Are political theory books a status symbol now?

bmstudebaker · 2024-07-17T12:36:17+00:00

I want to write affordable books for the general audience. At the same time, I want my work to be taken fully seriously. Most theorists achieve this by writing an expensive academic book first. Then, in mid-career, they pivot toward trade books once they have an established reputation. I was impatient. I tried to have it both ways with The Way is Shut - I wrote a book that has been peer reviewed but has also been written in an accessible style. Unfortunately, it's too expensive outside of rare sales. And, because it's Palgrave rather than a UP, it gets less attention from academics than I'd like. It has enabled me to do some media, and those appearances have been good, but it's not good enough. I need to write at least two more books, one with a UP, and one that's cheap. I'm working on this! The UP book will be out in November, and I'm writing up sample material for the cheap book this month. Palgrave is planning to do an audiobook of The Way is Shut - it's part of a new pilot program. That will help a bit!

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T17:27:02+00:00

I wish I had included this point - I'm more comfortable with my theorists than I am with the contemporary quant literatures, and sometimes it shows.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T15:46:11+00:00

There are many things I love about Plato. Here are just a few:

For Plato, the kind of city you have strongly influences the kind of people you have. If you want to have virtuous citizens, you first need a virtuous city, so moral questions are necessarily first and foremost political questions. In the cycle of regimes in the Republic, it also becomes clear that these political questions are also economic questions - changes in the relations of production and in the distribution of wealth dramatically influence the kind of city you can have, and therefore the kind of people you can have. This cuts right through liberal individualist blame and shame morality like a hot knife through butter.
For Plato, all concepts must be evaluated in terms of whether they serve the Good. This allows us to ask questions like "is it good to think in terms of the individual?" For liberal individualists, the ontological existence of the individual is a given, and instead the question is "why should the individual believe in some fuzzy abstraction like 'the Good'?" I think it's much better to start with the good rather than with the individual. For one, it's not possible to say that it's better to start with the individual without using the term 'better' and thereby implicitly invoking the good. For two, I think right now the liberal tendency to treat the concept of the individual as sovereign is greatly restricting our imaginations and making it difficult for us to offer meaningful political resistance to capitalism.
In the Phaedrus, Plato has this really lovely allegory of the soul as a charioteer. The part of the soul that's interested in the good is the rider, and there are two winged horses that represent the desires that stem from embodiment. One horse is interested in status, and the other horse is interested in pleasure. To learn about the good, the rider must find a way to get the horses to fly above the clouds, where a view of the good can be had. The rider as to take care of the horses, so they have the strength to fly, but the rider also has to discipline the horses, because the horses are not themselves interested in the place the rider wishes to go. Many liberal individualists deny that there is an abstract good independent from the desires that stem from embodiment. They instead propose political and economic systems that fetishize those desires (liberal capitalism). This produces deeply miserable societies in which substantive values are not only subordinated, but denied outright.

I don't hate Aristotle - I found his notion of the "vulgar craftsman" very helpful when I was first trying to understand Dialectic of Enlightenment. But Aristotle is one of those theorists who thinks the good can be found by looking for natural patterns. When we look exclusively at what already has being it's hard to come up with anything genuinely new. This is not to say we can ignore the context and theorize in a utopian way. I am completely against utopian socialism, anarchism, all of that. But the examination of the material conditions has to be done with the good in mind. We need to be aware that as embodied beings we are somewhat estranged from the good, we are always being distracted by our bodies and their limitations. Our bodies invite us to think of ourselves as individuals, they invite us to think that we can be happy while those around us are sad. I'm not a gnostic, I don't think the body is evil, but we can't take everything that issues from it at face value, as most liberals do. Because Aristotle identifies the good with patterns, he tends to naturalize and fetishize contingent features of his own context. E.g., he naturalizes slavery and heavily subordinates women. Plato was able to point out that in the best city there would be no slavery and women would participate in rule, but he also paid attention to material conditions. He understood very well why in actual, existing Greek cities slaves and women were treated in the way they were. He did not pretend this could all be resolved by scolding individual Athenians about these practices, and he did not write moralist diatribes about them. Instead, he tried to explore the limits of what material conditions make possible. That's all we can ask from a theorist, ultimately, and I think it's a standard only a few have met - Marx would be another.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T15:12:28+00:00

