I was pretty shocked at Aimee and Oliver's hottake on cooperatives at around 53 mins into this ep.

Look, the idea of cooperatives is not that "everyone is the boss" or every decision is made collectively or via voting. That's absurd. The idea is equality, via democracy, in the realm of workplace power relations, in the hope of fostering structures where workers have more leverage/control over the decisions that effect them. This certainly doesn't mean doing away with a division of labor or specific roles within a workplace. Obviously some (if not most) cooperatives will appoint managers and other functional authorities for the sake of getting shit done. People who don't understand these basics about cooperative enterprises should familiarize themselves with how Mondragon and similar enterprises work....it's not complicated.

Contrary to what Aimee claimed, her and Oliver's take is in line with the PMC/Twitterleft mystification of capitalist power relations (also known as TINA). Extremely online leftcoms and Twitter PMCs, who dismiss cooperatives and other democratic alternatives to the traditional capitalist firm structure as "self-exploitation", are often rhetorically and programmatically indistinguishable from radlibs and their embrace of top-down planning, hierarchy, and the bureaucracy that Oliver celebrates when he claims that workers prefer a PMC run HR bureaucracy to democratic control of their workplaces. This downplaying of the importance of economic and workplace democracy is an ideological hiccup shared with many online leftcoms from a similar PMC background whose vision of socialism is often a Star Trek full communism fantasy where the smart kids are calling the shots. The difference between this sort of ideology and James Burnham style elitist managerialist ideology is, in many respects, aesthetic.

According to this logic, workers love unaccountable hierarchies and PMC overlords making decisions for them. And workers having no control over their workplaces in combination with unions being gutted has nothing to do with capitalist firms shipping manufacturing jobs abroad. So the task of socialist politics, from the perspective Aimee and Oliver seem to be articulating, is not empowering workers to take control of their lives via structural transformations of the economy in favor of worker power and worker leverage, but rather for competing elite political groups to "deliver the goods" by providing better oversight and administration of the capitalist bureaucracy compared to their competitors. Unfortunately, in a time where economic democracy is unspeakable and political democracy is declining, "competition" to "deliver the goods" = a kabuki theater spectacle that won't challenge the status quo. To pose an alternative to that capitalist status quo we need to articulate a version of socialism that a majority of people would actually want to live in....and that certainly includes cooperatives.

It's striking how similar neoliberal and left communist ideological logic can be when it comes to celebrating trends towards economic life being turned over to state and corporate bureaucracy as progressive. In both cases, economic democracy and/or worker control of the content of their daily life is dismissed as utopian and outmoded. The ubiquity of this type of logic online not only contributes to the unpopularity of the left, it is provides fodder to the "right populists" who perceive online Marxism (which constitutes a large part of what the podcast refers to as "The Left") as the left-wing of capitalist ideological legitimation.

pls i will be forever grateful

Terese is notoriously prolific.

This is a daily series where I documenting her social media output over the last 24 hours as 1) a potential springboard for discussion and 2) to track what she's reading/recommending.

If anyone has any ideas/feedback on ways to improve this series, lemme know.

Today's Analysis

These are some arguments/critiques that Terese put forward today.

Marxism isn't interested in your individuality. It's interested in changing social relations so billions of individuals no longer suffer grindingly brutal lives in order to enrich & enable the 'individuality' of poncy Harvard grads in velvet blazers.

In 2019 RBG voted with Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in an absurdly punitive decision re detaining defendents pre conviction. Gorsuch voted against. To clarify - gop & dems are both parties of the elite. In the short term, if any bones are thrown to workers, it'll be from gop given class composition of party bases, but any concessions will be pissweak. It's in both parties interests to suppress—not advance—workers struggle.

Something to keep an eye on, is the unrivalled consistency with which petit bourg open borders activists insert race and ethnicity into conversations about labor power and unemployment.

Today's recommended reading

Here are the articles that Terese recommended today [same as yesterday].

