View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] markets do not simply dissolve status distinctions; rather, they instrumentalize them, bending pre-existing patterns of cultural value to capitalist purposes. For example, racial hierarchies that long predated capitalism were not abolished with the dismantling of New World slavery or even of Jim Crow, but reconfigured to suit a market society. No longer explicitly codified in law, and no longer socially legitimate, racist norms have been wired into the infrastructure of capitalist labor markets. Thus, the net result of marketization is the modernization, not supersession, of status subordination.
The distinction between affirmation and transformation can be applied, first of all, to the perspective of distributive justice. In this perspective, the paradigmatic example of an affirmative strategy is the liberal welfare state, which aims to redress maldistribution through income transfers. Relying heavily on public assistance, this approach seeks to increase the consumption share of the disadvantaged, while leaving intact the underlying economic structure. In contrast, the classic example of a transformative strategy is socialism. Here the aim is to redress unjust distribution at the root--by transforming the framework that generates it. Far from simply altering the end-state distribution of consumption shares, this approach would change the division of labor, the forms of ownership, and other deep structures of the economic system.
she says later that affirmative strategies can actually promote misrecognition (e.g., liberal welfare state programs that mark the poor as "needy")
[...] grants would guarantee a minimum standard of living to every citizen, regardless of labor force participation, while leaving intact the deep structure of capitalist property rights. Thus, in the abstract they appear to be affirmative. That appearance would jibe with reality, moreover in a neoliberal regime, where the grants would effectively subsidize employers of low-wage, temporary labor and possibly depress wages overall. In a social democracy, however, the effects could be dramatically different. According to proponents, if the level of the grants were set high enough, Basic Income would alter the balance of power between capital and labor, creating a more favorable terrain on which to pursue further change. The long-term result could be to undermine the commodification of labor power. In that case, an apparently affirmative remedy for maldistribution would have deeply transformative effects with respect to economic class subordination.
[...] nonreformist reforms seek to spark transformations in the status order--not only directly, by immediate institutional intervention, but also politically, by changing the terrain on which future struggles for recognition are waged. Thus, for recognition as for distribution, this approach represents a via media between affirmation and transformation that combines the best features of both.
[...] In the US form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism and LGBTP rights) on the side, and high-end 'symbolic' and service-based sectors of business (Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood) on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. [...]
[...] Trump's victory is not solely a revolt against global finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but progressive neoliberalism [...] an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism and LGBTQ rights) on the one side, and high-end 'symbolic' and service-based sectors of business (Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood) on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and the middle-class livelihoods that were once available to those engaged in it.
[...] feminism and Wall Street are birds of a feather, perfectly united in the person of Hillary Clinton.
What made possible that conflation was the absence of any genuine left [...] any comprehensive left narrative that articulated the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization, on the one hand, and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation, on the other. [...]
[...] Does anyone believe that a Clinton presidency would have gone after Wall Street and the 1 per cent? That it would have diminished rather than stoked populist rage? In fact, the rage felt by many Trump supporters is quite legitimate, even if much of it is currently mal-directed towards immigration and other scapegoats. The proper response is not moral condemnation but political validation, while redirecting the rage to the systemic predations of finance capital.
yesss
[...] Trump's victory marked a defeat for the holy alliance of emancipation with financialization. But his presidency offers no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new 'new left'.
Nancy Baeser
[...] one might separate those Trump voters who could and should be responsive to such an appeal from the card-carrying racists and alt-right ethnonationalists who are not. To say that the former outnumber the latter by a wide margin is not to deny that reactionary populist movements draw heavily on loaded rhetoric and have emboldened formerly fringe groups of real white supremacists. But it does refute the hasty conclusion that the overwhelming majority of reactionary populist voters are forever closed to appeals on behalf of an expanded working class of the sort evoked by Bernie Sanders. That view is not only empirically wrong but counterproductive, and likely to be self-fulfilling.
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that a progressive-populist bloc should mute pressing concerns about racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia. On the contrary, fighting these harms must be central to a progressive-populist bloc. But it is counterproductive to address them through moralizing condescension, in the mode of progressive neoliberalism. That approach assumes a shallow and inadequate view of these injustices, grossly exaggerating the extent to which the trouble is inside people's heads and missing the depth of the structural-institutional forces that undergird them.