Catherine Liu details how the professional managerial class (PMC) has betrayed workers for seats within the halls of power, all while they wag their fingers at the politically incorrect working class.
The Left always purports to speak for the working class, while rejecting the values of the working class. Even worse, the left actually represents the interests of the PMC and does not know the extent of its ignorance on many many issues.
For instance, when the left promotes "Green Technology" it forgets who installs that Tech, who maintains that Tech, and most importantly who drives that Green Technology to the Landfill to be disposed of. The working class understands the world far better than the PMC because it knows where the bodies are buried, because they buried them.
The modern Left affects a touching sympathy for The Workers. The People, humanity, whatever, but can't stand actual working class people and avoids contact with them whenever they can.
Why I find "vanguard of the working class" so disgusting. No better evidence they consider us too stupid to lead ourselves. No different than upper middle class types who believe themselves wonderful for speaking to the help as if we were human.
Yes, years of experience having cats as roommates. Their (c)attitude is justified. One of my Australian Shepherds was quite similar. I took her on a country drive to see sheep and cattle; she turned her head 180* away. (really) She'd been on union picket lines and she knew contract language. Hers said "Show Dog" and she had championships--she'd fulfilled her end of the bargain. She did NOT do sheep. They're dirty, smelly, outside...and they're WORK! She had the instincts, but was smart enough to say NO.
John, the liberal PMC can call themselves stuffed purple dinosaurs. It doesn't make them Barney.
We do not have a left in the US; we have a far-right (Trump, Bloomberg, etc.), a right (Schumer, Pelosi, Warren), and a center (Bernie Sanders).
The left was destroyed by Bill Clinton on behalf of his owners. And please recall the photo of the Clintons and the Trumps having a good time together (and who told Trump to run in the first place). Trump is destroying what little remains of a principled conservative party.
Yes Yes Yes !!! In case anyone doubts we blue collar workers aren't a bunch of undeserving, ignorant bigots, read the deep research and robust statistics in Les Leopold's 2024 book //Wall Street's War on Workers (How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It)//.
Since 1996, 60 million workers (!) have been hit by mass layoffs. Why? To finance stock buybacks that only benefit CEOs and banksters. Behavior once tightly regulated by New Deal laws repealed under Clinton. Leopold begged the Dem leadership to take up the issue: *crickets*
Bear in mind the working class is the majority in the U.S. In 2016, Sen. Chuck Schumer said "For every blue collar Democratic vote we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." That proved a winning strategy, didn't it?! Leopold's stats show a direct correlation where as mass layoffs go up in a county, Democratic votes go down. And here's the kicker--at the same time, these same white working class voters have grown more and more progressive on social issues. So much for elitist denigration and so much for wedge issue.
I speak from decades of experience. My grandpa was a Wobbly (IWW.) I was a blue collar rank and file union activist for nearly 30 years. Trained in the late '60s by people who'd been leftist (C.I.O.) labor organizers in the 1930s; they told me "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." Exactly what happened when the neolibs usurped the D party, then dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. We lessers know the Ds did FOR the unemployed, suffering workers of the Rust Belt/Appalachia as they did TO the vultures who caused the '08 crash. NOTHING! No coincidence the same area leads in what are called 'deaths of despair.'
I'm also BIPOC (my avatar is my own artwork) and LGBTQ--trans, two-spirit {gasp!} I deeply resent armchair theorists who whitemansplain what we Others should or should not feel when they've never had to fight to be recognized as human nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. We're not ceding what was hard won (or still ongoing.) Same I feel about self-selected vanguards implying, in contrast to Eugene Debs, you think we're too stupid to lead ourselves. In a post-Einstein quantum world, the either/or of Aristotelian logic is no longer sufficient. Besides, politics is the art of coalition building. The leftist, liberal, and D party elites had best learn to talk with us, not down to us.
Catherine is amazing! Fun story. Hedges exposed me to Gretchen Morgenson in his Real News interview with her (which probably played a part in his dismissal!) I brought her to Oklahoma City to speak on private equity... shortly after I started talking with Liu and then connected the two of them.... really neat when stuff works out like that. Thanks for everything Chris, you're really helping.
Just re-read the transcript. At around the 18th paragraph, there's mention of events circa 1972. The VN war, the decline in production of physically real goods, union strikes...
I've been screaming for years that the D party abandonment of the New Deal and labor wasn't a reaction to Reagan. The neolib takeover was in place as of the late '70s. A comment to a post I made on Les Leopold's "Wall Street's War on Workers" blog pointed out the likely link to the '71 Powell Memo. The corporate (vehemently anti-New Deal) agenda. I re-read it, which I hadn't done in decades.
The Memo resembles the now dominant Friedman/ Chicago School of Econ in that it simply asserts claims as truth with little, if any, empirical evidence. What's really appalling is how so much of its agenda has become accepted as givens.
The timing fits what Liu and Hedges mentioned re: 1972 as well.
There's a lot here, and it does feel a bit confusing...but I think I agree with the base line assertions.
There is no left in neoliberal, neocon America.......or only a very marginalized, and often under analysed one.
The problem is, the success of globalization happened so long ago (45 years?) that most people now take it for granted. Most people weren't alive....let alone politically conscious, during the Viet Nam years..............and its a long way we've come from any summer of love.
Having studied in America I don't really believe that there's ever been a left in America...at least not one I'd recognize. I'm Canadian, born into a CCF family and I think I understand socialism....the ideas and goals of socialism. I have no freaking idea what 'left' stands for...maybe left out is what it means. Just as being on the right means always having the correct answer, even if you don't know the question.
There seems to be a lack of analysis concerning what we need as societies in order to prosper, live well and not be afraid or hungry half the time. The virtue signalling is all around us....people with the most means seem the most progressive........in their attitudes. But few do much to change anything for the better........and yes, identity politics are silly politics......they only don't seem so in a culture that's intolerant and judgemental.
I read a Lebanese playrite recently who said "To have only one identity is to be a fascist". The comment lit up my brain, it was so obviously true. But America, and the west in general, is the culture of the Same. We gather in gaggles of Sameness....even when we endorse diversity, no one should assume we intend to live diversely.
The American gulag is self destructing. Perhaps the managereal class are largely to blame...but how the broken working class has decided to express its rage and despair is pathetically capitalist as well. And while we fight, and demonize each other.........the planet breaks down under the multiple attacks of our extractivist corporations........
I think most of us, on all sides, are fiddling.............WHILE THE PLANET BURNS.
I agree....and while I have little patience with 'identity politics' I've often wondered why it enrages the right so thoroughly. Seems to me it would make more sense to just acknowledge the diversity of life......see it as an asset, and for sure a source of mental stimulation.......
And then get on with building a society that includes all of us, has purpose for all of us...and isn't constantly bickering about who deserves to live.
The belief that people are lazy astounds me......the idea that only competition gets us off the couch seems moronic. Where did these awful 'western values' come from???
don't think about the whole right wing deal with it, it's not worth contemplating too deeply beyond it being something used to distract them....I like what prof chomsky told me 16 yrs ago:
Really impressed to hear about what the unions are doing, and particularly what you're achieving. Exactly the right thing. My guess is that a lot of the "tea party" movement could become a militant part of the left, with the kinds of efforts that you are carrying out -- and unfortunately few others. Most prefer to ridicule "death panels," etc., missing the authentic grievances and what can be done to direct them in very constructive channels.
also I think the whole diversity thing as it is now is soooo wrong in that it really is a status quo preserving thing...creating one giant homogenous consumer culture rather than allowing these folks to bring to the table what they have as far as wisdom and life experiences to bring about necessary change....the Dem party abandonment of the working class and how they use these things as a weapon has a lot to do with why the right is bothered by this stuff, but like I said not worth contemplating too deeply rather take it from the angle of what Chomsky said...look at their legit grievances and go from there.
Left wing self-appointed vanguards chastise us lessers for insisting on recognition of our identities. They conflate this with the D party elite "diversity" of whatever race, gender, or sexual orientation--but that's only if you are Ivy League or the equivalent. Fannie Lou Hamer and Delores Huerta knew better.
We should drop the 'left wing' labels....they're misleading.....and show the same kind of contempt for diverse others that the right is claiming elites show them.
I'm a farmer's daughter.....I know BS when I hear, see or smell it.
The facts of the matter need new vocabulary....and a bit of history.
Traditionally, the working class was leaning toward socialist ideas. I don't see them as belonging to left or right....left and right are dualistic concepts made up by people who can't count past two. And those labels reduce and obscure the real issues.
