#daniel denvir

[eelhound]

"Daniel Denvir

You write that 'markets and labor power change the internal character of what is traded on them and the surrounding form of life in which they are located.' What is alienation? What is it that we’re alienated from or made alien to?

Nancy Fraser

There’s a long tradition of writing about alienated labor that goes back to Marx’s very early writings. The concept refers to exploited wage labor within capitalism, where the worker is alienated from his or her work but also from fellow human beings and from what Marx famously called our 'species being,' our humanity, our freedom to collectively decide what kind of lives we want to live and to build the institutions to do that.

People today are alienated from all of those things. There’s nothing more alienated, in terms of labor, than having to follow a script in interacting with customers, either on the phone or at a fast-food joint, while you’re also doing some backbreaking or repetitive labor in horrible conditions. So, we’re no strangers to alienated labor. I think the popularity of freelancing, even though that’s quite mystified in certain ways, does speak to a hunger for creativity, for being able to determine how you use your time, being an individual, not just being under the watchful surveillance of somebody else.

But I would say the deepest meaning of alienation and being unalienated has to do with freedom and democracy. Capitalism steals from us not just our labor and energy but our ability to decide collectively the most important questions about how we want to live. How hard do we want to work? How many hours? How much leisure do we want to have? What do we want to leave for future generations? How do we want to relate to nonhuman nature? What should we do with the social surplus that we collectively produce?

These are fundamental questions, and they are decided now essentially by a small handful of people who appropriate the surplus we produce and basically use market mechanisms to invest for the sake of maximal expansion.

Daniel Denvir

In other words, we live in a society where Elon Musk gets to decide that he’s firing a car into space for fun and that’s how our social wealth is being used.

Nancy Fraser

Absolutely. Whereas there might be many other things that we would prefer to do with that wealth. We might even prefer to produce less wealth and to live more simply, companionably, socially, and easily in a more relaxed way. We could have a much freer and more democratic life. But that’s not compatible with capitalism."

- Daniel Denvir interviewing Nancy Fraser, from "How Capitalism Worms Its Way Into Every Aspect of Our Lives." Jacobin, 8 December 2022.

[juregim]

things i've watched/read and liked in January '24

Articles/Essays

Approaching The Infopocalypse by Nathan Gardels

Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence by Anne Thériault (reread)

home for the holidays by Rayne Fisher-Quann

It’s Not a Child’s Job to Heal Their Wounded Mother by Arah Iloabugichukwu

Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook

The Idea That Won't Go Away by Anu Alturu

Time After Capitalism by Miya Tokumitsu

No one is bored, everything is boring by Mark Fischer

When Did Humans First Start Wearing Clothes? by Sarah Zhang

Zionism’s History Is Also a History of Jewish Anti-Zionism, Shaul Magid interviewed by Daniel Denvir (note: while it is interesting to learn more about the history of the initially not very popular movement of Zionism, Magid is somehow anti-zionist without an anti-Israel position)

Youtube

A series of 4 lectures on Albert Camus by Eric Dodson Lectures

Colour In Storytelling by Cinema Cartography

Eastern Promises: A Study of Bodies by Nerdwriter1

Happy Poor People: Our Conception of Happiness is Messed Up by Cheyenne Lin

How Red Bull makes money selling nothing by Slidebean

The Meaning of Red in Movies by Now You See It

The Metaphysical Mirror by Cinema Cartography

Why the FBI Wants This TikToker by CHUPPL

i also watched a lot of Rosie Paw before sleeping but this video Art Museum 🖼️ | Relaxing Scrapbooking is my favourite from what i've seen

Books

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang

Issey Miyake: Making Things by Art V.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Films

A Streetcar Named Desire dir. Elia Kazan

Black Orpheus dir. Marcel Camus

Eastern Promises dir. David Cronenberg

Paprika dir. Satoshi Kon

The Princess Bride dir. Rob Reiner

my letterboxd

[kp777]

By Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams

May 13, 2024

The figure comes as part of a new set of polls that show former President Donald Trump narrowly leading Biden in 5 out of 6 crucial battleground states.

Approximately 13% of poll respondents in six swing states who voted for U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020 but would not vote for him again said that his foreign policy or Israel's war on Gaza were the most important issues determining their vote.

The figure comes as part of a new set of polls released Monday from The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer that show former President Donald Trump narrowly leading Biden in 5 out of 6 crucial battleground states.

