Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

/274/ Aufhebonus Bonus: July 2022 (Patreon)

Published:
2022-07-12 06:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

[Patreon Exclusive]

On your questions & criticisms.

We discuss the link between Covid and war in Ukraine and return to the question of who exactly is the ruling class. Plus: inflation, what actually happened in the 1990s, contemporary art, and the politics of abortion.

Files

Comments

Kenneth Smith

I just got word that I’m going to be brutally murdered if Phil brings up lockdown more than once again… pray for me patrons

Davka Smolah Collective

Hahahaha "thrust through an enormous stimulus" Biden really swinging it around huh Phil? Anyway, thank you to Phil for that clarification regarding the difference between Fourth Worldism and Third Worldism. I confuse the two routinely since most people practicing either one today also seem to be practicing the other: by now whatever was left-over of Third Worldism has been assimilated into Fourth Worldism, while calling itself the same thing. Thank you also for being based enough to note the transition in Left stances during and after the Cold War. Mfers today act like the Left has only ever had one opinion about anything and it has to have been Jeremy Corbyn's.

Mathieu Dube

Can you list the books you suggested please? Specially the post-liberal one…

Alex McAuliffe

My gut feeling is that reactions (like Phil's here) against the *possibility* of Chinese economic growth and opportunity drawing migrants from elsewhere is pretty naive, given the lengths that people have gone to historically for any chance of a better life (I'm thinking of all the migration around the world in the mid to late 19th century). At the moment, maybe America and Europe are drawing the 'best and brightest' who can get there; but I can imagine a whole swath of reasonable futures when this is changed - first to mind would be the own-goal of draconian immigration policies in the US eliminating what is today's "best option", regardless of what exactly is going on in China. I know very little about Chinese migrant work or immigration policies, much less their social controls, but it is an enormous, dynamic and fairly politically stable economy... I don't think its possible draw to many can be dismissed out of hand.

SeaWorldOrBust

It seems pretty easy to argue against Caldwell's argument (at least as you've described it; I can't get around the paywall) on empirical grounds and I'm kind of surprised no one (on the pod or apparently in the comments) has apparently done so. It seems ridiculous to assume that simply because inflation predated the war in Ukraine, the logical explanation for it must be Biden's (apparently woke?) stimulus. I don't think I know of anyone serious who ascribes the current inflation solely to the war in Ukraine; it's certainly exacerbated the spike in energy prices, but those were already worryingly high as early as November/December of last year (at least that's the first time I remember reading about it) as OPEC+ preferred to reap the profits of high prices and low production with the sudden post-covid increase in demand — and of course Tooze makes the argument that other producers in other industries are behaving similarly; another potential factor not to be discounted. Caldwell also doesn't seem to engage at all with other supply-side factors factors contributing to inflation besides energy, such as long lead times on new production (something expansionary fiscal/monetary policy could ironically actually help, at least in theory), the ongoing post-covid reconfiguration of supply chains to be more robust, or China's apparently never-ending lockdown. And that's just on the supply side. Given the wider context of the reopening of the global economy — and the loosening of a consumer savings glut that accumulated during covid — it seems absurd to attribute demand-side inflation to fiscal stimulus in one country. If that is indeed the argument he's making, I see no reason whatsoever to take anything else he says seriously. Of course fiscal stimulus in the US may well have been one amongst *several* factors contributing to the sudden spike in demand (that savings glut may not have been entirely behavioural), but it also may not have been; does Caldwell do enough to demonstrate that the stimulus wasn't largely countered by ongoing negative pressures on demand, as its architects would have assumed? Since, again, I haven't been able to read the article, I'll just assume that he does. But even counting poorly-timed stimulus in the US amongst the factors driving demand — never mind what's going on with supply — I'm inclined to doubt its relative significance given that inflation in the Pound and the Euro also predates the war (albeit not as significantly, but again, people were writing about this late last year). Of course the US economy being the behemoth that it is, expansionary fiscal policy there can have nock-on effects abroad, but if that is indeed what we're seeing here (and I'm not convinced that it is, at least on any scale comparable to other factors), then it would seem that perhaps defining the stimulus primarily in terms of it's "wokeness" is rather missing the point. I suspect that the timing of the stimulus did contribute to the early rounds of inflation in the US to at least some degree, but it was at most one amongst a great confluence of factors, and especially outside the US (where Caldwell seems to be based), probably not particularly significant compared to others. There's a reason Tooze has written about this as part of a larger "poly-crisis." The decision to focus so narrowly on wokeness (or intergovernmentality, as George I think rightly points to as a more interesting framework for analysing these decisions) strikes me as simply petty, and points to a typically American culture war obsession that puts the cart well before the horse.

