New psychology research shows people are more willing to harm men than women for the greater good

2023/11/11


Recent research reveals a striking gender bias in how people perceive and accept instrumental harm, which occurs when harm is inflicted on some individuals to achieve a greater good. The study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that people tend to be more willing to accept harm to men than to women in various contexts, even when women are traditionally expected to sacrifice more.

Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that justifies causing harm to some individuals if it leads to a greater overall good, has been the subject of much philosophical debate. It encompasses two key elements: instrumental harm and impartial beneficence. Instrumental harm allows for the harm of innocent individuals for the greater good, while impartial beneficence requires prioritizing the greater good above personal attachments and biases.

Yet, in practice, people often struggle to adhere to these stringent utilitarian principles, frequently deviating from impartiality due to various subjective factors. Judgments about benefit and harm are inherently subjective and can be influenced by personal beliefs and societal norms. This subjectivity, coupled with the challenge of defining the greater good, makes it difficult to reach a consensus on what actions are truly morally justified.

The new study set out to investigate a specific factor that may influence individuals’ impartial evaluation of social interventions – the gender of those experiencing instrumental harm. Building on previous research on gender and moral decision-making, the researchers hypothesized that people might show a bias in supporting interventions that inflict collateral harm on one gender over the other, thus violating the principle of impartial beneficence.

“People’s assumptions of who’s a victim and who’s a perpetrator differs by gender. People tend to stereotype men as perpetrators and women as victims. This project built upon those findings by examining how people evaluate harm, when that harm is unintended and results from interventions aimed at helping people,” explained study author Tania Reynolds, an assistant professor at the the University of New Mexico, in a press release.

“Most policies have trade-offs whereby some individuals are benefitted, and some are either not affected or actively harmed,” Reynolds said. “How do people evaluate these costs? If it’s the case that one gender benefits while the other is harmed, might that influence whether people evaluate the intervention or policy as worthwhile?”

To investigate the gender bias in acceptance of instrumental harm, the researchers conducted a series of three studies.

In the first study, participants were asked to evaluate a workplace intervention designed to reduce mistreatment, which involved instrumental harm to some employees. The researchers recruited 200 American individuals through Amazon’s CloudResearch platform. To ensure a minimum of 75 responses in each condition, 160 participants (67.1% men, average age 34.5) were included in the final analysis.

Participants were presented with an employee intervention program aimed at improving toxic work environments. They were randomly assigned to one of two gender conditions in which either male or female employees experienced instrumental harm due to the program. Participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of the program.

In particular, they were told that the workplace intervention “reduced reports of mistreatments and it improved work experience for most employees,” but that “[men or women] found the program to be insensitive, demeaning, and offensive,” and “experienced worse psychological outcomes.”

Study 1 found that participants were significantly more willing to accept instrumental harm when men suffered the harm compared to when women did. This gender bias was influenced by the gender of the participant, with female participants showing a greater bias in accepting harm inflicted on men than male participants.

“In this context, people were more supportive of the intervention if men found it offensive than if women found it offensive,” Reynolds said.

Study 2 aimed to replicate the findings of Study 1 using a broader array of contexts. It involved 233 participants (51% men, average age 36.5) recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants evaluated five scenarios describing the efficacy of various interventions in areas such as chronic pain management, education, nutrition, psychological well-being, and sexually transmitted infections. Within each scenario, the gender of the group benefiting and experiencing harm was experimentally manipulated.

For example, in the nutrition scenario, the participants were told that men (or women) who drank a weight loss meal replacement shake “once a day for 2 months lost 20% more weight and had 6% lower blood pressure” but that women (or men) who drank the shake once a day “actually gained 10% more weight and their blood pressure slightly increased by 3%.”

Study 2 constructively replicated the findings of Study 1. Participants consistently showed a greater willingness to support interventions benefiting women at the cost of men compared to the reverse scenario. Female participants exhibited a stronger bias in this direction, while male participants did not show a similar bias. Additionally, the study explored the influence of ideological beliefs and found that participants who endorsed feminism or egalitarianism were more supportive of interventions favoring women.

“What we found is that beyond just participants’ sex, people who more strongly endorsed egalitarianism or feminism showed these gender biases to larger degrees,” Reynolds said. “Both of those ideologies have to do with rectifying historical injustices, so maybe it’s part of the reason why people endorse harm to men. Throughout history, women have typically had to sacrifice in contexts like caring for the elderly or infants.”

“Likewise women have not had the same career or educational opportunities. Perhaps people who identify as feminists or egalitarians perceive men to have benefited throughout history, and therefore they now evaluate it as fair if men suffer and women gain an advantage.”

In Study 3, the researchers sought to examine whether the gender bias in accepting instrumental harm could be neutralized in contexts where women have traditionally been expected to sacrifice more than men. The study involved 225 participants (61.7% men, average age 35.1) who evaluated interventions in stereotypically female contexts, such as parenthood, nursing, early childhood education, and elderly care.

Contrary to expectations, Study 3 found that the gender bias in accepting instrumental harm persisted even in contexts where women are traditionally expected to make sacrifices. Both male and female participants were more likely to endorse interventions inflicting harm onto men than women. Exploratory analyses suggested that feminist identification did not predict this bias in this context. However, participants with liberal political ideologies were more likely to accept harm to men.

Together, the findings indicate that people tend to show a gender bias, favoring instrumental harm for men over women in various contexts. This bias appears to be influenced by participant gender, political ideology, and the endorsement of feminist or egalitarian beliefs.

“Throughout history, countless male lives have been sacrificed on the battlefield, ostensibly to promote the greater good,” the researchers concluded. “Our findings suggest that these sentiments persist beyond the field of combat. For many people, accepting instrumental harm to men is perceived as worth the cost to advance other social aims.”

“We invite researchers to further investigate how individuals appraise the value of suffering and whether those appraisals differ across target characteristics. A deeper understanding of the biases embedded in such calculations may minimize the unforeseen and unintended consequences of those preferences, thereby reducing harm to men and women alike.”

However, it is essential to acknowledge some limitations of these studies. The scenarios presented to participants were hypothetical, and real-world decisions may involve more complex factors. Additionally, the studies focused on American participants, and cultural factors may influence moral judgments differently in other regions.

“We had a hard time getting this paper published. It goes to show you have to be resilient and believe in your work,” Reynolds added. “It’s a nice feeling and makes the research worth it–a good reminder persistence pays off.”

The study, “Worth the Risk? Greater Acceptance of Instrumental Harm Befalling Men than Women“, was authored by Maja Graso, Tania Reynolds, and Karl Aquino.

© PsyPost

Large psychology study debunks stereotype of feminists as man-haters

2023/11/12


Feminists tend to hold positive attitudes towards men, comparable to those of nonfeminists, according to new research published in Psychology of Women Quarterly. The research, spanning multiple Western or non-Western cultures and involving nearly 10,000 participants, indicates that common perceptions of feminists’ attitudes are not grounded in reality.

Feminism, as a social and political movement, has a long history of advocating for women’s rights and challenging gender-based discrimination. Throughout its evolution, feminism has achieved significant advancements for women, including securing voting rights, property ownership, reproductive autonomy, and legal protections against marital rape. Despite these accomplishments, feminism has not been without its critics and skeptics.

However, recent years have seen a resurgence of feminist identity, especially among young women, with a majority of 18- to 24-year-old women in the UK identifying as feminists. In the United States, while the feminist identity has gained ground, it is still perceived as polarizing by a substantial portion of both women and men, with many believing that feminism unfairly blames men for women’s challenges.

“We had started to notice a trend in the popularity of feminism among younger women and were interested in this social change given the negative stereotypes associated with feminists in the media,” said study author Aífe Hopkins-Doyle, an assistant professor at the University of Surrey.

“After some reading of the literature, we discovered there were very few empirical tests of the accuracy of the most widespread stereotype about feminists – that they are ‘man-haters.’ In particular, previous studies had been limited by the measures used, which focused more on ideological beliefs about men rather than warmth of feeling or liking, but also by the relatively few feminists in those samples (e.g., often < 30% in female student samples in the US).”

