By C.D. Varn

Revolutionary socialist parties—whether class-based or otherwise aligned—often struggle to function within Anglo-American parliamentary systems when they simultaneously attempt “dual power” strategies. To understand why, we must examine the history of the term, its relationship to working-class parties, and the specific hurdles it faces in a modern context.

What is Dual Power?

Dual power is a strategy frequently cited but often misunderstood. While shared by socialists and anarchists alike, it is also utilized by religious movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. Murray Bookchin notes that the concept of using clubs and societies as power bases was first implied by the French mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon suggested that the mass democracy of popular clubs could prepare a social agenda for the Constituent Assembly—a move Bookchin argues actually defused the clubs’ rebellious potential by tethering them to the state.

The concept was later formalized by Vladimir Lenin, who codified what had been nascent in earlier movements, from the Protestant associations of the English Civil War to the mutualist societies of the French Revolution. In the context of the Russian Revolution, Lenin’s definition was explicit:

“Alongside the Provisional Government... another government has arisen... the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies... It is a revolutionary dictatorship... a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power.”

Lenin saw the “Soviet” (or council) as a parastate institution designed to divorce the community from dependence on a failing state. However, this model was specific to a state in crisis. In the stable liberal democracies of North America and Western Europe, this revolutionary model has rarely succeeded. Instead, modern iterations of dual power often fall into two traps: they become class-collaborative (relying on wealthy patrons) or they function as a “retreat” (such as autonomous zones or intentional communities) rather than a challenge to state power.

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Dual Power as a Tool for Expertise

The primary reason for a party to engage in dual power today is not just ideological—it is practical. In the Anglo-American tradition, parties are merely “parliamentary sorters.” They require little of their members beyond occasional donations and votes. This is a sharp departure from the early Social Democratic parties, which provided benevolent societies, schools, and sports leagues.

Today, socialist parties struggle with retention because they do not meet the material needs of their members. Consequently, membership is often limited to students and academics—those with the “intellectual” time to spare. Once these members start families or enter demanding careers, they phase out.

To retain a diverse, multi-generational working-class base, a party must provide tangible material support, such as:

• Childcare and social outlets to allow parents to remain active.

• Job skills and labor organization to provide value outside of election cycles.

• Mutual aid that replaces the atomized experience of neoliberalism with a concrete community.

Without these, the party remains a “micro-party”: a group of students led by an academic, producing newsletters for a theoretical “real movement” that never arrives. Dual power builds the expertise necessary to actually run a society, ensuring that if a revolutionary moment or a general strike occurs, the party possesses the logistical knowledge to sustain it.

Historical Limitations and Risks

History provides a cautionary tale for this model:

1. The Swedish Model: In the 1960s and 70s, Swedish Social Democrats successfully ran women’s centers and health clinics. However, once the party achieved dominant state power, these dual-power functions were absorbed into the state bureaucracy, becoming dependent on capitalist tax revenue and international trade.

2. The Religious/Insurgent Model: The Muslim Brotherhood filled the vacuum of the Egyptian state by providing social services, but they relied on wealthy donors—a resource the Left lacks.

3. The “Lumpen” Risk: In the absence of donors or state funding, groups like the FARC in Colombia turned to illicit trades (kidnapping and narcotics) to fund their social programs. This inevitably led to corruption, paranoia, and the alienation of the very working class they sought to protect.

Conclusion

Dual power is not a panacea, and it carries the risk of overwhelming a party’s resources. However, it is a necessary strategy for building institutional accountability and retaining expertise.

By moving beyond the “cadre-and-newsletter” model and toward concrete projects—as seen in contemporary groups like the Philly Socialists—the Left can begin to build the institutions of tomorrow today. We must test whether these regional successes can scale, moving dual power out of the history books and into a viable modern strategy for social transformation.

There are realities at hand, the bond market has broken the backs of most progressive mayors attempts to run a polis like a left Bonaparte. Yet, Mamdani’s win seems like a victory even to my cynical eyes and ears. While your enemies’ anger doesn’t make for good politics in and of itself, the right people hate Zohran Mamdani. Furthermore, unlike a lot of the progressives who had gotten Bernie Sanders or Bill DiBlasio’s blessing or the blessed (or dreaded if you are me) phone call from Barack Obama, Mamdani is a DSA member and open socialist. Sure, it is not MY socialism precisely, but at least, I am not wasting capital writing about someone who doesn’t even identify with my movement in order to push back against the “centrist wokes” or whatever left populists convince themselves are under their beds.

There are some reality checks here: even in a city with as strong an executive as NYC, you need legislative support and some backing in the councils. To get that Mamdani will have to play nice with DiBlasio largely YIMBY coalition, and NYC has a fordist core which many other cities don’t have, as well as a middle class left that has been declining relative to the ultra-rich there but still is largely privileged in social goods compared to the rest of the country. The Democratic Socialists of America have produced a mayor before, and Dickens’ tenure more or less washed on the shores of the police union and limits of mayor’s office. Furthermore, the temptation for the DSA will be to pretend that NY is America, which it most assuredly is no more than London is the UK or Paris is all of Europe.

Yet, I still think this victory is a sign of change with one major caveat: the last waves of left populism from the end of the new left and self-liquidation of new populist movement has mostly benefited the center of the Democratic party. But there is something strange here, despite Mamdani last few months barely being to the left of Bill DiBlasio, the Democratic center has not seen him as a loci of recuperation. In fact, the former(?) neo-conservatives at the Bulwark have been more open to Mamdani than the Clinton establishment or the bulk of the national Democrats. Furthermore, even very important left-wing mayors have been harder to recuperate for the national parties, although is often because their policy limits make them somewhat ineffective executives when faced with taxation limits and bond markets.

So I have a trust but verify attitude towards Mamdani despite my increasingly sour notes on left populism, which shows more and more signs of being a kind of establishment of itself, with millions in consulting for progressives and massive mistakes such as sticking with Biden and Harris for too long and endorsing people who just appeared working class like John Fetterman. As I said on X, I never expected socialism in one city, so I won’t be crushed if Mamdani is just a competent progressive who is more charismatic than DiBlasio. I don’t put all my hopes in one basket, so I also don’t have Bonapartist expectations from a mayor. Mamdani’s victory will be historic, but how history will cut should not be called too prematurely.

As I said to New Yorkers as if my opinion on a place where I cannot vote matters, you did this. This is your victory. More power to you. Now keep everyone honest and build power beyond individuals. Good luck, sincerely. I won’t call the game when it is just started, even if I am skeptical about this left populism within the Democrats. Yes, I think most left populist policies are insufficiently thought out, often from a series of bad binary debates on the left (Degrowth/growth, electoral/anti-electoral, YIMBY/rent control, etc). Yes, I think most socialist electoral work should be legislative and largely (but tactically) obstructionist unless such a party had a clear popular mandate or had rested power with massive popular support.

The future has to be built, and the odds are rarely in one’s favor, but the idea that failure will radicalize everyone further left seems just as much a pipedream. Furthermore, this is New York’s victory, and I live in Utah, and the nationalization of everything serves very few interests politically.

So here’s to Mamdani, and to better future for New York, if, of course, both the mayor and the voters can keep it.

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I am doing a live stream--the last one before I have surgery and the first one since I started moving. 9:30 ET/6:30 PT

But life also happens—the last year I have had two cancer scares, and if this one is just a scare, it is unknown, but it is going to involve surgery either way. So, for the first time since I started it in 2021, I am taking some time off at the Varn Vlog and definitely may be low-key here.

In addition, my wife, who was a project manager and professional research writer, was laid off after working on a massive project on the science around gender affirming care, and no, she didn’t lose her job for that reason. But as I am dealing with tumors, I will have to readjust my insurance to deal. Such is the American system.

I will be back here regularly, but my day job, my book and my health, then my podcast come first.

There has been a lot of discussion about “anti-intellectualism,” often ironically stated in absolute and incurious ways, which sees it as a moral failure or a political conspiracy. What is rarely dealt with is a side effect of complexity, and one of the things I think pushes people towards simpler expressions of what could be complex ideas.