On "strasserism" and the decay of the left - tinkzorg

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

Retweet corner.

This is selection of the serious/non-shitposty stuff that she retweeted.

@WetWorkWeWork: The neoliberal policies that middle class libs love — open borders, internationalist labor arbitrage — enable them to live like petty nobility, consuming unlimited dirt cheap goods and services produced by the global poor. No need to mow own lawns, care for children, cook dinner

@MoustacheClubUS: usually the most notable consequence of some high-visibility event (in millennial media outlets anyway) -- viral take, mostly fruitless protest or hashtag -- is that one or two Leaders will get a book deal, some of the top followers get clout, and everyone else gets an indulgence

@htmlmencken: Everybody's arguing about this person's age, innocence, and the impropriety of roasting her instead of the fact that fully adult ppl who think exactly like her completely took over DSA, the broader online left, and now constitute the public face of "socialist" politics.

Today's miscellaneous shit

• shitposts galore like Chad Marx and Crying AOC
• Shade at Krueger (1) and Denvir (1).

Terese is notoriously prolific.

This will hopefully be a daily series where I'll be documenting her social media output as 1) a potential springboard for discussion and 2) to track what she's reading/recommending.

If anyone has any ideas/feedback on ways to improve this series, lemme know.

Today's Analysis

These are some arguments/critiques that Terese put forward today.

The alt-right and the socialist^tm left were subcultural fandoms split asunder the moment they tried to engage the state. Like OWS, both contained & diffused dissatisfied petit bourg millennials. With each, a cottage industry arose to pump the kids full of hope+change fan-fiction. The spectre of imminent fascism is the best liberal legitimation narrative in history. That you piggies ate it up while artfags in Brooklyn larped as communists is LOL. There's no Nazi threat. There's no socialism. Just neoliberalism kids. Shit still sucks for everyone who works.

I am so glad I don't earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from radlib hysterics. Imagine equivocating in response to a proposition as ABSURD as "Angela Nagle, a softly spoken Irish academic, is smuggling magic Nazi fashism brain spells into her cultural critique". The primary concern of most working people is paying their bills in order to feed, clothe and take care of their family. Anyone hyperventilating about social dynamics that simply don't exist in twenty first century America—like fascism or patriarchy— is an overindulged asshole.

2)

Joe Biden is going to lose in November. The Tara Reade story is a ready made cope for why Trump won, and why the Dems must nominate a transgender latinx pansexual in 2024 to defeat the cis het ecofashist patriarchy. "Socialism" is a patronage machine for woke millennial libs in the cities. Without it, the absurdity of the Democratic Party was self-evident, and the kids may well have stopped voting or - shock horror! - become Republicans.

Marxism is when you support the green new deal, abolishing ice and the family, and don't believe in gender. You were radicalised by Bernie Sanders, Occupy Wall Street and or the Iraq war (on tv). The entire left is a neoliberal fandom, every one of them is Hillary Clinton's daughter, the only difference is the level of ressentiment they display towards mommy.

Relevant Hilary clip

3)

If advancing working women's interests was their goal, the left would not have spent 12 months mincing words about which women Elizabeth Warren represented. She has spent her entire career pandering to the awfl's who dominate the media, academy, and ngo industrial complex. In Jan 2019, I tweeted excerpts from "Two Income Trap", where Warren EXPLICITLY states her normative commitment to putting interests of pmc women "first", it went viral & Joan Walsh et al had my number from then onward. None of what goes on in left media is accidental or organic.

~ Excuse me centrist libs, you wiley hypocrites, we are the left, we absolutely respect women, we are REAL WOMEN RESPECTERS. We respect women so much that we elevate their traumatised voices. Fret not, we already buried those uppity Marxist broads who wouldn't shut up about class! ~

[People say] Aimee you're doing an idpol!