“We decided that the uptick in feminist identification was an opportunity to conduct an in-depth test of the misandry stereotype. Beyond this, we were also interested in why people think that feminists hate men and set out to examine the faulty perceptions we hold about other people’s beliefs and how these can lead us to incorrect conclusions.”

To address the misandry stereotype, the researchers conducted five separate studies with a total of 9,799 participants from nine different countries, including two nationally representative samples. The research aimed to explore whether this stereotype accurately reflects feminists’ attitudes toward men and to investigate potential reasons behind such attitudes.

In these studies, feminism was operationalized using multiple measures, including identification with feminism, ideological beliefs, and engagement in collective feminist action. Attitudes toward men were assessed through several explicit measures, capturing various dimensions such as warmth, liking, trust, and emotional reactions. In addition, the researchers also examined hostile attitudes towards men (e.g. “Men act like babies when they are sick”), benevolent attitudes towards men (“Men are more willing to take risks than women”) and collective anger (“I am furious with the sexual harassment of women”).

The first study focused on explicit attitudes toward men among women from Italy, Poland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. These countries were chosen to represent different cultural contexts with varying degrees of gender equality.

The results from this study revealed that both feminists and nonfeminists held positive attitudes toward men. Contrary to the misandry stereotype, feminists did not exhibit significantly different attitudes toward men compared to nonfeminists. While there was no significant difference in hostility toward men, feminists were found to be less benevolent toward men than nonfeminists.

Hopkins-Doyle and her colleagues also found that feminist collective action, such as participation in the #MeToo movement, was unrelated to explicit attitudes towards men. However, it was positively associated with collective anger about women’s experiences of sexual misconduct.

“Feminism is associated with anger about men’s mistreatment of women, but not with negative overall evaluations of men,” Hopkins-Doyle told PsyPost.

Building on the first study, the researchers extended their investigation to non-Western countries in Asia, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These countries were chosen to explore how cultural contexts influenced attitudes toward men and feminism. The results of this study were consistent with the previous findings, demonstrating that feminists in non-Western countries also held positive attitudes toward men.

In the third study, the researchers delved into implicit attitudes by using a Single-Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) to assess participants’ automatic associations between male words and positive or negative categories. This study provided further evidence that both feminists and nonfeminists had positive implicit attitudes toward men, and there was no significant difference between the two groups.

The findings indicate “that feminists have largely positive attitudes toward men, which are similar to those of non-feminist people,” Hopkins-Doyle explained.

Study 4 aimed to uncover the underlying mechanisms shaping feminists’ attitudes toward men. It also explored participants’ metaperceptions, or their beliefs about feminists’ attitudes toward men. The study revealed that feminists perceived men as both more similar to women and more threatening than nonfeminists did.

“Compared to nonfeminists, feminists did think that men represent more of a threat to women’s dignity and welfare,” Hopkins-Doyle told PsyPost. “This was associated with less positive attitudes to men. However, counteracting this tendency, feminists also perceived that men and women were more similar, and this led in turn to more positive attitudes.

“Further while our pattern of findings for feminist self-identification consistently showed no negativity toward men, we did find some evidence that women who subscribe to some less mainstream feminist ideologies have less positive attitudes toward men. That being said, these effects were small in size and should be replicated and extended in future research.”

Interestingly, both feminists and nonfeminists inaccurately perceived feminists’ attitudes as more negative than they actually were. They overestimated the perceived threat feminists felt from men while underestimating their perceived gender similarity with men.

In the fifth study, the researchers sought to replicate and extend their findings in a nationally representative sample of UK adults. This study confirmed that feminists in the UK held positive attitudes toward men, and there was no significant difference in attitudes between feminists and nonfeminists. Additionally, feminist collective action and collective anger were unrelated to attitudes toward men.

Finally, to provide a comprehensive overview of the findings across all studies, the researchers conducted meta-analyses. These analyses confirmed that feminists, across different nations and measures, consistently held positive attitudes toward men, and there was no evidence to support the misandry stereotype.

“We were surprised by the size and consistency of the effects we found,” Hopkins-Doyle said. “Across many different samples, methods, and national contexts, and using meta-analysis of all our data we found very little evidence that feminists hold negative attitudes toward men as the misandry stereotype suggests.”

“We call the stereotype that feminists tend to have negative attitudes to men the ‘misandry myth’ because it conforms to the dictionary definition of a ‘myth’ as a false yet widespread belief. In sum, these findings mean we are wrong to dismiss feminism on the grounds that it is about hatred of men.”

While this research offers valuable insights, it is not without limitations. With the exception of Study 3, the studies primarily rely on self-report measures, which may be subject to social desirability bias. Future research could explore attitudes toward men using alternative methods to complement self-report data.

Although the findings provide compelling evidence that feminists generally have positive attitudes toward men, it’s important to acknowledge that some individuals deviate from this pattern. “There is little doubt that some feminists do hold negative attitudes toward men, and some attest that it is a necessary and legitimate response to the inequality and misogyny women experience (see Pauline Harmange’s book).”

The study, “The Misandry Myth: An Inaccurate Stereotype About Feminists’ Attitudes Toward Men“, was authored by Aífe Hopkins-Doyle, Aino L. Petterson, Stefan Leach, Hannah Zibell, Phatthanakit Chobthamkit, Sharmaine Binti Abdul Rahim, Jemima Blake, Cristina Bosco, Kimberley Cherrie-Rees, Ami Beadle3, Victoria Cock, Hazel Greer, Antonina Jankowska, Kaitlin Macdonald, Alexander Scott English, Victoria Wai Lan YEUNG, Ryosuke Asano, Peter Beattie, Allan B. I. Bernardo, Chinun Boonroungrut, Anindita Chaudhuri, Chin-Lung Chien, Hoon-Seok Choi, Lixian Cui, Hongfei Du, Kei Fuji, Hidefumi Hitokoto, Junko Iida, Keiko Ishii, Ding-Yu Jiang, Yashpal Jogdand, Hyejoo J. Lee, Nobuhiro Mifune, Chanki Moon, Aya Murayama, Jinkyung Na, Kim One, Joonha Park, Kosuke Sato, Suryodaya Sharma, Eunkook M. Suh, Arun Tipandjan, and Robbie M. Sutton.

© PsyPost

Mike Davis on Fellow Legendary California Historian Kevin Starr

Historian Mike Davis was appalled by the horrors California had inflicted on itself, while Kevin Starr was awed by the Golden State's spirit of optimism. In this interview right before his death, Davis reflects on their mutual admiration and tender friendship.

The legendary socialist historian Mike Davis died on October 25, 2022. (Verso Books)

BYMIKE DAVIS
 11.12.2023
JACOBIN

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times published an article contrasting Mike Davis and Kevin Starr, both widely read historians of California. “Mike Davis sees murky decay, while Kevin Starr embraces shiny optimism,” the paper said. The contrast was undeniable, especially to their own admiring readers. “Davis groupies scorned Starr’s boosterism as unfashionably chipper. Many Starr fans dismissed Davis as a left-wing lunatic.”

In reality, Davis and Starr shared a deep mutual admiration and longtime friendship. Starr died in 2017, and Mike Davis died in 2022. When the latter was in palliative care, Jason Sexton approached Davis to record his thoughts about Starr — many of which Davis had never shared publicly — for his book Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation between Davis and Sexton, which took place July 6, 2022, in San Diego.

Davis’s criticisms of Starr are astute and penetrating, but they are greatly outweighed in this conversation by his admiration for Starr as a scholar and a person. Reflecting on an exchange with Starr’s wife Sheila after his death, he said, “She told me after he died that Kevin loved me, and I was incredibly touched by that. But it’s hard to pin Kevin down.” Just shy of four months before his own death, Davis thanked Sexton for the opportunity to talk about his friend, saying, “We’ll never see the likes of him again.”