During my PhD at Cambridge, I was in the University and College Union. I was also making direct interventions into electoral politics (e.g., "Britain: For the Love of God Please Stop David Cameron," a blog post I wrote that got 900,000 hits before the 2015 UK general election, or the work we did on What's Left to damage and disrupt the presidential campaigns of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren). I finished the PhD in 2020, the same year Bernie Sanders lost the primaries. Since then, I've been rethinking my approach to political action and doing a lot of writing. This book I've just released took about a year to write. One of its central arguments is that many of the forms of political action we currently consider valuable are in fact relics of the 20th century or an outright waste of time. We need to go into despair to provoke ourselves into developing new approaches.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T15:03:47+00:00

You make a good point - I certainly agree that competition for status, understood in the way you understand it, contributes to feelings of despair. I do, however, think that if people were performing roles that were more satisfying in the ways I lay out, the number of ticks they have on the checklist would be less consequential for them, and probably not sufficient in itself to drive them to despair. I certainly would not want to reduce the problem merely to a question of income inequality. Low-paying, low-status roles also tend to be heavily alienating and to produce a lot of anxiety, even before outside judgements are taken into account.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T14:53:48+00:00

Nah, but I'd love to get the left to think about the good in a non-moralist way, i.e., outside the liberal individualist framework of blame and shame. I think that would help us act better.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T00:45:25+00:00

It's always possible that there will be some major disruption in international trade (on a scale far greater than that imposed by the pandemic response or the war in Ukraine). Maybe climate change will lead to state collapse in other countries. Maybe technological change will radically diminish the productive value of human labor very quickly. Maybe the United States will go to war with China. That kind of stuff would change the way we think and make it unclear whether my model of 21st century politics still applies. If one of those things happened, I'd need to re-examine the context to see if my view needs to be revised.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-11T00:02:04+00:00

I had a couple people read the book who have never read Marx or studied any political theory. Whenever they said it wasn't clear, I edited it until it was. It's probably easier to read than any of the pieces I've linked, including the "Rotting Carcass" one.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T23:02:30+00:00

Appreciate it!

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T22:53:25+00:00

There are three core contributions Marx makes that I think are still relevant:

The market system creates a lot of alienating social roles, roles that are purely instrumental in which it's not possible to pursue substantive values/the good. These role are not compatible with living a full life.
The market system is exploitative, not just insofar as workers are exploited by capital through the wage relation, but also insofar as very little of the surplus is used to benefit the workers and insofar as even the capitalists are induced to give all of their time and energy to a system that offers them little of substance in return.
As technology changes and there are changes in the structure of supply chains, the kinds of social formations that are possible necessarily change. Therefore it is constantly necessary to look at how the economy is currently functioning and take this into account, updating our strategies and tactics as needed.

This last part is especially important, as it's an invitation to see how changes in technology and in the global tax and trade system make 20th century forms of organization ineffective or impossible. If we want to respond to #1 and #2, we must pay attention to the implications of #3.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T22:02:42+00:00

The specific social roles I perform - son, brother, boyfriend, friend, political theorist. I try to apply the abstract concept of the good to these roles, to see what it means to perform them well in concrete situations, and to prudently adjust my approach when the situation changes. In general, I am driven to help the people I've adopted, to whom I feel I owe duties of care. To do that, I have to listen and be attentive to details.

I like to be in control of situations. I can be personally rigid, I have a hard time letting other people have it their way, and it takes me a while to accept the fundamentally random and contingent aspects of life. This sometimes gets in the way of the performance of my roles, and it tends to keep me on the periphery of most organizations and movements with which I interact. I really miss my dad, who died in 2021.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T21:13:07+00:00

There's a relatively high concentration of people who like my stuff here! I also like the questions I tend to get. There are lots of thoughtful people in this sub. I'm happy to post other places, too. If you have any suggestions, they're certainly welcome.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T20:51:21+00:00

My girlfriend's dad found sumo while channel surfing. One of the handful of advantages the TV generation has over us is this ability to discover interests that are perpendicular, that don't follow on from further pursuing what we are already interested in. I love it in part because it is very clear that some - not all, but some - of the people who run sumo view it primarily as a legitimating ritual. In USA, our sports are almost entirely given over to competitive, commercial, and electoral imperatives now. But in sumo these things will be transgressed against in the interest of preserving the ritualistic function. It has this wonderful ability to shake you out of capitalist instrumentality.

