Author: Bertolt MEHcht

An exhortation to the 0 people who will see this: keep your calendar clear on the 1st of May. I have a feeling that this year will be slightly more intense than past years.

A reclamation of the holiday, perhaps. Perhaps not.

Lately I’ve been in a position where I can’t necessarily decide whether or not Twitter is good or bad for the Left. After roughly a year and a half of being fully ensconced in that area in the tripartite Venn diagram where Left, Weird, and Hockey Twitter meet (there’s like a dozen of us) I’ve noticed a violently shitty tendency in the discussions on the Left. There was a brilliant piece that I often see referenced in these parts (“Exiting The Vampire Castle”), so I needn’t do a pale imitation of that.

But in the last three weeks I’ve bore witness to a series of idiotic and banal arguments that were so strategically-placed at certain lynchpins of the On-line Left that if I were 4% more paranoid I’d be certain were done by COINTELPRO. Some were idiotic and absurd and ended in threads of people posting their own boobs, others disconcerting and intractable in their divides (looking at you, dumb Liz Bruenig mini-controversy). But all shared two important similarities: they were dumb and distracting from the most important goal and they were ON-FUCKING-LINE.

I’m forced, therefore, toward a conclusion that I had settled on three years ago and then tossed out midway through 2015: Twitter is actively harmful to social movements and mass politics.

By May 2014 I had the basic thesis that social media was a wholly ineffective metaphorical release valve, giving people validation without necessarily giving them a material outcome to justify that pleasure. The events thereafter, however provided compelling counterarguments. I notived Fight for 15 and #BLM getting the word out and gathering large crowds in a largely-ad hoc fashion. I saw miniature wildcat strikes and freeway shutdowns. There was an undeniable power to these new tools.

Further thought, however, has forced a distinction upon me. Fight for 15 and BLM are examples of movements or organizations that merely demonstrated the power that immediate information dissemination has–that power is only useful, sadly, insofar as there’s a material, political ask with that power backing it up.

So now we come to yesterday, March 20th. There was a talk from their ABCs of Socialism series, one that I knew would get the hackles of the “JACOBIN SMACKS OF CLASS REDUCTIONIST DUDEBRO” up as soon as I saw the topic. The official Jacobin twitter account tweeted some innocuous excerpt from the talk, and while I saw some protestations to the wording (that I agreed with, for the most part), it looked like another mini-controversy that would blow over by the time I woke up on the 21st.

That, uh, that didn’t happen. Instead, today was another fucking trench war, Leftists fighting Leftists for either being insufficiently woke or a counterrevolutionary liberal. Granted, these are the schismatic tendencies of the far radical groups of the fringe, but it seems as though Twitter is making these inevitable flare-ups easier, faster, and more completely universal–especially when the work of protest and the networks formed are digital and “blocking” someone is equivalent to them ceasing to exist.

While it is clear that my sympathies lie with the people who (perhaps overzealously) push class first–if only due to the unique backwardness of the USA in class politics–the people who make these callouts are rarely doing so in purely bad faith. They genuinely feel like the issue, person, wording, or idea at question is making the hard work of solidarity harder, and we should take concerns and critiques of this nature seriously. But Twitter isn’t real life.

The callout is undoubtedly a good tool, one that I have used and has been used on me to great effect, but each time that I can say that actual growth or understanding was achieved, I was looking another person in the eyes IRL. The callout only works because you can see the sincerity in someone’s face, either their anger, disappointment, or sadness. This may sound facile or self-evident, but think on this for a moment: has it ever worked on you, when someone on twitter is trying to call you out? No, we tend to retrench.

And so it is in these two ways–the demobilization of the electorate with the release valve of good twetes and the streamlining of calling out without the face-to-face component that makes calling out useful in the first place–that I fear that Twitter is officially tipping toward “net negative.”

This isn’t really the point of the blog, I know. I mean, it’s my fuckin’ blog, so I can do with it what I will, but this isn’t politics.

But Chuck Berry did die last night.