Ifirst met Kevin Starr when somebody set up a debate between the two of us at a Westside public affairs forum. I went in ready to be critical, but he was so disarmingly charming, so generous — there’s just no way I could debate him in a hostile way. It was confusing to me because I had this image of Kevin as a kind of spokesman for elite genealogy, but we never really dueled. Kevin agreed with so much of what I had to say, and I found too much of what he had to say challenging and fascinating. Besides, there’s nothing I hold in higher esteem than a great storyteller. When I was at another event at USC with Kevin, Mike “the Poet” Sonksen, who was a student of mine at UCLA, got up out of the audience and recited a poem about Kevin and me. And Kevin got up and shot right back at him with an even better rap. Kevin the rapper — a tour de force. I loved that.

On the matter of why Kevin never really addresses the ’60s and the ’70s, I think his silence was similar to Joan Didion’s revulsion. Los Angeles literally made her sick, and so she had to leave. I have a very different perspective on that period, having been a political activist in LA during those years. But I think I also don’t understand Kevin’s whole biography, because the Kevin in his heyday that Peter Richardson writes about, who wrote for the Hearst paper The Examiner, is not the Kevin I knew. Amid the bigotry, including spats over cultural values with San Francisco politicians like Harvey Milk in the late ’70s, there’s a big sea change, or perhaps “spiritual change” I think Kevin would prefer. It doesn’t grow out of his view of the ’60s, I think; it has to do with the research that would show up later in the Depression volume. So the more radical but always ecumenical Kevin that I knew corresponded to the writing of that volume and subsequent volumes. This was not just a result of the early progressives, but Kevin had this kind romantic attitude toward the wild boys, even the Communist Party in the ’60s.

Kevin’s methodology and mine are similar in that they’re modular. We’d take an eight- to twelve-thousand-word essay and then compile them together in a book. And certainly there were many things for Kevin to write about in that period, avoiding some of the subjects he found most distasteful. To me the surprising thing is that Kevin wrote nothing on the rise of LA mayor Tom Bradley. I don’t know what Kevin’s relationship to Bradley was later on. But if you want to find the kind of silver lining in this turbulent, sometimes violent period, you could do it through a narrative about the rise and fall and rise again of Tom Bradley. I am not sure why he had this particular aversion to what other people saw as the most heroic period, at least until ’69.

Kevin doesn’t really pick things up until the ’80s in his chronicle of California, leaving out Proposition 13 and issues that led to it. He does know that race is the American dilemma, and I think beginning with Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, race is present, and genocide is present. I never saw Kevin as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because by the time I had met Kevin I think you’d have to describe him as a solid liberal. You can see this in his embrace of California’s progressive history.

There are two things, however, that are missing in Kevin’s opus. One is if you take Kevin as a kind of French Annales school historian, the deep geography is missing. Of course he talks about water, and of course he talks about subregionalism in the state. But the kind of hard natural-history framework is missing. The other thing that’s missing is economic history. He writes a lot about the economy, but for instance in the nineteenth century what made California distinctive was Montgomery Street. This was the only independent pool of capital west of the Mississippi River, west of Chicago. And this is such a vital thing in California’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history — the banks, finance, and the great banking empires.LA is just a branch of San Francisco until the twentieth century, when it becomes a kind of colony of Chicago.

I’m giving away a lot of books, and unfortunately that included all of my Kevin volumes. I don’t recall what he says about people like Harris Newmark or later [Amadeo] Giannini, who I’m sure is in there in some way. But banking and finance are missing, and it’s all important. LA was just a cow town totally dependent on investment, and it didn’t work — recycling, for instance, Comstock fortunes by the Flood family, the Irvines, the Lankershims, etc. in the 1860s. LA is just a branch of San Francisco until the twentieth century, when it becomes a kind of colony of Chicago. For instance, LA has the second scientifically designed industrial district in the country — the first was in Chicago. Chicago investors built a duplicate here, and that’s where you get people like the Wrigleys and so on.

It is in a way totally unfair to level against Kevin the charge that he didn’t do everything. Who can? Still, in Kevin’s own spirit of handing the mantle down to younger historians, these two things are important. A kind of deep environmental history is so necessary with San Diego, for instance. Why was San Diego such a backwater? Two reasons. There was no real route east of here. When [John D.] Spreckels finished the first railroad, it had to dip down into Baja, California. But even more importantly, there’s very little water. LA floats on water. The fundamental geographical fact is that condition, how interurban competition would take place. As for the economic/financial industry: Where did capital come from? Who had capital to dispose? In that sense, San Francisco was a colossus compared to Southern California taken as a whole.

But these are not so much criticisms. I think Kevin would say, “Yeah, you’re right Mike.” He celebrated and was enthusiastic about all the historical work being done by the gang around Bill Deverell at USC. I would say that probably more quality work on LA has come out of the [California] State University campuses than UCLA, for instance. That was the sort of critical school with Deverell, but black studies and Chicano studies among others have kind of moved back around to narrative and what Kevin was doing, which is, to me, a major point.

Kevin looks like simply a great storyteller, in traditional narrative history. But if you were to examine his work epistemologically, it’s far more sophisticated than that. He writes so much about how imagined environments and history were transformed into material facts that became part of a subsequent history. It’s a pretty sophisticated idea with a lot of implications. One of the ideas that I stole wholeheartedly from Kevin when I wrote City of Quartz is that there’s a lot more there.

Of course, he was philosophically well trained. You can’t go through sixteen years of Catholic and Jesuit education without being so. Kevin always considered me a lapsed Catholic. I studied at the University of Edinburgh for a while under the Irish historian Owen Dudley Edwards (not exactly an Irish name), and upon the minute I met him he said, “You’re a lapsed Catholic.” And I said, “No, I’m not. I have the same attitude toward the Church that Robespierre did.” And he said, “Then you’re really a typical lapsed Catholic.” And of course, that was the category that Kevin put me in.

One of the things Kevin did that I always found astonishing was his constant attempt to make connections between people who, if not enemies, were people you wouldn’t expect to be invited to the same dinner table. He even asked me one time, “Why don’t you come to Bohemian Grove with me?” I said, “What, to pee on Redwoods and run around in togas with George Shultz and so on?” He said, “No, you’ll find it utterly fascinating.” So I toyed with that, but then he told me, “You can’t write about it. You can’t document it in any way.” Which gave me an excuse not to go. I’m kind of notorious in that way. I got invited to the Vatican, but I didn’t go. To the consternation of all my far-left-wing friends, I got invited to the Naval War College to speak, and I didn’t go. I’m kind of bashful about rubbing shoulders with some people, even if the individuals turn out to be fascinating people with far different views than you’d stereotypically attribute to them. But this was just wild. Of course, I imagine myself going around with my spy camera at the Bohemia Club, unraveling the mysteries of California’s rulers. But it was typical of Kevin, the reconciliatory kind of vision.

He also had this thing, like Tom Hayden, of really accentuating Irishness. He had this kind of Irish gang, as many people know, that included figures like Robert McGuire — a self-identified Irish group that would meet in the Pacific Dining Car or wherever they all hung out. I was somewhat included on the periphery of this, which isn’t so strange in a way because my two older children are Irish citizens. I lived in Belfast during the Troubles for about a year and a half. But I always found it kind of amusing, because I grew up Irish Catholic in a town where everyone was a Southern Baptist, Mormon, or some form of Pentecostal. I was always fascinated by Irish Americans who came from real Irish-American backgrounds: those with grandfathers who ran bars on 42nd Street. I always found that interesting, and I have a green shirt that has “Unrepentant Irish Bastard” written on it that I put on for special occasions. My ethnic identification extends to stuff that I never heard Kevin talk about, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He may have talked about it all the time, but I was never witness to it. And I never brought it up.

