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Not that being rejected by one’s peers is the end of the world. It hurts like hell while it’s happening and it does leave permanent scars, but it doesn’t keep a kid from being socialized (you can identify even with a group that rejects you), and I’ve noticed that many interesting people went through a period of rejection during childhood. Or got moved around a lot, which has similar effects. I was moved around a lot as a child and went through four years of rejection, and there is no doubt that I would have been a different person if it hadn’t happened. A more sociable person, but more superficial. Certainly not a writer of books—a job that has as its first requirement the willingness to spend a good deal of time alone. [...]
[...] 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.
[...] the depth at which racism is anchored in contemporary capitalist society - and the incapacity of progressive-neoliberal moralizing to address it. They also reveal that the structural bases of racism have as much to do with class and political economy as with status and (mis)recognition. Equally important, they make it clear that the forces destroying the life chances of people of color are part and parcel of the same dynamic complex as those destroying the life changes of whites - even if some of the specifics differ. The effect, is finally, to disclose the inextricable intertwinement of race and class in contemporary financialized capitalism.
The objective side of the crisis is no mere multiplicity of separate dysfunctions. Far from forming a dispersed plurality, its various strands are interconnected and share a common source. The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism - globalizing, neoliberal, financialized. Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system but something larger: an institutionalized social order. As such it encompasses a set of noneconomic background conditions that are indispensable to a capitalist economy: for example, unwaged activities of social reproduction, which assures the supply of wage labor for economic production; an organized apparatus of public power (law, police, regulatory agencies, and steering capacities) that supplies the order, predictability, and infrastructure necessary for sustained accumulation; and finally, a relatively sustainable organization of our metabolic interaction with the rest of nature, one that ensures essential supplies of energy and raw materials for commodity production, not to mention a habitable planet that can support life.
Financialized capitalism represents one historically specific way of organizing the relation of a capitalist economy to these indispensable background conditions. It is a deeply predatory and unstable form of organization that liberates capital accumulation from the very constraints (political, ecological, social, moral) needed to sustain it over time. Freed from such constraints, capitalism's economy consumes its own background conditions of possibility. It is like a tiger that eats its own tail. While social life as such is increasingly economized, the unfettered pursuit of profit destabilizes the very forms of social reproduction, ecological sustainability, and public power on which it depends. Seen this way, financialized capitalism is an inherently crisis-prone social formation. The crisis complex we encounter today is the increasingly acute expression of its built-in tendency to destabilize itself.
i love the "institutionalized social order" formulation
Whatever our uncertainly regarding the endpoint, one thing is clear: if we fail to pursue this option now, we will prolong the present interregnum. That means condemning working people of every persuasion and every color to mounting stress and declining health, to ballooning debt and overwork, to class apartheid and social insecurity. It means immersing them, too, in an ever vaster expanse of morbid symptoms - in hatreds born of resentment and expressed in scapegoating, in outbreaks of violence followed by bouts of repression, in a vicious dog-eat-dog world where solidarities contract to the vanishing point. To avoid that fate, we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have largely supported it - casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism. Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc capable of leading us beyond the current crisis to a better world.
The left in general has a lot of work to do at a programmatic level. I think we know what the values are. We know what is wrong, what is bad, what has to be gotten rid of. We know the economy needs to be de-financialized and de-carbonized, that there needs to be planning and a big rise in the share of income that goes to the working classes and so on.
What we don't know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives - or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else. Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working class and globalized. [...]
we need a socialist compass!!
My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroes so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous, priggish, prudish, and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight (and to his later embarrassment), Somerset Maugham called them “scum.” Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky, as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all-time low, females were depicted as passive and put-upon. (Then came the ’70s—Gloria Steinem and her Ms. magazine, Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the ’60s I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life: “Make up your mind, you can either be a monster or a doormat.” I opted for the former.
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again—leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.
heh
From my very first glimpse of the battered neon trout sign that hung outside the entrance with its fish-eye winking and sputtering and every now and then slowly dying away, the Truite Bleue impressed me with its air of frank senility. Passing through the shabby entrance hall and coming upon a cubicle in which a few coat-hooks and hat-shelves had been improvised I started to hand my coat over to an old trout-shaped waiter who had been standing there staring into space but at that precise moment another more attractive action presented itself to him and he teetered off out of my reach to grope among the hats for his glass of beer. My coat, suspended in midair, fell to the ground; it was nonetheless three full sips later before he bothered to pick it up. You had to admire that kind of professional slackness.
The waiters looked as if they’d staggered out of an old dark hole. They creaked and wobbled and limped and trembled under their loads, their turkey-gobbler necks rising pink from their stiff wing collars. They rattled and shuffled to and fro groaning, “Y’en a plus!” in hoarse strangled Cockney-French to customers’ requests, laughing toothlessly at the very idea of their clients’ presumption. And yet, looking around, I saw that the restaurant was crowded with contented-looking people. In spite of everything they were eating with gusto. No doubt about it, the place had atmosphere. The genuinely old-fashioned bad service that was being meted out impartially was instantly recognizable as the real thing: a subtle sophisticated Old World incompetence we Americans can never hope to emulate, the best our rustic efforts can produce being a superficial smart-alec surliness not to be spoken of in the same breath as this lofty disdain which was both thoughtful and thorough and would not disintegrate suddenly under a pleading word, a plaintive gesture, or a large tip. These waiters were hand-picked for pleurisy, deafness, and a variety of speech defects. They were flushed of skin, gnarled of hand. The dishes that jumped on to the floor from their palsied hands were never referred to again, as it were, but just lay there for the rest of the evening to be ground under foot by passers-by.