You can resolve an unfair inequity 2 ways: help the worse-off group, or harm the better-off group. The Fairness value is satisfied either way

This was a huge general problem in Woke 1, and a reason why we must abandon “privilege” as a framework, instead focusing on “harm”

“Privilege” as a framework has TONS of flaws, but one of them is that it implicitly and unavoidably frames inequities as problems of better-off groups having something unearned, unfair, and unjust—privilege. Even if the “privilege” in question is something like “grace and empathy for their disability,” which is actually a good and necessary thing everyone should get, or if the “privilege” is “being served and protected by police, instead of occupied and assaulted.” Again, that’s just a good and correct state of affairs all should enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with it; the only problem is its *absence* among the oppressed and marginalized. The problem is not that some people get what they need, but that other people are *harmed*.

But “privilege” as an analytic lens *unavoidably* suggests a resolution to the problem—removing the privilege! This is really unhelpful when the privilege in question is *something good that all people deserve*. It absolutely fosters zero-sum, race-to-the-bottom thinking. It implicitly endorses the ways in which the marginalized are harmed! It validates the harm, by narratively framing the *absence* of that harm as an unearned reward for belonging to an oppressor class! Privilege, in other words, necessarily implies that *what harms the marginalized is the correct and fair state of existence for all people.* Privilege *valorizes* racism, ableism, misogyny, and so on. It does so by locating the moral problem—the violation of the fairness principle—in *the absence of these kinds of harm* enjoyed by “privileged” counterparts.

Privilege is a fucking psyop to make everyone worse off, to neuter and splinter liberatory coalitions. Privilege unavoidably implies that “when black people suffer, that’s good—we just need to make other people suffer equally.” Any “justice” framework that logically validates existing racist harm is totally unacceptable.

And this is only ONE of the many analytic and practical problems with privilege. It is one of the most toxic, anti-liberatory, anti-solidarity theories ever devised. It should be seen as revolting and anathema on the left.

https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/2026704042903187702

Now, there are some situations where harm to one group actually accrues a benefit to another group—actual zero-sum problems. Someone else’s pain is my gain. But Marxists have a more precise and useful analysis for this than “privilege”: exploitation.

I see we are once again doing “mental illness can obviously make you kill yourself or drown your own baby, things of that nature, but it definitely can’t make you say bad words, that’s your vile and corrupt soul” discourse again. I think technically Tourette’s is a neurological disorder not a mental illness but whatever the last time we did this it was about Kanye and bipolar disorder, the basic logic is the same

Tbf there’s a weird problem with how Biden & Obama went about good trans policy.

They tended to set policy quietly at the level of the administrative state, but then avoid messaging around it, and eschewed legislative means that require you to win a political/narrative battle.

This really contributed to the sense that trans policy prescriptions “came out of nowhere” and were “shoved down our throats” for lots of regular people.

In fact most strides for trans people in the last 20 years happened this way: court rulings on Title IX, private administrative bodies issuing rules, medical boards issuing guidance on care, ACA guidance on trans health coverage, etc. It came through an alphabet soup of acronym agencies and boards and bodies—NCAA, IOC, APA, AAP, AMA, etc—handing down rules that governed trans people’s rights to participate in public life and receive healthcare.

The policy was good! And it was based on evidence and motivated by an effective elite-outreach activist strategy that lobbied rule makers, judges, and administrators. This is not at all, morally or empirically, bad. It was however *politically* vulnerable, because it didn’t entail building a broad coaliton that was actually persuaded of arguments in favor of trans people’s rights and interests. It wasn’t durable, and it remained open to be overruled by a popular coalition organized against it. And that’s exactly what the Right realized and executed.

https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/2024106918218772817

It’s entirely understandable why trans advocacy took this approach: in a very real sense, it worked! We got a slew of good rules that protected our rights and made it possible for more people to transition who wanted to transition. But it was always vulnerable.

It’s crazy how it will literally be impossible to build a PC in about 12-18 months, and might never be possible again. whatever PC you have now is probably it. Unless you feel like spending 200-500% MSRP for RAM and GPUs. And even that option is likely to go away. At some point soon, your “upgrading” options will be a cloud terminal connecting to Sam Altman’s panopticon, or a $300,000 server.

A tremendous problem with liberal technocrats and leftist theorycels alike:

Both go: “Fuck!! We have got to Get Dumber, we have got to shovel Shit to the Pig People of The Heartland” but they never bother to eat any shit for themselves and learn which shit tastes good to a pig If you want to Dumb Things Down to connect with the pigs, you need to become a shit sommelier. You need to be able to tell shit terroirs apart at a resolution of 20km microclimates, from a single whiff. You need to eat lots and lots of shit!