This happens as concepts multiply, interpretations multiply, but tolerance for the complexity one is experiencing decreases. This is particularly bad in sectarian views of history, where people are given to assert counter-factuals or even psychologize the belief in historical facts without much evidence other than what is effectively hearsay. The complexity of the situation is reduced, and often to strawmen and counter-strawmen.

This leaves me with a hostility to segments of my audience who don’t just seem to have the Dunning-Krueger effect but cannot also engage in a way to do anything about it. Lately, I have been cutting up my 15-minute to 1-hour into small 1-to-2-minute clips. This is suboptimal and leads to understandable misreadings because clips lack context. But it also leads to a lot of younger and most male responders who literally respond by calling the points stupid without even understanding the basic claims. The fact that more of this happens on the clips indicates that a lot of the commenters have neither the executive function nor the curiosity to get the context.

One of the ironies of an over-complex material world is that people cannot parse the complexity in general. They don’t have the cognitive load capacity. This is not a sign of “idiocy”—it is a sign of the breakdown of the comprehensibility of the world as various subjects. One or two obscurantists or know-nothings, that is, on them. But a culture of it, one should expect to have materially substantive explanations, and over-complexity is about the best I have.

Cognitive load is not the same as general intelligence. If general intelligence is processing power, then cognitive load is like the computer’s RAM. The more complex the information, the more the need to simplify so one can hold things in one’s head.

So this leads me to a paradox with parts of my audience whose first reaction is to “correct” without counter-evidence, or just reactionaries just calling everyone who doesn’t confirm a relatively simplistic worldview, “stupid.” They are products of an overcomplex and thus decadent society, so one can explain them without psychologizing the “rabble” or just implying they are anti-intellectuals (as a flaw of character). They are incentivized to be anti-intellectual, and that is often backed up by the failure of educated elites to understand things outside of a narrow range of their specialization, despite often speaking to general phenomena.

The temptation to shame one’s audience for not understanding is always there, and it is usually the wrong thing to do. That said, it also makes trying to articulate what would be needed for people to build a better society a lot harder for people to imagine. It would take a lot more than “Medicare for all” and “universal free college education” or pretending that desk work isn’t skilled or that everyone can be a welder without dropping the value of the labor on the labor market to nothing. An overly complex society isn’t fixed by tweaks like those proposed now.

Who do we get out of it? I don’t know, but I will leave with another quote from Joseph Tainter: “Personally, I feel that when your narrative about the future includes the phrase ‘and then a miracle happens,’ you’re in trouble”

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But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

For all my studying on political philosophy, anthropology, and economics, it is important not to feel like a dilettante in your study's prime area: literature and language, in my case. The narrative always seems anti-systemic as it forgoes quanta for qualia more often than not. Structure is there in narrative—it is crucial—but the way we construct sensuous meaning around narrative often gives it the illusion of embodiment. What is abstracted away in the breaking down of structures and systems is given a symbolic embodiment that is both clarifying and deceptive at once.

Lately, I have been incorporating more of my favorite literary writers into my works to make some different points: William Vollman’s writings on violence as about as idiosyncratic and yet systematic as any critical theorist or philosopher. Samuel Delaney’s discussions on self-construction and narrative, the tensions that emerge within them are given a narrative form in Dhalgren.

This tendency to view narrative as a way to model minds in action is one of the ways we learn as primates. We model in narrative as if embodied. We incorporate models of the mind as if they were insights into characters in life. This is why both radical liberals and Matthew Arnold focus so much on the representation of moral universes—sure, the Rhetoric and Composition graduate student concentrating on linguistic justice thinks they are changing the social world. This is a misrecognition of the focus on narrative and misrecognizing all word choices as somehow modeling a mode of thinking. If we “change linguistic framing,” we change thought.

But narrative works in prose dialogically. I mean think in the sense of dialogics in linguistic anthropology from Mikhail Bakhtin, each utterance contains the contradictory ideas of all prior users socially, which also means the meanings of words are constantly expanding in their usages. The limits that narratives place on words are not that limit this dialogic chaos, but that they model a social reality in simulation. Hence why reading narratives often requires such sustained and expansive attention—one uses both an analytic and a social mind to understand them.

So the didactic limiting of ideas in trying to limit the social usages of a term, which is what a lot of language policing is actively trying to do, seems to confuse what words do with what narrative does for “modeling minds.” It is the modeling mind’s elements of narrative that, in short, make para-sociality possible.

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“Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

One of the reasons I have loved Samuel Delany is that he understands this almost paradoxical nature of narrative and social being. Our sociality is what makes narrative so effective as a teaching tool. Modeling is the primary form of pedagogy; modeling with feedback and reinforcement is (and in many cases must be) the basic structure of teaching.

This is why I think the linguistic turn in philosophy was both very important and doomed to failure—it assumed that language was the structure of being. Instead of inverting it, being structures’ comprehensibility and thus language. There are deeper neurological and semiotic structures at hand, but also problems created by language itself. Does an abstraction exist if it has no symbol? Or is the abstraction implied by any number of like qualities?

This matters for debates about categories, which many debates in leftism are without the debaters realizing it. Much that is labeled political, which to do with the forms of force and legitimacy of its use in helping people function in collective institutions, which can act as if they were themselves singular agents, actually either semantic (do we agree on the meaning of a symbol or category) or moral (what is the oughts an individual should have in regards to the is of others). These things are crucial to politics but not reducible to it.

So bracketing out the social, and its messy and contradictory impulses, for the forms of linguistics is both necessary—the forms do give us deeper insights—matter, but ultimately limiting, particularly in regards to language. Most fiction writers know this almost innately, many theorists avoid this almost innately because it implies that most of the language understandings have the order of operations. It’s not the words that construct the narrative that make the social world; it is that there is a social world, one can name things and give them meaning and limitations, and in doing so alter the social world and mental world in ways that one cannot entirely prescribe or control.

This can seem paradoxical in the same way meta-fiction like Delany’s can seem paradoxical: words and writing structures out thought, but the power is that it is social. It connects people, but as importantly, disconnects them. Words can subsume our thoughts too, and have pursued debates that change neither the world nor ourselves, but get us stuck in that our representations of the world or of the social ARE the world and are social.

Yet until we can articulate these things, do they exist? Do they exist for us? Do you see see how those are actually, subtly, different questions?

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I am not a Utahn by birth or by faith or by temperament, but it is where I have chosen to live since I came home from Egypt to take care of a partner with cancer. This Southern bird has the dessert suck the moisture from his expression and the sugar from his tea, and I have learned to love this otherwise wholesome and surreal place. Salt Lake City, in particular, has an interesting history as it is no longer the majority Latter-Day Saint. Despite its reputation, it is not a lily white city in demographics.

On May 3rd, I tabled representing my union… urm, I mean “association ” —I was an association representative for my school from 2019 until this year when I resigned. I got my red shirt1, put on some sunscreen, and went down to the park to the table for May Day week. This was an Organize Utah (OUT) event. OUT is a union promotion group that advocates for pre-majority unionism, social union functions, and community involvement of workers in their civic sphere. I encountered OUT when Utah House Bill 267 was in the state legislature, and I was also considering starting an Independent Labor Clubs chapter here in Utah, only to discover that an organization that did a similar thing already existed.

The event was lovely, but it brought a few things to the forefront for me. In the park, there was also an anarchist-inspired food not bombs event nearby. We collaborated with them somewhat in so much that they had tacos and we had hot dogs, and we were both very left-oriented events for May Day. The electrician union, the CWA nurses’ union, trying to organize the University of Utah hospital, and the Ski Patrolers union were all speaking. Around the various old picnic tables, flaking into the open air, the various political groups loomed like sparrows: the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Black Rose Anarchist Federation, and Democratic Socialists of Salt Lake had a few members flitting about in the atmosphere.

I rarely get recognized in Salt Lake City except by former high school students or people adjacent to the poetry scene, but the OUT members are familiar with me and locals here recognize me quickly. What is immediately apparent is the diversity of the people here eating hot dogs and listening to Joe Hill Labor Choir: straight-laced men and pink-haired men, nurses and dockloaders, teachers and high school dropouts, LDS and neo-pagans. It is immediately clear that most people in the left cultural commentariat imagine either the rural or the urban worker as some kind of imaginary of an imaginary collective—be it the 1950s hardhat men on scaffolds or plumbers with F150s, or a barista with blue hair and an half the course work for an MFA in ceramic arts.