Now, an incredibly important aspect of the person I am boils down to music and my ability to soundtrack the goings-on around me. This has always been a truism for me, going all the way back to swim practices in 5th grade that I mentally grafted to “Nevermind the Bollocks” in all of my remaining memories.

Without Chuck Berry, this is impossible. Without Chuck Berry, it’s beyond impossible–it’s unintelligible.

While I rarely sought out Chuck qua Chuck, it is literally impossible to not get Chuck qua Jimi, or Chuck qua Johnny and Joey, or Chuck qua Iggy. Chuck was the mold from which Rock and Roll was cast. Everything I love in guitar-based rock, from the insouciant smirking as the solo starts to the physical flourishes–jutting the neck up and down as though being electrocuted–to the pure buzzsaw energy, I have Chuck to thank for.

So pour some out for the Inventor of Rock and Roll today. I will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT3kCVFFLNg

My main pursuit–intellectual or otherwise–from May 2014 to (almost exactly) November 8th, 2017 was to find a way to shoehorn Socialism into the fabric of the America that I grew up in.

After those 3 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that that pursuit and the questions that inspired it may have been 100% folly. That the pursuit was folly, however, may end up providing answers to many of the questions that I encountered in the pursuit of answers leading toward the ontologically-supreme goal: advancing Socialism in the USA.

The America I grew up in is a dusty, snowy, windy high mountain desert, nestled between the ski areas and Denver–suburban sprawl punctuated by mesas, hogbacks, and foothills. You’d think the suburbs endless, were it not for the interventions of geology. It was, until I returned from college, a largely foreign land that I felt I didn’t need to make any effort to understand; after all, I grew up there.

Thusly, if the overriding goal was/is instantiating Socialism, I was already putting myself behind the 8-ball–perhaps even further away, behind the 8-ball, two tables over. While it was almost certainly due to the arrogant overconfidence of the 18 year old in part, it is understandable that I wouldn’t see the things about Colorado that I’d need to until I removed myself from the situation, hovered above and one abstraction away like an objective scientist.

After four godforsaken years in the literal swamp of Washington D.C., I returned to the place where I grew up, ready for the rest of my life. Instead, I found out just how hard it is for a Philosophy major to get a decent job in a city that was pivoting–and fast–to high tech pursuits. Consequently, I ended up in my parent’s place, hating life and wasting time.

This period lasted almost 6 months before I found employment with a healthcare nonprofit. That said, I still couldn’t make enough to move out, so I had the unique position where I was making what one could theoretically deem as an “adult income” while still living at home and not paying rent.

So I bought books. I bought a lot of fuckin’ books. Books about Marx, about the history of America, about geography and the environment and psychology–I consumed nearly everything I could in order to better understand the world around me. In that pursuit, I began to notice a pattern, a pattern which could help to bridge the divide between the Socialist Colorado in my head and the Hickenlooper/Hancock Colorado of bitter, grey reality.

I had never given much credence to the idea that different peoples had distinct political cultures. It seemed to stray too far from the “material base defines superstructure” orthodox understanding of Marx that I agreed with. That said, a very small portion of Colin Woodard’s American Nations and a couple of odds and ends that led to further specialization and further narrowing has given me my new synthesis (if you’ll allow such insanely lofty language).

According to Woodard’s conception, the “unique national culture” of the Interior West is that of a resource colony. And this makes sense. In the early 1900’s when monopoly capital ran rampant, the political reaction was one of SPUSA and IWW; as the Bundy ranch debacle demonstrated, in modern times the railing is against faraway government bureaucrats. In both cases, however, there is a similarity: a concentration of power (or capital), thousands of miles abstracted from the facts on the ground, exerting control over OUR lands and resources.