Real Issues??? Yes, things like how to organize a society so there are no victims. How to support families so that no child is abandoned....or demonized because of looks, IQ or sexuality. How to share resources in such a way that we don't crater the environment we all depend on? How to nurture the various talents of our people and put those talents to work for the good of all?
I suspect that people who think they are 'on the right' will already have their backs up at my list of priorities. Because a society without socialist ideas begins to devourer itself, and then blame the victims for not having jobs or places to live........but in capitalist America...asking pro social questions looks like Left Wing Cant....
On the right its about Competition and Meritocracy...its about high achievers and 'the cream always rises' while the milk is thrown away.
Race, gender, sexual orientation wouldn't be disqualifiers in a Socialist economy........and when anyone...at any point on the linear scale....says those diversities aren't important.....just now....I suspect them of being Bigots.
Once we've achieved a fair society......such issues will be largely irrelevant....or decorative at best. But as long as we have racists, sexists and homophobes........we're going to have identity politics.......
But identity politics are not in themselves either right left or centre...they're about people fed up with being marginalized. Stop the marginalization and a lot of that identity stuff goes away.
Sorry to go on so long.......but our reductive language makes it hard to be brief. A Lebanese playrite I read recently said "To have only one identity is to be a fascist". I think he was right...I know I have several.
One of them is I'm a Canadian Tommy Douglas Socialist...and damn proud of it.
This interview required 100% focus of my attention - I gave it that, but did pause a few times to catch my breath, so to speak. The content is rock-solid and needs to heard and considered by a stunned US population that doesn't yet comprehend how we got here - ASAP.
The "stunned" part of the U.S. population is the ~20% admin and professional educated elite. The ones satisfied with a D party that reflects their learned opinions about the majority working class--that "basket of deplorables." They don't see "deaths of despair' in their gourmet ghettos. Their friends aren't among the 60 million affected by mass layoffs since 1996. They don't consider the outcome of a D party that dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor decades ago. As I post on nice liberal sites, I'm astounded at their bewilderment.
Be that as it may, many economies got tied into it. Russia however, not so much. Which I've read recently is why those sanctions on Russia weren't as effective as the globalist czars thought they would be.
Turns out, making most of what you need in house has its advantages.
I am going to say something really controversial, I think.
I am a red-diaper baby, born to factory workers in the Midwest in what is now a deep rust belt town. I was a little kid during the '60s and '70s, and I owe my health, my education, and my later success to the combination of growing up in a union and the strong progressive democratic governance of my shit-hole Midwestern state.
However, I find that the working class is given far too much credit and the college radicals of the late '60s and early '70s far too much blame.
These kids didn't just turn on their working-class parents for no reason. South Eastern Wisconsin / Northern Illinois working-class culture WAS racist, homophobic, and horrifically ignorant. Even in the 70s, with the first generations of working-class kids going to college en-masse, it was common to hear bullshit like "Those kids are book smart but street stupid" and "You got a library card - you think you're better 'en us?"
It wasn't just anti-elitism—kids in the UW system on working-class campuses were hardly the 'elite'—it was anti-education and anti-intellectualism on a stunning level. The resentment with which college students were treated wasn't earned; the kids didn't start it.
Moreover, I watched Reagan and the Republicans use the vile racism of my people to get union members to turn against their unions - unions that provided tens of thousands of people in my little town to own their own homes - and often a vacation home - plus new cars, college for the kids, on a single earner 40-hour income. Reagan especially fanned the flames of race hatred, using this as a way to sow division between black workers and white workers so that solidarity became impossible. My people GAVE their unions away just so darker-skinned people wouldn't be equal.
I am union through and through, but I would encourage people who grew up in white-collar academia to avoid working-class hagiographies.
This post is a brave one....and it made me remember my years in the United States...first as a student, and then coming back after a years hiatus ostensibly to marry my university sweetheart.
That didn't work out and I came home to Canada...thankfully.
But I do remember this weird gap between the college kids and the surrounding rural areas in Massachusetts...even!!! And it puzzled me.
Because in Saskatchewan, where the Great Depression had ended lots of people's hopes of higher education......higher learning was almost revered....and lots of people talked politics and world affairs regardless of their educational level. I think that was in large part because of our CBC.......something the Canadians right wants to shut down just now if they get elected.
So I never equated smarts with university educated........although a university degree certainly didn't hurt. In the States......it appeared that there was a divide...and perhaps as you say....
It had to do with the bigotry. We had that in Canada too, but much less so.
We give up our hatreds very hard.....and I've long counted it one of my biggest advantages......that my family had less of them than most. Dad didn't care for 'coupon clippers' as he called the capitalists...........but one of his good friends was the owner of our Chinese restaurant...everyone was more or less poor, but managing....and eveyone dreamed of sending their kids to the university, or trade school when high school was finished.
Maybe its' Slavery that throws the long fascistic shadow over your nation??? But for sure, its no union that restricts itself to white males...........that's just a fraternity!
Reply so you know you're not alone...and in acknowledgement of what is a painful historical truth. That academic "hagiography" is just another form of what I called talking at, not with; a way of distancing oneself from the messiness of real individuals through abstractions.
Over the decades, I witnessed many instances of rank and file bigotry as well as horribly short-sighted union leadership. Frankly, it's painful to talk about. Decerts are not difficult to argue against, but that takes maintaining close relations with the union members so there is trust. Also have to make sure workers understand why union, including knowing about the harsh history of organizing. All of which takes lots of effort.
And there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Like Eugene Debs. Or the C.I.O. unions. I was elected to the bargaining committee of a union 90% white and 90% male because of my political skills and knowledge of contract language. (At the time, early '80s, I still presented as female; much later transition.) BTW, a big reason for the rise of the KKK 1890s-1910 was to counter the Populist movement in the South, which featured interracial cooperation.
The stats in Les Leopold's 2024 book refute the common liberal intellectual prejudice that we're all a bunch of idiot bigot white men. I've heard versions of that for years. My rejoinder is to tell them to go look at any Central Labor Council monthly meeting--the race and gender diversity is obvious. Of course that doesn't mean racism free, but neither are the professional elites. Theirs is just more hidden. Or expressed in genteel fantasies like the white savior complex. Getting into the working class version too much only justifies the D party's decades of neglect and that unforgivable "basket of deplorables" remark. The old I.W.W. slogan "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All" says it best. No litmus test for having the proper enlightened beliefs required.
PS--I also was among the '60s-'70s protesters. Much +++ and some not so much. In '70 I was with a group of un-elite community college students at the demonstration against the bombing of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. A well-known SDS leader (IMHO typical as being from an elite upper middle class educated family) yelled at us to "charge that police line." I yelled back in my best stage voice "we'll be right behind you."
I went back to school (U. of WA, botany/forestry) in the late '90s mostly I wanted to but in part that I'd been blacklisted. Took some courses in Labor Studies (U. of WA is one of several w/ Labor institutes) including from a nationally known prof. She was nasty as hell to me--probably because my knowledge of the subject was not theoretical.
I'd also committed the unpardonable sin of physically reacting to her announcement that she based the subject in rational choice theory. I am smart enough never, ever to contradict a professor (they have grade books) but it was too late to recant my heresy. To me, idiotic on the face of it--what would solidarity mean if the only motivation is personal gain? I now know econ theory well enough to be able to argue the idea is just one more unsubstantiated assumption among the many in consensus econ dogma.
Not all profs are like this. I learned the best mentors, whether full tenured professors or chief engineers on ships, are the ones who when you ask a question, will say "hmm...I don't know." They're secure enough to be okay not immediately knowing everything. The worst are those who feel embarrassed; you're then on their enemies list forever.
As self-evidently better people, smarter, better educated, with better taste and virtue and the totebags to prove it, the PMC see themselves as a natural aristocracy.
At the same time, because they are so obviously better people, it is only right and just that the PMC are entitled to the lion's share of The Goodies.
"tote bags" ;- ) The economic right wing elite is more honest with their belief "the cream always rises to the top." Decades ago a MAD magazine rejoinder: "so does the scum."
Ask anyone with experience in service jobs about how the elites (including nice liberals) treat us. As if akin to something they've scraped off the bottom of their shoe.
You know who DOES love the culture wars, and truly can't stop talking about them? It's Republicans and other rightists who are constantly banging on about DEI, etc., not the left (phantom or otherwise).