The frequency with which the adjective “baroque” is attached to Kevin is amusing, but in some ways appropriate. It’s not at all hard to see Kevin as a baroque pope. And he was progressive without, as far as I know, ever writing about, say, liberation theology. I never quite understood the religious stuff until Kevin died and I talked to his wife Sheila about how he had this high mass and how important that was to him. But I also saw Kevin somewhat through the eyes of my mother, who’s a Ryan and Mulligan. The most fundamental, primordial distinction she made was between the shanty Irish and the lace curtain Irish. My mother definitely hated the lace curtain Irish — she hated Jackie Kennedy. I’ll never forget: my mother comes in, I’m at my folks’ house in the ’70s and she says, “Could anything be more disgraceful?” I said, “What’s that?” “Onassis gives her $20,000 a year just to spend on lingerie,” my mother says, “Can you imagine that? $20,000 a year for undies and people are starving all over the world?”

When I first met Kevin, I thought he was most likely a son of privilege; in fact, he was shanty Irish to the core. Tom Reifer, who writes a chapter coauthored with Cid Martinez in this volume — I was struck by how similar of a background he has to Kevin, going through a series of orphanages and foster homes. Tom spent a lot of time on the street and had a really tough upbringing. But it was a revelation for me to discover Kevin’s background.

On the matter of whether Kevin told an accurate story of California, I think his story changed over time. Kevin evolved like any serious historian or writer would through writing and research, always in constant dialogue with Sheila. She told me after he died that Kevin loved me, and I was incredibly touched by that. But it’s hard to pin Kevin down. There’s certainly a huge contrast between the Kevin I met at the end of the ’80s and ’90s the Kevin of the ’70s whom Richardson writes about, which I thought was being a bit of a big-game hunter in that piece in this volume, and not seeing personal transformation, or the evolution of ideas. Richardson interprets Kevin as a reactionary, part of the elite, which seems to have been his aspiration at one time.

But the Kevin I remember above all is the librarian — the state librarian. Quite frankly, most historians and academics take librarians more or less for granted. Sure, you’ll put them in your acknowledgements, or mentions, or something. But they don’t understand, I think, what the real vocation of a librarian is. As a librarian, or as Kevin would put it, a “civil servant” — he was very proud of that term — he was a fighter for the public sphere and believed in public works. Basically, he saw the capacity of the public sphere for doing good.

It’s funny that I never talked to Kevin about [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, but I assume he had some exposure to FDR. In my case my dad was a founding member of his meat cutters’ local — he was more trade union than he was a Democrat; but of course, he adored FDR. I understand that Kevin had admired one of FDR’s advisors, Father John Ryan, who was definitely a working-class hero. And considering this was the period of Father Coughlin, Ryan really was a progressive figure. It’s always confused me, because I didn’t know Kevin well enough to pull together all the different facets of Kevin, and how he squared his Catholic education with a lot of his beliefs. Now, of course, when you think of Jesuits you think of Greg Boyle and so on, and Jesuits being killed by juntas in Latin America. But in Kevin’s day, that wouldn’t be true. There were German Jesuits who ran the ratline, helping Nazis escape.

I left the Church on my own when I was about twelve because I was totally enthralled with science. I became an atheist without much external influence. Later on, I developed a great interest in religion, beginning with Pentecostals. I used to tell people if they asked, “What was the single most important event in twentieth century Los Angeles?” It would have to be Azusa Street. New religion among extremely poor Italian immigrants, Black people, Mexican track laborers, and so on. I would have loved to talk to Kevin more about that. But then, we’d all love to have another hundred hours with him.

He would often say that I called him a Whig, but I don’t think he is one. But does he practice a kind of Whiggish history? The answer has to be “Yeah,” but qualified by the fact that he also can see the darkness and is always fighting against the darkness of history, whereas I find so much of the truth of history precisely in that darkness. I’m notorious for saying hope is not a scientific term — people find it out of love and anger, not because of some promise that history will pay them.

For Kevin’s final volumes, he turned attention to the Catholic Church, and was deeply affected by its scandals. For working-class Catholics in many parts of the world, the scandals that rocked the Church have been an utter catastrophe. I see that most in the case of Ireland. I remember riding to the airport one time while there, and I started talking to the taxi driver about this. The guy said, “Do you mind if I pull off the road for two minutes?” He just started weeping. He said it just tore his heart out, and that we’re all guilty in a way because we all kind of knew on the margins of our consciousness that this stuff went on.Hope is not a scientific term — people find it out of love and anger, not because of some promise that history will pay them.

I never talked to Kevin as far as I can recall about any of this and how he experienced it. His writing is autobiographical, and his interviews and his writings don’t sound much like the Church, or at least the Irish Church — most of my friends in Ireland, my generation, were educated by the Christian Brothers. They knew the strap and they knew beatings from elementary school. Kevin’s got very nostalgic portraits of his Catholic school education.

I’ve actually always been jealous of Kevin, because more than anything in the world I always wanted to live in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. I never managed to do it. I felt deeply alienated growing up here in San Diego. I think it’s obvious from his biography that he had a tremendous amount of anger around his experience growing up rejected, unwanted by his mother and father, and in San Francisco, in the shadow of the wealthy and all.

One of the people I’ve always admired most is Greg Boyle. He was the only person in the city to get up and say that the issue here is jobs. “Give me one job, I’ll take one gang member and turn them into a member of the working class,” he said, at a time when the archdiocese couldn’t really care less. But Kevin had a far different vision of working men and women, of working hand in hand with one another in order to respect one another and build anew, with protections we had for workers when unions were strong in this country.

I’d like to also point out in kind of a summary that Kevin really believed people can be changed by dialogue with people who have different or opposing views. That’s why he was always trying to connect people from different backgrounds. I’m not sure if that was Hegelian or Roycean idealism; I don’t think scholastics would call themselves Hegelians. One of my closest friends in Ireland — with a PhD in scholastic philosophy at Queen’s in Belfast, from a tough working-class background — we used to fight all night long about these questions, Hegel and Marx versus the scholastics, but this is an area of ignorance for me. Obviously I’m aware of Josiah Royce’s influence on Kevin, but on his ideas I don’t have much of a clue. I know that somewhere Kevin says that Royce was the biggest single influence on him. He talks about Royce and Carey McWilliams as being two major influences, but actually Royce is the more important one.

Kevin’s desire to bring people together he saw as something of a hopeful act, or the struggle for corrective action he would talk about. Kevin also believed in the inherent goodness of people, some who might be deemed inherently evil. Actually the theologians that I’ve read, some of the Russians, left me fascinated with the concept of the apocalypse not as universal destruction and disorder, but as the emergence of the truth of history at the end of time. History is, then, experienced basically by the wretched of the earth, and by persecuted minorities. That made me a big fan of Ernst Bloch, and the whole messianic strand of Jewish Marxism.

I’m very touched to be given this opportunity to share my thoughts about Kevin. We’ll never see the likes of him again.

CONTRIBUTORS
Mike Davis is the author of several books, including Planet of Slums and City of Quartz.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MIKE DAVIS 

Trump issues sinister threat to 'root out' leftists if elected in 2024

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
November 13, 2023 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump pledged during a Veterans Day speech on Saturday to "root out" those he described as "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" if he's elected in 2024, an openly fascistic threat that drew comparisons to Nazi rhetoric.

"We are a failing nation. We are a nation in serious decline," Trump, the current Republican presidential frontrunner, told the crowd gathered in Claremont, New Hampshire. "2024 is our final battle."

The former president vowed to target communists and Marxists—ideological groups that he described as "radical left lunatics"—and "rout the fake news media until they become real."

"The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it's growing every day—every single day," Trump claimed. "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."

David DeWitt, editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal, characterized Trump's remarks as "rhetoric literally out of the Nazi playbook" and joined others in criticizing The New York Times for initially headlining its coverage of the speech, "Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction."

The former president also said Saturday that his administration would launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history," institute "strong and ideological screenings for all immigrants," revive the Muslim ban, further slash taxes, gut regulations, and prioritize the approval of fossil fuel pipelines.

Trump's speech heightened alarm over his authoritarian intentions should he win another term in the White House four years after attempting to overturn the election that removed him from power. The former president is currently facing more than 90 felony charges, many of them stemming from his election subversion efforts and the January 6, 2021 insurrection that he provoked.