There IS a unique political culture in the Rocky Mountain West. We are a reaction against the perceived locus of power on the coasts. And, again, in that purely materialist conception, the Interior West is still a resource colony. Have been, hopefully won’t always be. At least, that’s what the actually-existing-socialists who kept getting elected in Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico hoped around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Many of the names that got involved in this period in time are famous to only a very specialized group of people–names like Mary Harris Jones, Bill Haywood, Davis Waite–and many of the conflicts sound like made up Civil Wars from Newt Gingrich’s alternative history novels. The Victory Mine Massacre, the Colorado Mining Wars, the Bombing of the Vindicator–if these names make it sound like a legitimate war was going on, that’s with good reason: there was.

For your right to the 8 hour work day, many miners died. Many of their family members were massacred. Many of their leaders were assassinated. But they didn’t give up. Even when they were atomized immigrants of several different european countries brought in to break strikes, unable to communicate (and thus, organize) with the east of the English speakers, they managed to coalesce and find solidarity in one another. Even when the armed forces were called in on you, you never considered surrendering and instead began military training. Labor has never been more radical and vital than in the mining industries around the turn of the century, and it’s time to remind folks.

The reading, researching, traveling, and thinking led to one conclusion. The Rocky Mountain West is ready for Socialism, ready for a return to a time when Red State meant RED and the GOP felt it necessary to literally hire private armies to hold us back. I went to D.C. looking for some rational, liberal nonsense that would provide a silver bullet in “solving” Colorado’s politics. I stand here, 8ish years later, knowing that there’s no silver bullet, none save organizing. 8ish years ago, I left Colorado thinking something pathological about the character of the state and I know now that there’s no pathology here save what the coasts gave us. We always had it right, and goddammit we just need to remember why and how we got it right.

Bury me at the rodeo.

 

Yes, holy shit yes it has. Basically I’m just gonna post what’s in my drafts folder, regardless of how together they are.

Some of them are weirdly prophetic, others are… well, Trump won. We’re all fucked on prediction track records as of recent. But it appears as though I had my fingers on the pulse(s?) of a couple of trends that have borne out.

What’s stopping the formation of an American Syriza?

Rather, why aren’t we, as Leftists, working toward such a goal yet?

This piece will answer neither of those fairly large and important questions, and will instead assume that they’ve been settled in the hopes that a rough schematic for creating a Left coalition party–one that can make legitimate challenges in electoral politics–can be envisioned.

That said, I’ve just started reading “Crowds and Party” by Jodi Dean and and it causes me to wonder: what’s stopping us?

I chose to purchase the book after hearing an interview with her on the Majority Report. In the discussion, a left-ish liberal in the form of Sam Seder questions Dean about the existence of an American Left. Seder doesn’t necessarily buy that there is one, but Dean does. Further, she believes that this Left doesn’t know it’s own strength and size. I really, really want to agree with her, but I’m not certain that she’s totally right on that count. Seder on the other hand is patently incorrect that the Left is non-existent and that a Sanders campaign is one of the first steps in building one. My observation and analysis fall in between these two: there is a Left, but it needs to take seriously the tasks of outreach and coalition-building. And that is why this analysis feels scizophrenic to me at times: the Left is there but seems to deny itself, but seems to demonstrate no meaningful willingness to cross Cold War-holdover sectarian lines.

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What’s Stopping Us?

Now that that’s out of the way, I posit the following question: why can’t DSA, SPUSA, Socialist Alternative, the Greens, and the other smaller parties (even those RCP psychos) set aside their comparatively small philosophical differences and start organizing at a local level?

Syriza only develops in a unique historical context: austerity bombed-out the Social Democratic consensus of PASOK and required that the most Left members of that party find a new home. Parallel to this, fringe parties, dozens of which were so irrelevant that they stood no realistic chance at electing a Member of Parliament, began to open lines of communication.

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What Unites Us?

Anticapitalism. Duh.

The unique qualities of climate change for the provide a uniquely modern reason to make an anticapitalist appeal to the general public. Anticapitalism nowadays is not solely desirable merely as an end in itself because capitalism is evil and yucky, but also because global capitalist economic organization–if left unaltered–will suffocate and drown us. And it will do so in my lifetime. (list party interests in anticap)

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What Is To Be Done?

