16 September 20
RSN Isn’t Something You Can Take for Free
To get what RSN has to offer, you have to be a part of it, you have to participate. That’s the key. It’s the participation that builds the social benefit.
RSN, it’s about doing something.
Help.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
15 September 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Why Liberals Should Unite With Socialists, Not the Right
Matt McManus, Jacobin
McManus writes: "Conservatives are sounding the alarm bell about a Marxist takeover, with at least one philosopher urging liberals to join forces with the Right to destroy the socialist bogeyman."
ast month, the conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony published an essay in Quillette on “The Challenge of Marxism.” Hazony is known for his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, which lodged some valid critiques of liberalism, but was ultimately unconvincing in its effort to reframe nationalism as an anti-imperialist endeavor. His chosen exemplars included the United Kingdom, France, and the United States — all countries with long histories of colonialism and expansionism.
With his new essay, Hazony has jumped into the culture wars, attempting to explain and criticize the “astonishingly successful” Marxist takeover of “companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches.” He concludes with a call for liberals to unite with conservatives to halt this takeover, lest the dastardly Marxists achieve their goal of conquering “liberalism itself.”
Hazony’s essay, though long and detailed, has many flaws. In the end, it’s less a compelling takedown of contemporary leftists than another illustration of why conservatives should read Marx.
The Red Menace
Hazony opens his essay with an odd claim. Contemporary Marxists, he argues, aren’t willing to wear their colors proudly, instead attempting to “disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including ‘the Left,’ ‘Progressivism,’ ‘Social Justice,’ ‘Anti-Racism,’ ‘Anti-Fascism,’ ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Critical Race Theory,’ ‘Identity Politics,’ ‘Political Correctness,’ ‘Wokeness,’ and more.” Nonetheless the essence of the political left remains staunchly Marxist, building upon Marx’s framework as Hazony understands it.
For him, Marxism has four characteristics. First, it is based on an oppressor/oppressed narrative, viewing people as invariably attached to groups that exploit one another. Second, it posits a theory of “false consciousness” where the ruling class and their victims may be unaware of the exploitation occurring, since it is obscured by the “ruling ideology.” Third, Marxists demand the revolutionary reconstitution of society through the destruction of the ruling class and its ideology. And finally, once the revolution is accomplished, a classless society will emerge.
This account ignores a tremendous amount of what makes Marxism theoretically interesting, focusing instead on well-known tropes and clichés. It is startling, but telling, that Hazony never once approaches Marxism as a critique of political economy, even though Marx was kind enough to label two of his books “critiques of political economy.” By effacing this fundamental characteristic of Marxism, Hazony reduces it to a simplistic doctrine that could be mapped onto more or less anything.
If it is true that Marxism is just an oppressor/oppressed narrative with some stuff about a ruling ideology and revolution tacked on, then mostly every revolutionary movement through history has been Marxist — even before Marx lived. The American revolutionaries who criticized the ruling ideology of monarchism and waged a war for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would fit three of Hazony’s four characteristics, making them borderline proto-Marxists. About the only thing that remains of what distinguished Marx in Hazony’s account is his claim that we are moving toward a classless society, something about which the German critic wrote very little.
Marxism is a very specific modernist doctrine, inspired by the events and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marx drew on three dominant currents in European thought at the time: the German philosophical reaction to Hegel, French radicalism, and English political economy.
From Hegel, Marx took the idea that history is the story of humanity moving toward greater freedom, understood by both Hegel and Marx as the capacity for self-determination. Marx famously attempted to turn Hegel “right side up” by contending that the renowned philosopher’s emphasis on ideas was misguided: material relations, Marx argued, largely moved history forward. From French radicalism, Marx took the idea of a class conflict between workers and the bourgeoisie. He was certain that one day we would live in a classless society, where every individual could develop each side of their nature.