I'm disheartened by those on the left who oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion, which should be cornerstone socialist principles. We don't have to embrace corporate 'DEI' but we do have to embrace the actual meaning of those three terrifying words.
Hard to believe we're still blaming the hippies for everything that's gone wrong since the 1960s.
Gosh John - I don't think you've been ganged up on yet for objecting to liberal class orthodoxies.
Defend Free Speech and oppose censorship? You'll be told you want to use racial epithets because you are racist, sexist, whatever.
Call out the Ukraine war in the early days as a proxy war? Get slandered as a Putin puppet. (This is sort of an all-use slur)
Did you doubt the Proximal Origin story in favor of the much more obvious lab leak? Obviously you love Trump.
No leftist is actually against diversity, inclusion, and equality. However, as a corporate movement DEI was cynical bullshit. DEI means a living wage for all workers but instead was just used as a way for liberals to feel good about themselves.
I've been ganged up on plenty of times by liberals - almost as many times as I've been ganged up on by conservatives. The only difference is that the conservatives use more inflammatory insults (faggot, moron, retard) than the liberals do.
Catherine Liu was bursting . . . over the top, enthusiastic to have her say with Chris. When she dropped the F-bombs (I enjoyed it for dropping all pretense to status-quo Christian values) Chris didn't flinch (didn't expect him to). We need to hear more from her and those few out there on the same wavelength - ASAP.
My goodness. In western Canada, those things go right by us...but then, I was reading, not listening so must have found them appropriate to the context.
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu for this interview.
Running through my mind was an accompanying thought (that hit me a couple of days ago): At least the Trumpen horde attack might at least break the stasis of the DNC, the post-Clinton hold. But the cost to rest of the political institutions will be a high price to pay for this possibility, the damage that they will do, particularly whatever they manage to acheive of their Project 2025 goals.
Greatly appreciated was what Catherine Liu described at the conclusion (her crazy-sounding thought):
"I do have some hope that there is a kind of baseline American sense of anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism that will emerge when Trump's excesses become too obvious.
And I think that we have to speak to the anti-authoritarian, egalitarian leanings of the country that we live in, not pretend that we live in another country, not try to flee from this country, not try to reinvent this country from the ground up. But there is, I find, a craving among my students, among the people who read the book, who've been reaching out to me, a craving for a kind of left-driven community that takes the social issues seriously, that wants to channel this anger for social ends, not for the enrichment of others."
And also:
"The longer term issue for me is how can we return to bread and butter issues, to undoing private equity’s hold on real estate, on health, on education? And I don't see the Democrats having any path forward on this.....working class people have even less hope of actually finding a way of living with dignity that was cemented into this promise of post-war America, which had to do with social mobility and certain things like vacation time or an eight-hour day. Now we all have to like be hustle culture 16-hour days, seven days a week. And take it for granted.
Every day we should be talking about private equity, but if we're talking about DEI and we're talking about underrepresented minorities and we're talking about equity and not equality, we're not going to be talking about what private equity is actually doing to every single sector of the American economy.
....these DEI policies, they destroy solidarity.....They destroy any kind of class solidarity or class feeling. They are designed to manage difference rather than produce equality and justice.
we have gotten far, far away from the values of the working class, which should be about bread and butter material issues."
I'm not convinced that you aren't reducing the working class a bit when you argue the values of the working class 'should be about bread and butter material issues'.....
Nor do I think that diversity, equity or inclusion need to divide or destroy solidarity.......
What kind of solidarity would it be if diverse people weren't accepted in all their diversity? What kind of solidarity is afraid of equality? Or Inclusion???
That makes no sense to me at all. But as a working class girl who did well in University...I think I know what bothers certain sectors of the 'working class'.........its sexualities that don't fit in their ideas about what sex is and should be. It's accents of immigrants that are hard to understand. It's the difficulty many working people have with listening...especially to stories or ideas they've never heard before.
For real solidarity to happen........we need to all learn to be more open...sharing our stories builds solidarity......being afraid to share them......or existing inside solid cabals where personal truth has to be suppressed isn't solidarity. It's Oppression.
Still, solidarity groups can be oppressive without knowing they're oppressive. We all come out of an essentially Anglo-Christian puritanism that thinks a lot of reality should go unmentioned....and certainly unshared. Privacy is important...but I maintain that when we are much less Judgemental......much more Empathic, less cold, more warm, less inexpressive, more welcoming.............less fearful, more jolly..........
Diversity will be accepted as the norm it likely is. Equity will mean snobbery vanishes...and everyone is treated with respect. Inclusion will mean folks support the union...BECAUSE THE UNION SUPPORTS THEM.
I think it will be much easier than we imagine.......but as long as there's only jobs for the meritocracy few (white, male, college educated, well off)......there won't be solidarity and there won't be strong unions. Capitalism is the problem. Bigotry is the problem...
Not gender diversity......non binary sexualities, race differences or ableism. CAPITALIST WEALTH ACCUMULATION FOR THE FEW...fighting among the people as to what's most important for the rest of us.
We keep doing it..........but its stupid, and not half as much fun as real solidarity would be.
If I am correctly reading the layout of substack, you are replying to my comment wherein I quoted a couple of points made in the interview. I will address it with my own view, not presuming to know how Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu might respond.
In my view:
I think that we all perceive things somewhat differently, based upon a number other things, our histories and conditioning, our basic temperament, our culture, (including family culture) and group and individual tendencies that fall under the problematic rubric "human nature".
Some of these things are more malleable than others. I think that some, unfortunately including the more toxic, appear to be a part of what we simply seem to be as a species. I would include within these bigotry of all forms, sexism, racism, religion, basically enmity triggered by any definable, perceptual and especially group distinction.
The power of us and them, or Us versus Them.
It is EVERYWHERE, if you look at history, look at the world, us and then can be identified in pretty much all of the conflicts that are evident. I think that people fall into viewing this way, particularly in self-identified groups, pretty much automatically and unconsciously.
It seems as human beings, all we need is an excuse, something to hang us and them fury on. And I think that collectively, globally, we are falling into divisions based on us and them which is manifested in nationalism, exclusion, group enmity of all forms.
As far as the subject of politics in this country, I don't disagree with the feeling that bigotry is a primary problem. But I also think that this runs very deep, and that some people (perhaps most) are simply never going to see it within themselves. And I feel that the emphasis placed on identity, on formally mandated institutional reform has had the opposite effect of that hoped for (I am not speaking here of equal rights, civil rights). I think that from a strictly effective point, it has increased the fervor of those who are by temperament or conditioning reactionary and archly conservative.
It has fed fuel to the fires of bigotry. And again, while I don't disagree with what you say, I think that it has from a standpoint of the playing out of the polarity of this time, what is needed to ameliorate this pattern of reaction is something that unifies the majority of people in the fundamental concerns posed by the domination of neoliberal capitalism. To put it in terms using expressions that I'm particularly fond of: it has expended "political capital" which might have been better applied to seeking commonality based on economic class considerations, a movement that has worked before (when not much else has). I think that point of Chris Hedges (and Catherine Liu here) is that this is the continuing, foolish error of the DNC, which still seems unwilling to look at it. In the hands of the DNC strategists, identity gestures that don't truly address the plight of what ought to be their base, that don't address the neoliberal concentration of wealth (and power).
I think that seeking common a goal, in a wide range of contexts, has been seen to bring out allowances of differences in people.
Identity is a key component in the phenomenon of us and them, I think that placing such a great emphasis on it has, in the context of where we are now, has hurt rather than helped the cause of progressives, it seems to only galvanize the fervor of the right, and have been a big component in their success. They have opposite aims in their vision of solidarity.
While this argument has merit......it also reproduces the mechanism that is widely used to keep the stupidity going......binary thinking.
If you can call reducing the world to two ideas, one of them wrong......thinking!
I don't see it as natural........I see it as created by the Competitive/Dominant world view of Western colonialism. Inside that bubble (admittedly, a large one) your appeal to human nature holds true. But if we knew more about the indigenous cultures our colonialism destroyed.....to a far greater extent than any of us actually know.....we'd likely find that Difference, Variety, and many forms of cooperative organization were more prevalent than todays 'civilized' folks could imagine.
And that's where I totally leave the so called values of western civilization....I've been reading about the natural world...the world of fungus, the ecological development and role played by insects.......the way trees actually function and how the soil holds more symbiants than monocultures.
DIFFERENCE IS THE NORM..complexity, interactivities...networks in which competition is the recessive activity. But we're separate from that natural world of living fecundity yes?? We're the chosen species...the only one with intelligence???
