Monthly Archives: April 2020

Review of Nathan RobinsonsWhy You Should Be a Socialist(Macmillan, 2019).

Like Moses and the ancient Israelites, for forty or so years, socialists were lost in the wilderness. From 1975 to 2015, socialists were a fast-greying lot with no power and influence and very little hope. A small few cornered appointments at universities, stuck by their politics, but remained politically isolated. The rest congregated on the margins of political life; or hid their full convictions from their coworkers, friends, and family; or threw themselves into union and community activism but never dared to use the s word. Or they gave up altogether.

That has changed, thank God. Socialismis back. And were now in a moment that is calling out for new books, magazines, documentaries, podcasts, and commentary making the case for democratic-socialist politics to millions of readers.

Thats what makes Nathan Robinsons new book Why You Should Be a Socialist a welcome and useful addition to the bumper crop in cases for left-wing politics. In a little over 250 pages, Robinson persuasively lays out the moral case against capitalism, a system of brutal exploitation, oppression, and waste that Robinson dissects and disposes of in short order.

Robinson launches the book by engaging a hypothetical reader who is extremely dubious about socialist ideas and promises to win them over. Its a fruitful strategy. Even though most of his readers will probably be at the very least already curious about democratic-socialist politics, theyll find many of their doubts assuaged and questions answered.

Robinson does so by directing his attention first to awakening in his readers a socialist instinct. He invokes basic moral principles that many of us share, a hatred of cruelty and a passionate desire to alleviate suffering being prominent among them.

His own process of radicalization provides the starting point for this part of the argument. I saw people buying new phones every year and keeping the old ones in a drawer, while a few miles away, day laborers picked tomatoes, earning 45 cents for every 30-pound bucket. I saw reports of Americans being charged $5,000 by hospitals for an icepack and a bandage, or paying $1,200 a month in rent for a bunk bed.

No doubt every reader has had similar experiences. And while the depravities of the capitalist system are onerous enough for those of us not on the top, the life of luxury for the lucky few makes it all the worse. Robinson appeals to those readers who want to see what being super-wealthy means, but [who] dont have the door codes to get inside their lairs sorry, homes to buy a copy of the Wall Street Journal and turn to its real estate section, which is literally called Mansion.

Robinsons point is a basic one, but one that deserves constant repetition: these shared moral inclinations ought to lead us to want to make dramatic changes to society in a socialist direction.

He then pivots to show how those moral instincts can be hardened into more concrete political commitments, particularly towards policies that help build a more solidaristic and egalitarian society. Such a society, Robinson points out, would actually be far freer than the world of capitalist freedom we live in today. Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a real plan to end mass incarceration all would expand the freedoms and quality of life of the vast majority, and are part of walking the fine line Robinson draws between both dream[ing] of a very different world and look[ing] closely at the world you actually live in and be[ing] realistic in setting short-term political goals.

Finally, Robinson dispatches with alternative political orientations. He shows how a conservative worldview is at its core an ugly one, and how liberalism is wholly inadequate to the challenges of the moment. In Robinsons apt phrasing, conservatives today are mean, false, and hopeless while liberals are engaged in the unenviable task of polishing turds.

Robinson carries out the core tasks he sets for himself with admirable skill. The socialist movement is lucky to have him, and he has made a valuable contribution to the debate about capitalism and socialism now underway in the United States.

But Robinson runs into trouble when he approaches strategic debates within the socialist left. Though a relatively small part of the book, its worth focusing in on two points where he is on much shakier ground: his unsubstantiated attacks on the most important political tradition in the history of the Left, Marxism, and his self-proclaimed identity with the politics of libertarian socialism.

The problems begin when Robinson turns his attention to Karl Marx, who he introduces as a thinker who cant be ignored. After recognizing the force of Marxs writings on capitalism and economics, Robinson disappointingly drudges up accusations against Marx from Marxs nineteenth-century anarchist contemporaries.

