Thread by @chitrans_plant

I finally read @OlufemiOTaiwo's article on deference epistemology after listening to @thedigradio episode about it a couple weeks ago, and god damn I want to send this to everyone and make them read it. thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo

On the 'chattering class': "Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture."

On our political task: " it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have."

On using the lived experience of oppression: "Contra the old expression, pain – whether borne of oppression or not – is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school."

And, unsurprisingly, the piece pairs extremely well with @SamAdlerBell's banger from fall 2020 that I'm also just getting around to: "Why I Am A Socialist." The pieces are dialectically intertwined, even. hedgehogreview.com/issues/america…

"We are taught to experience our traumas, like our material conditions, as a personal burden: our own responsibility. We are subjected to our lives, encouraged to learn strategies for enduring them—alone. Organizing offers an alternative path: taking the risk of (cont.)

interdependence for the promise of self-sovereignty. Every moment that someone makes that bet—signs a union card, locks arms with a fellow marcher, joins in civil disobedience—is heartbreakingly beautiful to me. Romantic, even."

In the section 'Organizing or Manipulating': "To reconcile who I was before—ambivalent, fragile, self-loathing, confused—with who I had become was antithetical to the whole enterprise. I am a socialist because I am a socialist. Because it was intolerable to be nothing at all."

Important connection here re: weaponization of trauma - how it's used to compel deference to 'lived experience' in @OlufemiOTaiwo's piece, and how it's used to "compel allegiance...out of desperate need for a community" as @SamAdlerBell says.

"And in acting together, there is inevitably the risk of falling in love." 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Speaking of great articles, I also finally am getting around to reading some articles on socialist strategy that I've had open for far too long. Last night I read this @jacobinmag interview with Leo Panitch that I can't stop thinking about jacobinmag.com/2020/01/social…

On a governing program: "I don’t think the leaders of the socialist movement were naïve at that stage... about how much state apparatuses would have to be transformed. But they certainly hadn’t worked out how to transform these institutions."

On Sweden and limits of social democracy: " [social democrats] were less realistic than the socialists who understood much better that the dynamic of capitalist concentration and centralization was not that it was going to spill over into socialism inevitably. (cont)

Rather, it would lead to the kinds of contradictions that would undermine the postwar settlement, and eventually the unity and power of the working class."