What I take offense with is the annoying combination of denying superculture while incessantly engaging in culture war discourse and blaming everything on imagined "PMC liberal virtue hoarders" in the name of equally imagined "white working-class values". It's just Fox News with red varnish on top.

And the article on paperback publishing does a far better job at that, actually. A genuine historical materialist wouldn't turn a discussion about dwindling readership into a culture war about gender and biological facts, but would look at the economy underlying the book industry.

I'm thinking Jacobin could urgently use a "seriousness editor". Someone should be asking the question: "Is this just to get people riled up online, or is this really serious?"

Rage bait pieces' biggest offense imo is to draw attention away from interesting articles. Just now, I see on Jacobin's homepage pieces on Jan Kandiyali, tech worker organizing, and the economics of paperback publishing. All infinitely better than this, and yet this quote is clogging up my newsfeed.

After two weeks of conferencing about Marx back to enjoying a bourgeois novel. EM Forster can be summarized as: what if a writer had a 19th-century writing style but 20th-century sensibilities about social inequality?

I’m quite sure capitalist corporate law is also a bit like pacman. Allows companies to eat all the coins while avoiding the spectres of communism.

Important contribution to democratic theory, making the case that an active role for workers is crucial to the success of workplace democracy, but also that the latter can only go so far without real economic democracy, which requires capitalist control of society to be restricted effectively.

I think indeed Eva mainly approached the issue from a non-rationalist PoV. If people are not already committed to some form of enlightened self-interest, they struggle with accepting limits. So the argument works more on the level of a phenomenology of freedom, so to speak.

Paperback of Citizen Marx published today. Now available for the (slightly) more reasonable price of $29.95/£25.00 (+30% off with code PUP30) 🙂

Liberal politics is then mainly a debate between the right expanding free choice and the left imposing limits due to antisocial harms. Eva’s solution is to not promise this egoistic form of “anything goes” from the start. Freedom is not a matter of individuals but of communities.

Indeed, she argued that the limits create a tension within liberal freedom itself: you get promised an unrealistic notion of complete free choice first, but then limits are imposed. This triggers people to indignation whenever their total self-ownership is overruled by the wellbeing of others.

Freedom is then inherently relational as my capacity to live life to its fullest is deeply embedded in sustaining a just society and ecology for all. This is a *very* brief summary, but the main gist of the argument imo. 4/4

A better view of freedom is, however, temporal. It’s the capacity to experience time at its fullest. Here, others are not an obstacle to my freedom but a necessary precondition. My time is much better spent dhen I can rely on the care of others and can spend that time with others. 3/4

Social justice demands are then “obstructions” to prevent people from using their freedom to harm others. But that triggers fascist resentment because then the desire for freedom becomes a fight to lay claim to the right to harm others to do what you want. 2/4

The links to Deleuzianism aren’t all that present in the book or Eva’s talk tbh. But her main idea is that liberalism views freedom in a spatial way as “not being obstructed by obstacles”. You can do whatever you want with no one in your way to stop you. 1/4

I am still amazed how journalists never ask those academic “freedom of speech” bros about the suppression of Palestine support. Promoting racial eugenics is fine, but criticizing a genocide is “too controversial”.

Fitting metaphor. If he takes one more step into the "future", he jumps of a cliff.