benburgis.bsky.social
GTAA host, Jacobin columnist, adjunct philosophy prof, TMBS crew for life
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But this decree that one of the last major nominally neutral national papers in the United States will be 100% free (rather than just 99% free like it was before) of any dissent from "free market" orthodoxies just feels like a confession that he's terrified of having the debate.
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Like, having some publications be devoted to ideological perspectives is fine! Reason magazine already exists for the "Free Minds and Free Markets" crowd (just like
Jacobin is there for the pro-worker pov).
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For now, though, some general thoughts I posted elsewhere:
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Didn't advertise it because it was an internal event but I do have a transcript (of my initial talk, not the subsequent discussion) I can share at some point in the near future.
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The whole thing's just a mess.
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That's also the kind of argument that Reed, for example, has always made against race-focused rather than class-focused solutions to racially disparate patterns of economic inequality. And the whole point of Chibber's book The Class Matrix is almost the opposite of the alleged "abstraction."
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My article, for example, explicitly makes a purely *strategic* arguments for the political primacy of class.
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It just amazing how free both the McCarthy & Desan and the WCR are of quotations from any of these named "abstractionists" showing that they make the alleged mistake of "abstracting" political from structural primacy.
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The "abstractionists" listed (putting together the two essays) are Vivek Chibber, Adolph Reed, and several Jacobin writers including, not to put too fine a point on it, me. (This article of mine makes it into WCR's footnotes: jacobin.com/2020/12/cult... )
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(3) If we run with their main definition (such that abstractionism is the error of deducing the political primacy of class via an abstraction from whatever they mean by "structural primacy") then none of the "abstractionists" McCarthy & Desan (or, in his followup, WCR) list actually do that!
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(2) The 2-by-2 grid of possible combinations of positions about class is a mess, and putting it together with the rest of the paper they seem to have two very importantly non-identical definitions of "abstractionism" but:
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(1) What they mean by "structural primacy" is, at best, unclear.
They cite Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine & Elliot Sober's excellent book "Reconstructing Marxism" on this point but in a way that deeply misunderstands what WLS were saying about what does and doesn't count as "primacy."
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Wrt to this, later in the thread, I'm working on a paper (co-written w/my friend Michael Sechman) that we'll be presenting at a conference in a couple weeks responding to McCarthy & Desan (and a separate essay by William Clare Roberts) on "class abstractionism," but here are a few main points:
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You're fixated on the legal argument. That's fine. But my post wasn't about that. It was a precisely and literally accurate description of the thing the legal argument is a legal argument *for*.
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You're not getting my point.
I'm not talking about white nationalist intent. I didn't say anything about white nationalism *or intent*.
I'm very literally and precisely describing the thing being proposed.
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There are always multiple ways of framing everything. That's trivially true in 100% of cases.
My description is literally accurate and (I think we agree?) gets down to the nub of the moral obscenity of this in ways that the more prettified (and vaguer!) way you mentioned does not.
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(1) is true but...honestly I think pretty pedantic?
I'll accept "the lack of *the right kind of* blood connection" as a friendly amendment, but what I said would be universally understood as a shorthand for that.
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My question was in what way is this not literally accurate. Your (2) is not relevant as part of an answer to that question. Sure, there are other, less unpleasant ways of putting it, but the existence of those unpleasant ways doesn't show my way to be in any way, shape, or form inaccurate.
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Everything you've said has pertained to the legal argument for people who lack blood connection to citizens therefore being denied citizenship. But the argument for it is one thing, *the thing being argued for* another, and I'm doing nothing more or less than accurately describing the latter.
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A very literal description would be "these people, who current automatically get citizenship, should not get it because their parents aren't citizens."
In what sense is that not literally accurate?
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Again, this has nothing to do with motives or influences. I'm not talking about motives or influences. I'm literally describing the proposal.