My conclusion is that we are the most self absorbed, the most given to unwarranted egotism, the most easily deluded and bullied into beliefs that are pure hokem. We actually believe it is in our nature to make war....that we are natural killers and there aint nothin we can do about it.
I've read Chris Hedges WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING...twice...and the evidence suggests that war destroys everyone...even the survivors don't come back whole. Chris says the militias were made up of the village failures....the guys who for whatever reason didn't get the nurturance/support they might have needed....the bullies and layabouts.
I believe we'd all prefer to live in peace. We'd even prefer a purpose...good work...and we die without the respect and support of our community.
So what the Power hungry do, is take away community...isolate and impoverish. THEN THE HUMAN NATURE WE'RE TOLD TO BELIEVE IN, KICKS IN...and they have us.
The don't intend to let go. So they fill the schools and universities with their people....preaching their preferred story of 'human nature'. The Kochtopus did it big time, for over 40 years, in your gulag democracy. Once we're in competition with everyone for scarce resources, once we believe we're killers by nature, once we're scared most of the time.............all the bigotries can come easily into play.
And luckily....you've got white christian nationalism to the rescue. Join that cabal and you're among the good guys. Never having read the gospels they can use Jesus as their guide...............to the good work they do reducing everything to Us versus Them.
I can't think of a better recipe for Armageddon...and if we want to believe that's human nature go for it. For me and mine, its unmitigated lies and BS. Ideology...idiotology: Nary an idea among it.
I described my views derived from my life, my experiences, what I see, and the best that I can make out in terms of attempting to understand us. I have seen a lot of violence, and this undoubtedly has shaped my views, and even the way that I perceive and experience my life.
I have also read about different cultures including indigenous, and the views of the natural world of Merlin Sheldrake, Suzanne Simard.
There is life, and humans are a form of life with it's own nature. From what I can see, we are both social and cooperative, and collectively murderous against outside groups. That is simply what I see. They are not mutually exclusive. I think that they in fact are the two sides of the same aspect of being a social animal.
I can't speak meaningfully about ways of seeing that I have not experienced. I do think that things are lost and gained with each culture, each gets some things right and some things wrong, each has its benefits and its ills.
I think that ultimately to try to define and specify human nature is problematic, as I stated, and subject to our own way of seeing, our experience and our conditioning. I don't think that we are going to reach an answer here. But thank you, it is an important question.
I think we essentially agree......its more that I grew up in a culture that had very little overt violence in it..........the violence was hidden perhaps....as the discrimination against woman was there, but unspoken for the most part.
I'm just stating the case for survival. Justifying our culture, based on our experience of it.........is likely the biggest barrier to actual change.
If suddenly, we all valued difference, saw in difference new solutions to old intractable problems.......we would instantly dissolve a lot of the prejudice our culture is clinging to now.
I want a different Tomorrow. Less consumption, more local resilience. Less competition, more cooperative exploration of the possibilities our reductive ways of thinking are rendering invisible.
I want change...life affirming change......ways of being that don't spew carbon, or hatred, or greed. I want a possible tomorrow.
And for reasons of extreme privilege.......I don't enjoy hating...or demonizing...I like most people, would give everyone a chance. I loved teaching...that too was a privilege. I'd have no problem paying trash collectors the same as teachers........both jobs being essential, and teaching having so much more intrinsic pleasure...........I could even see trash collectors getting more money than teachers.
Surely we do not find our life's work by monetary calculations??? Or in my future world.......we would not. We wouldn't look down our long noses at others.
What's the fun in that????
I want us to evolve. Become the species we could be. That's the main difference I suspect.
Just a trivial point, but one that did come to mind in watching the interview: Chris Hedges in the introduction comments "I love the book. I can't believe you're an academic. It was so well written."
Not to say that it wasn't well-written, and I do appreciate tremendously Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy, Inc.", but I am just grateful that I had a copy of the Oxford Academese-English Dictionary at hand as I read it. Still working up the courage to tackle his tomes on deTocqueville or Politics and Vision.
A daunting prospect. But then again, I was always hoping for a Classics Illustrated (comic book) version of Finnegan's Wake. It's probably just laziness.
And...another small point. When talking about the counterculture of the 60s-70s, perhaps the question should be asked WHICH counterculture (as was mentioned regarding the left in this interview, or WHICH America per Chomsky). There was a very wide range of thought and action that fell within that wide rubric, and to my memory, an emphasis on collective social values and alternatives than merely the indulgences of the self. Granted on the part of a number it was fashion, a function of the zeitgeist, but some of the movement at this time was substantive, and with practical possibilities, and the values deeply held by some.
Also invaluable: The Oxford Marxian-English multi-volume set. Helps especially in decrypting Marxian words and phrases when appearing in the typical multi-page Marxian sentences, which reference an earlier part of the sentence appearing four pages earlier.
The online version is cheaper (also free on the Left Bank Books website!), but some people still prefer the print, compact version, available cheaply at used booksellers. The compact version comes complete with magnifying glass like the compact OED.
In some strange fashion, identity seems intimately bound up in that whole French deconstructionist quagmire, Derrida, Foucault, "gaze", etc, the vague ideas in hazy form, which have so infected the "space" of present popular/media "discourse".
So glad though, to have found this application to Joyce. Clarification, after all this time!
The interrogation of those metonymic exemes and dislodging the phallogocentric organization of writing - that was the key!
Thank you to Alan Robert Roughley!
..............
Finnegans wake as a deconstructive text Roughley, Alan Robert
Abstract
This dissertation considers Finnegans Wake as a deconstructive writing that exemplifies many of the textual operations that the French critical theorist Jacques Derrida attempts to define through his use of such "undecidable" terms and "non-concepts" as "difference," "dissemination," "trace," and "grafting." It argues that the Wake operates much like the "bifurcated writing" and "grouped textual field" that Derrida identifies as the only possible site for a deconstructive engagement of the terms and concepts of the Western metaphysical tradition, the tradition that Derrida terms phallogocentrism. The Wake has been an important text in the critical formulations of many contemporary theorists, and, as Derrida has recently acknowledged, his own theories of dissemination and deconstruction have been considerably affected by the Wake during the twenty-five to thirty years that he has been learning to read it. In drawing on Derrida's theories to analyze the Wake, this dissertation utilizes Derrida's terms to "re-mark" in Joyce's text, the disseminative textual operations that Derrida has marked as operative in the texts of the history of philosophy and in "so-called literary" texts like Finnegan’s Wake. In a certain sense, it renders unto Joyce's text that which has always already belonged to it. Drawing on Derrida's investigation of speech and writing, the dissertation considers the Wake's identification of itself as a fusion of speech and writing that requires a "speechreading" on the part of its readers. It supports this consideration by employing Umberto Eco's semiotic methodology to trace the network of metonymic lexemes by which the Wake identifies itself as a writing for the ear as well as the eye. Next it analyzes the Wake's tenth chapter as a chapter that exploits the formula 1+2+3+4=10 and produces a writing that operates as an arithmetical textual machine which problematizes the traditional concepts of presence and being and which also works towards dislodging the phallogocentric organization of writing with such hierarchically organized binary terms as male/female and central/marginal. In order to illustrate how the Wake disseminatively disrupts the binary terms by which phallogocentrism dominates thought, speech, and writing, the dissertation also considers how Joyce's text functions in an Intertextual relationship with some of the writings of Blake and Shakespeare. It does this by analyzing how the Wake dismantles some of the philosophical paradigms operating in the Blake and Shakespeare texts and takes important signifiers from those texts in order to set them to work as signifiers of signifieds that are radically different from those in the texts of Blake and Shakespeare.
Catherine hits the nail on the head.
The Left always purports to speak for the working class, while rejecting the values of the working class. Even worse, the left actually represents the interests of the PMC and does not know the extent of its ignorance on many many issues.
For instance, when the left promotes "Green Technology" it forgets who installs that Tech, who maintains that Tech, and most importantly who drives that Green Technology to the Landfill to be disposed of. The working class understands the world far better than the PMC because it knows where the bodies are buried, because they buried them.
The modern Left affects a touching sympathy for The Workers. The People, humanity, whatever, but can't stand actual working class people and avoids contact with them whenever they can.
Why I find "vanguard of the working class" so disgusting. No better evidence they consider us too stupid to lead ourselves. No different than upper middle class types who believe themselves wonderful for speaking to the help as if we were human.
Cats naturally see themselves as superior, and are famously resistant to being led anywhere.