The Washington Postreported earlier this month that Trump and his allies "have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations."

"In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to 'go after' President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence," the Post noted. "To facilitate Trump's ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional."

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued the scheme "would be, in essence, the military coup that [Trump] wasn't quite able to pull off on January 6, 2021."

Pointing to a recent survey that showed Trump leading incumbent President Joe Biden—who is running for reelection—in key battleground states, Bunch warned that "America is on the brink of installing a strongman in the White Housewhose team has been surprisingly open about their plans for an autocratic, 'Red Caesar' rule that would undo constitutional governance."

In response to Trump's threat to "root out" leftists, Bunch wrote

on social media, "Looks like someone picked up the book of Hitler speeches on his nightstand recently."

RAT BAIT

It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk

NOT JUST ANY VERMIN BUT LEFT WING VERMIN

He’s telling us what he will do to his political enemies if he’s president again. Is anyone listening?

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump spoke at a rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday



We’ve all often wondered whether Donald Trump understands the historical import of what comes out of his mouth. He’s so ill-informed, so proudly ignorant, that it’s easy to think that when he hurls a historical insult, he just doesn’t know.

I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.

Before we get to that, let’s just record what he wrote and said. On Saturday at 10:25 a.m., he posted on Truth Social: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.” Then, at a rally in New Hampshire later that day, he repeated those words essentially verbatim—promising to “root out ... the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”—and then doubled down on it: “The real threat is not from the radical right, the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.

Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Maus and Maus II, the graphic novels in which he drew Jews as mice and their Nazi captors as menacing cats, explained some years ago to The New York Review of Books how he hit upon the idea:

I began to read what I could about the Nazi genocide, which really was very easy because there was actually rather little available in English. The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was The Eternal Jew, a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.

If you feel that you need additional backup, just go to Google Images and type in “Jewish vermin.” You’ll get the picture in a hurry. Here’s one cartoon from an Austrian newspaper in 1939 depicting Jewish refugees as scurrying rats. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of such images.

Trump, let us clarify, does not mean Jews. He means some Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which come to think of it is most Jews. And by the way, to drop that rhetorical bomb at this time, when antisemitism is raging across the country because of what’s happening in the Middle East, is especially outrageous. But Trump’s vermin are not a racial category. No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him.

And no, he’s not going to be throwing anybody in a gas chamber. But that’s a pretty low bar for un-American behavior; that is, fascism was not so bad until it started exterminating people? The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.

Apparently many Americans need to. I woke up Sunday to a Latino man telling CNN for a story about Trump gaining among Latinos that well, under Trump, we didn’t have all this inflation. Which is true as far as it goes. The inflation wasn’t Joe Biden’s fault, but of course Biden and the Democrats can’t say that true thing because it sounds like excuse-making. And one can’t blame this man, who I assume is working hard to feed his children, for thinking this way.

But dear God. Can’t we get people to think about fascism, and what Trump would do to this country? Trump invoked “vermin” on the very day that The New York Times broke yet another harrowing story about his second term plans, this time having to do with immigration. “He plans,” the Times reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” And he wants to build huge—yes—detention camps. There’s much more. And all of this, by the way, appears to have been fed to the paper by his own people, who are obviously proud of it. They want America to know. And just before this, remember, Trump told Univision that he would use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies.

They are telling us in broad daylight that they want to rape the Constitution. And now Trump has told us explicitly that he will use Nazi rhetoric to stoke the hatred and fear that will make this rape seem, to some, a necessary cleansing. We may not get every voter to care about this. But for those of us who do care, this is what the election is about, and nothing else, and history is screaming at us to convince as many people as we can.

Michael Tomasky @mtomasky
Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic.

Climatewatch: Can the market get us to net zero?

Statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh. Image: Shutterstock

Marco Magrini considers the limits of market forces to tackle climate change

Homo economicus, as we were dubbed by Adam Smith, the father of economics, can be an amazing species. As the canny Scottish Enlightenment thinker predicted, it seems that people can, en masse, adopt new, radical technologies when they’re sufficiently mature, whenever it benefits them. It happened in a snap with the internet, not to mention the smartphone. It may be happening again with clean-energy technologies.

In the first half of 2023, ‘investment in renewable energy skyrocketed to US$358 billion’, according to BloombergNEF’s latest report. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that, in 2023, global renewable capacity will grow by more than 440 gigawatts, the biggest increase ever, mostly thanks to solar investments (and to China). As incredible as it may sound, next year, the manufacturing capacity for photovoltaics production is expected to more than double to one terawatt (1,000 gigawatts).

The recent swift adoption of electric vehicles has also been astounding. Less than five per cent of all new cars sold were electric in 2020, rising to around nine per cent in 2021 and 14 per cent in 2022. This year, EVs are projected to reach a 19 per cent market share. In the first half of 2023, the Tesla Model Y was the top-selling car worldwide, thus beating every petrol-fuelled vehicle. ‘The global automotive market is firm in the Electric Disruption Zone,’ reads the CleanTechnica website with some fanfare.

Is H. economicus’s innate rationality going to steer our society towards the safe haven of decarbonisation? Unfortunately, the answer is no – its rationality is, by definition, marred by selfishness. As Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’

Solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles and lighting (more than half of residential lights are now low-consumption LEDs) are the only innovations, among the more than 50 monitored by the IEA, that are considered ‘on track’ towards the global goal of net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. All of the remaining ones are not.

The majority of the IEA’s indicators are listed in the ‘more efforts needed’ category, including energy efficiency, electrification level and renewables adoption in general, but also hydrogen, wind and nuclear, heating and cooling, energy storage and smart grids. The IEA also laments an insufficient pace of innovation.

The several items ‘not on track’ comprise coal usage, methane abatement from oil and gas operations, and gas flaring. Aviation and shipping are still far from their emissions goals, as are all heavy-emitting industries (aluminum, cement, chemicals, steel and paper). The still unproven carbon capture technology, long promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a dramatic solution, is probably off track entirely.

As a matter of fact, French consultancy Capgemini has outright excluded carbon capture from its own list of ‘technology quests’ that are needed to reach the fabled net-zero target. The list is a very detailed inventory of breakthroughs required to decarbonise Europe’s economy, including (unlike the IEA’s tracker) agriculture and land use (together responsible for more than 18 per cent of global emissions). From building a trans-Mediterranean electric grid powered by concentrating solar energy to retrofitting existing shipping vessels with ammonia-fuel-cell propulsion engines, Capgemini’s 55 quests give a clear idea of the magnitude of the tasks ahead.

Yet ‘progress is occurring faster in those parts of the energy system for which clean technologies are already available and costs are falling quickly’, the IEA reckons in its tracking report. In other words, H. economicus’s instincts aren’t sufficient to avert the climate and environmental crisis; the old idea that market forces could do it has proven to be a fallacy. Maybe a global tax on carbon emissions could have succeeded, but it was irrationally ruled out by many states.

Among the ‘not on track’ flags, the IEA also lists ‘behavioural changes’. In this case, the agency talks about energy usage, but it’s more than likely to be a general rule: nobody is keen on changing their status quo – neither people, nor nations.

We should also remember that Smith was no blind free-market zealot. He realised that his H. economicus needed interventionist government to guarantee the wealth of our nations

More climatewatch columns from Marco Magrini

The transition metals needed to power net-zero
Climatewatch: Dystopian fact not dystopian fiction
The warnings on climate change are clear
Should we use geoengineering to tinker with the planet?
2023 Europe heatwave showed off the charts climate anomalies

To Avoid a Dystopian Climate Future, We Must First Envision the World We Want

When we envision a sustainable future, we can show people that there is something worth fighting for, not just against.

By Kwolanne Felix , 

TRUTHOUT

November 12, 2023

As a climate activist struggling against slow-moving policies, influential Big Oil companies and public apathy, I’m mostly focused on stopping a future I don’t want. I fear a future where fossil fuels aren’t phased out in time, leading to ecological destruction and the destabilization of society due to climate change.

