Intriguing book
mentioned by Tom:
I can still talk about Achieving Our Country, which was a pivotal read. It’s a political-philosophy book on the left about the shifts in American leftism in the 1900s. It really clicked with me: someone who wants there to be a thriving left and is fully on board with the theories in Piketty’s Capital and many of Henry George’s ideas, but is constantly surprised and disappointed by the mainstream brand of socialism that I find in DSA chapters in major cities and online. I keep wondering why the American left is so enthusiastic about homeownership, skeptical of reform and political participation, accepting of libertarian-tinged ideas, and attached to a class politics and “class analysis” that seems skin-deep and more interested in identity than anything else. Why do they waffle about their support of Ukraine and give space to so-called tankies?
Achieving our Country gives a compelling theory for why: that the 1960s marked a shift from a reformist leftism to one dominated by radical and Marxist thought. Writing radical Marxist here might set off some “Fox news” alarm bells, but it’s meant literally: that people shifted from wanting to reform a system to radically replace it. And that the explicit influence of the Marxist strain of Socialism – his historical materialism, emphasis on labor, ideas about the proletariat - are the underpinnings of a lot of what you hear at the average DSA meeting or in your issue of Jacobin.
The right and center are just so, so dumb and bigoted lately, but what kinda really makes you want to just go to space is that left are also dum-dums, at least the parts loud enough to hear. Maybe I’ll read this. Then again, it’s probably a bummer, so continuing to think about the hypercube may be the way to go.