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/457/ AufheBonus Bonus - December 2024 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-12-12 13:37:50
Imported:
2024-12
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Content

On your questions, comments & criticisms. We're back with a final letters to the editor episode of 2024 in which we discuss:

the universalisation of 'anti-fascism' as a kind of politics

whether there are any actual 'family abolitionists' out there

humanitarian intervention in Palestine

the hard and less hard facts of US imperial decline

the legitimacy of 'existential' politics

whether anti-corruption politics are good, actually

and why Phil loves Hillary

Files

Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

To answer Phil's question: 45% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sefaradi. The Ashkenazim who more resemble what Europeans or Americans think of as "Jews" are about 32%. https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic-origin-and-identity-in-Israel-JEMS-2018.pdf To elaborate on the internal/external distinction a bit, the Israeli Left has long stood for the principle of the "villa in the jungle" by which the Israeli state can close itself off as a fortress-state from the rest of the region and thus guarantee the safety of Israeli citizens. Speaking of Eva Ilouz and the PMC... the Israeli PMC and most of Israel's classical ruling institutions remain disproportionately Ashkenazi-dominated and more liberal-left (as in other countries) than the population at large. Israeli Left politics is between a rock and a hard place: if they represent their natural voter base and run on continuity with previous Left projects (eg: the Oslo Accords, the peace process, postzionism, etc), they will fail because their projects failed and their natural voter base are shrinking proportionately. So far, though, trying to renew their program and find a mass base has been taken as either tailing the Right badly or simple treason against what the Left *ought* to stand for (again, eg: peace process, liberal Tel-Avivi fortress state, postzionism, etc.). Meanwhile, Netanyahu is playing Napoleon for the Levant. My Italian friend I saw this week turned out to have an Israeli girlfriend and there were lots of points of comparison to draw. A good model of Israel might be, "Italy, but a bunch smaller, constantly at war, and with more porous borders."

Richard R

On the family bit: I wish I had the time to write about it in a serious way, but I think most of the debate around the family on the rightwing could be very easily answered (intellectually, if not politically) with Martin Hagglund's "socially available free time". Much of the evacuation or emptying of family life can be explained by long work hours and high rents. I am constantly tempted to scold you all about how this concept of the family you're using is about as old as Freud, but this wouldn't change anything: the nuclear family was a reduction of a more robust family form, and now even the nuclear family is often not possible. How do you care for your live-in elderly parent when every occupant of an apartment must pass a credit check? The lack of socially available free time helps explain why parents develop absolutely batshit insane ideas about gender and school and media and critical race theory, et cetera. Who is actually spending time with kids? Media figures on their phones and the teachers who babysit them in underfunded classrooms. Parents are certainly doing their part to destroy families, of course, kicking gay kids to the street at a very high rate. But the socially available free time that makes it possible for the family to develop deeper bonds with their kids just isn't there. Parents have no time to build stronger bonds than mere punitive or indulgent parts--no time to teach whatever their own perversions around sexuality are, (reproduction? you mean your pregnancy fetish?), or simply to experience the joys of familiarity and togetherness. The spastic transphobia and homophobia of many a family in the contemporary isn't merely a response to PMC power grabs around administering identity. They are also entirely misdirected responses to social alienation that only an increase in socially available free time can address. There is literally no room, no time or space, for families to fully perform the profound disciplinary duties Althusser and Foucault assigned them. There is no room for families to achieve much autonomy whatsoever.

Mouldy L

I'm genuinely trying to understand why you think the national should be at the forefront of left/Marxist/socialist political engagement. If I follow you, your logic is: the nation votes in elections (though only some of it does and it's not clear if it views itself as a nation), therefore the nation is the fundamental political unit. This despite the fact that elections look less real than pro wrestling and are far less consequential than energy security and capital flows? In that context I would view appeals to people's material concerns which are/were oriented by the desire to make a family (the oldest form of social organisation) as potentially more galvanizing. When civil society was more of a thing family did actually determine how you voted. In France if you were from a communist party family you voted communist, in Ireland if you were from a family that voted Fianna Fail you voted (and to a large extent still do vote) Fianna Fail, and that was that. Civil associations, like the church, trade unions and parties were built on families (see my answer to Richard R below on what I meant by family as a fundamental anthropological fact). I'm reminded here of Paul Schrader's movie Blue Collar. We obviously have to work to some extent with the political institutions we have including electoral procedures but if we want people to organise around material self interest, (things like the possibility of making a home and heating it and filling it with people who might remember we existed), this imagined community stuff sounds like a marzipan dildo.