"We have warned that this would happen for months, and the Democratic Party didn't give a damn," author and organizer Daniel Denvir wrote on social media in response to the news.

The polls showed Trump leading Biden with registered voters by three percentage points in Pennsylvania, seven in Arizona and Michigan, 10 in Georgia, and a full 12 in Nevada. Only in Wisconsin did Biden edge ahead by two points. Biden won all of these states in 2020, but he could still win in 2024 if he secures Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and does not lose any other states he previously won. The results were slightly different for likely voters, with Trump narrowly leading in every state except for Michigan.

One voter the pollsters spoke to was 30-year-old Gerard Willingham, a Georgia web administrator who voted for Biden in 2020 but said he would vote for a third party candidate in 2024 because of Biden's response to Israel's war on Gaza.

"I think it's made quite a bit of difference in that it made me more heavily than in the past push toward voting for a third party, even if I feel that the candidates almost 100% won't win," Willingham said. "It's starting to reach into my moral conscience, I guess."

"Biden seems to get the blame for the war in Gaza. For the high cost of living, too."

The polling comes after Biden has spent the last seven months providing military, financial, and moral support for the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it wages a ground and air assault on Gaza that the International Court of Justice ruled could plausibly be a genocide. Only last week did Biden threaten to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it launches a full ground assault on Rafah, but several observers pointed out that Israel's incursions into Rafah so far should already qualify. Further, the poll was conducted from April 28 to May 9, so many respondents would have given their answers before Biden's May 8 remarks.

Palestinian rights and progressive activists have spent the primary season trying to persuade Biden to switch course on Gaza, launching "uncommitted" campaigns that won two delegates to the Democratic National Convention in the key swing state of Michigan. The poll provides further evidence that Biden's support for Israel's war is a real electoral liability.

"There is a cottage industry of political columnists who have said for months that these voters don't exist, only live in Brooklyn and Berkeley and on Twitter, TikTok, etc.," said Hamid Bendaas, communications director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. "To the extent that Biden and his advisers are buying into it, they are costing him the election."

Gaza isn't the only—or even the primary—issue threatening Biden's reflection bid. A quarter of voters consider the economy and cost of living as their most important issues, and more than half of all voters rated the economy as "poor." Further, Biden actually lost more support overall from conservative and moderate Democrats.

Responding to the poll results, journalist Frank Bruni said that Biden needed to "wake up."

While Democratic Party insiders seem to believe that there is no way voters could ultimately prefer Trump's anti-abortion stance and authoritarian leanings, Bruni warned against "complacency."

He pointed out that Democratic senators in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada did continue to poll ahead of their Republican opponents, suggesting that the problem is less with the Democratic Party overall than with Biden himself.

"Biden seems to get the blame for the war in Gaza. For the high cost of living, too," Bruni wrote.

"Regarding the economy, he has a story to tell—infrastructure investment, the CHIPS Act, low unemployment—and must tell it better, with an eye not on his liberal base, but on the minorities and young people who are drifting away from him," he advised. "That's the moral of the latest numbers: Take no voter for granted. And there's not a second to waste."

[catdotjpeg]

Huge turnout at Brown encampment for Gaza. Solidarity to @/BrownDivest. Free Palestine 🇵🇸

-- Daniel Denvir, 25 Apr 2024 12:24pm EDT

The Brown Divest Coalition announced a victory this evening:

CAMPAIGN WIN‼️ The Brown University Community Council voted to pass 2 resolutions: one allowing students to make the case for divestment before the Brown Corporation meeting in May and one recommending that the University drop all charges against the BDC 41 🇵🇸🇵🇸

[bfpnola]

Hi, my lovelies! I'm still in the process of adding these to our Social Justice Resources but I just could not wait to share them!

Currently, the 2022 Socialism Conference is being hosted in Chicago, Illinois, as well as virtually, with lectures from a variety of diverse activists and authors, including but not limited to Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Liat Ben-Moshe. I genuinely believe that these recordings could become such an amazing resource for my auditory learners, especially since a lot of our resources offered, including our own, are mainly text-based. (There is even a Q&A section provided at the end of each and just the representation in the room as well as the nuance in each and every person's words is truly astounding.)