The problem with Chibber's (and Brenner's) economic history might be summarized as it being a theory of "Capitalism in One Country."

The enclosure of peasants' land to convert to sheep pasture for commodity wool production, for example, was fueled by Italian and Spanish demand.

Italian and Spanish demand, in turn, was fueled by early colonial enterprises. The Italians' trade and marine networks were hugely determined by the advent of the Crusades--to the point where it's hard to imagine the Genoese or Venetians as we understand them in retrospect *without* the Crusades shaping them. Not only did they engage in merchant activities, but provided transport, mercenary, and supply services to the various Crusader armies.

The Crusades also gave the Genoese and Venetians durable access to Eastern Roman and Muslim markets and (more importantly) demand. The Eastern Roman empire was fabulously wealthy compared to the relatively cash-poor Western European states, and that monetized demand allowed Italian merchants to engage in an early M-C-M' capitalist accumulation cycle.

Not only this, but the massive expense and risks inherent in these maritime networks--particularly when providing and outfitting massive Crusading fleets during a major crusade--led to a banking renaissance in the 12th century. The Crusades required financial coordination on a colossal and international scale, driving innovations in insurance, banking, and bookkeeping, which (directly or indirectly) gave rise to modern financial technologies like double-entry bookkeeping, fractional-reserve banking, and specialized risk insurance.

The Crusades' financial and logistical challenges also enhanced processes of state-centralization in places like England, which would be important for the enclosure process and removal of the peasantry from the land that accelerated in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

But it wasn't just Levantine crusading: there was also the Reconquista in Iberia (with associated, formally-declared Crusades), crusading in the Baltics against pagans, and colonial enterprises in the Balearics as early as the 13th century.

The Northern Crusades in Prussia and the Baltics were crucial in driving North Sea maritime trade into the hands of German trading cities and the formation of the Hanseatic League, which ultimately drove commercialization as far as London and Amsterdam. Do you get the Dutch East India Company--the world's first joint-stock company--or the Amsterdam Stock Exchange without the Northern Crusades ~400 years earlier? Probably not!

Colonial enterprises in the Mediterranean led to the first cash-crop sugar plantations west of the Indus River--established by the Venetians as a direct result of lands acquired through Crusade. In the 12th century! Long before English or Dutch capitalism!

Commercial plantation agriculture spread throughout the Mediterranean islands as Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese merchants and nobles conquered Muslim island polities, before expanding into the Atlantic with the conquest of Madeira and the Canary Islands. All of which was carried out with the social, political, technological, and financial innovations first pioneered through the Levantine Crusades.

England and the Netherlands, in other words, did not develop capitalism sui generis, as a mechanistic consequence of the Black Death or whatever else. Indeed, Chibber's argument that the presence of colonial plunder in Spain and Portugal disproves the particularity of an English/Dutch capitalist origin is the same problem with his theory of high labor costs and low rents after the Black Death resulting in English capitalism--the labor shortage was continent-wide, and so were the rising wages for laborers. Why England, and not France, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany?

Of course, the real answer is that capitalism does not have an English or Dutch origin, but was a complex, international economic development that spanned centuries and the entirety of Western and Central Europe, plus parts of Eastern Europe, Anatolia, the Black Sea, and the Levant. It gestated in network-nodes like Lubeck and Venice, Amsterdam and Genoa, Tyre and Florence, as people gradually worked out the necessary financial, political, military, legal, and other technologies that could make such a system possible at national scales.

Finally, even with all of this, who knows if it would've stuck in places like England if not for the massive influx of international demand for commodity goods (like English wool) directly consequent to the massive expansion of colonialism via Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonial projects, plus the huge opportunity for profitable investment in colonial ventures! That second part is important; it's not just that colonialism brought back silver and spices, but that it provided investment opportunity.

Chibber is correct here; feudal economies had money--which is to say, they had demand, which money simply tokenizes. The bigger problem preventing the development of capitalism was the lack of profitable investment opportunities. This was an incredibly difficult, colossal barrier to the development of capital.

European colonial projects--properly dated to an origin in 1096, not 1492--were essential in overcoming this problem, by providing huge coordinated pools of demand for commodity goods (food, metals, weapons, horses, etc), transport, mercenaries, and logistical demand for banking and insurance. They deepened international economic relationships profoundly, and acquired new lands where the old order of the previous occupants could be obliterated and replaced with new commercial ventures; enclosure wasn't a problem for Venetian merchants setting up sugar plantations around Tyre, because the old relationships of the people to the land were invalidated (in their eyes) by violent expropriation and by the Otherness of the people so expropriated.

The Crusader states, the Balearics, Crete, the new Prussian and Baltic cities that joined the Hanseatic League, these were all commercial zones made possible by Crusade. The opening of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to colonialism--effectively, a new kind of Crusade, which relied on similar religious justifications and political technologies, as well as the material and financial technologies honed through Crusade--provided an explosion of investment opportunity as profitable venture after profitable venture brought back slaves, silver, and spices to Europe.