And from the English political economists, Marx took much of his understanding about how capitalism worked; in particular, he drew on David Ricardo to argue that the exchange value of commodities lay in the “socially necessary labor time” invested in them. This last point was important for Marx circa Capital Volume One, since it seemed to explain the mechanism of workers’ exploitation. As David Harvey has pointed out, in the later posthumous volumes things become more complicated as Marx began to theorize on the nature of “fictitious capital” in the stock and credit markets. These developments demonstrated how capitalism was able to adapt to its own contradictions, but only through quick fixes that left the fundamental tensions intact and could even sharpen them over time.
This quick summary by no means captures the breadth of Marx’s work. But it should at least suggest how much richer Marxism is than the simple antagonisms Hazony puts forward.
This tendency for crude simplification extends to Hazony’s treatment of “neo-Marxism,” which he associates with “successor movements” led by “Michel Foucault, postmodernism, and more” including the “‘Progressive or ‘Anti-Racism’ movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain.” But how or why these movements owe much, if anything, to Marxism is left extremely vague. Michel Foucault famously denigrated Marxism as outdated nineteenth-century economics and even flirted with neoliberalism. So much for class conflict as the engine of history. As for the anti-racist movements gathering steam across the world, they’re more likely to look to Martin Luther King and other totems of the black freedom struggle than Marx.
None of this is to say these movements don’t or shouldn’t draw from Marx (they should!). But reducing them to simply “updated Marxism” ignores the particularities and histories of progressive figures and movements — rather ironic given that Hazony spends a great deal of The Virtue of Nationalism arguing for the benefits of a world of particular nations, each with its own identity, history, and customs that warrant respect.
The “Flaws” with Marxism
Later in his essay, Hazony makes the novel decision to criticize liberals who believe Marxism is nothing but a “great lie.” This isn’t because he wishes to praise Marxism’s theoretical insights or political ambitions, but because he shares its progenitor’s critical appraisal of liberal individualism.
Hazony argues Marx was well aware that the liberal conception of the individual self, possessing rights and liberties secured by the state, was an ideological and legal fiction. While liberals felt that the modern state had provided full liberty for all, Hazony takes the Marxist insight to be that there will always be disparities in power between social groups, and the more powerful will always “oppress or exploit the weaker.” As he puts it:
Marx is right to see that every society consists of cohesive classes or groups, and that political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups. He is also right that at any given time, one group (or a coalition of groups) dominates the state, and that the laws and policies of the state tend to reflect the interests and ideals of this dominant group. Moreover, Marx is right when he says that the dominant group tends to see its own preferred laws and policies as reflecting “reason” or “nature,” and works to disseminate its way of looking at things throughout society, so that various kinds of injustice and oppression tend to be obscured from view.
Hazony goes on to criticize American liberals for pushing secularization and liberalization, particularly by excluding religion from schools and permitting pornography, which amount to “quiet persecution of religious families.” Liberals tend to be “systematically blind” to the oppression they wreak against conservatives, merely assuming that their doctrines provide liberty and equality for all. Hazony thinks Marx was far savvier in recognizing that “by analyzing society in terms of power relations among classes or groups, we can bring to light important political phenomena to which Enlightenment liberal theories — theories that tend to reduce politics to the individual and his or her private liberties — are systematically blind.”
None of this means Hazony is sympathetic to the idea that workers are the victims of exploitation or anything else that smacks of left-wing critique. Later in the essay, he criticizes Marxism for having three “fatal flaws.” First, Marxists assume any form of power relation is a relationship of oppressor and oppressed, even though some are mutually beneficial. Second, they believe that social oppression must be so great that any given society will inevitably be fraught with tension, leading to its eventual overthrow. And finally, Marx and Marxists are notoriously vague about the specifics of post-oppression society, and their actual track record is a “parade of horrors.”