So much writing about the “working” class is projection: not a projection of oneself, but one’s imago of what one thinks legitimate work is. I spent my afternoon chatting to a few left podcast listeners, helping set up a queer in the workforce table, chatting to some CWA organizers, and talking to a college drop-out who worked stagecrew before becoming a union staffer about Badiou. I talked to some electricians about annoying “college boys” and another who complained about anti-intellectualism.

A few anarchists from the Food Not Bombs event came by, and one young woman drilled us about our stance on boycotts.

”Do you support the genocide?”

”No, here’s some literature on workers’ relationship to mid-east if you want it,” one of the others tabling responded.

“Do you support the boycott?” she said.

“We aren’t buying Sabra hummus if that’s what you mean, but I am not sure what boycotting does about the Israel/Palestine?” said the erstwhile Badiou-fan.

”I think boycotting is one of the most effective….”

I smirked and kept my head down. I appreciated the drilling, but also found the turn of the events so incredibly individualistic in focus. The B.D.S. movement was as much about institutions as individuals, and as rank-and-file union members or those trying to stop them, we had minimal impact on institutional investment other than attempting to force books open.

I finished some chips and looked over to he other person at the table was speaking about platformism and union organizing.

”There is so much individualism in these kinds of anarchist circles, rendering everything about consumer choice,” he said, and almost sighed. He expected me to rib him about anarchism, but I didn’t.

“To you send her over to CWA or one of the other recruiting union booths?”

”She’s self-employed,” the other man at the table said.

To be fair, only two unions were recruiting at the event anyway. The others, like myself, were trying to extend their profile into the communities, sometimes with the backing of their union leadership and sometimes as individuals or members of OUT. We all shrugged, and we spoke more about change in the situation.

“Tout ce qui bouge, n’est pas rouge” became a topic of discussion between me and the autodidact Badiou scholar. Not all that moves is red. From trucker strikes to mobbed-up Teamsters stories from the seventies, to talking about wading across rivers with rifles over one’s head as an intimidation tactic to Pinkertons.

We listened to a skit on the life of Joe Hill and then another performance of traditional labor songs, mostly from before the New Deal, with a few from the 1960s thrown in. It occurred to me that all our labor songs were from several generations back. The choir did a solid job, but the disruption of the tradition became clear.

“Have you ever felt that Trotskyist in the SWP-US or that old Panther who sits in the DSA meeting and talks about 1968?” I ask.

”I am 40,” he said as he passed out directories of the SLC unions.

“I am 44, and Battle for Seattle was when I was 18. I don’t lionize it, but it’s definitely a key point of reference. I realized that I am just a decade or so younger than old Trots we used to complain about around Occupy.”

“You know, my history professor thought Joe Hill did it?” said a graduate student with us, referring to the double murder that Hill was convicted of with almost no evidence other than a bullet wound, which his wife said was part of a love triangle after Hill’s death.

“Of course he does,” I said. “Of course, he does.”

A little over a hundred people probably passed through the park that day, and I think we all hoped we were half in the future but also wondered if I was focusing primarily on heroic but distant past.

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When the premises of a critique of a person’s position are wrong, all subpositions derived from that premise, correct or not, are irrelevant. Still, this comment is reasoned enough that I can make some useful clarifications about my positions and my logic.

Let’s break this down: To what I think Kneal is responding to here. I have critiqued the analytic Marxists (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, Vivek Chibber, etc) and structural Marxists (Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey, etc.) for trying to write out the Hegelian methodology in Marx. This was not a claim about the world itself; this was a claim about presenting the methodology of Marx. My discussion of Marx’s methodology was never a statement about the truth of Hegelianism. Here lies another problem: “Hegelianism” is not a singular thing that can be asserted to lead to unitary logic like this—most Hegelians did not arrive at Marx’s conclusions about the worker despite anything implicit in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic (which as far as I can tell Marx never even alluded to) or unhappy consciousness.

”…then how is your promotion of Hegelianism vindicated?”

This is fallacious, but to be fair in the post the commenter is referring to, I didn’t state what I was vindicated about; the vindication was about my critique of Bernie Sanders and the likelihood of “insider/outsider” strategies to shift the Democratic Party in the US. There was nothing about teleology in this, nor was my critique that Bernie wasn’t “Marxist” enough or “Workerist enough” (although the article I was responding to DOES imply the latter, and I will get back to that). Indeed, when I did critique Bernie’s policies specifically, it was that he used policies promoted by left-wing and liberal advocates of using Modern Monetary Policy for a jobs plan, but rejected the logic of MMT, that his policies were too simple and could easily be recuperated, that he lacked leverage within the Democratic party even when he had key committee postings, that if he ever won the Presidency, he would have a much harder time than even Trump in changes its habits from the top as the Democratic party was heavily invested in official state and quasi-state institutions like long-standing NGOS and universities.

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That said, to be fair, you can’t know this from my note, even after reading the context of the article about Bernie Sanders’ rightward draft. What I specifically felt vindicated about was the two structural problems: Bernie Sanders wanted a workers’ movement that could help him get past the structural limits placed on workers in the neoliberal arrangements of capitalism, thus enabling a “workers’ movement” with real political power to be born anew. The problem with this is obvious: it requires a worker’s movement to already exist (if latently) to create the political conditions for a… worker’s movement as a result of Bernie’s candidacy. It is very close to a circular line of reasoning. The second structural critique, from 1930s-to-2010s, the Democratic party had the working poor in its coalition, at no time after, say, 1948 was the bulk of the Democratic party’s coalition in power made up of “working people.” Trying to make the Democratic party’s coalition that of working people because “working people like Bernie” has two problems: it makes points of popularity with points of leverage. The various interests and classes which supported the Democratic party historically have been varied and, from William Jennings Bryan’s liquidation of the People’s Party into the Democrats to the New Deal and then the Popular Front in the wake of World War 2, the Democratic party tried to incorporate more and more of the “broad masses” in its coalition. To make a super-complicated history short, the Democratic party relied on institutions of the post-war consensus well beyond a post-war consensus, and thus never built up para-institutions to thrive when it was out of governmental favor. For a figure like Bernie Sanders, this creates two limitations for leverage: 1) popularity is limited since the right-leaning elements of Democratic coalition can more easily leave the coalition and still have political influence, and 2) there was no outside apparatus with sufficient resources to protect his politicians from donors and the influence of cultural politics. This is where the circularity of the first critique became vicious: even if AFL-CIO-affiliated Unions truly represented the bulk of the working class, their leadership had been in the same bind as Bernie Sanders since the 1960s and their leaderships complicity with a capitalist state in the prior period is part of what made them unpopular in the 1970s.

You will note that none of this assumes a teleological emergence of workers’ movements from necessity. What is the necessity here? Is it crisis, immiseration, the self-organization of the workers in factories, etc? To use Marxist verbiage, we see counter-tendencies to every one of these mechanisms of emergence: Immiseration, there is evidence that the poorest workers have never been the ones to lead movements, and even Marxist strategists recognized this by the time of the Second International. Marx even hinted at the problems here with his focus on the “advanced” elements of the proletariat, although he didn’t often comment on what he meant by “advanced,” thus allowing it as a weasel word for Marxists in the future to consistently “move the political subject.” Crisis? Well, the business cycle has led to depression and recession cycles, but the political order of capitalism has been remarkably adaptable in changing its style of management. Self-organization of the workers in factories? The social skilling of factories has been, frankly, subsumed by automation, which requires worker specialization but pushes workers into auxiliary roles in the logistics, the service sector, skilled elements of production, and lower-level management.