Yes, years of experience having cats as roommates. Their (c)attitude is justified. One of my Australian Shepherds was quite similar. I took her on a country drive to see sheep and cattle; she turned her head 180* away. (really) She'd been on union picket lines and she knew contract language. Hers said "Show Dog" and she had championships--she'd fulfilled her end of the bargain. She did NOT do sheep. They're dirty, smelly, outside...and they're WORK! She had the instincts, but was smart enough to say NO.
John, the liberal PMC can call themselves stuffed purple dinosaurs. It doesn't make them Barney.
We do not have a left in the US; we have a far-right (Trump, Bloomberg, etc.), a right (Schumer, Pelosi, Warren), and a center (Bernie Sanders).
The left was destroyed by Bill Clinton on behalf of his owners. And please recall the photo of the Clintons and the Trumps having a good time together (and who told Trump to run in the first place). Trump is destroying what little remains of a principled conservative party.
Yes Yes Yes !!! In case anyone doubts we blue collar workers aren't a bunch of undeserving, ignorant bigots, read the deep research and robust statistics in Les Leopold's 2024 book //Wall Street's War on Workers (How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do about It)//.
Since 1996, 60 million workers (!) have been hit by mass layoffs. Why? To finance stock buybacks that only benefit CEOs and banksters. Behavior once tightly regulated by New Deal laws repealed under Clinton. Leopold begged the Dem leadership to take up the issue: *crickets*
Bear in mind the working class is the majority in the U.S. In 2016, Sen. Chuck Schumer said "For every blue collar Democratic vote we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." That proved a winning strategy, didn't it?! Leopold's stats show a direct correlation where as mass layoffs go up in a county, Democratic votes go down. And here's the kicker--at the same time, these same white working class voters have grown more and more progressive on social issues. So much for elitist denigration and so much for wedge issue.
I speak from decades of experience. My grandpa was a Wobbly (IWW.) I was a blue collar rank and file union activist for nearly 30 years. Trained in the late '60s by people who'd been leftist (C.I.O.) labor organizers in the 1930s; they told me "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." Exactly what happened when the neolibs usurped the D party, then dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. We lessers know the Ds did FOR the unemployed, suffering workers of the Rust Belt/Appalachia as they did TO the vultures who caused the '08 crash. NOTHING! No coincidence the same area leads in what are called 'deaths of despair.'
I'm also BIPOC (my avatar is my own artwork) and LGBTQ--trans, two-spirit {gasp!} I deeply resent armchair theorists who whitemansplain what we Others should or should not feel when they've never had to fight to be recognized as human nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. We're not ceding what was hard won (or still ongoing.) Same I feel about self-selected vanguards implying, in contrast to Eugene Debs, you think we're too stupid to lead ourselves. In a post-Einstein quantum world, the either/or of Aristotelian logic is no longer sufficient. Besides, politics is the art of coalition building. The leftist, liberal, and D party elites had best learn to talk with us, not down to us.
Catherine is amazing! Fun story. Hedges exposed me to Gretchen Morgenson in his Real News interview with her (which probably played a part in his dismissal!) I brought her to Oklahoma City to speak on private equity... shortly after I started talking with Liu and then connected the two of them.... really neat when stuff works out like that. Thanks for everything Chris, you're really helping.
Catherine’s rhetoric is refreshingly candid. Great interview.
Just re-read the transcript. At around the 18th paragraph, there's mention of events circa 1972. The VN war, the decline in production of physically real goods, union strikes...
I've been screaming for years that the D party abandonment of the New Deal and labor wasn't a reaction to Reagan. The neolib takeover was in place as of the late '70s. A comment to a post I made on Les Leopold's "Wall Street's War on Workers" blog pointed out the likely link to the '71 Powell Memo. The corporate (vehemently anti-New Deal) agenda. I re-read it, which I hadn't done in decades.
The Memo resembles the now dominant Friedman/ Chicago School of Econ in that it simply asserts claims as truth with little, if any, empirical evidence. What's really appalling is how so much of its agenda has become accepted as givens.
The timing fits what Liu and Hedges mentioned re: 1972 as well.
There's a lot here, and it does feel a bit confusing...but I think I agree with the base line assertions.
There is no left in neoliberal, neocon America.......or only a very marginalized, and often under analysed one.
The problem is, the success of globalization happened so long ago (45 years?) that most people now take it for granted. Most people weren't alive....let alone politically conscious, during the Viet Nam years..............and its a long way we've come from any summer of love.
Having studied in America I don't really believe that there's ever been a left in America...at least not one I'd recognize. I'm Canadian, born into a CCF family and I think I understand socialism....the ideas and goals of socialism. I have no freaking idea what 'left' stands for...maybe left out is what it means. Just as being on the right means always having the correct answer, even if you don't know the question.
There seems to be a lack of analysis concerning what we need as societies in order to prosper, live well and not be afraid or hungry half the time. The virtue signalling is all around us....people with the most means seem the most progressive........in their attitudes. But few do much to change anything for the better........and yes, identity politics are silly politics......they only don't seem so in a culture that's intolerant and judgemental.
I read a Lebanese playrite recently who said "To have only one identity is to be a fascist". The comment lit up my brain, it was so obviously true. But America, and the west in general, is the culture of the Same. We gather in gaggles of Sameness....even when we endorse diversity, no one should assume we intend to live diversely.
The American gulag is self destructing. Perhaps the managereal class are largely to blame...but how the broken working class has decided to express its rage and despair is pathetically capitalist as well. And while we fight, and demonize each other.........the planet breaks down under the multiple attacks of our extractivist corporations........
I think most of us, on all sides, are fiddling.............WHILE THE PLANET BURNS.
This interview might be a little more coherent... A better intro to Liu
https://youtu.be/Ia6m3pIIS2k?si=zOqYMFUm4iwGFtNu
I agree....and while I have little patience with 'identity politics' I've often wondered why it enrages the right so thoroughly. Seems to me it would make more sense to just acknowledge the diversity of life......see it as an asset, and for sure a source of mental stimulation.......
And then get on with building a society that includes all of us, has purpose for all of us...and isn't constantly bickering about who deserves to live.
The belief that people are lazy astounds me......the idea that only competition gets us off the couch seems moronic. Where did these awful 'western values' come from???
don't think about the whole right wing deal with it, it's not worth contemplating too deeply beyond it being something used to distract them....I like what prof chomsky told me 16 yrs ago:
Really impressed to hear about what the unions are doing, and particularly what you're achieving. Exactly the right thing. My guess is that a lot of the "tea party" movement could become a militant part of the left, with the kinds of efforts that you are carrying out -- and unfortunately few others. Most prefer to ridicule "death panels," etc., missing the authentic grievances and what can be done to direct them in very constructive channels.
also I think the whole diversity thing as it is now is soooo wrong in that it really is a status quo preserving thing...creating one giant homogenous consumer culture rather than allowing these folks to bring to the table what they have as far as wisdom and life experiences to bring about necessary change....the Dem party abandonment of the working class and how they use these things as a weapon has a lot to do with why the right is bothered by this stuff, but like I said not worth contemplating too deeply rather take it from the angle of what Chomsky said...look at their legit grievances and go from there.
Left wing self-appointed vanguards chastise us lessers for insisting on recognition of our identities. They conflate this with the D party elite "diversity" of whatever race, gender, or sexual orientation--but that's only if you are Ivy League or the equivalent. Fannie Lou Hamer and Delores Huerta knew better.
We should drop the 'left wing' labels....they're misleading.....and show the same kind of contempt for diverse others that the right is claiming elites show them.
I'm a farmer's daughter.....I know BS when I hear, see or smell it.
The facts of the matter need new vocabulary....and a bit of history.
Traditionally, the working class was leaning toward socialist ideas. I don't see them as belonging to left or right....left and right are dualistic concepts made up by people who can't count past two. And those labels reduce and obscure the real issues.
Real Issues??? Yes, things like how to organize a society so there are no victims. How to support families so that no child is abandoned....or demonized because of looks, IQ or sexuality. How to share resources in such a way that we don't crater the environment we all depend on? How to nurture the various talents of our people and put those talents to work for the good of all?
I suspect that people who think they are 'on the right' will already have their backs up at my list of priorities. Because a society without socialist ideas begins to devourer itself, and then blame the victims for not having jobs or places to live........but in capitalist America...asking pro social questions looks like Left Wing Cant....
On the right its about Competition and Meritocracy...its about high achievers and 'the cream always rises' while the milk is thrown away.
