Political Philosophy

Edmund Burke, father of classical conservatism, and Eduard Bernstein, one of the foundational thinkers of democratic socialism, have a remarkable similarity in their approach to solving problems. Here I begin by showing that they share a disdain for dogmatic certainty. The books under consideration are Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism. Both are available for free on the internet and in e-book form various places.
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Launching off the interplay between the Desert Manifesto and Eckersley’s Green State, I discuss the meaning and place of the anarchist value and strategy of mutual aid. I talk a bit about the origins of the concept of mutual aid, and some of the reasons why this idea is becoming popular now.

According to the anonymous author of Desert, even anarchists have been caught in the Enlightenment grand narrative of history as progress,and the “end of history” in some ideal future utopia. Though they disagree about the promise and value of state power, Desert and Robyn Eckersley (The Green State) both depart from “ideological possession.” Either explicitly (Desert) or implicitly (Eckersley), they reject the grand narrative and introduce a new openness to a pluralistic “good enough for now” perspective that may be more useful for actually making things better, incrementally. I continue to try to find areas of agreement as well as opposition between these two perspectives, because we need to compromise to survive. Can Desert find a place even within Eckersley’s vision–yes, because for both authors it’s not “all or nothing.”

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/green-state

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https://lauriemjohnson.com/
https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

This brief video discusses what a time bank is and some of the philosophy behind the idea, including the ideas of its founder Edgar Cahn. I became interested in the idea after reading Walter Brueggemann’s Another Kingdom. Time banks already exist in a lot of cities and towns. The URL below will take you to TimeBanks.org, which has everything you need to find out if you have one nearby or to start one up if you don’t. Time banks are one way that we can cooperate with each other without relying on the money economy.
https://timebanks.org/

https://www.nycservice.org/organizations/1097

http://www.cafederationoftimebanks.org/starting-a-time-bank.html

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https://lauriemjohnson.com/
https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

In this video, I reflect on the current coronavirus pandemic and what I think I have learned over the past couple of years about the human reaction to crises and how our “just in time” economy and expectations can leave us without the resources to deal resiliency with unforeseen contingencies.

In this final video on McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? I discuss some of the big takeaways I get from the book, and relate Wark’s view of “past masters” and detournement of old ideas to Friedrich Nietzsche’s three types of history in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Along the way, we find out why farmers are turning into hackers.

I will make some final observations based on reading McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead next weekend. The weekend after that I’ll put up a special topic lecture on Machiavelli. Starting on the third weekend of March I’ll start up on Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. If you’d like to follow along on that book you can get it for under $20 on Kindle or in paperback on Amazon and probably a lot of other sellers.

Thinking about Ch. 5 in McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, I dwell on how the scientists and technologists might have been able to make the world truly better rather than more dangerous and polluted. We still look at them as our heroes and saviors. But they’ve done more harm than good, at least arguably. Who or what is responsible for their status as tools of corporate profit-seeking and national security? What light does this unorthodox view of scientists (not as our saviors but as a large part of the problem) have to say about if and how we can deal with our environmental problems. Is there any reason to think that the scientific and technical hacker class can rise to the occasion and use their latent imagination to create pathways to a better way of life?

McKenzie Wark argues that capitalists are no longer at the top of the economic food chain, and that this is not good news. It turns out vectoralists can make more money by outsourcing risk and depreciation to manufacturers and contractors and moving the capitalist pieces around on the global chessboard. That makes them, as Cardi B says, “the boss.” In this video I reflect on some of the key insights from Chapter 4 of Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
For more from me:
https://lauriemjohnson.com/
https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/