Of the three, only the last strikes me as at all compelling. It is true that Marx never spelled out what a postcapitalist society would look like, and this ambiguity has led to figures like Stalin invoking his theories to justify tyranny. Socialists are better-off confronting this problem than pretending it doesn’t exist, which makes us easier prey for critiques like Hazony’s.
But whatever Marx intended, we can infer from his Critique of the Gotha Program that he wanted a democratic society free of exploitation, where the means of production were owned in common and distribution was organized according to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Whatever that might look like, it bears little resemblance to the litany of dictatorships conservatives love to point to when trashing Marxism. (Conservatives critics also skate by the central role that class struggle and Marxist-inspired parties played in building social democracies, even if those societies never transcended capitalism.)
There are big problems with pretty much every other feature of Hazony’s analysis of the flaws of Marxism and leftism. Hazony never takes on the specifically Marxist point that the relation between capital and labor is indeed oppressive and exploitative — a key point, since Marx never claimed that all types of power relations or hierarchies were illegitimate. His argument was far more specific: capitalist relations were oppressive because they were based on the systematic exploitation of labor.
Hazony might have been on firmer ground with his second criticism if he’d leaned into his critique of the teleological vision of history, which led some classical Marxists to claim capitalism was going to inevitably fall and be replaced by communism. But his contention doesn’t even rise to this level. Instead, he wants to argue that in a “conservative society,” it is possible “weaker groups [would] benefit from their position,” or at least are better-off than in a revolutionarily reconstituted polity.
And this is where things get interesting.
Marxism and Liberalism Redux
Hazony isn’t fond of liberalism. He sees American liberalism in particular as an oppressive force that has bullied religious and conservative families by advancing a pornographic, secular agenda. But Hazony is also deeply anxious that liberals will ally with progressive and “Marxist” groups — the great evil, in his mind — to further corrode conservatism.
In the most insightful part of his essay, Hazony describes the “dance of liberalism and Marxism.” Liberals and Marxists both believe in freedom and equality, and both are hostile to inherited traditions and hierarchies. Marxists and other progressives just take things a step further by arguing that real freedom and equality haven’t been achieved because of capitalism and other elements of liberal society. Under the right conditions, Hazony argues, liberals might become sympathetic to these arguments, since they often draw on the principles and rhetoric of liberalism. Liberals might even start pushing a “Marxist agenda.”
Hazony, then, isn’t criticizing Marxism in the name of defending liberalism. What he is doing trying to entice centrists to side with the political right rather than the political left. He is willing to tolerate liberals as part of an alliance to prevent the Marxist “conquest” of society.
To make this attractive to liberals, Hazony raises the stakes by suggesting the political left wants to destroy democracy and eliminate both conservatives and liberals. He argues that both conservatives and liberals are distinct in allowing — at minimum — a “two-party” system dominated by themselves. By contrast, Marxists are only willing to confer “legitimacy on . . . one political party — the party of the oppressed, whose aim is the revolutionary reconstitution of society. And this means that the Marxist political framework cannot co-exist with democratic government.”
Democracy, Liberalism, and Socialism
This is patently wrong. One of socialists’ ambitions since the nineteenth century has been to advance democracy in the political sphere, which is why they were central to the struggle for workers’ suffrage in Europe and elsewhere. Socialists deplore liberal capitalism for not being democratic enough. Likewise, the other progressive groups denigrated in Hazony’s essay are hardly foes of democracy: anti-racist movements have been agitating against voter suppression.
It is also telling that Hazony’s essay ignores the antidemocratic efforts of contemporary conservative strongmen, from Viktor Orbán’s dismantling of democracy in Hungary to Trump’s flirtations with canceling the 2020 election. Probably a savvy move given that none of this supports Hazony’s contention that liberal democrats have nothing to fear from aligning with the political right.
Interestingly, Hazony’s essay skirts near a deep insight, before rushing away, perhaps for tactical reasons. The insight: both liberalism and Marxism — properly understood — are eminently modernist doctrines. Both emerged within a few centuries of each other and are committed to the principles of respecting moral equality by securing freedom for all.