Race, gender, sexual orientation wouldn't be disqualifiers in a Socialist economy........and when anyone...at any point on the linear scale....says those diversities aren't important.....just now....I suspect them of being Bigots.
Once we've achieved a fair society......such issues will be largely irrelevant....or decorative at best. But as long as we have racists, sexists and homophobes........we're going to have identity politics.......
But identity politics are not in themselves either right left or centre...they're about people fed up with being marginalized. Stop the marginalization and a lot of that identity stuff goes away.
Sorry to go on so long.......but our reductive language makes it hard to be brief. A Lebanese playrite I read recently said "To have only one identity is to be a fascist". I think he was right...I know I have several.
One of them is I'm a Canadian Tommy Douglas Socialist...and damn proud of it.
This interview required 100% focus of my attention - I gave it that, but did pause a few times to catch my breath, so to speak. The content is rock-solid and needs to heard and considered by a stunned US population that doesn't yet comprehend how we got here - ASAP.
The "stunned" part of the U.S. population is the ~20% admin and professional educated elite. The ones satisfied with a D party that reflects their learned opinions about the majority working class--that "basket of deplorables." They don't see "deaths of despair' in their gourmet ghettos. Their friends aren't among the 60 million affected by mass layoffs since 1996. They don't consider the outcome of a D party that dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor decades ago. As I post on nice liberal sites, I'm astounded at their bewilderment.
Be sure and pick up a copy of Virtue Hoarders....it's a very short read like 80 pages...great stuff.
I have it. Highly recommended!
Ok so now read " I'll burn that bridge when I get to it" by Finkelstein!!!
oh-oh. I'm more about Yogi Berra's "when you see the fork in the road, take it." So non-binary.
I second that! Awesome interview!
"Globalism" is just an arbitrage scam.
Be that as it may, many economies got tied into it. Russia however, not so much. Which I've read recently is why those sanctions on Russia weren't as effective as the globalist czars thought they would be.
Turns out, making most of what you need in house has its advantages.
I am going to say something really controversial, I think.
I am a red-diaper baby, born to factory workers in the Midwest in what is now a deep rust belt town. I was a little kid during the '60s and '70s, and I owe my health, my education, and my later success to the combination of growing up in a union and the strong progressive democratic governance of my shit-hole Midwestern state.
However, I find that the working class is given far too much credit and the college radicals of the late '60s and early '70s far too much blame.
These kids didn't just turn on their working-class parents for no reason. South Eastern Wisconsin / Northern Illinois working-class culture WAS racist, homophobic, and horrifically ignorant. Even in the 70s, with the first generations of working-class kids going to college en-masse, it was common to hear bullshit like "Those kids are book smart but street stupid" and "You got a library card - you think you're better 'en us?"
It wasn't just anti-elitism—kids in the UW system on working-class campuses were hardly the 'elite'—it was anti-education and anti-intellectualism on a stunning level. The resentment with which college students were treated wasn't earned; the kids didn't start it.
Moreover, I watched Reagan and the Republicans use the vile racism of my people to get union members to turn against their unions - unions that provided tens of thousands of people in my little town to own their own homes - and often a vacation home - plus new cars, college for the kids, on a single earner 40-hour income. Reagan especially fanned the flames of race hatred, using this as a way to sow division between black workers and white workers so that solidarity became impossible. My people GAVE their unions away just so darker-skinned people wouldn't be equal.
I am union through and through, but I would encourage people who grew up in white-collar academia to avoid working-class hagiographies.
This post is a brave one....and it made me remember my years in the United States...first as a student, and then coming back after a years hiatus ostensibly to marry my university sweetheart.
That didn't work out and I came home to Canada...thankfully.
But I do remember this weird gap between the college kids and the surrounding rural areas in Massachusetts...even!!! And it puzzled me.
Because in Saskatchewan, where the Great Depression had ended lots of people's hopes of higher education......higher learning was almost revered....and lots of people talked politics and world affairs regardless of their educational level. I think that was in large part because of our CBC.......something the Canadians right wants to shut down just now if they get elected.
So I never equated smarts with university educated........although a university degree certainly didn't hurt. In the States......it appeared that there was a divide...and perhaps as you say....
It had to do with the bigotry. We had that in Canada too, but much less so.
We give up our hatreds very hard.....and I've long counted it one of my biggest advantages......that my family had less of them than most. Dad didn't care for 'coupon clippers' as he called the capitalists...........but one of his good friends was the owner of our Chinese restaurant...everyone was more or less poor, but managing....and eveyone dreamed of sending their kids to the university, or trade school when high school was finished.
Maybe its' Slavery that throws the long fascistic shadow over your nation??? But for sure, its no union that restricts itself to white males...........that's just a fraternity!
Reply so you know you're not alone...and in acknowledgement of what is a painful historical truth. That academic "hagiography" is just another form of what I called talking at, not with; a way of distancing oneself from the messiness of real individuals through abstractions.
Over the decades, I witnessed many instances of rank and file bigotry as well as horribly short-sighted union leadership. Frankly, it's painful to talk about. Decerts are not difficult to argue against, but that takes maintaining close relations with the union members so there is trust. Also have to make sure workers understand why union, including knowing about the harsh history of organizing. All of which takes lots of effort.
And there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Like Eugene Debs. Or the C.I.O. unions. I was elected to the bargaining committee of a union 90% white and 90% male because of my political skills and knowledge of contract language. (At the time, early '80s, I still presented as female; much later transition.) BTW, a big reason for the rise of the KKK 1890s-1910 was to counter the Populist movement in the South, which featured interracial cooperation.
The stats in Les Leopold's 2024 book refute the common liberal intellectual prejudice that we're all a bunch of idiot bigot white men. I've heard versions of that for years. My rejoinder is to tell them to go look at any Central Labor Council monthly meeting--the race and gender diversity is obvious. Of course that doesn't mean racism free, but neither are the professional elites. Theirs is just more hidden. Or expressed in genteel fantasies like the white savior complex. Getting into the working class version too much only justifies the D party's decades of neglect and that unforgivable "basket of deplorables" remark. The old I.W.W. slogan "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All" says it best. No litmus test for having the proper enlightened beliefs required.
PS--I also was among the '60s-'70s protesters. Much +++ and some not so much. In '70 I was with a group of un-elite community college students at the demonstration against the bombing of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. A well-known SDS leader (IMHO typical as being from an elite upper middle class educated family) yelled at us to "charge that police line." I yelled back in my best stage voice "we'll be right behind you."
One of the greatest sins of academia was the erasure of union and labor studies, and the eradication of our history.
Thank you so much for your service.
I went back to school (U. of WA, botany/forestry) in the late '90s mostly I wanted to but in part that I'd been blacklisted. Took some courses in Labor Studies (U. of WA is one of several w/ Labor institutes) including from a nationally known prof. She was nasty as hell to me--probably because my knowledge of the subject was not theoretical.
I'd also committed the unpardonable sin of physically reacting to her announcement that she based the subject in rational choice theory. I am smart enough never, ever to contradict a professor (they have grade books) but it was too late to recant my heresy. To me, idiotic on the face of it--what would solidarity mean if the only motivation is personal gain? I now know econ theory well enough to be able to argue the idea is just one more unsubstantiated assumption among the many in consensus econ dogma.
Not all profs are like this. I learned the best mentors, whether full tenured professors or chief engineers on ships, are the ones who when you ask a question, will say "hmm...I don't know." They're secure enough to be okay not immediately knowing everything. The worst are those who feel embarrassed; you're then on their enemies list forever.
Weird how thinned skinned some of us can be is it not??
I suspect it comes from the logical error we make when we imagine intelligence is a commodity.
However, sometimes we also mistake ideology for ideas....sewing the world up into one particular theory is more debilitating than most of us imagine.
As self-evidently better people, smarter, better educated, with better taste and virtue and the totebags to prove it, the PMC see themselves as a natural aristocracy.
At the same time, because they are so obviously better people, it is only right and just that the PMC are entitled to the lion's share of The Goodies.
"tote bags" ;- ) The economic right wing elite is more honest with their belief "the cream always rises to the top." Decades ago a MAD magazine rejoinder: "so does the scum."
Ask anyone with experience in service jobs about how the elites (including nice liberals) treat us. As if akin to something they've scraped off the bottom of their shoe.
Great interview!
You know who DOES love the culture wars, and truly can't stop talking about them? It's Republicans and other rightists who are constantly banging on about DEI, etc., not the left (phantom or otherwise).
