hey gang,
I hope you’re maintaining. Personally, I’m feeling kind of tired from life and work stuff, and of course life in the hellscape is kind of, I dunno, disregulating. It feels gross to complain about that given that I’m about as arm’s length from the worst of it all as it’s possible to be. Still, the feeling that the hellscape keeps intensifying its hellishness, well, it sucks.

This may be the emotional disregulation talking and/or my trying to cope but I find myself recurrently angry over what seem to me missed opportunities and failures of political responsibility. In particular I’m convinced - and I know I’m massively biased here, a knowledge that doesn’t make me any less convinced, it just makes me that little bit more uncomfortable so that’s cool (interiority is a curse sometimes, eh?) - that all the soft left electoral activity since from around toward the end of Occupy - around 2013 or so - up until the present has proven to be close to completely wasted. (Yes, yes, Mamdani’s very charming and seems genuinely principled in a refreshing way, and of course I like public libraries and so on, but a New Deal Democrat/milktoast municipal socialism - a buddy calls it ‘socialism in one sewer’ - is a great deal closer to starting an anarchist punk band - something I’m very much in favor of, but as a means for shared psychic survival rather than as anything that contributes to actual forward motion - than it is to a meaningful left political practice. “Oh but writing a self indulgent little blog is a meaningful left political practice?” comes the response. And of course not. There’s nowhere to stand at the moment.)

I find myself falling into an impulse to believe that if a good case could be made - evidence compiled, a dossier assembled - then some of the goodhearted socialist electoralists would change to a better practice, and some would but far fewer than that fantasy suggests. (This impulse is on the one hand, I think, a measure of faith in people which is good, but on the other hand it’s also a clumsy expression of that faith and one that sets that faith up to curdle in a way that feels lousy and leads nowhere good. I dunno where it comes from other than that I teach college for a living and my gut feeling is that getting gripped by this impulse is an occupational hazard of that job.) That political practice, and political action a great deal of the time I think, is far less something that arises from or depends on worked out analyses self-reflexively held. Instead it’s something more like a lived practice that conditions the analyses people do (or don't) and are (or aren't) willing to hear. It’s been a while so I may misremember, and maybe I never understood in the first place, always a possibility and especially in my case, but I believe recall Althusser having a point somewhere comparing ideology to religious belief: if your faith is wavering, go to church, kneel and pray, and then you will believe. That is, people live the practice with a corresponding headspace and the action and thoughts reinforce, rather than people clarifying thoughts then finding a practice.

That’s not to say there’s no point to writing or that ideas don’t matter, it’s to say, in part, that it’s good to get the role of writing and ideas right, and also in part to say that there are different sorts of ideas with different kinds of significance and degrees of implicitness or explicitness. And often explicit, systematic ideas are downstream from ensembles of lived practices and implicit, unsystematic jumbles of ideas. I suspect the better ways to relate the former to the latter - ie, for explicit critical thinking to influence anything - is in part to have the critical thought at least partially try to identify and articulate the significance of existing alternative and oppositional practices. (Implied there, and pretty important, is that there’s never really a full and complete monoculture of practice, though it often feels like it - the sense of isolation, my god...!)

To put it another way, an old friend - the same one who used to say ‘we get socialized into a habit of when in doubt, look up!’ - used to say that in labor movement settings some people know the union, some people need to hear about the union, some people need to see the union in action. That is, some people show up in a context formed by past experiences ready to act in relatively beneficial ways. Other people can be, but also need to be, talked into that action (often as much or more through stories of examples that demonstrate possible pathways of practice - actual stuff that can be done here and now). Others need to see the first one or two groups of people action together - they need to experience, as witnesses, meaningful collective action before they’ll participate in it.

So I guess my view is that the left can reverse out of the electoral cul de sac - and the longer that takes the more people will die, which I mean literally - but likely it will do so not because of good arguments but because practical alternatives - which are at first in important respects impractical and not genuine alternatives in the sense of being competitors yet - grow in such a way that they become possible to imagine robustly - I mean this in the sense of gut level ‘yes, that feels right, I believe it, we could do it’ rather than a narrow sense of imagination as thought exercises.

Alright well that’s that thought (such as it is) unfolded. “It's all written down and I still don't feel any better.” “It's not a lot but it's what I got.” Keep on trucking good people! See you ‘round.