The following lectures are offered, so please share them, listen while doing chores or driving, etc:

Crises, Wars, & Revolts on the Edge of a New Global Slump with David McNally & Shireen Akram-Boshar

Disability, Madness, Liberation: Deinstitutionalization & Prison Abolition with Liat Ben-Moshe

 Transgender Marxism with Jules Joanne Gleeson, c, & Sophie Lewis

How Do We Get a New Constitution? with Aziz Rana & Amna Akbar

Pandemic Politics & the Viral Underclass with Steven Thrasher

Black Feminism & Black Liberation in 2022 with Barbara Ransby

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism & the Case for Abolition with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Abolitionist Internationalism: Borders, Migration, & Racial Capitalism with Harsha Walia & Robin D.G. Kelley

Gaza is Palestine: Voices from Under the Blockade with Jehad Abusalim & Shafeka Hashash

Playing Through Fire: Sports In A Time Of Reaction with Dave Zirin

Rebuilding a New Reproductive Justice Movement: Taking on the Right with Anne Rumberger, Cheryl Rivera, Sarah Leonard, & Natalia Tylim

Health Communism: Toward a New Political Economy of Health with Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant

The Dig LIVE: What Now? Perspectives on the Conjuncture, Daniel Denvir hosting Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, & Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns

Freedom Dreams and the Socialist Project with Robin D.G. Kelley

Don't want to miss future activist-related events, protests, and workshops like this in the future? We offer free text message updates!

Signal boost because Tumblr kills posts with links. Love y'all!

-- @reaux07 (she/they)

[newswireml]

Is “The Dig” the Most Important Podcast on the Left?#Dig #Important #Podcast #Left

(Photo by Thea Riofrancos) The Dig is a podcast devoted to politics, history, and economics. From its humble inception in 2015, it has become one of the most popular podcasts on the left and boasts a wide following. This is in no small measure due to host Daniel Denvir’s ability to bring together leftist intellectual voices with those devoted to organizing in the mutual attempt to address…

[magdolenelives]

(source)

[chiripepe]

:+:+:+:+:    ~MY FAVORITE CRACKERS~    :+:+:+:+:

[masbravaquenada]

I haven’t posted in a long time about books that I’m reading or are in my reading queue lol. Here they are:

We Were Eight Years In Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A book about the Black Reconstruction era in America after the Civil War. In 1867 Black people gained various important govermental offices until White people in power decided the Black people had too much power and took violent steps to remove black politicians from elected offices.

All-American Nativism by Daniel Denver

Explores and analyses how American politics has used immigration rhetoric to get to were we are now.

I’m Not Here to Give a Speech by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A collection of speeches by GGM. FYI if you didn’t know GGM is hella funny!

[votenet-blog]

Bernie Sanders: Bold Politics Is Good Politics

Bernie Sanders: Bold Politics Is Good Politics

Author: Bernie Sanders / Source: jacobinmag.com

Bernie Sanders speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, AZ in July 2015. Gage Skidmore / Flickr

In the wake of several recent successful challenges from the left to centrist, “establishment” Democrats, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders isn’t on record telling anyone “I told you so.”

[eelhound]

"The Fordist factory seems to require a particular family form. The male-headed nuclear family arose in coordination or correspondence with the transformations of employment in the twentieth century and got codified into law in various ways. For example, as Alice Kessler-Harris shows in her book In Pursuit of Equity, the Social Security system very strongly encouraged women to be housewives, making that make financially more sense than to work the low-wage jobs that were available to women. Women would accrue more Social Security benefits by means of the housewife formula than they would likely accrue in a job as a waitress or a secretary or the other jobs that were available to most women. This is one of the many examples of how the welfare state herds working-class people into this particular family form...

Why is it that the structure of the capitalist welfare state social formation prefers and seeks to produce this family organization?... the labor force upon which industrial production depends has to get produced and reproduced in the family. This is particularly true for industrial mass production like steel and auto. For long-term planning purposes, managers need a stabilized workforce. And for this, they need the labor force to be consistent and reliable and to show up in more or less the same form that they can anticipate every day. This is part of why they were willing ultimately to accept collective bargaining.

What that means is that the family has a particular role to play. The family has to produce steelworkers. It has to raise male children who are in one way or another ready for this role. It has to refresh them each night.

And it’s a more complex undertaking than you might think. Steel mills run twenty-hour hours a day. You can’t turn them off because they’re too hot and it takes too long to heat them back up again, so you just run them constantly. They run in three eight-hour shifts, which means that every steelworker at various points is going to be doing an 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift, a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and sometimes a 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift. If he’s doing a 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift, and the family has four or five kids — these are typically pretty big families, especially in the earlier Cold War period — the wife has to make dinner for the kids at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. and then stay up and make him dinner again at midnight when he gets home.