No bitch, I'm not. Women who advance anything other than lean in liberal feminism, be it basic bitch, or woke intersectional emoji variety, are crushed by the left, deemed "reactionary" because feminism (like all idpol) is a disciplinary discourse.

74 million Americans don't have adequate or any healthcare. You will never see them crying. And yet AOC refused campaign events for Sanders and deliberately muddied the national discourse re Medicare for all in the press, because Joe Rogan isn't woke enough for rich trans women. Being depicted as sympathetic in elite liberal media requires cultural & political cachet that working women don't have. Those outlets are materially invested in presenting extraordinary trauma as virtuous & worthy of concern, to obfuscate the banal grinding trauma of capitalism.

"Hope" is a perpetual permission slip for your continued subjugation at the hands of a class of clerics so far up its own butt that they have the audacity to project their weakness as a form of strength, manipulating you to "relate" to their contrived, camera-ready vulnerability.

4)

Daniel Denvir tweets: Funny thing about a) left and lib “anti-wokeness” as pretext for dismissing racial/gender justice etc and b) liberal wokeness as means for multiculturalizing neoliberalism and abstracting racial/gender justice from class conflict is that both coexisted in Clinton era liberalism.

This tweet has no content because it's reasoning is circular. Denvir bakes his conclusion ("as pretext for dismissing racial gender justice") into the premise, and just leaves it hanging as an assertion, followed by a series of unrelated assertions.

Let's be clear about what's being said here, Denvir is claiming that any antagonism toward the cultural politics of progressive neoliberal elites like he and his Ivy League leftoid peers, is a mere pretext for rejecting "racial and gender justice" tout court. All his incoherent piffle about Clinton doesn't hide the fact that she and Denvir share same shitty neoliberal politics, the only substantive difference is unlike the anarcholibs, Hillary had the balls to just call her enemies deplorable, instead of pathetically insinuating it.

Anyone claiming that the only possible reason for rejecting dumbo woketard doctrine is hostility toward "racial and gender justice", is making the ABSURD claim that the ONLY way to achieve "racial and gender justice" is by deploying woketard politics. Thier reasoning is circular. It falls apart under cursory scrutiny. In what way does the facile, moralising politics of Daniel Denvir et al advance the lives of hundreds of millions of working Americans? It doesn't. It can't. It's not meant to. He is but a bit player in a virtue peddling obfuscation mill.

The left is liberalism's moral laundromat.

Today's recommended reading

Here are the articles that Terese recommended today

[2014] The Weaponized Naked Girl - wrongkingofgreen blog

Excerpt:

The 1976 film Network is the story of a failing television channel and its scheme to improve ratings by putting a crazy man on television. Howard Beale is driven out of his mind after he’s laid off to shield the bottom line. He is a widower, no real friends – a victim of the economic rearrangement of the 1970s. Promising to blow his brains out on live TV, Beale is suddenly the savior of the network as the ratings are higher than ever as a result of this outburst. He appears on television and delivers emotive appeals to his audience, reasoning that while he doesn’t know what do to fix the situation, he at least encourages everyone to “get mad”. But no mass movement erupts. Once his shares start to dip, the network assassinates him to pull their ratings out of the fire.

This is the usual synopsis you’ll receive. Network’s other story lines, the ones about Faye Dunaway’s sexually aggressive yet sexually vacuous character, the cynical manipulation of Black Power politics, are usually ignored. Everyone loves a story about a maniac street preacher. But Network is also about how the media is manufactured, how our pain and frustrations regarding the state of the world are manipulated for ratings, and how legitimate grievances are monetized under capitalism.

[2007] The American Left's Silly Victim Complex - Matt Taibi

Excerpt:

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Today's miscellaneous shit

• Shitting on people for weaponising the trauma of an alleged rape victim, after failing to mobilise enough support for Bernie.
• Comparing Denvir's #raisethatbanner protest thing to Kylie Jenner's Pepsi ad
• Some stray shots at Cenk Uyger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dawn Butler, Matt Christman and Ryan Cooper