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[...] Obama’s election promised to harmonize political discourse on racial and economic inequality, as his presidential campaign and presidency would further legitimate underclass ideology’s project of racializing economic inequality via attribution of poverty to the dysfunctional culture of the minority poor themselves rather than political economy. [...] Obama would emphasize — albeit with quick nods to institutional racism and a soupçon of compassion — the impact of ghetto residents’ dysfunctional behavior on contemporary disparities as a pretext for stressing individual solutions to structural problems.
[...] The nations with which we have warred over the past few decades are, thus, in no position to pressure the US — indirectly or directly — to make restitution to African Americans. Because Coates’s ontological commitment to race can only permit a politics of moral pleading, the specific material and ideological issues that inform political decisions are inconsequential. The only details that matter to him are the grievance and the justness of the cause. Coates’s narrow focus on the righteousness of these cases ultimately allows him to insinuate parallels between them and the case for African American reparations in the absence of a material basis for comparison. And since reparations presumes that whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege precludes political alliances — short lived or otherwise — based on mutual interest, Coates’s case for recompense has to center on special pleading.
ooof this is brutal
[...] Coates’s commitment to racial ontology, however, precludes any serious attempt to either ground racism in the material world or to historicize liberal policy prescriptions beyond their failure to redress disparities. But if the endgame is to address the economic disadvantages that blacks face and, by extension, the attendant social problems that afflict lower-income black and brown communities disproportionately, it is difficult to see how the neoliberal consensus — which is antagonistic to the notion of government intervention for the public good — could engender targeted initiatives that benefit poor and working-class blacks rather than elites. Indeed, it is no coincidence that affirmative action’s focus shifted from material redress to diversity at the dawn of American neoliberalism. It is likewise no coincidence that in an era in which neoliberalism has become hegemonic, social justice has come to merge with entrepreneurialism — producing a “progressive” politics that not only casts charter schools, NGO s, and sundry internet startups as alternatives to state action, but lionizes black/brown businesspeople (including the occasional rap and R&B mogul) as the new generation of civil rights leaders.
[...] Obviously, the family has long been a source of coercion and domination of women. But it’s also been a way of dominating men. First because parental control over women’s mating choices was also a way of controlling young men, and much later in history, because men’s responsibility for women has kept their shoulder to the grindstone, so to speak. The family regulates and polices its members but also protects them in some ways. It’s a site of struggle and accommodation as well as a site of control. Families have been shaped by and for the existing hierarchies of societies but sometimes they have changed in ways that weaken or challenge those hierarchies.
I also think we need to distinguish between personal and structural male dominance. When a man works extra hours every week to support a stay-at-home wife, it’s hard to say he is oppressing her, even though this social practice reinforces women’s secondary place in society and even his own wife’s sense of dependence on his good will.
The theory of a common market with a common currency miraculously
creating convergence lies in tatters. On the contrary, bringing very different
economies and countries together in one currency zone took important
policy instruments away from weaker peripheral economies. Currency
devaluation and exchange-rate variation are but the most obvious exam-
ples. Convergence criteria sanctified price stability and utterly unfounded
public-deficit and debt-reduction targets. This straitjacket of Maastricht
mostly benefited Germany at the expense of weaker economies. The single
currency deepened the gap between Germany’s increasing surpluses and
trade and current account deficits in the periphery, two sides of a same
coin. Equal rules for different economies reinforced unequal development. One size fits none, Claus Offe summarized. Germany simultaneously
benefited from its leading position in both the machineries and chemicals
global markets. Berlin took full advantage of increasing demand in emerging
economies. Domestic labor market and security reforms in turn permitted
German multinational corporations to reduce the gap in profit margins with
their Japanese and American counterparts. These matter greatly not just
to finance future investments, but also to push up company share value.
same as what i'd gathered from Streeck and other EU critics, which is interesting as he's pro-EU
[...] In the absence of currency devaluation or exchangerate variations, wage compression for internal devaluation was meant to increase competitiveness. [...] Brussels, capital of the EU , is somewhat of a symbol. One in three city inhabitants is at risk of poverty. One child in four grows up in a family where no one has a job. Even temporarily forgetting about Greece, Brussels is no exception. Over the last decade, the number of working poor has doubled in Germany. In Italy, over 8 million people live in relative poverty. In France, 9 million people, of which 3 million are children, are poor. Portugal lost half a million workers between 2011 and 2014. While Portuguese workers were fleeing their country, big corporations saw their money reserves increase from 750 billion euros to 3,200 billion. The rich and wealthy meanwhile are seated on mountains of money, or rather, hiding them in tax havens across the world.
useful to have numbers sometimes
Six considerations seem to play a central role in the seductive force of a left-exit. (1) Left-wing policies are incompatible with the European treaties. (2) National states, preferably guided by left governments, can be allies or offer a bulwark against neoliberalism. (3) A demos exists only at the national level. Therefore, the national level is the most appropriate space to wage the struggle. (4) Power relations are more favorable in certain member states than in others. Nationally, we can show alternatives exist. (5) The EU is pitting people against each other, and an exit will allow for a different, real internationalism. A step back to leap forward. (6) A European continent-wide movement is unlikely to emerge anytime soon.
his rebuttals seem to be: (1) the treaties will change as power relations change; (2) left govts would have even less sovereignty; (3) people think of themselves as EU citizens; (4) too much economic integration for this to be feasible; (5) nationally-driven plans will somehow weaken the possibility of european-wide coordination; (6) there are transnational workers' struggles (Ryanair, Amazon, Deliveroo/Foodora)
kind of cool that he mentions the last one, but that's SO inchoate atm
[...] the ontology of the European state apparatus under construction leaves no doubt. Such a different Europe will require vastly different institutions. The current European treaties and institutions are designed not just to guarantee corporate oversight over decision-making at every level or create an interventionist “defense” system, but also to defuse, co-opt, and swallow any challenge to the system in an infinity of committees and commissions, meetings and institutions. European capital is building a state apparatus to obtain bigger slices of global spoils. Calls to save the EU or the social-democratic fantasy of turning this apparatus into a tool of and for labor are just that: fantasies obscuring the class nature of existing institutions. Rather than raising awareness of the need to build a counterforce to the power of capital, such claims reinforce illusions in the neutrality of the constructed apparatus.
his solution here is to construct a counterpower (detailed in the next note)
Not only is Emmanuel Macron intent on breaking the exceptional resilience of the French welfare state, but he combines this with renewed activism on the international stage. This activism reminds us — in barely subliminal fashion — that Germany remains a geopolitical dwarf compared to its neighbor, which has nuclear weapons, a seat on the UN Security Council, and nurtures a major neocolonial influence in Africa and the Middle East. [...]
i always forget about this lol
[...] while this declaration was symbolic in character, that did not mean that there was any room for ideological concessions. We can clearly see as much from the section on unemployment benefits: “The unemployed have the right to adequate activation support from public employment services to (re)integrate in the labour market and adequate unemployment benefits of reasonable duration, in line with their contributions and national eligibility rules. Such benefits shall not constitute a disincentive for a quick return to employment.” Activation support, reasonable duration, no disincentives to a quick return to employment.... If the principle of unemployment benefits is indeed recognized here, it comes with a series of precautions that seriously reduce the scope of this right
WoW ... referring to a summit in Gothenburg which adopted 20 principles that would define a social "Pillar" of the EMU