Mailbag No. 3

You Ask, I answer

Dear Readers,

This is the third mail bag post, which I will do every month or so. If you’re a paid subscriber, just respond to this email or leave a comment on a post and I’ll try my best to answer your questions. If I don’t answer, it doesn’t mean I thought your question was bad, just that I didn’t feel I had a thoughtful response.

Gabriel asks:

My question: You are very productive. What is your work routine? Does it vary by season or year?

Gabriel Finkelstein

I generally wake up pretty early in the morning (around 6 or 7) make myself two strong cups of tea (P.G. Tips is my brand) and then get immediately to work on whatever it is I’m trying to do that day. By around noon I usually run out of steam and then I just permit myself to spend the rest of the day as I see fit. I take a walk, watch a movie, go to a museum, or read, whatever. Sometimes I get a second wind around 5 p.m. and can do a little more light work until dinner time. I used to worry that I couldn’t just work 9 to 5, but I realized that it’s pointless to push myself past when I’m feeling actually productive and creative. I find it’s a much better use of your time to rest, relax, and recharge than to stress and struggle.

I’ve talked about this before, but I also think what helps me in terms of productivity is just trying not to be precious. Not everything is gonna be a beautiful work of art. Not everything is gonna contain some groundbreaking insight. Sometimes you just have to do your best to be as interesting and entertaining as possible. I hope that my writing provides some illumination on whatever the day’s issues are, but I don’t feel like I need to provide the final word on a given subject, just another angle. Like Joseph Stalin as a general and Woody Allen as a filmmaker, I’m a big believer in the principle of quantity over quality. Or rather, that quantity can eventually give rise to quality: If you keep writing, you are just getting more and more practice, and eventually you will improve and maybe every now and then do something kind of good.

Hi John, 

I have a question for the next mailbag. This probably speaks more to my naivety or ignorance than anything else but here it goes: I really enjoy your political and cultural analysis, but I was curious what system of governance would you want to institute? Communism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, so many -isms out there, which one have you settled on to advocate or believe in? I guess part of this question is borne out of my readings of theory, which have been rooted in "cultural studies"(MFA dropout). These system analyses are often so high level, they lack a groundedness in actual political action. So much so that I feel like a faithless pilgrim with no shrine at the end of the journey. Maybe I am just reading the wrong books, or should start knocking on doors for DSA instead of just paying dues. I realize this is an incredibly broad question, so I understand if you are not able, or do not want to, answer this in a mailbag, just figured I would ask. 

On an even more personal note, I just want to say that your writing last spring (especially in the wake of Uvalde) was something I returned to again and again when everything else seemed so irretrievably broken, so thank you, really and truly, for your newsletters in general, and those ones sent out when things look darkest, specifically. 

Best, 
Zach 

Thank you so much Zach, that is very nice to read! Well, I’ve long thought that the only political system anyone can rationally advocate is an absolute dictatorship with themselves as dictator. In the realm of pure theory, why would you settle for anything less? I am joking, of course…

This is actually a bit of a complicated question for me, which I will try to answer autobiographically, if you’ll tolerate it. Simply put, I’ve always found myself on the left. I struggle with this a bit, because I too find “the left” to be endlessly frustrating and annoying, and it would be much easier for me to be apolitical or even a little bit conservative: It’s much more in keeping with both my interests and inclinations. Sometimes I wish I could ignore politics altogether and just focus on art and culture, but there’s kind of a call to conscience I’ve never really been fully able to shake that keeps returning me to the left. I have therefore had to calibrate a degree of hypocrisy that my superego now apparently finds acceptable for the most part.

For what it’s worth, I started out as a kid on the far left: I read the Communist Manifesto when I was in 5th or 6th grade, then through in 7th through 10th grade got very interested in anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism partly because of proximity to the punk scene, then back to interested in Marxism in college mostly through learning about the Frankfurt School and what was then called without any pejorative intent “Cultural Marxism.” By the end of college, when Obama was running for President, I was sort of just a left-liberal, which is where I basically remained until Trump’s rise woke me from my slumbers and I once again felt the pull back leftwards. It was sort of disorienting but also exciting (and annoying) to see that, where I had once felt like a bit of an oddball, now everyone was suddenly a socialist. I actually sort of resisted this: I felt like it was an empty fad, felt like these kids didn’t what they were talking about, etc. It took me a while to realize that all this was a good development, something I actually wished for in the dark days of Bush and the war in Iraq.

But I haven’t really answered your question, which is about what society or system I’d like to see. Basically, I’m just a Social Democrat. I embrace the term in all its ambiguity: “Social Democrat” usually today signifies a type of socialist that endorses or has at least made their peace with liberal democracy and even some form of managed capitalism, but it was also the name the original Marxist parties gave themselves. The Bolsheviks called themselves Social Democrats as did the Mensheviks, but as you can probably tell I am definitely more of a Menshevik. I greatly admire Léon Blum and what the Popular Front was able to do in France for a brief time. Like most American lefties, I cannot avoid affection and admiration for F.D.R and the New Deal. And I don’t think one can really improve on the combination of moral clarity and political effectiveness of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. The tradition I identify with builds on the real accomplishments of formal or “bourgeois” democracy, but considers them to be insufficient. For me, a real democracy must include sharing more equitably what we produce as a society.

I also still consider myself a bit of a Marxist, for two reasons, which on their surface, might sound contradictory. One, I believe that society is fundamentally organized around how we produce for ourselves and reproduce ourselves. I believe there is a contradiction inherent in the way we create wealth through cooperative and social means and the fact that only a select few individuals appropriate it. I believe that there is something fundamentally irrational in the present disposition of society, something that doesn’t really work and is constantly being jury-rigged, and that is why we see these periodic social and economic crises. I also share Marx’s qualified admiration for what capitalism has accomplished in terms of the discovery and development of our productive capacities.

The second side of my Marxism, such that it is, comes from an almost opposite observation: the gradual process of development alone does not change society, acts of initiative and will must be undertaken as well. I believe that the only way to remedy the situation, even in limited or reformist ways, is through politics. I believe in the political reality of class struggle. I don’t believe that eventually technology or enlightened bureaucrats will just administer these issues away for us.

I don’t really know what society looks like at the end of all this. I believe that in the very long run we will either find a way to socialism or else humanity will destroy itself. It may not be a communist utopia, there may still be private property and even markets—that will depend on technology: whether we can completely coordinate a complicated system of production without the feedback systems of markets has yet to be seen—but I do think more of the infrastructure of our society will be—will have to be—socialized and held in common.

In terms of one’s role in the struggle for a more just society, I think one has to follow one’s talents and inclinations. If you’re not actually good at organizing or being an activist, putting yourself in that role is detrimental to both yourself and the movement you want to help. Engels identified three forms of social democratic struggle: political, economic, and theoretical. Political is the work of party-building and campaigns, economic is labor organizing, and theoretical is fighting the “battle of ideas.” In his book on socialism, Axel Honneth writes, “The natural enemy of socialism - today just as in Marx’s day - is the predominant school of economic theory, which has sought for over 200 years to justify the capitalist market as the only efficient means for coordinating economic action...” I believe a big part of the work ahead of us is defeating the intellectual hegemony of that ideology.

Hope that is somewhat helpful!