Yet, I find that pinpointing the future we do want is often much more difficult in the climate movement. Imagining this hopeful climate future is an essential practice because it helps sustain our movements, informs our advocacy and inspires action.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a world where we don’t intervene in the climate crisis in time. The narrative surrounding our climate and the future is overwhelmingly dystopian. Look no further than a long list of dystopian movies, shows, art and books set in a near-future ecological wasteland. These media tropes are popular and are shown in box office hits like Interstellar, Blade Runner and shows like “The 100.” Many of us are experiencing a glimpse of a terrifying dystopia as we witness the devastation of intensifying natural disasters and pollution. Many people believe we’re already doomed. Within this mindset, the climate movement is challenged in creating counternarratives to this doom-and-gloom expectation.

Established systems of oppression are skilled at making the current state of affairs seem inevitable. The climate crisis is no exception. The overproduction and overconsumption driving the climate crisis is often explained as “the selfishness of human nature,” or an inevitable cost of “population growth.” But this overlooks the fact that humans have been around for millions of years and have lived relatively sustainable lives. It’s only in the last few centuries that overconsumption of resources, including fossil fuels, has caused such extraordinary ecological degradation. These short-sighted explanations often stifle climate action and create a sense of hopelessness. To break out of this limited vision, climate activists must tap into collective imagination.

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INTERVIEW |

HUMAN RIGHTS

Practicing New Worlds in a Time of Collapse

“Our survival is at stake,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie.

By Kelly Hayes , TRUTHOUT

October 26, 2023

Embracing imagination in activism is often framed as wishful thinking. But radical imagination is a fundamental part of working toward a vision of the future for all social movements, from racial justice to decolonial movements. Imagination, world-building, dreams and utopias are used by various talented social activists who encourage us to envision a different world. Climate activists shouldn’t shy away from this.

I witnessed the power of imagination a few weeks ago when I was invited to an art exhibit focused on climate futures. This was during the tail end of one of the hottest summers in recent history, filled with natural disasters and reports of a perilous future if we don’t stop the climate crisis. The exhibit was a sharp contrast to this harsh reality. It was curated by talented climate scientists and author Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. It pulled together various Black artists and encouraged them to use different mediums to explore a sustainable and just future for their communities.

Established systems of oppression are skilled at making the current state of affairs seem inevitable. The climate crisis is no exception.

While walking through the gallery, I saw images of Black young people in a not-so-distant future enjoying a lush urban landscape. The artist Olalekan Jeyifous explores a vision of Brooklyn, New York, filled with joy, beauty and rich engagement with local ecologies in their exhibit, “The Frozen Neighborhoods.” I’d never seen anything like this before. Even though I work on the climate crisis with Black and Brown communities, I rarely have a chance to imagine us in a sustainable future. I’m often bogged down by the latest devastating news of the climate crisis to reflect on the possibility that we could succeed.

At that moment, I could almost taste what I’d been fighting for. I left the exhibit with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and dedication to climate advocacy. Climate advocacy is often thankless work. Having an opportunity to reflect on an exciting future is a regenerating practice that feeds our desires and renews our faith in this work. I hope to see more spaces where climate leaders work with artists, storytellers, filmmakers and writers to generate a vision of a better and brighter future.

This investment in creating visions of a sustainable future not only empowers climate activists; it’s also for the millions of people who are often discouraged from engaging in climate action. Most people believe that the climate crisis is a problem. But this knowledge can often translate to fear, hopelessness and dread. Climate anxiety is at an all-time high, especially among young people.

I hope to see more spaces where climate leaders work with artists, storytellers, filmmakers and writers to generate a vision of a better and brighter future.

The climate movement is missing an important opportunity to further engage by converting that dread and hopelessness into action and solidarity. People who experience overwhelming climate anxiety already know about the climate crisis and what’s at stake. More messaging about a grim future isn’t stimulating. We need to redirect attention to something more hopeful. By elevating and investing in ideas, images and writing about a bright, diverse and exciting climate future, we can inspire meaningful action and engagement. We must show people that there is something worth fighting for, not just against.

One of my favorite parts of imagining climate futures is that there isn’t just one vision to work toward. Our visions of a climate future should be as numerous and diverse as the many ecologies of the Earth and its people. Though I hope the climate movement invests more time in imagining climate utopias, futures and world-building, I want to push back against the need to create a universal vision.

Instead, I hope that climate spaces uplift a pluriverse of futures that nourish the needs of diverse communities. The climate futures and utopias of the Indigenous people of the Andes will look completely different from those of the communities of the Sahara region. We must embrace this as we explore futures that uplift Indigenous and traditional knowledge, sciences and sustainable practices.

In the wake of so much climate tragedy, a hopeful climate future of possibility is often the last thing on our minds. Nourishing the imagination is often an overlooked practice in climate movements. However, there are signs of change with prominent climate advocates, scientists and communities investing in imagination as a tool for change. As we start to see glimpses of climate dystopia, we remain in desperate need of visions of climate utopia.

Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination.

Capitalism’s proponents often defend it by pointing to the virtues of markets. But capitalism isn’t defined by the presence of markets — it’s defined by capitalists’ domination of workers.

A factory in India spews smoke as it burns discarded Amazon packaging on Saturday, November 19, 2022. (Prashanth Vishwanathan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)


BYBEN BURGIS
11.12.2023
JACOBIN

The video essay opens with battling citations of environmental activist Greta Thunberg and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. She says, “Capitalism will kill us all.” He says, “Free markets will save us all.” But, the narrator gently suggests, these are both untrustworthy sources. Fortunately, she’s here to break it all down for us.

The video has almost half a million views. The narrator is the German theoretical physicist and gifted science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder. Anyone on the socialist left hoping for Comrade Sabine will be disappointed. Her video is entitled “Capitalism is good. Let me explain.”

It’s an odd choice of subject. Hossenfelder’s popular YouTube channel usually tackles subjects like dark matter, the theoretical possibility of time travel, and whether the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics makes any sense.

As far as I can tell as a layman, she’s doing valuable work in those videos. I’d love it if more scientists found clear ways to communicate and correct misconceptions about their areas of expertise.

But when she turns from debunking bad memes about quantum physics to trying to debunk critics of capitalism, her commitment to rigor flies out the window. She performs reasonableness at several points throughout the video — like when she on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands the rhetoric of Thunberg and Kennedy — but the quality of the underlying arguments is less Carl Sagan than Jordan Peterson. It’s a compendium of common arguments people make in defense of capitalism when they haven’t taken the time to actually hear out any of the system’s critics.
Fun Fact — Money Existed Long Before Capitalism!

Hossenfelder spends the opening minutes of the video talking about the reasons why using money as a universal medium of exchange is more efficient than using a barter system. But what does this have to do with the video’s stated topic? Money existed throughout thousands of years of feudalism, ancient slave societies, and non-capitalist political-economic systems.

Later in the video, she bolsters her case for capitalism with a dismissive reference to “the nations who still don’t use it, such as North Korea, Cuba, and Laos,” which she tells us aren’t “places you would want to live.” Maybe so, but they’re all places where people use currency — the North Korean won, the Cuban peso, and the Laotian kip — to buy and sell products.

To be fair, Hossenfelder seems to be aware that market transactions have existed before — and, where capitalism has been locally replaced by other systems, after — capitalism. She says that capitalism itself comes about when you add “a person or institution who provides capital to those who want to launch a new business.”Money existed throughout thousands of years of feudalism, ancient slave societies, and non-capitalist political-economic systems.

This is a little warmer, but still quite cold. Hossenfelder seems to have mixed up the narrower category of financiers with the broader concept of a capitalist. Finance capital is certainly an important part of typical capitalist economies. But Hossenfelder’s definition of “capitalist” implies that we wouldn’t be living under capitalism if everyone who owned a business got their starting funds in other ways — for instance, from inheritance, saving up wages, winning high-stakes power games, or robbing banks.