So, no, capitalism didn't develop consequent to colonialism in the manner of the strawman argument Chibber provides, where Mexican silver magically transformed the relations of production. But the relations of production were transformed by the practices and technologies and investments of colonialism.

https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/2000332474673410247

Another way of saying this is that Chibber is correct when he asserts that feudal people tried to avoid and constrain markets. Indeed, peasants everywhere have always distained markets for their risk, and preferred land for its security.

And without robust markets, you can't turn a profit, which means you don't have investment opportunity. So Chibber is also correct when he says that this meant, during feudalism, the rich landlords invested their money in warfare, which was the most reliable way to turn wealth and power into more wealth and more power. The rudimentary, feudal M-C-M' cycle, but where C is just...violence.

But where he fails is in explaining how feudal Europe emerged from this trap: how, exactly, did investment in commerce displace investment in violence as a profit-center? As it happens, the answer is: it didn't. The two were intimately commingled for the entirety of capitalism's prodromal stage beginning in the 11th and 12th century, all the way through the height of mercantilism and then laissez-faire, and even well into the 20th century.

But, crucially, in the earliest stages, investment opportunities were developed almost exclusively through colonial violence, where unwanted (and generally unequal, and unfree) commercial relationships could be imposed on a conquered, colonized populace. Again, you didn't need to worry about the politics of enclosure--or seigneurie, or whatever--in Mallorca or Madeira or Antioch or Rostock, because the proto-bourgeoisie was setting up shop anew, on its own terms, not competing with the political power of landlords and peasants. They had to go outside the European feudal system to find new places that could be brought to heel, and where they could hone both their technologies of violence and of finance.

It is instructive that the Venetians, Genoese, etc, did not become financial sophisticates and early nodes in a capitalist international network by investing at home, but by investing in violence abroad. Eventually investments came home, yes, but only after this emerging merchant class had built sufficient political, financial, and military power to impose a new order.

England and the Netherlands are certainly notable for bringing the logic of a capitalist investment cycle to domestic agriculture earlier than other European states, and they did become wealthier by it. But it was something they brought to domestic agriculture; it was not invented there. It had already been honed for centuries in Mediterranean and North Sea colonial networks.

Before the English brought capitalist logic to bear on the peasantry--and simultaneous to that process, and for long after it was completed--they were investing abroad in networks of conquest, which were totally necessary to empower the emerging bourgeoisie such that they could remake the relations of production.

The Right understands this as a humiliation ritual, as a form of Effigy Politics in which they deploy Charlie Kirk as a synecdoche for the politics of subjugation he practiced, and the barista as synecdoche for the groups they want to dominate—young, queer, nonwhite, female, etc. We live in a time where popular democracy is so atrophied, and civic institutions so gutted, that even the ascendant Far Right doesn’t know how to vent their spleen except through expressive consumption, through symbolic Judas Burnings of non-compliant workers

The basic idea here, uniting vaccine hostility, ending PEPFAR, skepticism of GLP-1 drugs, pasteurization, etc, is that the Right believes The Strong do not need these protections or cheats, and they reward the undisciplined/deviant/weak when they ought to suffer or die

https://twitter.com/shreyabasu003/status/1959292167144280325

They believe that medical science has constructed a whole order which increasingly protects people from what we do not need to be protected from; sure, maybe some fat disabled homosexual needs pasteurization because their body can’t handle Natural Raw Milk—but not me, I’m Strong

You’re misunderstanding my point; “police are the actual enemies of people in the real world, so we must abolish them.”

Ok. How? And, importantly, how in such a way that doesn’t prompt immediate backlash and retrenchment? This is where “imagination” actually matters! I’m sorry but this is totally inadequate analysis: “X is bad, and therefore must be opposed. That’s all you need to know.”

Wrong! You need to know how you plan to successfully oppose police, or whatever other thing you’re opposing.

AI certainly looks a lot like a bubble, but I’d caution leftists from being too smug about it.

We used to ridicule Amazon for being a perennial money-loser. And Netflix. And Uber. Now they’re all profitable and have remade whole industries, and American life. For the worse! We used to shit on self-driving cars as “always five years away.” Well, Waymo seems to have actually gotten there, pretty much. Folks are still clinging to some copium about how you can mess with them, but it’s pretty clear self driving tech is viable.