The march of liberalism and socialism have razed traditionalist orders and hierarchies that insisted on naturalizing inequities of power. These traditionalist orders were neither natural nor particularly beneficent, subordinating women, LGBT individuals, religious and ethnic minorities, and so on for millennia.
Liberalism often failed to live up to its principles, which is partly why the political left emerged and remains so necessary. Liberals often engaged in just the kind of tactical alliances with conservative traditionalists Hazony calls for in order to maintain unjustifiable hierarchies. But this alliance is always fraught, since a liberal who doesn’t believe in freedom and equality for all is no liberal.
The same is true of those of us on the political left, except we believe that these ideals cannot be achieved within the bounds of the liberal state and ideology. More radical reforms are needed to complete the historical process of emancipation from necessity and exploitation, though what reforms and how radical are matters of substantial debate. (My own preference is for what the philosopher John Rawls would call “liberal socialism.”)
All this brings us squarely back to Karl Marx, who was very aware of these dynamics. With Engels, he applauded liberal capitalism for both its productive capacity and, for the first time, enshrining formal equality for all. It had achieved this precisely by upending the old traditionalist order, profaning all that was sacred, and forcing humanity to face up to its real conditions for the first time.
But liberalism remained just one stage in the movement of history, and like all before it would eventually give way to a new form of society. Whether this is inevitable, as Marx sometimes seemed to imply, there are indeed many limitations to liberal democracy as it exists today. Liberals sincerely committed to freedom and equality should recognize that and ask if they are better-off allied to a political right committed to turning back the clock — or striding into the future with progressives and socialists who share many of their fundamentally modernist convictions.
Excerpt: 'That's his specialty, he's the uterus collector. I know that's ugly.' (photo: VICE)
Whistleblower: ICE Facility "Like an Experimental Concentration Camp" With Staggering Number of Unnecessary Hysterectomies
Carter Sherman, VICE
Sherman writes: "'We've questioned among ourselves, like, goodness, he's taking everybody's stuff out,' said a former nurse at the facility. 'That's his specialty, he's the uterus collector.'"
whistleblower complaint filed Monday by several legal advocacy groups accuses a detention center of performing a staggering number of hysterectomies on immigrant women, as well as failing to follow procedures meant to keep both detainees and employees safe from the coronavirus.
The complaint, filed on behalf of several detained immigrants and a nurse named Dawn Wooten, details several accounts of recent “jarring medical neglect” at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, which is run by the private prison company LaSalle South Corrections and houses people incarcerated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In interviews with Project South, a Georgia nonprofit, multiple women said that hysterectomies were stunningly frequent among immigrants detained at the facility.
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” said one woman, who said she’d met five women who’d had hysterectomies after being detained between October and December 2019. The woman said that immigrants at Irwin are often sent to see one particular gynecologist outside of the facility. “It was like they’re experimenting with their bodies.”
In one case, Wooten said, a woman who ended up with a hysterectomy was not properly anesthetized and overhead the doctor say that he’d taken out the wrong ovary. That woman had to go back and get her other ovary removed as well, Wooten said.
“We’ve questioned among ourselves, like, goodness, he’s taking everybody’s stuff out,” said Wooten, who was a full-time employee at Irwin until July. “That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly.”
“Is he collecting these things or something,” she continued. “Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”
Wooten also said she’d talked to several detained immigrants who’d had hysterectomies but didn’t know why. One detained immigrant told Project South that, ahead of the scheduled procedure, she was given multiple different explanations about what would happen and why it was necessary.
While ICE reported in August that 41 immigrants at Irwin have tested positive for COVID-19, Wooten believes that the true number may be much higher, according to the complaint. Women housed in multiple units in the facility allegedly exhibited COVID-19 symptoms, but were not tested for the virus for weeks. Immigrants have also allegedly continued to be transferred in and out of the facility, against guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and the advice of Irwin’s own medical director.