SeaWorldOrBust

On a separate note I enjoyed Andrea's comments about the sad remnant of "red Bologna." Bologna is sort of the post-historical left in microcosm. It remains very much a hub of left wing thought and activism of varying degrees of seriousness; some is indeed very worthwhile, and forward looking in a way that even the more astute corners of the anglophone left often seem to struggle with, but the bulk of it amounts to little more than aesthetic posturing. I think there's definitely a connection there to the somewhat ambiguous ideological legacy of the cold war left, though I'm not sure I'd attribute it entirely to Eurocommunism given that a lot of these tendencies, at least in Italy, can be traced to more radical autonomist movements that were very much opposed to the PCI (not without reason, but unfortunately without much consequence). But of course the more proximate cause for this decline in meaningful political radicalism is less ideological and more the simple result of a gradual pricing out of workers and working-class students, which generations of PD governments have presided over, hand in hand with the university which meanwhile enjoys its reputation as a hotbed for radical thought.

Elias B

I'm surprised that in the whole inflation discussion, especially after Phil said inflation started before Ukraine, no one mentioned the supply shocks/bottlenecks due to the recovery from the Covid recession. Seems to me to be a much more convincing cause of inflation than the stimulus and it's what's generally pointed to by the BIS etc technocrats. Also re: inflation being a political choice — it's definitely true but Caldwell misapplies it here imo. Think it's useful to divide it into two levels: first there's the choice of stimulating a recovery which will always be somewhat inflationary vs letting the depression continue. The latter was done after 2008, the former after covid. You could use that to argue that the Biden administration is responsible for inflation but it's clearly better than what happened post-2008. Second when these supply problems cause inflation political-economic structures and to a lesser extent policy decisions determine who bears the brunt — as the Tooze piece shows it's largely labour because labour is weak. Maybe then here you can argue the Biden admin sought to compensate 'woke' groups adjacent to the Democrats more than others but given the small sums involved it doesn't amount to much. Especially compared with all the efforts they've made to lower petrol prices (fistbumping MBS, releasing oil from the SPR etc.), when you'd think car drivers are more Republican than the US on average.

jkjkjkj

The problem with the Caldwell piece is exactly that he is knowledgeable of the connection between the size of the 2020 bailout and the underwhelming nature of the 2008 bailout, and yet decided to focus on wokeness as the primary ideological justification for the 2020 bailout, rather than the much more boring point that the Biden administration and congress simply didn’t want to look like they weren’t willing to spend on the public in their time of need. wokeness was to a degree an ideological justification (rhetorically overstates by Caldwell, but it’s there), but if you listen to many of Biden’s speeches, you’ll notice many references (either explicit or implicit) to FDR and the Golden era of American social democracy, which act much more so as justifications for the size of the bailout. Whether they are sincere or competently executed is a different question, but to intentionally focus on wokeness as the ideological justification at the expense of the more mundane cause, which is simply a nostalgia for social democracy and a skittishness about another 2008, is at best misleading and at worst dishonest. If you know what the real cause is, say so, don’t dress them up in your ideological grudges, even if they are a minor factor themselves (particularly as regards the actual policy implementation).

dshamz_

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Phil (Dan here lol). I’d just say that I don’t think the disorganization of the capitalist class and working class doesn’t mean that those groups are no longer classes. Isn’t this the difference between a class in itself and a class for itself? Capital is still being accumulated despite the condition of disorganization, and the bourgeoisie appears to remain on the offensive. My own reading of the PMC’s position in all this is that they play a subordinate but necessary and ancillary role to certain fractions of the capitalist class to keep workers disorganized as a class (as managers are won’t to do), so that their own interests aren’t mainly opposed to capital’s but actually entwined with it, and subsequently with the bourgeoisie’s self-reproduction as a the ruling class.

dshamz_

I take some issue with the categorization of the Palestinian struggle as ‘fourth worldism’ - the history of that struggle, of and socialist support for it (though not uncontested, as pointed out), and of internationalism predates by far Palestine’s adoption by today’s left as a pet issue. What I would say is that a lot of the discourse surrounding the struggle today does indeed take the form of ‘fourth worldist’ humanitarian concern for ‘victims’ rather than robust and meaningful solidarity. An interesting point - last summer in Toronto, the local left and Palestine solidarity groups (the usual PMC suspects) were entirely taken off guard when tens of thousands working class Arabs from the surrounding suburbs took the streets not when Palestinians were attacked, but at the moment they began to fight back with rockets and other weaponry. What they were responding to was a show of strength and a defence of the dignity of the people, rather than the usual narrative of helpless victims or ‘existence is resistance’ (it’s not, unfortunately) stuff you hear from the a lot of the left activist groupings. Of course the influx of working class Arabs into the streets led to the PMC activists clashing with those they purport to represent in the most predictable, IDpol-laden ways, feeling threatened by the sudden influx of regular people, but that’s another story lol