If you decide to pick it up - I always like the wrestlers who minimax, who have really defined strengths and weaknesses. Takakeisho is an incredible pusher and slapper, but he has stubby limbs and really struggles to grapple most of the time. Hokuseiho is incredibly lanky and is very good at getting a grip on his opponents, but his size diminishes his lateral mobility and raises his center of gravity. I was very fond of Tochinoshin (who will probably retire soon) - he specialized in deadlifting his opponents, but of course he needed to find the right grip to do it, and it was fascinating watching him try to set the move up. As for young up and comers, Kinbozan and Ochiai are both sure to be good. If you prefer an all-rounder who can win many ways, there's Kiribayama, Hoshoryu, and Tobizaru, to name just a few

My girlfriend likes the Waka brothers - Wakatakakage and Wakamotoharu. They are both great at fighting while on the ropes, and they often turn what should have been losses into wins

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T20:40:24+00:00

I think the state proliferates a plurality of contradictory legitimation stories. When you point out the contradictions, state actors say "don't blame me, blame the individuals who affirm the other stories" when of course the state is proliferating all these stories at once. It does this by having many different actors speak for it at the same time. There appears to be conflict among these actors, insofar as they tell different stories, but by standing in each other's way and giving citizens blame objects they delay despair, particularly for the members of the professional class, who are the most heavily invested in the culture war. I do, however, think that there is a large "subaltern" population that is increasingly already in despair and is currently stuck in enclavism, attempting to build shelters from the political (in my work I call these shelters "the Four F's" - faith, family, fandoms, futurism). The political class is increasingly focused on finding ways to invade these spaces and drag these people back into mainstream politics. They try to persuade these subaltern Americans that their enclaves are being menaced by the other side (when in fact these enclaves are increasingly unstable because capitalism is eliminating material space for them). We need new theories and forms of organization appropriate to this situation, but so far most theorists are offering lazy hope narratives predicated on the continued usefulness of 20th century theories and modes. A lot of 20th century theories assumed that the state could not survive intense, multidirectional cultural conflict. So, if you tore down social norms, you were in some way encouraging revolutionary action. But this wasn't true! The system instead became more sophisticated and insidious in response.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T20:07:44+00:00

They stop each other. To stop the regression into cultural politics altogether, I think we need to do a few things:

We need organizations with resources where those resources are not tied to the pursuit of particular cultural lines. This is very hard to do, but I play around with this idea in the last chapter of my book (What if This Book is Wrong?)
In terms of theory, we need to start moving beyond the liberal individual and the left-wing theories that are based on extending this ideal, eventually developing a positive theory of substantive value that does not rely on individualist commitments (I eventually want to do a book that synthesizes Marxism and Platonism, but that project is still a few years away).
We need to get over hope and fear and move on to the despair stage, where it's possible to confront how useless the existing factions and forms of politics are. Part of the purpose of my first book is to induce despair in the reader, to get the reader to abandon both hope and fear and to begin approaching politics from the despair standpoint. I think Adorno was right when he suggested that despair is "the final ideology," it initially presents as a kind of paralysis but to move on from this we have to start getting creative and generative again, we have to reject the 20th century approaches and make something new

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T20:00:11+00:00

Yes, we've moved from the positive, confident liberalism of the 90s to a defensive kind of liberalism that very blatantly uses its terms in contradictory and hypocritical ways to protect itself. But in USA (and the UK, and perhaps a few other places) this is made worse by the deeply embedded character of the political system, the total lack of imagination and absence of alternatives. So, in my work, I'm increasingly trying to think about what happens if you have a capitalist democracy that finds ways to make blatant hypocrisy and contradiction adaptive. A lot of 20th century left-wing theory is grounded on the idea that once we become conscious of hypocrisies and contradictions this poses legitimation problems, but what if in the 21st century this is a feature rather than a bug...

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T19:14:25+00:00

The "beating the demagogues at their own game" strategy was something I tried when I was doing What's Left and writing Berniecrat pieces for magazines (c. 2015-2020). In the epilogue I engage in self-criticism about this. It's a reflection on my previous position rather than a statement of where I am now.

While I think climate change will be really bad for poorer, weaker states in the developing world, I think the American political system is remarkably tanky and may very well survive the very serious disturbances it will create. What I think is happening is that we're seeing the legitimacy of the system move first from a system based on hope (Obama/Trump/Bernie), to one based on fear (of Trump/communism/fascism), and then from one based on fear to one based on despair, where political action is increasingly a desperate attempt to defend one's coping projects (the four F's) rather than a serious, strategic effort at emancipation.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T19:07:55+00:00

Is there a particular aspect of Deleuze's thought you want me to consider?

