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Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

Jun 27

Where do liberals get their military analysis of the war in Ukraine? I ask this because they always seem convinced the war is “going badly” for Russia. I think many of them honestly believe that. Where do they come by this analysis? /1

Based on the analysis I read and listen to, this is the picture I have:

First, Russia has annexed for Ukrainian regions. They seem to be holding them successfully, and have built massive fortifications and three lines deep defensive lines. /2

Ukrainian losses in the war are somewhere between 8 and 10 times the Russian losses. They have lost a huge number of trained soldiers and are now on impressing untrained raw recruits and rushing them into the fight. /3

Read 13 tweets

Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

Jun 5

“Crime” is the catch-all term people use to refer to any activity in the subaltern orders of society that raises anxiety that those people have broken free of their yokes. /1

When people start complaining about crime, they are usually expressing their fear of things well beyond literal violations of statutory law. It’s a response to anything they perceive as impudent disobedience rumbling the ranks of the servants. /2

And crude, overly broad conceptions of class are often not very enlightening for understanding this kind of backlash. Their many, tangled systems of historically-rooted hierarchy that weave across communities of every kind. /3

Read 7 tweets

Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

May 24

Progressive Congress-critters decided that helping Biden hype US-against-the-world conflict would be a cool tactic to get some (re)industrial policy spending thrown around in their American districts and states. /1

The only price would be a few hundred thousand dead in Ukraine, severely heightened risk of escalating a mass-murdering world conflict, and an increase in Sinophobia and anti-Asian bigotry. /2

It would also be necessary to throw all the usual communist and socialist bogey-men under the bus, especially from all those disturbingly non-white countries. /3

Read 6 tweets

Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

May 15

The first most important thing to understand about the Cold War is that it was a global class war fought to protect the interests and power of the propertied from those who were prepared to challenge those interests and that power. /1

The propertied included many different allies: very old money European aristocrats and established colonizer families, old money US bluebloods, 20th century war fortunes, newer money rising corporate ventures, Jim Crow southern upper and lesser bourgeoisie. /2

If a rising socialist leader in Latin America led a popular movement for land reform, redistribution, internal de-colonization, he was targeted for death, and his followers targeted for rape, terror, torture. /3

Read 8 tweets

Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

May 13

The recent deflation of the left movement in the US wasn’t the result of Sanders’s second defeat. It was the result of the white backlash that was triggered when we had people in the street all over the US to rise up against our fascist police regime’s war on black people. /1

The backlash included not just the usual suspects. It included a bunch of white progressives and self-identified leftists who joined in with the great white moan, empowering and boosting the reactionary “moderation” of Crime Bill Joe, a.k.a Jim Crow Joe. /2

Out it all came: the blubbering about the cancellation of racists, about “wokeness”, about CRT, about the 1619 project, the sudden concern for electoral demographics, the sudden discovery of a “crime problem”. /3

Read 5 tweets

Dan Kervick

@DanMKervick

May 12

Socialists in the US have a special kind of moral obligation that our comrades in other countries don’t typically have. We have to help them all liberate themselves from imperial capitalism, which requires that we adopt a stance of firm dissent toward our domestic establishment.

I worry a great deal about budding movements toward “patriotic” and “nationalistic” socialism in the US. That would be appropriate for other countries, but it’s a much more fraught, risky and difficult project in the US.

In principle, one could imagine a socialist patriotism oriented toward the radical democratic, anti-imperial, anti-capital and anti-settler colonial tradition in the US. But in practice, I don’t know if that tradition, always a minority counterculture, would prevail.

Read 5 tweets

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