The complaint also alleges that both the detained immigrants and staffers at Irwin lacked the personal protective equipment they need to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic: People in both groups have only received one mask each since the pandemic broke out. It is also impossible to socially distance within the facility, according to the complaint.
“There is no way to protect [against COVID-19] at all here in the facility,” one immigrant said. “We share everything together. There is no way at all we can feel protected here in the facility.
Detained immigrants also said that the medical and quarantine unit in one part of the Irwin facility were filthy. One woman said she had to clean her cell using shampoo because staffers wouldn’t give her any cleaning chemicals; she recalled seeing another woman use her socks to do the same.
“If it wasn’t for my faith in God, I think I would have gone insane and just break down and probably gone as far as hurting myself,” the woman said. “There are a lot of people here who end up in medical trying to kill themselves because of how crazy it is.”
Some men at the facility even went on hunger strike, demanding to be released or to have better protections against the coronavirus, according to the complaint. But nothing changed.
Meanwhile, employees are also expected to work even if they have COVID-19 symptoms and are awaiting their test results, Wooten said. And management at the facility also allegedly refuses to tell officers if any detained immigrants have tested positive for COVID-19, which could heighten their risk of contracting the virus.
“Ms. Wooten explained that she believes ICDC is hiding information about COVID-19 in order to keep things quiet,” the complaint alleged. “She stated that everyone in the facility is scared at this point, so management does not want to tell officers and detained immigrants the truth because they are afraid of an uproar. Instead, the secrecy has created a ‘silent pandemic’ where even if officers get COVID-19 from the facility, the officers won’t be able to blame ICDC because no one knows how prevalent COVID-19 is inside ICDC due to not testing detained immigrants and not sharing who has the virus.”
Besides Project South, the advocacy groups Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network helped file the complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. Law and Crime published the complaint after the Intercept covered some of the allegations inside it.
LaSalle Corrections didn’t immediately respond to a VICE News request for comment. In the past, the Irwin County Detention Center has repeatedly been found to be in compliance with ICE’s detention standards.
In a statement, ICE said it does not comment on matters handled by the Office of the Inspector General.
“ICE takes all allegations seriously and defers to the OIG regarding any potential investigation and/or results,” the agency said. “That said, in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve."
A rally in support of immigrants. (photo: Laura Bonilla Cal/Getty Images)
A Federal Appeals Court Has Allowed the Trump Administration to End a Program That Lets 300,000 Immigrants Live in the US
Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed
Flores writes: "A federal appeals court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to terminate a program that lets at least 300,000 immigrants live and work in the US."
READ MORE
John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
DOJ Opens Criminal Inquiry Into John Bolton's Book
Carrie Johnson, NPR
Johnson writes: "A federal grand jury has issued criminal subpoenas to a publishing company and a literary agency in connection with a book by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, NPR has confirmed."
The move signals the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation surrounding the publication of Bolton's book The Room Where It Happened after an unsuccessful effort to block from being published in June.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book had already been distributed, and Judge Royce Lamberth concluded at the time that the emergency request from the Trump administration had come too late.
But in his 10-page ruling, Lamberth issued a warning to Bolton, writing that he "has gambled with the national security of the United States. He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability" for possibly disclosing national security secrets.
President Trump has criticized Bolton on Twitter: "He turned out to be grossly incompetent, and a liar. See judge's opinion. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION!!!"
A source told NPR the subpoenas have been issued to Simon & Schuster, Bolton's publisher, and Javelin, his literary agency. The criminal probe was first reported by The New York Times.
Bolton's attorney, Charles Cooper, has accused the government of slow-walking the review of the book before it was published. Cooper did not return multiple messages from NPR seeking comment Monday evening.
