What I’m Reading: Lefts’ Party Like It’s 2014
Here's an old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 5 years ago, in 2019, on the World Wide Web.
- Michael Kazin, The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left, Dissent (Spring 2012)
- Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements, Dissent (Spring 2012) (in praise of horizontalidad and in criticism of Kazin)
- David Marcus, The Horizontalists, Dissent (Fall 2012) (one cheer for horizontalidad and Sitrin, one jeer for
an aging and vertically inclined Left
, and a lot of boringly predictable Leftist guff aboutlarge-scale institutions,
larger structural vision
and a silly moral panic[1] at the bogeyman ofaspirations
— oh dear! —dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right
) - Andrew Flood, An anarchist critique of horizontalism, Anarchist Writers (2 May 2014), the somewhat predictable anarcho-syndicalist perspective on Occupy, Kazin, Sitrin, Marcus,
class analysis
, life, the universe and everything. Along the way some brief and interesting notes on relations betweenmass movements,
revolutionary movements,
information technology and the effect of a press that has been infinitely digitally dispersed, etc. - Andrew Flood, Turnips, hammers & the square – why workplace occupations have faded (7 May 2014), more of much the same, with some look at precursors to 2011, and a landscape of globalized economic complexity.
- [1][18-Jun-2020: Formerly
moral painc
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In though, Flood’s bit on globalized economic complexity seems more than a little too quick to conclude that the issue must be limits on what can in the current landscape. Maybe service-sector workers’ imaginations are less limited than that, and in any case there’s a lot of tools we have now to better get a cognitive and imaginative grip on complex global supply-chains than we could in nineteen-aught-seven.
In any case I have no idea why one would conclude that etc. are supposed to produce nothing of obvious direct material value to themselves or their neighbors. (Of course burgers and coffee and sugar-milk-drinks are valuable.) Nor why it would be difficult for them to imagine localized exchange at least with each other, if nothing else. Nor why it would be unusual for them to think that IT workers and computer programmers — I mention all these here because they are the examples directly mentioned in the article — might be able to do something useful for them in exchange for food.
It’s true that a proper fast-food outlet relies on a national or supra-national network — and making a computer relies on a massively intricate global network — of global commodity trades, both for raw materials and for partly-processed inputs. But some of these commodities are durable or easily substitutable in the short term, in any case very few IT workers or programmers are going to think of their job or their skillset in terms of producing computer hardware from scratch, the real constraints imposed by long-term global complexities don’t seem like the obvious big limits on short-to-medium term — if anything, they’re more likely to be a hangover that only shows up later through hard experience and on reflection if things start running aground, etc. etc.