Centrists can’t grasp that it’s impossible to remedy this by campaigning with Liz Cheney, or even by adopting conservative policy positions

Kamala could say she would be tough on the border, but she was abysmal at saying *why*. She couldn’t speak conservative *values*

https://twitter.com/trouble_man90/status/1952119111825174536

She also couldn’t speak very well to *liberal* values, either! She comes from a grand Democratic tradition of being fucking awful at speaking the language of morality, of moral metaphor and archetype. Of scaffolding policy with a moral and metaphorical context

I’m kind of tired of people talking about “revolution, not [material improvement short of revolution]!” unless they’re actually out there successfully building institutions/organizations which might plausibly be able to mobilize the working class for revolution In my experience, 99% of the time the people who say stuff like this mean “refuse to participate in the existing struggles of the working class, at the level of workers’ current political consciousness” with no serious effort to do anything else besides publish zines

Honestly the easiest thing to do immediately and by executive authority, as a left-populist president, would be to punish/imprison *different* symbolic targets. Instead of immigrants, bankers. Instead of homeless people, slumlords. Health insurance CEOs. Etc.

https://twitter.com/armanddoma/status/1919791447387074658

But Dems generally refuse to punish elites even when there’s legitimate grounds to punish actual crimes, with full due process. They couldn’t even punish their political opponents who attempted a coup!

While this is articulated in MAGA-coded grievance language, there’s a related truth.

I’ve talked before about how liberal experts are often blind to their own values, because they approach society as a math problem to solve. Goodness is something to be Efficiently Optimized

https://twitter.com/jbraunstein914/status/1914391100959465889

It’s not truly sneaky, in the sense that this blindness is totally sincere. They really think everyone wants the same things—that there just is an objective definition of The Good, and that the job of the state is to maximize Goodness Production. It all seems obvious to them

This is the lib version of Trumpism and it is present in some of the Abundance types—specifically, we’re seeing a nationwide exhaustion with self-regulation and compassion, and a desire to just throw up your hands, and do what’s easy even if it leaves others behind

https://twitter.com/vitruviusgrind/status/1904591689576042895

I have a family friend who was a really volatile and narcissistic 20-year old, who worked on herself over the years, went to therapy, grew up, and became infinitely more conscientious and regulated in her 30s. She fell down the Trump pipeline this election, and has regressed

I will keep begging leftists to have some humility about praxis. We act like politics has been solved, Correct Praxis is already known, and we just have to implement it. But we keep losing. So how can we possibly have the right praxis? If the American left already had the answers for how to Do The Work correctly, then why did we fail when 2 million people in Gaza needed us to win? We failed so comprehensively it’s totally broken all my faith and trust in our received wisdom about strategy and tactics

I’ve got some quibbles here but Trace is mostly right. On the left we’ve largely abandoned persuasion in favor of discipline, and instruction.

We get strident and offended when it’s suggested we might have to *entice* and *encourage* people to agree with us

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1897914435014213772

I maintain my belief that one of the great virtues and unique strengths of socialism/socialists is that we’re *right* more than anyone else. We’re materialists, we’re critical, and that counts for a lot. But we’ve also gotten kind of high off that rightness.

It’s actually imperative liberals and leftists learn how this works: only a tiny minority of Americans actually care about literal deficits. No one really cares about “fiscal responsibility.” These are symbols; they signify “taking resources away from the Undeserving and Cheats.”

https://twitter.com/hutchinson/status/1894543149047189884

The GOP is the party of “fiscal responsibility” because “fiscal responsibility” means “taking money away from poor people, single mothers, the homeless, immigrants, and minorities.” They can take out infinite debt and give it to billionaires and be totally consistent

Sorry but he’s right. This metric doesn’t explain any of the political behavior leftists want to explain as being due to economic suffering.

Things got better; people voted for Trump. Culture war issues are luxury issues that Americans vote for in good times, not bad.

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1889552031360098359

All the data on economic discontent is most parsimoniously explained by partisanship. People unhappy with “the economy” mostly report positive personal financial situations—it’s literally just Republicans mad that the Wrong People are getting assistance.

Something I’ve come to realize about most of the American left, is that we believe that it’s liberals’ job to win and hold power, our job to shame them, and their moral duty to listen to us—a tiny powerless minority—and do our bidding. It’s a toddler’s theory of change Of course, it’s a theory largely sold to us by liberals, especially in academia (many who fancy themselves radicals). It’s a narrative of the eternal Outsider radical, who marches and sits-in and publishes exposés and whatever else.

Jesus Christ Jacobin is fucking embarrassing.

This attitude of “so what if I was lying? It’s a lie that slanders the Bad Guys” is a fucking blight on the Left right now.

It matters because we can’t solve fake problems, dumbass! @devintoshea This type of shit matters—if people think the problem is private equity owning existing housing stock, then they’ll push for legislation to ban that, which would be fine, but WOULDN’T BRING DOWN RENTS. Which then leaves people mad at us, the Left, for failing to deliver!