Back to the comment: “If economic subjugation does not teleologically incite and model political participation without cultural organization, then it follows that political expenditure must rely upon leisure expenditure.” It actually doesn’t follow because this statement has an excluded middle. Furthermore, I understand the verbiage in this sentence, and it does have cognitive meaning, but its terms are vague. “Political” and “cultural” organizations are posited as being inherently separate. I would NEVER assume that. Even most early Marxists didn’t assume it, hence the focus in multiple Marxist movements on either class social and cultural hegemony or in developing proletarian cultural formations. In fact, in my study of dual power organizations, I pointed out that political formation required “cultural” subjects. The issue is that I also think the difference between culture and politics is largely an illusory one. But even if I didn’t think that, it would still be an excluded middle fallacy to assume that the division was either/or as stated in the comment.

‘… where workers are much freer to model political behaviors(yet also free not to, which means politics may not be constrained by the Marxian emphasis on “social necessity”).”

There are a bunch of problems with this statement. “Social necessity” in Marx tends to be limited in use as a measure of the average amount of labor time required to produce a commodity under current conditions of production, and this time determines the commodity's exchange value. It is not a limit of the general society outside of commodity production. “Material conditions” tends to be the vague word Marx uses to refer to both social and physical limits on social development. Now, there are other uses of necessity in Marx, particularly early Marx, such as the famous line from the German Ideology,

The Necessity of the Communist Revolution

Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions:

(1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class.

(2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the State; and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class, which till then has been in power. [4]

(3) In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present society; and

(4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

In a 1975 article on the issue of “necessity” in Marx and Marcuse, Donald Lee wrote about the last claim on “neccessity”:

It seems immediately obvious that there are three possible interpretations of that term "necessary": ( 1) that a revolution is historically determined, i.e., inevitable, or (2) that a revolution is hypothetically imperative, i.e., if one wants to achieve the establishment of a new society, he must follow a particular procedure (but then again, of course, he may not), or (3) that a revolution is categorically imperative, i.e., one ought to pursue the revolution because it is morally obligatory to establish a new society and revolution is morally the best or only way to achieve that end. Some combination of these meanings is probably intended in the particular claim above, but in numerous other instances in both the early and the later works of Marx and Engels, mannd.

What is difficult to find is a clear-cut case of usage in the third-the moral-sense. The issue here is important because, not only have Western critics of Marxism such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper generally attacked Marx's historical theory with regard to his predictive claims of the historical inevitability of communism, but they were not at fault in doing so, since the influential followers and expounders of Marx in the last century, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Stalin, have for reasons of praxis, emphasized the inevitability of the victory of socialism.

It is only in the last three decades that a few Marx scholars, lead by Marcuse, have rediscovered the humanistic aspects of the early Marx and attempted to reinterpret the whole corpus of Marx in the light of those early works seen as foundational to the whole. In doing so, they have aroused the wrath of the mainstream of "orthodox" marxism, whose reply is that the young Marx represents the immature Marx, and only the later, largely economic, and more "scientific" works representthe genuine Marx.

It is true that Marx in his later works ceased using the moralistic, prescriptive terminology of his early works and turned to more "scientific" sounding descriptive terminology; thus he arrives at "laws" of "inevitable" historical development. The term "necessity" in the later works is used in the sense of historical inevitability1

There is an entire disputed literature of disputed hermeneutics and historiographies on the meaning of “necessary” in Marx. Many different schools of thought, including elements of the structural and analytic Marxists, emerged largely in a university context in Europe to address these ambiguities. That said, when going back to the debates between different Marxist groups in the 1920s and 1930s, the debate about inevitability or common ruin was a key focus. Everyone from Lenin to Hal Draper wrote about it.

What isn’t clear is how the teleology would work “materialistically.” As Hegel’s teleology developed from metaphysical and theological notions that were notedly absent in Marx. Donald Lee proposes a solution or, at least, an aphoria:

Even in the early works, we have only hints at what the future of man might be like, for communism is ‘. . . the necessary actual phase of man's emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future but not as such the goal of human development-the form of human society.’ If communism is to be only a transitional phase to man's future, what is that future to be? Is there a goal of human development? The answer of the early Marx is that we cannot know, for we are chained by"necessity"; only those who have been freed from those chains and whose senses have been reformed will be able to decide. Communism is to be the resolution between "necessity" and "freedom." Man, free, unalienated from himself, from Nature, and from his fellow men, is the creature who creates himself in his free productive activity.

It is, Marx says, "necessary to humanize man's senses and also create a human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of humanity and nature." If we do not yet have that "human sense" then how can we know what it is we must create, and how can we know how we would act in our freedom once we had it? The answer can only be Platonic, that in some sense we must already know what we do not know, or we could not know what is lacking in ourselves which must be developed. There must be, in Aristotelian and Hegelian terms, a "telos" toward which human nature tends in its efforts to overcome its inadequacies. When Marx posits that an "animal produces what is necessary" while man produces as a man only when he produces freely, he is speaking in teleological and moral terms, for men in capitalist society generally do not produce freely, but are practically reduced to animals.

Marx's ideas are here very Kantian: men ought to produce freely; men ought to treat each other as ends-in-themselves. Now let us return to the three senses of "necessity" we originally posited: (i) historical inevitability, (2) the hypothetical imperative, and (3) the categorical (moral) imperative. Marx and Engels do not distinguish these three senses of the term, but it is important for us to distinguish these usages in order to understand Marcusens interpretation of Marx and Engels.

It was pointed out to me that when Marx and Engels use the term "necessity" in the second sense, that of the hypothetical imperative, it is usually to speak historically from the viewpoint of some third party, such as the bourgeoisie or Utopian socialists; such hypothetical imperatives were not in accord with the inevitability of historical necessity.2

So there is no “socially necessary” teleology of work itself that would make that would be the singular reading the commenter is referencing, as if it was an obvious interpretation.

Back to the original comment in question:

“Therefore it follows that those with greater leisure allotments invest and waste more toward politics than workers who our society places a prohibitive burden upon, and your dream of politics without an excess toward “hipsterism” may be unrealistic in the contemporary context”

Now, this may be a fair response to the article, I said “vindicated” my view of a decade. That said, I NEVER use terms like “hipsterism.” But again, now that I have clarified what I was critiquing Bernie Sanders on, let’s get to what I agreed with Davide and Stephanie Tinsley about: “The Bernie movement has moved to the right so much in the past 10 years it’s really incredible.” I thought this was structurally the most likely outcome for the reasons that are “game theoretic,” not “Hegelian” or even “Marxist.” I agree that logical drift would be towards political novelty that people with the ability to invest in politics would do.

But even if I were speaking from a Marxist point of view solely, it doesn’t mean I endorsed all of Tinsley's (and maybe Davide’s) implications. I agreed with the question raised by Tinsley: “My question is: do we really need bourgeois and aristocratic twenty-somethings dressed in designer boho-chic to lead the charge against the very system from which they largely benefit?” That is a valid question, and the answer to that is not clear. Not just because Bernie’s appeals to them violate some crucial element of “Marxism,” but because frankly, these appeals by Bernie haven’t worked even when draped in populist rhetoric. There seems to be a hard limit to what Sanders can do, even though he has been consistently fairly popular.

However, there is a lot that I disagree with Tinsley about:

Coachella is not a cultural reference most people in any American hood or rural town would understand, nonetheless care about. None of these artists (no, not even Neil Young or Joan Baez) appeal to today’s working class voter, even if their lyrics are supposedly speaking to them.

I knew plenty of “working class” people—wage earners who made less than 10 dollars an hour in 2009, when I followed such things—who liked this music, but they didn’t confuse it with politics. I spent a few days talking to Union workers about philosophy, specifically electricians and concern riggers. Only some of whom were college-educated. I find this just as cultural as critiques of hipsterism implied in Tinsley. Now, I don’t know Tinsley’s class background, but her website says she is “…a writer and filmmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2020 with a BA in Film & TV and a minor in Art History.”3 In short, this is a veiled critique of the class Tinsley currently operates in. This is fine, but it is culturalist, and it seems to speak to a nebulous class unity of cultural identification of “working class” that I don’t have any data to support. Tinsley’s doesn’t offer any evidence for this assertion either.