jkjkjkj

Phil’s point about the generalization of anti fascism as a sort of cheat code anti politics that allows for managerial centrist parties to exert their wills on populations while ignoring accountability makes sense generally, but in the case of the us election it’s disingenuous to compare “Gaza anti fascism” to the specifically American context of “anti fascism” which is generally used as a Democratic Party placeholder against republicans and reinforces the previously dominant Democratic Party. In the case of anti fascism as an extension of Gaza, it likely at least partially cost Harris the election, it genuinely and sincerely undermined her with critical members of the traditionally democratic coalition. Equating it to the managerial anti fascism of the democrats makes no sense, even if anti Israel anti fascism has its own substantial political short comings. It was sincerely counter hegemonic to the American political establishment at the time in that it arguably kneecapped THE political hegemon, which can’t be said of putins anti fascism or the democrats anti fascism

Podcast subscriber 78

People will be like, “Phil, what is even the goddamn point of you? You stand for nothing and should leave.” And he will respond, “Ok, let me reply since I am perhaps being taken slightly out of context…” Always fun to listen to these episodes and appreciate that you guys do respond to comments.

Richard R

Regarding Clintonian interventionism: In the absolutely barest material sense, the US government is and has been sending weapons to Israel for generations. If that's not interventionism, I can't imagine what is. Especially since, on the other side, the call is to, well, not do that.

Ran Heilbrunn

I mostly agree with what's been said, but I still want to push against the relegation of existential fears to the social level and challenge the claim that existential politics applies to the level of the state only in situations of total annihilation. Socio-political reality does not follow the state-society distinction so neatly, and political entities can experience profound crises at the level of statehood even without facing formal disappearance (I’m reminded of Hegel’s claim in ‘The German Constitution’ that ‘insofar as it is a state [Germany] exists only as a state-in-thought while its non-existence must possess the reality’). A state undergoing profound transformations can provoke existential fears among its citizens not because its empirical existence or their physical well-being is in jeopardy, but because their relationship to the state destabilizes; their most basic structure of belonging is being questioned. The drama takes place not at the level of society or that of the state, but at the level of their hyphenation. It increasingly looks like, due to both domestic and geopolitical reasons, Israeli democracy is morphing into populist-religious authoritarianism or fragmenting into a sectarian mess – all the while conducting a permanent war. Israelis fear that they have no future in such a state. What is threatened is neither their nor Israel’s immediate existence, but their existence as citizens of Israel. The over-educated “anywheres” of today's left may not see this as a big deal. But for ordinary people the prospect of de-naturalization or the breakdown of political membership is deeply scary. The idea that we are living through the end of Zionism and that Israeli democracy is nearing its end is discussed openly and constantly in today’s Israel, and I don't think that this can be reduced to the question of 'framing' or to 'the politics of fear.' It's a very powerful personal and collective experience.

Richard R

Regarding the "imputation": The idea that Palestinian solidarity represents a motte and bailey is ultimately false. Different groups have convergent interests. I want my healthcare money, and I don't want my healthcare money to be used to turn children into skeletons. The idea that the only way to oppose Israeli excesses is to support Israel is ultimately stupid, more than any other trait I might impute to it. It simply does not bear out historically. The idea that the only reason to oppose Israeli excesses is to hitch yourself to an eliminationist agenda ultimately supports Jewish exceptionalism. As I said last year: race realism prevails. The reason to oppose Israeli excesses is that I want my healthcare money. The 1-to-1 opposition between helping veterans, homeless people, and other marginals in my society, and our government's support of Israel is so obvious from inside the US that it hardly bears saying. But apparently it does. Direct dispensation at the federal level favors fighting this war over responding to its citizens needs. It ought not. The fact that Israel's history is a prolonged moral travesty is simply an added reason to give me my fucking healthcare money back.