Capitalism’s critics typically distinguish capitalism from other systems, like feudalism and socialism, by talking about what Karl Marx called “relations of production.” The relationship between a feudal lord and a peasant is one production relation, the relationship between a Roman patrician and his slaves is another, and the relationship between capitalists and workers is a third.

The single sentence referencing North Korea, Cuba, and Laos is the only mention in Hossenfelder’s sixteen-minute video of any possible alternative to capitalism. Even more amazing, there’s only one mention of a critic of capitalism other than twenty-year-old Greta Thunberg. And this single sentence is also the only one in the entire video referencing the concept of class.

She says:
Capitalism got a pretty bad rep when Marx claimed that it’s just about grabbing hold of the “means of production” and “exploiting the working class.” Of course, there was an element of truth to his fears, because some things went badly wrong during the industrial revolution, but that’s another story.

The million-plus subscribers to her channel are left in the dark about what either of the quoted phrases actually means. But the implication of what she says here and later in the video is that “exploiting” the working class just means “mistreating” them, and that this was subsequently solved by the regulatory state.

Marx’s actual point is that, under capitalism, there’s a class of people who own the means of production — everything from factories and farms to restaurants and grocery stores — and a much larger class of people who have no realistic way of making a living except renting out their working hours to capitalists. This means that, whether we’re talking about Victorian England or Sweden in 1970s (in many ways the high-water mark of social democratic welfare states in human history so far), there’s still a deep power asymmetry between workers and capitalists.


Regulation, labor unions, and a welfare state can all sand away some of the most horrifying edges of that power asymmetry, but even heavy doses of all three don’t eliminate it. Most of the working population is still forced by what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of economic necessity to spend half their waking hours, most days of the week, following orders from unelected bosses.

“Exploitation” refers to one class’s involuntary extraction of a “surplus” created by another. Under feudalism, Marx pointed out, this extraction happened right out in the open. Serfs might have their own little plot of land they were allowed to work part of the time, but there were designated periods of time in which they were coercively required to farm the lord’s field.

Under capitalism, exploitation is disguised by the legal form of a voluntary agreement between equal parties — what in Capital Marx calls the owner of money and the owner of “labor power” (i.e., the capacity for a certain number of hours of work). At the end of the day, though, workers under capitalism still have no realistic choice except to part with much of what they produce. There’s a portion of the day in which they’re laboring to produce products or services that are equivalent to what were advanced to them as wages, and a portion of the day in which they’re laboring to enrich the boss. So part of the money generated by the activity of workers in Amazon warehouses, for example, goes to paying for Jess Bezos’s spaceship.

Workers can go work for some other capitalist, but the basic shape of the deal will be the same. If they want to have a job and not beg for change on the streets or go on welfare for as long as they can or live in the woods, they have to consent to this arrangement.

Hossenfelder makes a big show of crediting capitalism with spurring scientific innovation. The example she focuses on — the development of medicine — is particularly poorly chosen, given the massive role played by state investment in medical research even in the ultra-capitalist United States.

But the general point that capitalism spurs technological development (what Marx called development of the “forces of production”) is absolutely correct. The opening pages of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto are so much prose poetry on this exact point. Where Marx and Hossenfelder differ is on the question of whether capitalism is the best humanity can do — whether the choice is between capitalism and North Korea — or whether it’s possible for workers and communities to run the means of production collectively and democratically, thereby allowing humanity in general to benefit from the high-tech abundance capitalism has generated.
Capitalism, North Korea, or . . .?

Anyone who’s ever heard of the six-decade-long embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba — which almost every country on the planet annually begs us to lift for humanitarian reasons in United Nations resolutions — or, say, the Vietnam War might have some inkling that not all the problems that beset Cuba and Laos are products of innate flaws in their economic systems.

To put it in terms a scientist should be able to understand, these economic experiments haven’t exactly been allowed to proceed under laboratory conditions. This is true even of the country with the most deeply undesirable political model of the three she lists. The United States bombed North Korea so intensely during the Korean War that some estimates put the casualties at 15 percent of the population.

Part of the money generated by the activity of workers in Amazon warehouses goes to paying for Jess Bezos’s spaceship.

That said, it would be foolish to blame everything that ails these societies — some of which, by the way, I’d much rather live in than others — on external factors. Their systems do have very real flaws. But Hossenfelder is willing to entertain a variety of different forms of capitalism, and throughout her video blames the environmental and other failings of real-life capitalism on capitalism not having been “set up” correctly — with enough regulation, or with sufficiently smart regulations. Why isn’t she similarly willing to consider alternative possible kinds of socialism?

The most obvious objection to the societies she lists, or broadly structurally similar examples like the Soviet Union, is that they were or are politically authoritarian. One of the main values that has inspired socialists over the generations is a desire for more democracy than exists under capitalism. We like democracy so much we want to extend it to the workplace, and to large-scale economic decisions of the kind currently made by wealthy CEOs only accountable to their shareholders. In countries like the USSR, workers had no more institutionalized say in what happened in factories or offices than their counterparts in the capitalist West, and large-scale decisions were made by unelected bureaucrats.

There were also real problems with economic efficiency, particularly with aligning production priorities with fine-grained consumer preferences, that can’t be reduced to the lack of democracy. Even if we added a free press and multiparty elections to the basic structure of the Soviet economy, so that whichever party won each election got to appoint the head of the state planning office, I see little reason to think that would have taken away the day-to-day frustrations of consumers at Soviet grocery stores.

It could be that, at least at this phase of history, we don’t know how to organize an efficient modern economy without some market mechanisms of the kind that the USSR lacked. But that doesn’t mean we need capitalist property relations that disenfranchise most the population at the workplace and create a small elite of capitalists with outsize political power.

Why not have, for example, a system where the “institution” that “provides capital to those who want to launch a new business” is a state-owned bank, and it only provides capital to internally democratic workers collectives? This would still provide market mechanisms where they are needed. Meanwhile, the “commanding heights” of the economy — like energy, finance, and transportation — could be taken into public ownership. Sectors like health care and education could be taken outside of the market altogether and provided as public goods, free at the point of service — as indeed they already are, to one extent or another, in actually existing social democracies.

My friend Mike Beggs has provided some detailed thoughts about the logistics of such a model here. (Full disclosure: I’m cowriting a book with Beggs and Bhaskar Sunkara fleshing out this model.) Someone as smart as Hossenfelder might well have good objections to this model that would give us pause. But for her to make them, she’d have to do something she’s shown no inclination whatsoever to do: she’d have to actually seek out critics of capitalism and ask us what we think.
“But That’s Another Story”

Throughout the video, Hossenfelder waves away concerns about environmental or other externalities with the phrase “that’s another story.” It never seems to occur to her that one of the main motivations for criticisms of capitalism is a considered judgment that it’s all the same story.

In other words, there are at least two reasons to think the long-term horizons of the Left should go beyond reforming capitalism with better regulations or a bigger welfare state to transcending capitalist property relations entirely. One is philosophical: we don’t think it’s fair or reasonable that some people have to rent themselves out to capitalists while other people get to live off the labor of others.

But the other reason is practical. We’ve noticed that where important reforms have been achieved in the past, they’re eroded or even reversed by the efforts of the politically powerful capitalist class. As the Marxist theoretician Rosa Luxemburg once put it, reforms are important, but a workers’ movement whose long-term horizons are limited to reform ends up being like Sisyphus in Greek mythology — perpetually rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down.

That’s bad enough when it comes to reforms that remove entirely avoidable forms of human misery. But it’s potentially catastrophic when it comes to the environmental issues that seem to be among the only problems with capitalism Hossenfelder has noticed. If we don’t take power out of the hands of the capitalists who are letting their unquenchable thirst for profit destroy the planet, our very survival as a species may be at risk.

Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.

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EDITORS

The death of the New York Times

D. Earl Stephens
November 12, 2023 

Photo by Stéphan Valentin on Unsplash

After being a loyal reader for the better part of 60 years, I have officially run out of respect for The New York Times.