So I am not trying to purge the “hipsterism” from the movement. I am not even sure I understand what that means. As Bernie Sanders tries to get leverage over his party, he will most likely do so in the ways Tinsley condemns. He has to; it’s the party he is in. You can say he lost his plot, but in some ways, the plot is a structural limitation of the Democratic party as much as a personal failing of Sanders. Her answer is not structurally likely within the Democratic party:

The left needs a new generation of political figures who are unabashedly common. Activists who can empathize with the poor and working class—not sympathize. Compelling speakers who don’t talk down but who speak across and whose words uplift the communities at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. I don’t know where these bold, authentic and captivating leaders are right now, but I know for damn sure they are not, have not, and will never be at Coachella. Look elsewhere.

This would be nice, but can these people at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy fund campaigns? Not alone, so even if someone was doing exactly what Tinsley wanted, those same candidates would have to do the kinds of things Bernie Sanders is getting critiqued for. Still, despite the artistic-rentiers on artistic-rentier symbolic violence in her article, her fundamental question remains. Why is Sanders doing this now? Is his goal to make a workers’ movement or to gain leverage in the Democratic Party? Well, the answer seems to be both, but it has been successful at neither. Sanders can’t have skin in the workers’ game anymore and skin in the Democratic party’s game if the goal is an individualistic attempt to change the party by running for the executive or by passing the torch to someone young and popular to do the same. Particularly as AOC has spurned a lot of para-institutions that could have leveraged, like the Democratic Socialists of America. Is DSA ideal for this? No. But it was an actual institution that wasn’t an NGO with millionaires on the board or a university institution whose very existence was due to the Cold War largess that is actively being rolled back now.

Does this vindicate “my defense of ‘Hegelianism’?” No, but Hegelianism has almost nothing to do with why I felt that way. Can we purge hipsterism from the movement? No, no more than we can purge cultural workerism from people who are in the strata of society they are constantly critiquing. There are reasons these kinds of cul-de-sacs exist, and just complaining about them doesn’t change that.

The originality of giving everything my surname as an alliterative title aside, I called “Varn Vlog” that because originally, I was in a hotel room during the Pandemic in rural central Utah, and I posted a rant from my tablet after reading a few books on the trip. I kept the title when the host of the now-defunct podcast, Giving The Mic to the Wrong Person, asked me to release audio of the rant to a Patreon. My original aesthetic was an anti-aesthetic: no lighting, no filters, a streaming service so I could do interviews, and a name I made for myself in the 2010s: blowhard podcaster on Marxism.

Now, I have read hundreds of books on the topic at this point. Both my ex-wife and my current one said I have basically given myself an ersatz doctorate in Marxism: going through as many historical books on the various internationals as I can, poring over Marx letters to contextualize the writings, etc. I did this, originally for me, and then as an educational project: I got tired of seeing historical figures with radical politics used as ventriloquist dummies. Since I had worked in left-wing publishing many times—first as an editor for obscure and removed from the internet The Green Triangle in 2007, then as a writer for some collective blog projects such as Symptomatic Redness, and (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity, for the defunct and infamous North Star from 2012 to 2013, and then for Zer0 Books from 2014-2021—I had come into the “left” as insider/outsider. I had done the work, had both the formal and autodidactic education, but came from a different background than my audience. I also developed my identity as a “proclaimer of things left-wing” abroad. The irony is that podcasts were always a part of that for me. When I first got involved in “Left-wing podcasts”--most of the far left podcasts were Pacifica radio shows, Jacobin magazine was just coming into being, and I mostly went into the shows in the domain of a perpetual philosophy graduate student.

Ironically, this distance from a paying audience and the literal soil of the countries I spoke of served me well. I developed a reputation as combative and zealous, but also fairly consistent. Yet, the demands of the left-wing media sphere sucked me in more and more in the second half of the 2010s. I started knowing the gossip of Green Pointe and Silver Lake, not because I lived there, but because my contacts circled around that world. When I came back to the US, my then-wife was recovering from cancer, and I was a teacher at the same charter school as her, and then I was running off to promote my poetry collection and to do conferences. I hid my marriage since I had seen families doxxed, I hid the fact that I was the primary caregiver in my home, and I tried to hide the tensions with all the co-hosts on the various shows I did. None of it worked.

Increasingly, it felt like a dual life—a journey I had ventured on primarily to develop my interest, which had become a character of its own. A mask that I felt compelled to keep up. My audience viewed me as combative, so I would get angrier and angrier with my audience. My audience viewed me as an “Orthodox Marxist”—a concept that I think is actually an oxymoron if not outright meaningless—so I started insisting on very strict interpretation and hermeneutics. I felt myself become meaner, and what is funny to me about that now, it wasn’t when I was connected to the shadiest characters on the “left.” Nor was I still getting canceled despite my proxy to people who I felt where taking more and more “edgelord” positions. Attempts to cancel me had happened earlier in the 2010s, and temporarily worked.

What I noticed was that despite doing entire shows on the dangers of parasocial connections, I was actually conforming to my audience and getting into what was expected of me. My shows, to me, felt increasingly like they had the standard voices of the post-Micheal Brooks’ socialist left, and the sectarian projections I mocked were increasingly part of the daily question set.

That’s the funny thing about audience capture and character masks: they work better when they are interpolated onto you. If you think you are being sincere, the more effective the capture is.

Just like the people who often tell you the most about “logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and motivated reasoning” often cannot see their own logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and motivated reasoning, the person who thinks they are above audience capture is generally the most captured.

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There are times when the category gets so inflated or so tied down to vague or affective notions that the only agreement of a word is its connotation. Its signified is a vibe. This is super common around contested phrases that are also abstract that you can use to invoke disgust (the signified emotion), but not any clear criteria beyond that. This is a kind of category inflation where the “family resemblances” (or sets of related criteria) break down. At this point, it is better to describe what you are getting at as opposed to abstract nouns.

Words mean something because we agree that they mean something, but when it becomes inflated to the point where there is no clear criterion to limit the category or when the category becomes totally affected (no content that is factual or logical is attached and merely emotion) or when the category is so contested, users of the word instantly go into semantic fights: then it is not clear that the word does or doesn’t “mean something.”

So far, so much linguistics and semantics. To people who think about language or philosophy, you may disagree with my frameworks, but you are familiar with this problem even if you won’t talk or write about it as technically (or in the same frameworks as I do here).

Which gets me to my point: Today, I am preparing to go on the Real Progressives to explain the historical differences between “Trotskyism” and “Stalinism.” This is more difficult than it seems: 1) neither group calls themselves those things—Trotskyists see themselves as “Leninists” (or Pabloists, Mandelites, Marcyites, Cliffites, Sparts, Schachtmanites, etc) and “Stalinists” see themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” (or Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Marxist-Internationalist-Maoists, Hoxhaists, Castorists, Guevaraists, Maoists-Third-Worldists, Eurocommunists, etc). When I spell out the belief differences, there are subsets of Leninism and Marxist-Leninism that barely overlap in beliefs with groups that call their ideology the same thing. Do I categorize them with other socialist and communist groups or only with each other? Do I follow official statements of ideology or do I follow what sectarian groups claimed about the statements?

It presents both a semantic and historical problem, and yet I am betting most people will pretend the differences are obvious. Yet neither ideology is all that predictive of any one set of beliefs today.

This makes much of the debate about which words we use to be funny. Words mean something when we agree on what gives them meaning. When that goes away and these categories break down, trying to do anything about it becomes a historical or philosophical treatise.

Sometimes it’s better to just describe what is going on, but even that rests on relative agreement about categories.

Still, I have said that Trump is symptomatic of developments in our culture and economy. I have characterized both political parties as actors who, as individuals, are comprised of rent-seekers. The “Democratic party” and “left liberals” worldwide as wonktopians. The Trump Era GOP is a coalition of “griftopians.” Not in the heavy-handed way of GOSPLAN in the USSR or even the five-year plans of Syngman Rhee—the ironically anti-communist government that submitted economic development plans ot the US state department based on a capitalist version of Soviet planning—but of Cass Sunstein and nudge. It assumes a status quo and that the status quo can be altered by minimal and micro-transactional regulation. The leans on the elements of neoliberal ideological frameworks maintained in the Democratic liberal view of politics: regulation and public-private partnerships. Now the wonktopians aren’t only the Democrats—all kinds of technocratic functionaries fill this role. Still, the management is a point of rent-seeking—what David Graeber called “The Utopia of Rules”—that creates more and more NECESSARY points of capture. I say necessary because the regulation and self-management of the system are required for it to work, but it comes at a higher and higher cost. This is a complexity cost.