Moreover, when he gets home, he is going to be filthy, because he works in a steel mill. His clothes are going to be caked in industrial grease, and there will be grease under his fingernails, in his hair, on his eyelids. She has to help him get clean. He’s going to be tired, frustrated, worn out, maybe humiliated from the shit he went through with his foreman that day, and he’s maybe going to want to have one or two drinks, a very common ritual. So she has to do what we could think of as emotional work to deal with that. She needs to keep him from waking up the kids. He’s then going to sleep through the next day because he was up late working at the steel mill, and so she has to keep the kids from making any noise that would wake him up during the next day.

Just from these little examples I’m giving you, you can see how the family has this economic function supplying a steady supply of labor power, but it’s people who make it up. It’s not just a series of input factors — it’s people living their lives, with human experiences and needs and desires and conflict. And basically it’s a wife and mother’s job to square that right, to figure out how to keep it all going. It’s a very difficult job, emotionally and physically. I read diaries and letters and all kinds of things from steelworkers’ wives saying things like, 'I typically do the laundry at two in the morning because that’s when I know no one will need me for anything else.' And it’s also impossible: they can never make it fully line up. They can’t ever be the family that postwar Cold War America imagined that they should be able to be."

- Gabriel Winant being interviewed by Daniel Denvir, from "For Workers, Hospitals Have Become the New Steel Mills — Minus the Strong Unions." Jacobin, 28 January 2023.

[brotheralyosha]

Every Republican national leader since 9/11 had backed the harshest possible prosecution of the War on Terror. Even Mitt Romney pledged to double Guantanamo. Those relatively few prominent Republicans who did object to the war, like senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, did so on the respectable grounds that it was costing America freedom and wealth. They were openly disdained by the ascendant McCains of the party. Rand Paul’s father, Ron, sought the presidency on an antiwar platform, but he was even more marginal, despite an enthusiastic following on the far right.

Handling the party’s nativists was a more delicate proposition for GOP leaders. Romney and McCain, uncomfortable fits in nativist circles, compensated by advocating “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants or releasing “complete the danged fence” ads, to say nothing of proposing that the nativist Sarah Palin should be a heartbeat from the presidency. No Republican since 9/11 had been able to combine nativism with antipathy to the futility of the War on Terror and seize control of the party. It occurred to few to try. Then, in June 2015, Donald Trump descended his escalator at Trump Tower.

In his infamous announcement speech, the one claiming Mexicans were rapists and criminals invading a supine America, Trump demonstrated just how effortlessly 9/11 politics amplified nativism. His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself. That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness: “We don’t win anymore.” Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation.

It was a heretical sentiment to hear from someone seeking the GOP nomination. Every major Republican figure had spent the past 15 years explaining away the failures of the war or insisting that it was a noble endeavor. Trump called it dumb. His America was suffering unacceptable civilizational insults. “We have nothing” to show for the war, he said, and certainly not the spoils of war that Trump believed were due America. “Islamic terrorism” had seized “the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should have taken.” The war was a glitch in the matrix of American exceptionalism, and Trump offered a reboot.

But except for the Afghanistan war, which he considered particularly stupid, Trump was no abolitionist. “I want to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, and we need it now more than ever,” he stated. He threatened to sink Iranian boat swarms, even as Iran was aligned with the United States against ISIS in Iraq, engaged in the ground combat Obama desperately sought to avoid. Then there was ISIS, at home as well as abroad. Trump pointed specifically to ISIS’s spoils: the 2,300 Humvees they drove out of Mosul. “The enemy took them,” he complained, pledging that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump.” His latest position on Iraq was that it was dumb to get in, dumb to get out, and now the United States had to win, whatever that ultimately meant.

Trump’s incoherence was less important than what it revealed: a disgust at waging the war on its familiar terms, along with an enthusiasm for voicing its civilizational subtext. The same weakness that made the War on Terror a no-win situation had also yielded the current wave of Central American migration. Trump promised to crash the wave against a giant wall on the southern border for which he would make Mexico pay. The socialist writer and critic Daniel Denvir observed that Trump’s pledge to extort Mexico’s wealth for the wall was effectively a demand for imperial tribute. The analysis applies equally to his claim on Iraq’s oil.