The most important thing in creating a working coalition in the realm of electoral politics is a concrete, discrete demand. One of the central problems with the Occupy movement was an inability to lay out a set of demands due to the horizontal leadership structure and the absolute (and anarcho-liberalism-inspired) deference to the agency of the individual. The Sanders moment and associated movements would do well to remember those two lessons. The diagnosis for what is to be done, then, comes in the form of direct response to those two criticisms.

1) A Congress of Left Parties must be called with the intent of creating a plan for maximizing ballot access, funding, and membership to elect as many Left Alternative candidates as possible, AND

2) This Congress of Left Parties must then adopt a universal economic platform.

Thinking about the circular firing squad qualities of the Left, those two imperatives may seem insane. They are, however, much less contentious and difficult than they appear. Referring to imperative one, the plan to maximize resources is one that, necessarily, will create political equivalents of non-compete clauses (after all, why run a Green and a SPUSA candidate in the same congressional district) that will free up further resources. Those resources can then be used to plant seeds of Left parties outside of the safe blue states where they tend to proliferate; take, as a rough example, SPUSA funds in Nebraska being redirected to the Green party because the prior efforts by BOLD Nebraska suggest that they would be more amenable to social democracy framed as conservationism than the frame that SPUSA uses.

Keeping in mind that the uniting, galvanizing truth of the coalition of the Left Alternative is anticapitalism, the explicitly socialist parties must be willing to accept a more moderate, environmentalism-based avenue simply because the ends are united in purpose.

 

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“In that same vein, I wonder if maybe the Democrats stand as much of a chance of having a party breakup as the Republicans? Everyone is talking about the distance between the GOP base and elites, but the distance in the Democratic party isn’t insignificant. I personally hope that both collapse, and that the remaining two parties are a Left Labor party versus a party of Capital made up of the remnants of the establishment GOP and the DLC Clintonite Dems. I can dream.”
“I feel bad this morning, sure, but the exit polling regarding the youth is still the most encouraging thing to me. For the first time, I’m now torn between whether agitating outside of the Democratic party is the best route, or whether the demographics of the “Bernie Coalition” suggest that–with some hard, hard work–the Democratic party has already started the shift to a social democratic party.

For now, though, the Democratic party is a sclerotic party of capital. They’ve not done anything to earn my vote–save that they’re NOT Republicans. Vote for Hillary in the general if you live in a swing state, sure. But you’d better fucking vote in the off year, and if you really wanted to make a change, you should run for local office. I think it’s high time that the JeffCo school board or the Golden City Council here in CO had a Socialist Board Member, don’t you guys?”

About one month ago, Matt Bruenig was fired from Demos for tweeting (relatively) benign barbs at Neera Tanden. It wasn’t the “what” of what he was tweeting, so much as the “who.” And, while Twitter isn’t real life, Matt was an expectant father-to-be, and losing a job in that situation is sub-optimal. Now that the dust has mostly settled and the factions are clear, some lessons can be gleaned from what should have been a tiff confined to the decidedly-not-IRL stakes of Twitter. In fact, Bruenighazi can be used as a lens to understand a few new and novel things about this election:

While the ideological distance between us is less, Liberals are the true enemy of the Left in the United States, not the rapidly dwindling white nationalists that make up the GOP.

The Liberal establishment is scared. They will knock down the best (albeit most inflammatory) avatar of Millenial Leftism they can manage, but they still ignore the content of his critiques in doing so (and completely ignore young women and PoC–the start of the spat that ended in Bruenig losing his job in the first place).

For the Left to succeed in this time of flux and realignment, a clear, moral argument must be made against the limitations of Liberal representation politics.

The Matt Bruenig affair, while decidedly shitty for Matt and his new family, and slightly less shitty for those of us who enjoyed his online presence, has resulted in another corner of the velvet drapery covering the rotting flesh of liberalism falling off, revealing the degredation beneath.