I have come to the grudging realization that this newspaper is actively playing a part in undermining our Democracy by convening a political horse race, and backing a burnt-orange, reprehensible, racist traitor, and his dirty trainers, who mean our country harm.

I believe they are doing this because they have lost their way and their morals, and have carefully dug out a tributary that flows from the obscene river of cash that is currently poisoning our politics, and runs directly into the bottomless pockets of the broken decision-makers whose fat asses are comfortably stuffed in the chairs of their front offices.

Unrest and instability might be bad for our Democracy, but they are damn good for business at The New York Times.

I take no pride in writing what I believe is this necessary piece.

I have been a steady reader of the “Gray Lady” for most of my life. Growing up in New Jersey, I actually aspired to work at the place as a starry-eyed kid, who pedaled his bike around delivering newspapers after school each day.

That never happened, and mostly by design. It turns out I got far more of a thrill working for smaller, underdog newspapers that stood up for their readers, called power to account, and strived to make a real difference in their communities.

Still, I never lost my respect for The Times — until now.

Their news presentation was boring, gray and haughty, but their writing and editing was second to none, and I had a certain amount of confidence that if there was an important world or national story that needed telling they’d get to it before anybody, and fire it out there for all to see.

In the wake of the terrible blast on November 8, 2016, that blew a hole through America’s decency, it took me no time at all to write in so many words, that it would be professional journalism organizations like The New York Times that would dig deep into Trump’s gory affairs, and begin exposing him for what he was, and always had been.

They would save the day, because that is what good journalism can do when it is done right.

They’d cover his White House like a blanket. When he invariably did completely terrible, anti-American things like defending Vladimir Putin’s attack on America while standing next to the murdering fascist in Helsinki, they’d put a laser focus on it, and make sure everybody in the world understood why that really mattered.

Yes, their treatment of Hillary Clinton’s emails (and the woman herself) leading up to the 2016 Election was a journalistic crime spree, but I still had confidence they would make amends for that malfeasance.

If you are saying to yourself right now that I was a gullible fool, and I was served my just deserts, I am saying that is completely fair.

I still believe I was mostly right, at least for a time, and The Times did start turning around some pretty good stuff that covered the burnt-orange traitor with shame. Just as quickly, however, they resorted to ultra-cheap, both-sides journalism, even when there was nobody even close to the incomparably awful, lying, pussy-grabbing racist and his fawning party on the other side.

And if I never read another 77-column-inch story dedicated to what 11 Trump supporters are saying about anything while inhaling black coffee in a Pennsylvania diner it will be too soon.

What has finally driven my lifelong respect for the paper to an end was yet another poll they conducted with Sienna College that went to print this weekend focusing on six swing states. The poll was accompanied by hundreds and hundreds of column inches devoted to a bunch of ridiculous numbers culled from a sampling of American voters that was so small, the 11 Trump voters at the diner looked more significant and reputable by comparison.

I guess The Times wanted everybody on the face of the Earth to know that according to them Joe Biden was in trouble in these six swing states, and that their burnt-orange steed was snorting hard and closing with a huff on the outside.

We can try to play stupid for a minute and pretend the leadership at The Times had somehow talked itself into believing it was performing some kind of helpful journalism to its readers by producing this bought-and-paid-for bilge, but that just doesn’t add up.

There are too many people there who know full well that a news organization’s job is to report the news, not make it. By devoting three full news cycles to this outlandish slop, the paper made it crystal clear they valued themselves and their bank accounts more than their readers.

Essentially, they told their readers this: “We are glad you are paying us to cover the news, but we just did something we think is important and we are going to spend the next three days patting ourselves on the back and telling you why we’ve come to amazing conclusions that we think are so bloody important. Please make sure you sign your checks before sending them to us. You’re welcome.”

I’m not going to wade too deeply into the results of this poll for reasons I will get to in a second. And frankly, I don’t know how many polls have to be wrong before people stop paying attention to them altogether. Still … I would like to know why Republicans were oversampled by The Times in this particular foray into professional guessing.

The Times has not provided an answer to this question, but it is a fact their minuscule sample size of the American public was predominated by right-leaning voters.

As to polls in general ... To start, they are often ridiculously wrong, as we’ve seen time and time again since, ironically, Trump was somehow elected despite being given a one-in-five chance on Election Day 2016 by these expert pollsters.

More consequentially, depending on their murky results, polls can also present a very dangerous bias and these days are being used mostly by Republicans to suppress the vote. Nobody has more practice in the ghoulish art of voter-suppression than they do.


Let me tell you just one grievous story about how bogus poll results were used to re-elect the vomit-inducing Ron Johnson (another one of Putin’s fast friends, incidentally) in last year’s senatorial race here in Wisconsin, and how the Democratic Party inexplicable and disastrously fell for this ruse.

In the final weeks of the race, polls were released in Wisconsin showing Johnson running 4%-to-7% points ahead of his firebrand of a challenger, Democrat, Mandela Barnes.

These numbers were a bit of stunner because incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers was also on the ballot, and was running slightly ahead of his Trump-kissed challenger.

It was also obvious to anybody who was actually covering this campaign, instead of floating poll numbers into the air about it, that it was crystal clear Barnes was closing like a freight train on the fading Johnson.

I was at two of Barnes rallies in the final days of the campaign and the man was drawing huge crowds, and was positively on fire. He was connecting, and I had no doubt in my mind that the race was going to be very close.

Trouble is, the Democratic National Committee got wind of these bad polls for Barnes and pulled the money they had planned to allocate to his campaign during the final week, and instead deployed it to other races they deemed closer and safer around the nation.

Turns out, Johnson prevailed by less than ONE percentage point. It was agonizingly close. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise that if the DNC had stayed with Barnes he would be in Washington right now representing my state in the Senate.

Oh, and Evers won his race in a cakewalk. So much for those polls.

In this case, bad polls actually scared the DNC away. In too many other cases, polls can convince prospective voters that maybe the person they are supporting doesn’t stand a chance. This might cool their support for him or her on Election Day.

I’d guess that both of these things conspired to sink Barnes, which still makes my stomach turn.

But back to this NYT poll, and why what’s left of my hair is on fire.

It turns out that buried deep inside the print editions of their endless, breathtaking coverage of their flimflam poll, was this juicy nugget they had to hope almost nobody would see:

“Polls have often failed to predict results of elections this far out.”

I mean, holy s---.

This isn’t burying the lede, it’s completely obliterating it.

Oh, and on Tuesday? Democrats once again exceeded expectations and those blasted polls in nationwide elections, and won just about every important race on the docket.

Ever since Trump and his Republicans attack on our country and subsequent coup attempt in 2021, I have been calling for The Times and ALL major media companies to establish Democracy Desks in their newsrooms.

Every day — hell, every HOUR — Republicans are doing something to undermine our Democratic Republic here in America, whether it be squashing voting rights, refusing to certify elections, threatening DOJ officials, flat lying about the results of these elections, supporting dictators around the world, banning books detailing our nation’s choppy history, all of the above, and more.

It never ends. There is no bigger overarching story in America right now than Republicans’ surge toward fascism.

WHY isn’t this being given the editorial weight it deserves?

I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again right here: If the Republicans are successful in taking down our Democracy and installing an authoritarian regime in Washington, one of the very first things to go will be our freedom of the press, and THEN where will The Times be?

It is ludicrous that their readers aren’t being educated everyday about what the Republicans have in mind and how devastating it would be to the citizens of this country if they ever got back into the White House.

For one thing, it’s fair to posit there would never be another election again -- at least not one that would be remotely fair.

Ever since the disaster in November, 2016, just enough Americans have risen up and gotten active stamping out the flames of fascism Republicans have so frantically been fanning.

But we could use a little help.

That would start with some first-class journalism and reporting about things as they are. That would start with knocking it the hell off with these stupid polls that predict nothing, and start dealing with our terrifying realties.

That would mean spending the time and resources necessary to really dig in, and actually start reporting only the news that’s fit to print.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough