I've been working on this piece for over a year and I'm super excited to finally have it published. I critique Chomsky and DSA's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their adoption of John Mearsheimer's offensive realist IR theory as the centerpiece of their argument.

https://twitter.com/moneyontheleft/status/1647748763321004032

This argument suffers from a poverty of theory and an acute ahistoricism. It views the world as a mechanistic body, driven by a competitive (capitalist) instinct. Mearsheimer purposely ignores social relations as "out of scope", divorcing his theories from the historical process.

Thinking more about how the DSA's inclusion in their statement on Putin's invasion of Ukraine of a call for the US to unilaterally withdraw from NATO demonstrates their unseriousness as a political organization and in their critique of capitalism and imperialism. 1/ First, their position is a capitulation to Putin's war demands - indeed, going further than Putin is demanding by calling for an immediate and unilateral withdrawal of US treaty obligations. This position puts them squarely in alignment with the Trumpists.
2/

Some thoughts on this article as I read it.
1) it states that autocrats "embodying the will of the people" against a corrupt elite is new. This is…wrong. This is not new, and is a tactic common among liberal, fascistic, and socialistic politicians.

https://twitter.com/mpeterf/status/1497943731349114880

I thought I had written some thread on this, but I can’t find them at the moment. Lots of people have written about this - including Trotsky himself. Another instructive book is Prophets of Deceit by Guterman and Lowenthal. They address this specifically in Chapter 4.

1) Economic theory is inherently tied to political preferences, regardless of whether you're an MMTer or a Monetarist. The political sphere and economic sphere are not two unconnected arenas; they are mutually reinforcing.

https://twitter.com/ChadMReese/status/1490689143067889673

2) Once more for people in the back - MMT does not say you can run deficits and never worry about inflation. What it says is that inflation is not caused by spending but by a lack of (or poorly managed) resources.

Don’t just take it from me:

Reading the replies to this thread and it’s striking that everybody is stuck on whether "MMT is working or not". First - MMT just describes how money works in a modern economy. It’s a description (and alternative explanation) of what is and what’s possible.

https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1490319250933919744

Second - everybody responding is stuck on the part about MMT saying there isn’t a fiscal limit to what can be spent and none of them recognize that MMT says spending that isn’t backed by the proper resources *will* cause inflation. This actually tracks perfectly with the last yr.

One thing that’s important about stories like this is that it sheds further light on the claim that people from outside the Minneapolis area were traveling to the Floyd protests pretending to be BLM supporters. At the time, a lot of people, left and right, dismissed it.

https://twitter.com/zaleskiluke/status/1475203252920762371

The right's reasons for dismissing it are pretty clear, so I’m not going to spend time on that. But the left's dismissal is more complicated.

Historically speaking, the term "outside agitators" was code for rootless "Commies and Jews" intent on destroying America.

The enclosure movement in England that produced capitalist social relations was in a sense a dual dispossession, alienating people from both their homes and their ability to produce the means of their subsistence, rendering them homeless and unemployed. 1/

https://twitter.com/WatTylerRising/status/1475128631785578497

However, the Tudor government made a deliberate decision to exempt a certain size of property from small producers from enclosure, allowing these property owners to increase their holdings through enclosing neighboring smallholder land. 2/

Took a break about a third of the way through the 1619 book to read some of @WilliamHogeland's Founding Finance to add context to some of the American-on-American disputes, discontent, and direct action around the Political and Social questions in the time period. I bought the book knowing it would focus on the differences between the republican institutions and the democratic institutions, especially as the Framers and their domestic adversaries saw them. Still, I was delighted to see it directly addressed on page 1:

Don’t think it’s Trumpism gussied up - it’s another example of liberals recognizing that there’s an emergency that needs to be responded to but that should not - and in fact definitionally cannot - change any of the present social relations.

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1463504112679591941

The basic liberal position here starts with the premise that people cannot live under a perpetual state of emergency, especially one that prevents socializing, etc. i agree with the premise. But the solution liberals present is a return to normalcy - a restoration of order.

On the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism and the #GND, or Why I Read Mostly #Medieval History For My Thesis Despite Being an Urban Planner.

A thread: First the why:

At its root, the Green New Deal is a blueprint for a transition from one mode of production to a new, yet to be defined mode of production. Fossil Capital is in its end stage and what comes next is up to us. Nothing is inevitable; everything is contestable.