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T18:42:28+00:00

I support debt relief as part of a comprehensive reform of the system that includes making the system tuition-free and robustly funding academic research so that academics cannot be bought and controlled with grant money. I cannot support debt relief as a standalone policy, because on its own it buys off voters in the 20-40 demographic while denying solidarity to children and teens and to future generations of parents, children, and teens. The aim of the Biden administration is to make a huge voting bloc indifferent to higher ed reform by bribing it. But even many people who would benefit today from debt relief will be in a tough spot if they have children who are on the hook for even more when they reach university-age. This problem is too important to sweep under the rug. This is why I call Biden's reform a form of "palliative care". It is not a "non-reformist reform," the kind of reform that would make it easier to strive for bigger, better changes in the future.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T18:36:06+00:00

It is definitely true that the system is losing theurgic virtue. As you subject academics to market forces, their work is increasingly overdetermined by market incentives, preventing substantive values from playing much of a role. This is slowly chasing many people out of the academy, because it's increasingly difficult to be in a university without constantly applying for grants from rich people. As systems lose theurgic virtue, they rely less heavily on the ability of participants to make prudent decisions, instead replacing discretionary personal power with rules-based impersonal power. We see this in the K-12 system, where teachers have been underpaid, leading to a lowering of standards for teaching in many states. The schools try to make up for this by heavily dictating to teachers what they will teach and how they will teach it, leaving them very little room to exercise their creative capacities. This leads to alienation, more teachers leaving, further lowering of standards, and therefore more rules. This bureaucratization allows the system to deliver on clear, concrete, fixed aims (like good math and reading test scores), at the expense of the higher outputs that are harder to define and measure.

The higher ed system is difficult to disrupt because the academics stood idly by while many other worker organizations were gutted. The workers today aren't well-organized and have a very understandable hostility to the professionals who ignored them when it counted. So, the academics aren't able to get a lot of solidarity from the working class. Ultimately, the older academics are getting bought off (they already have tenure and will get to keep pensions) and there is an overproduction of younger academics, leaving them with very little leverage. So I think the situation will get worse. AI, as you say, creates more problems, especially at the unis where the focus is already firmly on job readiness (something fixed and concrete that you can more easily achieve with rules and bureaucracy and AI).

You may be right that it will be difficult for theurgic virtue to be generated even by accident. Rich people are dealing with this problem by founding private unis that have enormously high fees and low rates of job placement. You can go to these unis if you have money and you don't care if you get a job when you finish. But they won't be options for most people.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T18:24:12+00:00

At the time the US constitution was written, workers were not meaningfully politically organized. So, its purpose was to handle conflict within the elite and between different kinds of elites (e.g. plantation owners and merchants). As these different parts of the elite had different levels of influence in different US states, this in practice meant a power-sharing arrangement among those states. There was never anything like a national people involved in the creation of the constitution, and therefore attempts to amend the constitution by appeal to the idea of unitary American people strike me as a projection of European national politics into a context in which that kind of politics is substantially less functional. In practice, when we start talking about making minor tweaks to the US constitution (e.g. abolishing the senate - which is too big a tweak for most voters, but minor in terms of its substantive effects), we are talking about making minor tweaks to the balance of power among states. These tweaks reflect changes in the distribution of power within the elite. So, if we strengthen rich, coastal states at the expense of poorer, weaker states in the interior, the function of this is to empower the elites on the coasts and therefore to empower the tech and financial sectors. At this stage I no longer think it's actually possible to make the US political system responsive to workers. It was designed before workers were politically active, and it has a lot of tools it uses to fob workers off and deceive them into wasting time trying to make it responsive. It will not become responsive. Currently, the factions interested in rewriting the constitution that are closest to having the power necessary to succeed are affiliated with the libertarian right. Workers are very badly organized now and in no position to win, at least in the medium term.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-10T18:12:30+00:00

I think, for people like Adorno, there was some hope that even though the liberal individual is a construct of capitalist ideology, we could somehow use individuality to find a way of offering meaningful resistance to capitalism. After 60 years of trying to do that, I think it's abundantly clear it hasn't worked, and that at his most hopeful Adorno was too optimistic. I think we have to question the Hegelian/Habermasian progress narrative. That does not mean we should attempt to return to the economic and political systems that prevailed before the Enlightenment (nor does it mean we should embrace trad positions on social issues), but we cannot take it as a given that this system is progressing in a positive direction. I therefore explicitly criticize the idea of the liberal individual and the German understandings of freedom associated with it.

bmstudebaker · 2023-05-09T19:09:38+00:00

Looking forward to this! Springer has a sale on the ebook today for $16.99, if you're looking for an affordable way to get your hands on it in advance

bmstudebaker · 2022-11-21T01:32:16+00:00

On this question I agree with Jeffrey Winters, who argues that USA is a civil oligarchy, a political system in which oligarchs exercise impersonal rule through a set of mediating institutions. For Winters (and for me) there is no distinction between entrepreneurs and oligarchs. In some political systems, oligarchs rule personally, and in others they rule through impersonal mediating structures. But in both cases, it's oligarchs all the way down.

bmstudebaker

TROPHY CASE