Then there are griftopians, which is a new breed of GOP. Most of its members of new rich, the clowns of Princeton, the titans of dying industries, etc. Where the wonktopian does its rent-seeking with a league of “proletariatized” professionals—I mean this in the technical system, people who were once independent business people in services who now earn a wage—who may be hurt by tax margins but are educated and relatively secure from the largess of government contracts; the griftopians are media manipulators and peddlers of dreams. The issue, however, is that the griftopians speak about the needs of precarious individuals who are being left in lurch, whereas the wonktopians, who have a view of a generous welfare state and universal education, but who will let the sun belt rot and the midwest sink into the abandoned construction projects and the great lakes.

I obviously feel more cultural kinship to the Wonktopians by virtue of my education, but I see what they leave out. This brings me back to Dr. Lurie’s point: the social reproductive elements of society are impulses of already secure, and ironically, highly individualistic. The griftopians are outwardly individualistic, but ironically, the impulses of scarcity do lead to more robust social institutions. Then, however, comes the double-bind here: the security mindset and streamlining of systems that have been left on autopilot may be necessary. My take, however, is that a coalition of people trying to benefit from the “streamlining” undoes the process if it is only going back into private bail-outs, a system of low social investment, etc.

I have said that tariffs tend to be economically advisable for capitalist societies in the early phases of ramping up production. However, as the economic system develops, a closed systems that exhaust its own inputs faster and can’t leverage trade or relative development. I consider this not just a tendency in capitalism, but a tendency in systems that need a dynamic equilibrium.

Both liberals, who all of a sudden are stalwarts of the service industry and free trade, are banking on an economy of low input costs and services, and these new breed of “conservatives,” who want low dollar value for an export economy and a focus on manufacturing seem to be hiding parts of the narrative. For the latter, manufacturing is highly specialized and highly automated, and getting large amounts of upfront investments for low-profit marginal manual production is unlikely to happen without high government investment or at least backstops, which the Trump administration is unwilling to do for reasons seemingly related to interest costs. Given that the US is already the second largest manufacturer of goods, but with few completely internal supply chains, one isn’t really “reshoring” but expanding, often into technological production was hasn’t even been done in the US since that production happened after People’s Republic of China leapfrogged over both Soviet and Western developments after Deng’s opening to world in terms of economics. Still, we can’t let liberals off the hook at all—their service economy is built on the military coercion that backs US dominance in blue water trade, low input costs from the global supply train, often at the expense of other countries economic stability (if only from the inflationary pressures their policies have on FOREX costs), and on bubbles. The Biden administration’s economic GDP growth was impressive since we only experienced inflation, whereas a lot of the West was in a stagflationary economy from 2022 to 2024. The “magnificent” seven in the US are driving MOST of the GDP growth of the Biden years. The issue is that this growth seems to be based on AI delivering profitability that it hasn’t. (Ed Zitron increasingly makes a career out of this.) Furthermore, like during the Obama economy, almost none of Biden’s policies slowed down growing inequality.

I suppose this brings me to my point. I think Dr. Lurie has a point about biological drives of reproduction and security driving mass constituencies for various policies. That said, I am not sure that political actors represent these policies in any meaningful way. There is little open social space for them to do so that isn’t merely “content production.” Furthermore, a need for security does indicate one should radically simplify social situations, but Joseph Tainter noted all the way in the early 1980s, that this tended to be manifested into strongmen leaders who may actually accelerate social decline—even if they are component and successful as individuals (which they generally aren’t).

For the ideological groupings clustered around the left, all this presents problems and contradictions in our goals. On one hand, most leftists realize that fear encourages social posturing and macho nonsense, which are often play-acting at what survivalists would need to do. This encourages our tendency towards social liberalism, which I do see as generally a good thing. However, the radical change we want is destabilizing, which leads to a backlash response and said posturing. We also want “internationalism,” which in itself implies nationalism, if not as political units, at least as cultural blocks. Yet we also tend to think that this nationalism will undo itself in cooperation when the competition-driven forces of capitalism are gone, but its production mechanisms give us the means to avoid unnecessary scarcity. This gives us a double impulse: to want to undo the exploitation of other national groups but also to strengthen the working class and other vulnerable populations domestically. To be in phrasing that I saw on social media from an account I didn’t know: the us left is torn between impulses that want to end imperial dominance and that is primary concern, and those who don’t want the workers and poor within the core to be more impoverished. Both these impulses are right from the virtues of the left, and both can emerge from both drive clusters Dr. Lurie describes.

What this leads me to is complicated: so these drives may clarify why we are attracted to certain systems and why people shift fundamental virtues when they do change, but I am not sure any individual political movements actually embody these drives in substance in any non-contradictory way.

These contradictory impulses aren’t easy, but I do think Trump, rightly or wrongly, represents a politics that is tailored for people who are precarious and yet also people who have a lot of power and want to hold to it. I think the Clinton-Obama-Biden era Democrats have embodied a status quo basis and a desire for lax times, but often couldn’t really deliver the goods except in aggregate and ways that primarily benefited the already wealthy. The various forms of “modal” politics—the far left(s), the populist left, the far right(s), the populist right—are also coalitions that speak to the fragmenting of the US system but often can only do so as projections of hopes, wishes, and, yes, even drives of various social classes and social groups in ways that are often removed from the larger reproduction of US society. The question is that if both tendencies have terminal contradictions in them, and increasingly given to positive feedback loops, make returning to the status quo both impossible and not entirely desirable. What would a better system mean?

Whatever the answer, we must remember that we are dealing with both social and biological beings and that may require dealing with things that are messier than most of the ideological and narrative frameworks can easily hold.

In my world, from my use of game theory to my use of complexity theory, I think primarily about feedback loops. When I am talking about political ideologies, like when I am asked to explain the difference between Left Communism and the Comintern in 1928 versus the Left Opposition in the USSR in 1926, I don’t use this language. It’s too formal and seemingly bloodless, but I think about it in this language. Each step moves a system back into a dynamic equilibrium (a relative homeostasis that is not a closed loop which moves into entropic disorder), static equilibram (a homeostasis that is a closed loop and will start to move into entropic disorder), or into outright disequilibrium (where there theloops are broken and the system cannot reach a new status quo).

So let’s look at an old-school definition of the phenomenon:

Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole. As provided by Webster, feedback in business is the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source.

— Karl Johan Åström and Richard M.Murray, Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers1

Feedback loops are hard to parse in terms of causation. Feedback may be causal, it may be reactive, or it may even be purely correlational. Did the movement of United Left Opposition in the USSR, despite the disagreements between Trotsky’s Left Opposition and Zinoviev and Kamenev’s new opposition, harden Stalin and Buhkarin’s positions and solidify the continuation of the New Economic Policy and “Socialism in One Country” in the Bolshevik party or is the result of hardening positions? Is the liquidation of the Left Opposition within the Warsaw Pact why Stalin moved against Bukharin’s faction, or would it have happened regardless? These aren’t even counterfactuals, but they are damn near impossible to know despite the fact nothing about it was purely contingent.

What we can say is that by the time of the murder of Kirov in 1932, a set of positive feedback loops kicked in on both sides, which made reconciliation impossible. Kirov’s murder was contingent, as a singular event, it is where the lack of variables ironically means the most possibility for a different outcome. If Kirov had not been murdered, would the purges have happened?

You can see the problems with this, and yet we can map these out. The factions in the Bolshevik party in Russia were in conflict with one another, which was a stimulus that led to various events made disagreements about the possibility of re-establishment of capitalism in the USSR if socialism could not be spread beyond the Warsaw pact move from a hypothetical theoretical question to a hypothetical strategic question to a reason for purges and bannings through out the world. Furthermore, these systems aren’t discreet—in what ways it change the status quo of labor relations within North America and Europe?

It’s difficult to answer and when you think about this in turns of pure feedback, you can map the responses but it isn’t all that predictive to the outcomes until the dust is settled and NKVD has filled the grounds of Medvedev Forest with the blood of all the Oryol prisoners, including a ton of old Bolsheviks.