I'm disheartened by those on the left who oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion, which should be cornerstone socialist principles. We don't have to embrace corporate 'DEI' but we do have to embrace the actual meaning of those three terrifying words.
Hard to believe we're still blaming the hippies for everything that's gone wrong since the 1960s.
Gosh John - I don't think you've been ganged up on yet for objecting to liberal class orthodoxies.
Defend Free Speech and oppose censorship? You'll be told you want to use racial epithets because you are racist, sexist, whatever.
Call out the Ukraine war in the early days as a proxy war? Get slandered as a Putin puppet. (This is sort of an all-use slur)
Did you doubt the Proximal Origin story in favor of the much more obvious lab leak? Obviously you love Trump.
No leftist is actually against diversity, inclusion, and equality. However, as a corporate movement DEI was cynical bullshit. DEI means a living wage for all workers but instead was just used as a way for liberals to feel good about themselves.
I've been ganged up on plenty of times by liberals - almost as many times as I've been ganged up on by conservatives. The only difference is that the conservatives use more inflammatory insults (faggot, moron, retard) than the liberals do.
You've got a point there :)
Refreshing interview. Also enjoyed the spontaneous F-bombs.
Catherine Liu was bursting . . . over the top, enthusiastic to have her say with Chris. When she dropped the F-bombs (I enjoyed it for dropping all pretense to status-quo Christian values) Chris didn't flinch (didn't expect him to). We need to hear more from her and those few out there on the same wavelength - ASAP.
My goodness. In western Canada, those things go right by us...but then, I was reading, not listening so must have found them appropriate to the context.
Feb. 13, 2025
I read this whole transcript and found it informative on the whole.
I agree with Super Bowl Steve Hunt that "This interview might be a little more coherent"
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu for this interview.
Running through my mind was an accompanying thought (that hit me a couple of days ago): At least the Trumpen horde attack might at least break the stasis of the DNC, the post-Clinton hold. But the cost to rest of the political institutions will be a high price to pay for this possibility, the damage that they will do, particularly whatever they manage to acheive of their Project 2025 goals.
Greatly appreciated was what Catherine Liu described at the conclusion (her crazy-sounding thought):
"I do have some hope that there is a kind of baseline American sense of anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism that will emerge when Trump's excesses become too obvious.
And I think that we have to speak to the anti-authoritarian, egalitarian leanings of the country that we live in, not pretend that we live in another country, not try to flee from this country, not try to reinvent this country from the ground up. But there is, I find, a craving among my students, among the people who read the book, who've been reaching out to me, a craving for a kind of left-driven community that takes the social issues seriously, that wants to channel this anger for social ends, not for the enrichment of others."
And also:
"The longer term issue for me is how can we return to bread and butter issues, to undoing private equity’s hold on real estate, on health, on education? And I don't see the Democrats having any path forward on this.....working class people have even less hope of actually finding a way of living with dignity that was cemented into this promise of post-war America, which had to do with social mobility and certain things like vacation time or an eight-hour day. Now we all have to like be hustle culture 16-hour days, seven days a week. And take it for granted.
Every day we should be talking about private equity, but if we're talking about DEI and we're talking about underrepresented minorities and we're talking about equity and not equality, we're not going to be talking about what private equity is actually doing to every single sector of the American economy.
....these DEI policies, they destroy solidarity.....They destroy any kind of class solidarity or class feeling. They are designed to manage difference rather than produce equality and justice.
we have gotten far, far away from the values of the working class, which should be about bread and butter material issues."
I'm not convinced that you aren't reducing the working class a bit when you argue the values of the working class 'should be about bread and butter material issues'.....
Nor do I think that diversity, equity or inclusion need to divide or destroy solidarity.......
What kind of solidarity would it be if diverse people weren't accepted in all their diversity? What kind of solidarity is afraid of equality? Or Inclusion???
That makes no sense to me at all. But as a working class girl who did well in University...I think I know what bothers certain sectors of the 'working class'.........its sexualities that don't fit in their ideas about what sex is and should be. It's accents of immigrants that are hard to understand. It's the difficulty many working people have with listening...especially to stories or ideas they've never heard before.
For real solidarity to happen........we need to all learn to be more open...sharing our stories builds solidarity......being afraid to share them......or existing inside solid cabals where personal truth has to be suppressed isn't solidarity. It's Oppression.
Still, solidarity groups can be oppressive without knowing they're oppressive. We all come out of an essentially Anglo-Christian puritanism that thinks a lot of reality should go unmentioned....and certainly unshared. Privacy is important...but I maintain that when we are much less Judgemental......much more Empathic, less cold, more warm, less inexpressive, more welcoming.............less fearful, more jolly..........
Diversity will be accepted as the norm it likely is. Equity will mean snobbery vanishes...and everyone is treated with respect. Inclusion will mean folks support the union...BECAUSE THE UNION SUPPORTS THEM.
I think it will be much easier than we imagine.......but as long as there's only jobs for the meritocracy few (white, male, college educated, well off)......there won't be solidarity and there won't be strong unions. Capitalism is the problem. Bigotry is the problem...
Not gender diversity......non binary sexualities, race differences or ableism. CAPITALIST WEALTH ACCUMULATION FOR THE FEW...fighting among the people as to what's most important for the rest of us.
We keep doing it..........but its stupid, and not half as much fun as real solidarity would be.
Hi Ingamarie,
If I am correctly reading the layout of substack, you are replying to my comment wherein I quoted a couple of points made in the interview. I will address it with my own view, not presuming to know how Chris Hedges and Catherine Liu might respond.
In my view:
I think that we all perceive things somewhat differently, based upon a number other things, our histories and conditioning, our basic temperament, our culture, (including family culture) and group and individual tendencies that fall under the problematic rubric "human nature".
Some of these things are more malleable than others. I think that some, unfortunately including the more toxic, appear to be a part of what we simply seem to be as a species. I would include within these bigotry of all forms, sexism, racism, religion, basically enmity triggered by any definable, perceptual and especially group distinction.
The power of us and them, or Us versus Them.
It is EVERYWHERE, if you look at history, look at the world, us and then can be identified in pretty much all of the conflicts that are evident. I think that people fall into viewing this way, particularly in self-identified groups, pretty much automatically and unconsciously.
It seems as human beings, all we need is an excuse, something to hang us and them fury on. And I think that collectively, globally, we are falling into divisions based on us and them which is manifested in nationalism, exclusion, group enmity of all forms.
As far as the subject of politics in this country, I don't disagree with the feeling that bigotry is a primary problem. But I also think that this runs very deep, and that some people (perhaps most) are simply never going to see it within themselves. And I feel that the emphasis placed on identity, on formally mandated institutional reform has had the opposite effect of that hoped for (I am not speaking here of equal rights, civil rights). I think that from a strictly effective point, it has increased the fervor of those who are by temperament or conditioning reactionary and archly conservative.
It has fed fuel to the fires of bigotry. And again, while I don't disagree with what you say, I think that it has from a standpoint of the playing out of the polarity of this time, what is needed to ameliorate this pattern of reaction is something that unifies the majority of people in the fundamental concerns posed by the domination of neoliberal capitalism. To put it in terms using expressions that I'm particularly fond of: it has expended "political capital" which might have been better applied to seeking commonality based on economic class considerations, a movement that has worked before (when not much else has). I think that point of Chris Hedges (and Catherine Liu here) is that this is the continuing, foolish error of the DNC, which still seems unwilling to look at it. In the hands of the DNC strategists, identity gestures that don't truly address the plight of what ought to be their base, that don't address the neoliberal concentration of wealth (and power).
I think that seeking common a goal, in a wide range of contexts, has been seen to bring out allowances of differences in people.
Identity is a key component in the phenomenon of us and them, I think that placing such a great emphasis on it has, in the context of where we are now, has hurt rather than helped the cause of progressives, it seems to only galvanize the fervor of the right, and have been a big component in their success. They have opposite aims in their vision of solidarity.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1738767
While this argument has merit......it also reproduces the mechanism that is widely used to keep the stupidity going......binary thinking.
If you can call reducing the world to two ideas, one of them wrong......thinking!
I don't see it as natural........I see it as created by the Competitive/Dominant world view of Western colonialism. Inside that bubble (admittedly, a large one) your appeal to human nature holds true. But if we knew more about the indigenous cultures our colonialism destroyed.....to a far greater extent than any of us actually know.....we'd likely find that Difference, Variety, and many forms of cooperative organization were more prevalent than todays 'civilized' folks could imagine.
