matters and is effective is to have socialist organizations in their lives that are positive and then the receptiveness of explaining those types of things to them will be much greater than just one comment on an internet thread.

Absolutely. I don’t think exclusively “convincing” people through argument is quite that productive. Meeting them where their problems are and reorienting them into solutions that highlight the true nature of the problem is what can reveal the necessity of class struggle to them, in a practical way. But it is a hard problem, always dynamic and highly contingent on real circumstances that have to be analyzed. And even then, it is entirely possible that your position is so vulnerable to various angles of subversion that whatever organizational form you’ve helped cook up is 99% doomed to being co-opted, de-fanged, exposed to such vulnerability that it is destined for collapse.

But most normal people will not adopt in any committed fashion some kind of -ism that suggests everything they know should be upended yesterday. But they are open to what they perceive as practical solutions, and once you’ve committed them to some project they think is reasonable if it were to come under attack by private and state interests then you’ve helped set the ground for a realization on the part of the members to the project, who suddenly have an avenue to directly experience who their enemies are.