So, to get to the issues about why I think feedloops are helpful, even if they can’t establish discrete “cause-and-effect” chains, you need to understand what a feedback loop maps, particularly in a social system. Social systems are living, and thus not entirely closed systems from the perspective of physics. Social systems seem to have a tendency towards dynamic equilibrium—a state where opposed processes are happening and changes in these processes bring in new energy and stimulus, but negative feedback loops keep the system balanced as opposed processes do not change the status quo. This is an analogy from chemistry, but it applies to these systems.

Dynamic equilibrium relies on negative feedback. From the standpoint of the system, although not components of the system, the stimulus causes a change in the system, the system responds in the form of output, which counteracts or incorporates that stimulus, thus maintaining a dynamic equilibrium. The third party emerges, it siphons off voters from one of the main parties, but as long as is in a negative feedback loop, the third party leads to its ideas being incorporated into the area of politics where it was siphoning off voters from a major party, or it is nuetralized by agitprop from the mainstream party, or laws are changed to limit the effect. In the second half of the 20th century, all three of these things were done when Reform party under Ross Perot mounted the first real threat to the party duopoly of the United States since both the Progressive (Bullmoose) Party and the Socialist Party stood as real challengers in 1918.

Sometimes, however, the center cannot hold. This moves feedback loops into positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops, from the standpoint of the system itself, are negative. This is when the product of a reaction (output) increases the response from the stimulus. Instead of stabilizing the system, the response destabilizes it, and again, this is not entirely contingent or stochastic. This increases momentum or the speed of change in a system.

Ironically, if a negative feedback loops work too well, it can make a system start to stagnate. Sometimes, one positive feedback spiral can move a system just enough into a new direction that it changes the situation. In both cases, relatively predictable determination in aggregate can lead to unpredictable results. A black swan event can emerge even if that event is not random. It is often a tipping point into either entropic disorder from stagnation or over-momentum when a system cannot adjust, and starts to fall into cascade failure. The latter will seem completely random in the moment, but after it is over, the movements and patterns start to be clear and even seem obvious. The former can lead to a social situation where “nothing ever changes,” which makes the people maintaining the system socially non-responsive, and institutions will be unable to maintain their mission since nothing is testing the competency of those maintaining the system. Ironically, both entropic disorder can turn into over-momentum where “a week will seem like a thousand years” or a major change in momentum made lead to elites and experts trenching where they become more and more resistant to criticism and stagnate.

Both can lead to a cascade failure and even system collapse, and not just in social systems either. A lot of ideological posturing seeks to avoid looking at these dynamics, and since an individual exists in multiple systems, it can propose change in one system in one’s life while ignoring the way stagnates others systems.

Another issue, and this is the one that makes causation hard to establish, is the tendency for feedback loops to generate mutually constitutive feedback loops. This describes a cyclical relationship where two or more aspects of a system influence each other, creating a self-reinforcing effect. The way, for example, the woke left and the anti-woke left move a lot of their rhetoric, not in response to the movement of general society, but to counter each other. The dynamic feeds into itself, and will most certainly turn into a positive feedback loop—the woke left moving increasingly towards symbolic capital and the anti-woke left increasingly making common cause with the anti-woke right, until both systems have altered so much in response to each other that they don’t resemble the groups they started out as. This can generate positive feedback loops where both parties have their ideologies co-opted or destroyed or lose touch with general society, and fail to often guidance to general society since they are responding to each other almost solely. Often, one can even see these patterns play out over time in mutual response to each other until an aphoria is reached, and the substance of the debate shifts—but perhaps the structure doesn’t. Think about politically correct battles on college campuses in the 1990s being interrupted by the suppression and then repression of elements of American society after 9-11, only to shift in the “call-out culture” debates from 2007-2014, and then shift again into the woke wars of the late aught-teens.

These are mutually constitutive feedback loops, but they can’t transcend the structure of the debate. It is new forces that try to utilize this feedback towards new purposes—an administration using attacks on a new framework like D.E.I. to go after socially accepted and established frameworks from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which breaks the feedback loop as a new factor has emerged.

Now, these are just very abstract examples with some very specific illustrative anecdotes, and one must be careful of any abstract framework that attempts to explain everything. However, one feels like things are getting out of control from situations where nothing ever seemed to change priorly: ask yourself, did the mutually constitutive feedback loop finally break in response to positive feedback throwing a system into disequilibrium? Did the agents of these loops ignore that they were using more and more social energy on something that merely responded to another stimulus until it generated overcomplexity for parts of the system outside of a mutually constitutive loop?

This won’t solve all your problems of analysis, but once you see these systems dynamics, you can start to ask better questions.

“Asylum for the homeless. – How things are going for private life today is made evident by its arena [Schauplatz]. Actually one can no longer dwell any longer. The traditional dwellings, in which we grew up, have taken on the aspect of something unbearable: every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition [Erkenntnis]; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family. The newly functionalized ones, constructed as a tabula rasa [Latin: blank slate], are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller: they slap the longing for an independent existence, which anyway no longer exists, in the face. With prophetic masochism, a German magazine decreed before Hitler that modern human beings want to live close to the ground like animals, abolishing, along with the bed, the boundary between waking and dreaming. Those who stay overnight are available at all times and unresistingly ready for anything, simultaneously alert and unconscious. Whoever flees into genuine but purchased historical housing, embalms themselves alive. Those who try to evade the responsibility for the dwelling, by moving into a hotel or into a furnished apartment, make a canny norm, as it were, out of the compulsory conditions of emigration. Things are worst of all, as always, for those who have no choice at all. They live, if not exactly in slums, then in bungalows which tomorrow may already be thatched huts, trailers [in English in original], autos or camps, resting-places under the open sky. The house is gone. The destruction of the European cities, as much as the labor and concentration camps, are merely the executors of what the immanent development of technics long ago decided for houses. These are good only to be thrown away, like old tin cans. The possibility of dwelling is being annihilated by that of the socialistic society, which, having been missed, sets the bourgeois one in motion towards catastrophe. No individual person can do anything against it. Even those who occupy themselves with furniture designs and interior decoration, would already move in the circle of artsy subtlety in the manner of bibliophiles, however opposed one might be against artsiness in the narrow sense. From a distance, the differences between the Viennese workshops and the Bauhaus are no longer so considerable. In the meantime, the curves of the pure purposive form have become independent of their function and pass over into ornaments, just like the basic shapes of Cubism. The best conduct in regards to all this still appears to be a nonbinding, suspending one: to lead a private life, so long as the social order of society and one’s one needs will allow nothing else, but not to put weight on such, as if it were still socially substantial and individually appropriate. “It is one of my joys, not to be a house-owner,” wrote Nietzsche as early as The Gay Science. To this should be added: ethics today means not being at home in one’s house. This illustrates something of the difficult relationship which individual persons have vis-à-vis their property, so long as they still own anything at all. The trick consists of certifying and expressing the fact that private property no longer belongs to one person, in the sense that the abundance of consumer goods has become potentially so great, that no individual [Individuum] has the right to cling to the principle of their restriction; that nevertheless one must have property, if one does not wish to land in that dependence and privation, which perpetuates the blind continuation of the relations of ownership. But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless lack of attention for things, which necessarily turns against human beings too; and the antithesis is already, the moment one expresses it, an ideology for those who want to keep what is theirs with a bad conscience. There is no right life in the wrong one.” - Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Dennis Redmond translation)

The last line, translated by E F N Jephcott, “A wrong life cannot be lived rightly” in the more standard Verso translation, is pithy. Indeed, it is one of my favorite quotes. The German original is ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.’ I would probably translate this as “‘There is no right life in the false one.” Closer to Redmond, but not as pithy as Jephcott. One cannot be moral beyond one's context, as every virtue is possible only because the conditions to embody it make it possible.