Word of the grand jury subpoenas comes as the administration reels from yet another book about the Trump White House. This time, it's longtime Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, whose account of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and a crisis with North Korea is garnering nonstop news coverage. Simon & Schuster also published Woodward's book.
Signs used during protests and rallies are gathered around a memorial for Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. (photo: Bryan Woolston/Reuters)
Breonna Taylor: Louisville Reaches 'Substantial' Settlement With Family
Tom McCarthy and Miranda Bryant, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has reached a 'substantial' settlement with the family of Breonna Taylor in a civil suit stemming from the fatal shooting by police of the 26-year-old inside her apartment in March, according to reports."
READ MORE
Colombia. (photo: Joshua Collins/VICE)
Colombia: 58 Officers Under Investigation for Police Brutality
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's authorities Monday announced that 58 police officers are under investigation for allegedly shooting protesters during the anti-police brutality demonstrations that have shaken Bogota over the past week."
So far, 14 civilians died and 403 people were injured due to actions directly related to the police.
olombia's authorities Monday announced that 58 police officers are under investigation for allegedly shooting protesters during the anti-police brutality demonstrations that have shaken Bogota over the past week.
After the analysis of at least 50 videos, 58 officers were identified as having abusive behavior during the protests that followed lawyer Javier Ordoñez's murder.
The uniformed officers "accepted having shot to the crowd or having lost ammunition during the protests," National Police's director Gustavo Moreno said.
Regarding Ordoñez's murder, seven officers are being prosecuted for "acting brutally and outside of the protocol. The violent acts will not go unpunished," Defense Minister Carlos Holmes added.
Ordoñez died from several traumatisms caused by blunt weapons during a police arrest. His body had nine skull fractures and rib injuries.
During the protests in Bogota and the Soacha municipality, in Cundinamarca Department, 13 civilians died and 403 people were injured.
This Saturday, victim number 14 was registered. Cristian Rodriguez, 19, was killed by an unknown person amid a demonstration. A man approached Rodriguez and shot him in the head without saying a word.
Birds in New Mexico are dropping dead. Scientists don't know why. (photo: NM State University)
Birds Are Dropping Dead in New Mexico, Potentially in the 'Hundreds of Thousands'
Ben Kesslen, NBC News
Kesslen writes: "Wildlife experts in New Mexico say birds in the region are dropping dead in alarming numbers, potentially in the 'hundreds of thousands.'"
Scientists are investigating why so many birds are dying and are asking the public for help.
“It appears to be an unprecedented and a very large number,” Martha Desmond, a professor at New Mexico State University’s department of fish, wildlife, and conservation ecology, told NBC’s Albuquerque affiliate KOB.
New Mexico residents have reported coming upon dead birds on hiking trails, missile ranges, and other locations.
In a video posted by Las Cruces Sun News, journalist Austin Fisher shows a cluster of dead birds he discovered while on a hike on September 13 in the state’s northern Rio Arriba County.
“I have no idea,” Fisher says in the video, as he pans the camera to reveals what appears to be dozens of birds laying dead on the ground.
Desmond said it is difficult to say how many birds are dying, but that there have been reports across the state. “I can say it would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of birds."
Multiple agencies are investigating the occurrences, including the Bureau of Land Management and the White Sands Missile Range, a military testing area.
“On the missile range we might in a week find, get a report of, less than half a dozen birds,” Trish Butler, a biologist at the range, told KOB. “This last week we've had a couple hundred, so that really got our attention.”
It’s unclear to scientists why the die-off is occurring, and Desmond said it’s possible it was caused by a cold front that hit New Mexico last week or by recent droughts.
Desmond also told KOB the deaths could be related to the wildfires in the West. “There may have been some damage to these birds in their lungs. It may have pushed them out early when they weren't ready to migrate.”
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said on Twitter that “not much is known about the impacts of smoke and wildfires on birds.”
Scientists are asking the public to report sightings of dead birds to an online database, and that people safely collect the dead birds so that researchers can study them closer.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.