Take for granted for a moment the assertion that Twitter is, on balance, good and worth having. Admittedly, this is a stretch. But, having accepted that proposition for the sake of argument, I must ask: are you worried about Twitter? If you listen to the Wall St. mavens, perhaps you should be. Like many companies of the Tech Boom 2.0 that it was born near (chronologically and geographically), insane public valuations created expectations and budgets that become hanging albatrosses around their baby necks. So, if Twitter is good and useful (remember, that’s the granted portion), what is to be done?

Nationalize Twitter, of course.

There are two interplaying prongs to the argument as to why we should nationalize Twitter, from my vantage point. The first is an issue of simply viability in the present and near future, and the second is an extension of a philosophy that can hopefully be applied to many forms of unpaid (but enriching) labor.

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To Save Twitter, We Must Seize Twitter
The first argument is blunt: Twitter, if it wants to continue existing, needs to be nationalized. Their business model isn’t panning out in terms of advertising revenue. Twitter, despite being incredibly useful in acting as–essentially–an AP wire service with racist trolls, is proving to not be a profitable enterprise from a free-market capitalist point of view.  (Twitter corp health). It may well be the case that the market in social media is moving away from Twitter and its death is inevitable.

So Twitter may well end up becoming one of many future failures in the looming tech bubble, because–simply put–Twitter isn’t can’t turn a profit. Just like fire departments, digital infrastructure, and many other varieties of public programs. The point of this comparison is to demonstrate that the government, if acting in accordance with a society that has deemed a certain good or service necessary, will sometimes subsidize that good or service. Whether roads, schools, or (in more civilized nations, at least) healthcare, governments will provide goods and services at a “loss” simply on the principle that they are worthwhile things for us all to have.

We may be reaching a point in the lifespan of Twitter where it will become necessary to nationalize it if we want it to continue existing (admittedly, an open question, considering that Twitter is an open sewer grate). While it may seem counter-intuitive at first, the infrastructural equivalents of roads and telephone wires in the digital future may indeed be services that disseminate information quickly and efficiently–like Twitter.

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Do You Own Your Twete, On Line? Or Are You Owned, On Line?

How much time do you think you’ve spent trying to craft a pefect tweet, shaving characters and finding ever more creative shorthands to cram your complex thought into the 140 character limit? If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent too much time doing this, perhaps even agonized daily over the incomplete manner in which you’ve just presented a thought or argument (Jesus Christ, I seriously hope that you’re not anything like me).

And I don’t even have more than 200 Twitter followers.

My point is that for folks who legitimately use Twitter as a publicity tool–or even those who attempt to advance a career through tweeting–must expend a great deal of time and effort on theirs, owing to the fact that their livelihood is tied into tweets, at least in some small fashion.

Hmm, I just used “time” and “effort” up there in reference to the act of Tweeting. And it’s easy to explain why: tweeting is mental labor. If tweeting is mental labor, tweets are the product of that mental labor; if tweets are the product that Twitter is selling to advertisers, then we are performing uncompensated labor for Twitter Inc. It’s a fairly simple concept, perhaps so rudimentary that drawing attention to it only draws quizzical stares and questions of efficacy.

“What, do you get .2 cents for every tweet view that leads to a link clickthrough? Do you get a stock dividend from Twitter based off of your percentage of the total amount of followers? How should this labor be compensated?”

My assertion would be that the labor should remain uncompensated, perhaps–but that the labor certainly should not be alienated from the unwashed tweeters, existing solely as corporate profit for Twitter Inc. Tying the disparate threads of this argument together, Twitter is a situation where nationalization would be the solution to the dual tracks presented: a government bailout and guarantee of continued existence for the public good in addition to an end to the essentially alienated, uncompensated labor that we perform, ostensibly for our own enjoyment but materially for Twitter Inc.’s profit.

 

While there is extenuating information, such as the relatively low clickthrough ratio for links posted on Twitter versus comparable services, it can reasonably be assumed by the fact that so many people use it thusly that Twitter is fast becoming both a necessary tool in media employment and a venue for entertainment itself.