I tend to think in more complicated systems than just binary dialectical models of the Kantian variety or even the more subtle variety of Hegel. Dialectics, after all, is the art of contestation. In ancient Indian and Greek philosophy, dialectical contestation is how one deals with contested definitions—think Plato’s dialogues or Nagasena’s dialogues in the Malindapanha. The German idealists took the concept from formal non-analytic debate into the absolute, and Hegel found that absolute in history’s unfolding. Marx flipped it on its head; instead of the absolute idea manifesting in negativity, Marx found ideas emergent in our organization of materiality. Adorno finds it negatively: the context of our text, the materiality of the world, undercuts the possibility of virtue as social life becomes contradictory.

I think in systems and thus in addition to the thesis, the antithesis, and its synthesis, or the thing, the negation, and the overcoming—I think about the strange attractors, the kluges, the gaps (which is implied in Hegel at least). This leads to paradoxes: the designed system which cannot embody the virtues implicit in its design (technology definitely has a teleology; life may or may not), will either be kluged (patched until it is unweildly achieving its function at great energy costs through over-complexity ot it may “work” but the various systems maintaining it are not comprehensible to the designer) or it will adopt a new function based on what it actually does, or, in the last moment, it will collapse.

This is a moral and political universe that is not entirely fun—private life is only known by its arena, which is, necessarily, public. The privation of poverty makes the maintenance of property possible. The necessary builds into positive feedback loops spiraling until the gyres widen and you are in black swans of contingency.

The implications of this are, though, harder to parse in systems than in Adorno’s poetic aphorism. Why should we care? How do we deal with these overlapping frameworks that seem so removed from our lives, or if they don’t, they seem hopeless?

The scholar obsessed with equality and talks the most radical politics works in institutions masquerading as quasi-medieval schools of higher learning, excepted from capitalism’s rat-race, while those institutions are basically kluged into hospital rentier markets and hedge funds that own the surrounding city as large land lords? A president is obsessed with manufacturing and undermining the very bond market, undoes the possibility of a functional market to enable production?

These paradoxes are all around you. The question is how you can start to shift the context, simplify the systems, and acknowledge the paradoxes of the change. Do we want the hotel Grand Abyss, or do we want the timber from the balcony of that hotel to be deconstructed to build a bridge over the gap?

That is a question for me. You cannot have virtues without context: a swimmer cannot swim outside of water. The water is the context, the motion the action, etc.
Ethics thus cannot exist out of its moment in history, its context of material production, and the social reproductive forces.

A wrong life cannot be lived rightly, or the right life cannot be in the wrong one, but it is the life you have, so perhaps learning how to live one can move to virtues.

This is a guiding principle here. Otherwise, we just have lonely atoms.

I hope that writing here and in my book will start to unpack all these things. But one can only just start.

This requires me to stop being the “Sage on the stage” (as teachers are often called when administrators want to pretend that students don’t need direct instruction, despite decades of evidence to the contrary) and start writing things down.

I will be doing all sorts of writing here, and even though this makes this newsletter effectively a marketing niche nightmare, more reliant on para-social attachment than some of subject area fandom.

But let’s begin.

Flash forward nine years and I am speaking to my co-editor over a shitty internet skype connection on an I-pad for a podcast/youtube video on Joan Didion. My voice is strained and if you can find the recording on Youtube still, brassy and higher pitched than my voice is on most recordings. I have defended Didion—against the cultural turn against her and her privilege that was inevitable after three books of essays on her grief. I was going through my own grief and at the time not talking about it.

I lived across from an Egyptian prison in Maadi. I was not allowed to take photographs out of my window and post them on social media. I had lost my working visa in a dispute between my employer and the government in an attempt to reconcile a political promise without losing labor was allowed to stay in the country. My partner, whom I had secretly formed a domestic partnership priorly, was alone in Wyoming, driving through the snow into Salt Lake City, to get treatment for stage-four melanoma. She did not know much of my plight, and I was literally two continents and an ocean away from hers. I had supplemented my time with podcasts—something that I did for free at this point in my life, even if it is a side gig now—but I had no real equipment and was on the internet that was often unable to consistently play videos from YouTube. Like the old Soviet and Italian cars I saw as Taxis in the Cairo streets, it felt strange back in time. Yet I was clearly privileged to have these problems: the Egyptian authorities would sometimes check my passport and let me be. Even after the church bombing in Maadi and the visit of Pope Francis to Egypt, I was largely left alone.

My apartment was cheap by American standards, and after the crash of the local currency, I paid a few hundred dollars for it. It has four beds and a master bedroom, tacky furniture and decor out of a particular faux-rich style of the 1980s, and a few wall-hangings for clearly Muslim families. The four beds were because this was a small apartment—Egyptian families were often large, and middle-class families could have a two-or-even-three wives taking caring six-to-eight kids. I felt alone because I was one man with a partner in America, teaching in my partner’s old position, in a politically tense country. At night, sometimes, I would have someone drive me alone to the edge of the desert and I would drink local beer and watch nothing the sands until the particulate dust made it too hard for me to see.

So I don’t know if my voice was brittle from worry for my then-partner or a particularly terrible internet connection and speaking at odd hours, probably after drinking too much and in pain in the stomach from complications from a typhoid bout I had in Mexico. But I defended Didion against charges of her “problematic nature” perhaps too hard.

What I have always loved about writers like Didion—even in her old age—was an ice-cold hostility to the way we lie to ourselves. As a person constantly ask to parse the finer points of history and ideology—a poet who studied philosophy and anthropology and, once or twice, taught critical theory—I also distrusted those eschatological narratives and models we are given to spin to make our lives make sense or to limit the damage that contingency or grief or give us.

It’s not as ironic that these two contradictory impulses emerge in the same person. Indeed, the Marxist jargon that would emerge imminently to the occasion, it is dialectical: the urge to construct grand theories of history and economics, to speak generalizations that can start to clarify but if reduce to simple slide-of-hand of language and abstractions can say less than nothing. In “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.),” Didion writes that she is comfortable “with the Michael Laski’s of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” I both recoil and identify with Laski, despite my sectarian affiliations having never been exactly in the same ideological checkbox, and with Didion’s skepticism of his faith. I have been the weaver of opiates to the people, the voice that helps people find hope in the fetishization and abstractions of life, to clear out the painstaking ideology to replace it with a new one, but I have also been the perpetual skeptic. The person who trusts relationships over ideas—because people betray you, but ideas can have you betray yourself.

I have spent years mimicking the turgid and tedious writing style of theorists. I remember in 2005, my MFA advisor telling me, “I don’t normally tell students this, but read more fiction and poetry and less theory.” When I sat down to eat with him four years later, on the precipice of my first divorce and leaving, for what I thought was forever, but what turned out to be a little under a decade, teaching in the United States, and heading to South Korea to teach at a university there. He said, “You seem so much more together now. Your desperation seems to have matured.” He was right about the second part but utterly wrong about the first.

This is the beginning of reopening my writing. I mostly write poetry and talk theory and history. Lately, more history. I teach high school literature, which is something that I won’t say much on, except that I understand why almost as many writers had contempt for their English teachers as loved them. Reading Didion a decade-and-half-ago, I lost a lot of my will to write prose that wasn’t highly theoretical or political. Debunking this or that trend in education, writing about religious inanity, then shifting to socialism and graduate school misuse of socialist and post-social theory, then critiquing “the left” from the perspective of “the left.” What amazes me about this, despite reams of turgid and sometimes inchoate prose I produced, is that I actually don’t know that these coherence models of the universe tell as much as we think, even if they are true. That yearning to be correct, to have an answer, to say something that makes the details and facts and interpretation, and the sad errata of human understanding seem redeemable is a good impulse, but it is often the impulse for individuals to weave stories, to lie, and for collectives of people to believe lies.

To make the stories we tell about yourselves true: to be honest about why we are pained when speaking about aging mid-20th-century American writer when we are in the desert or to admit that we were very lucky to turn the frustration with public school education into a way to travel the world. To admit that our politics come from our social class backgrounds, our regional interests, and the accumulated history of family and ethnic heritage, more than anything like a rational decision. To admit that our systems of exploring this are often fraught, not as coherent as their commentary, and obtuse. To look into the eyes of our notions of history and admit that maybe there is no brain behind the eyes. This is hard. Didion, whatever her faults and there are probably many, inspired me to write honestly about it.

Ultimately, we all know that the cost of drinking your own kool-aid is dying from the poison you put in it.

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