. . .

Fifteen years of brutality as background noise made it easy for many to misinterpret Trump’s position on the War on Terror. Journalists listened to his invective against it and called him antiwar, as if he had not been promising to “bomb the shit” out of millions of people. “Donald the Dove,” Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, “in most cases . . . would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.” Such attitudes revealed what elites chose to believe about Trump and what they opted to consider merely an act for the rubes. What they overlooked by focusing on Trump’s criticisms of the ground wars was that he wanted to expand the War on Terror to frontiers it had yet to reach. Most important, they heard Trump describe the enemy as Radical Islamic Terror. For 15 years, nativists, stoked by Fox News, had considered such a definition a prerequisite for winning the war. Elites had never understood why the right was so spun up about the phrase. Trump knew that “Radical Islamic Terror” extracted the precious nativist metal from the husk of the Forever War.

None of this was tolerable to the Security State and its allies. Sean MacFarland, a David Petraeus-favored officer during the Iraq occupation who now commanded the war against ISIS, rejected indiscriminate bombing as “what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of northwest Syria.” Dozens of Republican-aligned security luminaries signed open letters refusing to serve in a Trump administration, birthing the Never Trump Beltway movement. But the architects, contractors, and validators of the War on Terror were placed in awkward positions. One of the letters decried Trump’s “expansive” embrace of torture, since their own embrace of “enhanced interrogation” foreclosed on a more categorical rejection. Former NSA and CIA Director Mike Hayden, who had lied so extensively about torture that the Senate compiled his falsehoods into a separate annex of the torture report, who secretly constructed a surveillance dragnet around the United States while imploring Congress to set the balance between liberty and security, characterized Trump as “unwilling or unable to separate truth from falsehood.” Nor was there any self-reflection from signatories like Iraq occupation chief Bob Blackwill, who took over as Bush’s personal envoy after Paul Bremer, and who had asserted against “the professional pessimists within parts of the U.S. intelligence community” that “2005 will be a good year in Iraq for President Bush.” None of them seemed to understand that they had created the context for Trump. He was about to show them.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

[azspot]

The hostage-taking logic—that we must give the fascists what they want on immigration or else the fascists win—is the central political calculus Denvir shows to have greased the path to the “bipartisan war on immigrants” of his subtitle and the precipice we find ourselves hanging over today, when the president can use an unprecedented national health crisis as a pretext to suspend immigration. Negotiating with an ever more inflamed and ideological opponent has only resulted in the ratcheting up of “enforcement” brutality.

How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration

[marxist-feminist]

A new book on King’s political philosophy — To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr, co-edited by Brandon M. Terry and Tommie Shelby — takes seriously King as a thinker, not simply an orator or activist. Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin Radio’s The Dig, recently had the chance to speak with the Harvard scholars about King’s rich political philosophy. The following is a condensed and slightly edited version of their conversation.

"But he thought you needed to deal with issues of poverty, with employment discrimination, with joblessness, the threat of automation to people’s living standards, and access to non-menial work that paid a living wage.

People need access to good schools. People need access to decent housing, the freedom to chose where they want to live, the economic power to enable them to exercise that freedom. Those things require significant resources to be transferred to people who were previously impoverished and economically marginalized. And if you’re going to really allow people to be equals in what’s supposed to be a democracy, then they do need to be economically empowered to make good use of their various liberties and opportunities. That clearly is going to mean a shift of resources — really, ill-gotten gains, gains extracted from an unjust social order — to marginalized and dispossessed populations.

Naturally, people who are affluent don’t want to give those resources up. Persuading them that this is what justice requires, persuading them you can’t achieve justice without some sacrifice, without it costing you something, was going to be very difficult. It would mean that many people who might’ve been very sympathetic to the southern campaign against Jim Crow might be much less militant about the second phase."

[protoslacker]

The immigration prison is a reminder that human bondage based on racial and economic markers of undesirability can’t be relegated to some distant past.  If we’re willing to lock people up, we’ll find a reason. Most of the time the targets will be people of color. We can call this coincidence, but we would be lying to ourselves.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández quoted in an article by Cora Currier in The Intercept. IMMIGRATION DETENTION IS PART OF MASS INCARCERATION: THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING ICE AND EVERYTHING ELSE

Migrating to Prison:America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It by Daniel Denvir