And that's where I totally leave the so called values of western civilization....I've been reading about the natural world...the world of fungus, the ecological development and role played by insects.......the way trees actually function and how the soil holds more symbiants than monocultures.
DIFFERENCE IS THE NORM..complexity, interactivities...networks in which competition is the recessive activity. But we're separate from that natural world of living fecundity yes?? We're the chosen species...the only one with intelligence???
My conclusion is that we are the most self absorbed, the most given to unwarranted egotism, the most easily deluded and bullied into beliefs that are pure hokem. We actually believe it is in our nature to make war....that we are natural killers and there aint nothin we can do about it.
I've read Chris Hedges WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING...twice...and the evidence suggests that war destroys everyone...even the survivors don't come back whole. Chris says the militias were made up of the village failures....the guys who for whatever reason didn't get the nurturance/support they might have needed....the bullies and layabouts.
I believe we'd all prefer to live in peace. We'd even prefer a purpose...good work...and we die without the respect and support of our community.
So what the Power hungry do, is take away community...isolate and impoverish. THEN THE HUMAN NATURE WE'RE TOLD TO BELIEVE IN, KICKS IN...and they have us.
The don't intend to let go. So they fill the schools and universities with their people....preaching their preferred story of 'human nature'. The Kochtopus did it big time, for over 40 years, in your gulag democracy. Once we're in competition with everyone for scarce resources, once we believe we're killers by nature, once we're scared most of the time.............all the bigotries can come easily into play.
And luckily....you've got white christian nationalism to the rescue. Join that cabal and you're among the good guys. Never having read the gospels they can use Jesus as their guide...............to the good work they do reducing everything to Us versus Them.
I can't think of a better recipe for Armageddon...and if we want to believe that's human nature go for it. For me and mine, its unmitigated lies and BS. Ideology...idiotology: Nary an idea among it.
I described my views derived from my life, my experiences, what I see, and the best that I can make out in terms of attempting to understand us. I have seen a lot of violence, and this undoubtedly has shaped my views, and even the way that I perceive and experience my life.
I have also read about different cultures including indigenous, and the views of the natural world of Merlin Sheldrake, Suzanne Simard.
There is life, and humans are a form of life with it's own nature. From what I can see, we are both social and cooperative, and collectively murderous against outside groups. That is simply what I see. They are not mutually exclusive. I think that they in fact are the two sides of the same aspect of being a social animal.
I can't speak meaningfully about ways of seeing that I have not experienced. I do think that things are lost and gained with each culture, each gets some things right and some things wrong, each has its benefits and its ills.
I think that ultimately to try to define and specify human nature is problematic, as I stated, and subject to our own way of seeing, our experience and our conditioning. I don't think that we are going to reach an answer here. But thank you, it is an important question.
I think we essentially agree......its more that I grew up in a culture that had very little overt violence in it..........the violence was hidden perhaps....as the discrimination against woman was there, but unspoken for the most part.
I'm just stating the case for survival. Justifying our culture, based on our experience of it.........is likely the biggest barrier to actual change.
If suddenly, we all valued difference, saw in difference new solutions to old intractable problems.......we would instantly dissolve a lot of the prejudice our culture is clinging to now.
I want a different Tomorrow. Less consumption, more local resilience. Less competition, more cooperative exploration of the possibilities our reductive ways of thinking are rendering invisible.
I want change...life affirming change......ways of being that don't spew carbon, or hatred, or greed. I want a possible tomorrow.
And for reasons of extreme privilege.......I don't enjoy hating...or demonizing...I like most people, would give everyone a chance. I loved teaching...that too was a privilege. I'd have no problem paying trash collectors the same as teachers........both jobs being essential, and teaching having so much more intrinsic pleasure...........I could even see trash collectors getting more money than teachers.
Surely we do not find our life's work by monetary calculations??? Or in my future world.......we would not. We wouldn't look down our long noses at others.
What's the fun in that????
I want us to evolve. Become the species we could be. That's the main difference I suspect.
I agree with everything you say here, Ingamarie.
I hope that what we might become something that reflects more those better potentials that we have.
I am perhaps less optimistic.
The way it often comes to me, we are also capable of beauty such as these, an aspect of our being. This gives me as much hope as anything we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7bHov_9GR4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La22CjPFbIY
Here's an alternative to that other link to the book that I won't mention: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/
Just a trivial point, but one that did come to mind in watching the interview: Chris Hedges in the introduction comments "I love the book. I can't believe you're an academic. It was so well written."
Not to say that it wasn't well-written, and I do appreciate tremendously Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy, Inc.", but I am just grateful that I had a copy of the Oxford Academese-English Dictionary at hand as I read it. Still working up the courage to tackle his tomes on deTocqueville or Politics and Vision.
A daunting prospect. But then again, I was always hoping for a Classics Illustrated (comic book) version of Finnegan's Wake. It's probably just laziness.
And...another small point. When talking about the counterculture of the 60s-70s, perhaps the question should be asked WHICH counterculture (as was mentioned regarding the left in this interview, or WHICH America per Chomsky). There was a very wide range of thought and action that fell within that wide rubric, and to my memory, an emphasis on collective social values and alternatives than merely the indulgences of the self. Granted on the part of a number it was fashion, a function of the zeitgeist, but some of the movement at this time was substantive, and with practical possibilities, and the values deeply held by some.
Also invaluable: The Oxford Marxian-English multi-volume set. Helps especially in decrypting Marxian words and phrases when appearing in the typical multi-page Marxian sentences, which reference an earlier part of the sentence appearing four pages earlier.
The online version is cheaper (also free on the Left Bank Books website!), but some people still prefer the print, compact version, available cheaply at used booksellers. The compact version comes complete with magnifying glass like the compact OED.
https://www.leftbankbooks.com
In some strange fashion, identity seems intimately bound up in that whole French deconstructionist quagmire, Derrida, Foucault, "gaze", etc, the vague ideas in hazy form, which have so infected the "space" of present popular/media "discourse".
So glad though, to have found this application to Joyce. Clarification, after all this time!
The interrogation of those metonymic exemes and dislodging the phallogocentric organization of writing - that was the key!
Thank you to Alan Robert Roughley!
..............
Finnegans wake as a deconstructive text Roughley, Alan Robert
Abstract
This dissertation considers Finnegans Wake as a deconstructive writing that exemplifies many of the textual operations that the French critical theorist Jacques Derrida attempts to define through his use of such "undecidable" terms and "non-concepts" as "difference," "dissemination," "trace," and "grafting." It argues that the Wake operates much like the "bifurcated writing" and "grouped textual field" that Derrida identifies as the only possible site for a deconstructive engagement of the terms and concepts of the Western metaphysical tradition, the tradition that Derrida terms phallogocentrism. The Wake has been an important text in the critical formulations of many contemporary theorists, and, as Derrida has recently acknowledged, his own theories of dissemination and deconstruction have been considerably affected by the Wake during the twenty-five to thirty years that he has been learning to read it. In drawing on Derrida's theories to analyze the Wake, this dissertation utilizes Derrida's terms to "re-mark" in Joyce's text, the disseminative textual operations that Derrida has marked as operative in the texts of the history of philosophy and in "so-called literary" texts like Finnegan’s Wake. In a certain sense, it renders unto Joyce's text that which has always already belonged to it. Drawing on Derrida's investigation of speech and writing, the dissertation considers the Wake's identification of itself as a fusion of speech and writing that requires a "speechreading" on the part of its readers. It supports this consideration by employing Umberto Eco's semiotic methodology to trace the network of metonymic lexemes by which the Wake identifies itself as a writing for the ear as well as the eye. Next it analyzes the Wake's tenth chapter as a chapter that exploits the formula 1+2+3+4=10 and produces a writing that operates as an arithmetical textual machine which problematizes the traditional concepts of presence and being and which also works towards dislodging the phallogocentric organization of writing with such hierarchically organized binary terms as male/female and central/marginal. In order to illustrate how the Wake disseminatively disrupts the binary terms by which phallogocentrism dominates thought, speech, and writing, the dissertation also considers how Joyce's text functions in an Intertextual relationship with some of the writings of Blake and Shakespeare. It does this by analyzing how the Wake dismantles some of the philosophical paradigms operating in the Blake and Shakespeare texts and takes important signifiers from those texts in order to set them to work as signifiers of signifieds that are radically different from those in the texts of Blake and Shakespeare.
But this book is not new... it's 5 years old.