The accusations include claims that Marx had authoritarian tendencies. Where? When? Robinson doesnt say. Marxists have had too little regard for the importance of individual liberty. This is certainly true for Stalinism, but its hardly a fair picture of the rich democratic-socialist tradition inspired by Marx.

And the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robinson writes, was right to worry that Marx and other socialists had become fanatics of state power. This is a bizarre claim, considering Marx spent his life running from state authorities in Germany and never lived to see a socialist state for which he could be fanatical.

Robinsons accusations against Marx go beyond establishing some critical distance from an important thinker. They play into destructive anti-socialist tropes that are as common as they are unwarranted.

Contrary to the claims of Robinson, Proudhon, and others, Marx was a committed small-d democrat. Marx was so committed to democracy that in The Communist Manifesto, he and Friedrich Engels argued that the struggle and realization of a democratic society were the key to the achievement of socialism: [T]he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

Marxs successors in the socialist parties of Europe in the late nineteenth century were no less democratic in their politics. In fact, they were the main organizers for movements to extend suffrage to all, to defend and expand civil liberties, and to build unions and organs of democratic control in the workplace.

Robinsons attempted takedown of Marx therefore does an injustice to a committed democratic socialist, to many who identify as Marxists, and most troubling to young socialists looking for political direction. New socialists political development will benefit enormously from taking Marx and the Marxist tradition seriously and incorporating it into their newfound democratic socialism.

Robinson also throws his hat in with the tradition of libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialists hate government and capitalism alike, according to Robinson. It is a tradition that commits itself unwaveringly to a set of respectable principles and compromises neither its radical socialism nor its radical libertarianism.

What this really amounts to for Robinson personally, however, beyond an understandable desire to reject the authoritarian socialist experiments of the twentieth century, is unclear. If what Robinson wants is a credible alternative to authoritarian socialism, he does not need to reject Marxism. Marxists from Rosa Luxemburg to Ralph Miliband and Michael Harrington have maintained a clear-eyed criticism of Stalinism and its ideological brethren without embracing a hazy notion of libertarian socialism.

These confusing twists limit the effectiveness of Robinsons overall argument. While his moral indictment of capitalism is compelling, his moral defense of the positive program of democratic socialism is lacking.

This is not because Robinson fails to make the case for why democratic-socialist ends would be morally desirable. The democratic-socialist future that Robinson trumpets a world where people do not go to war; there are no class, racial, and gender hierarchies; there are no significant imbalances of power; there is no poverty coexisting alongside wealth; and everyone leads a pleasant and fulfilled life is clearly a desirable one, and he makes that point effectively.

But Robinsons peculiar commitment to the politics of libertarian socialism makes presenting a defense of the democratic-socialist means to get there difficult, if not impossible. After all of Robinsons celebration of the desirability of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and other policies paid for by new taxes on the wealthy, he fails to make a moral defense of the necessity of using state power to win them precisely the kind of question the socialist-dubious reader, fed on a steady diet of libertarian capitalist talking points for most of their life, is likely most uneasy about.

Surely Robinson knows that if Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 presidential election and was able to enact these policies, it would have required a massive redistribution of power in society power that he would say he supports. But that redistribution would only have been possible because Sanders and the democratic-socialist movement he now leads would have had access to a portion of state power.

To take just one example, under the very best-case scenario, Sanders would have signed a bill enacting Medicare for All at some point in his administration. The millionaires and billionaires and the CEOs of major health insurance companies would inevitably object. But officials from the IRS and the power of the US judicial system would be used to ensure that new taxes are collected and the doors to every health insurance company in the country shuttered by force if necessary. (The collective shout for joy on that day, when it finally does come, will be overwhelming. I predict fireworks and mass parades.)

Robinson is free to have misgivings about all this as a libertarian socialist. But he must recognize that the kind of political revolution Sanders put forward, that millions of working-class Americans rallied to, and that Robinson himself supported, is a process that would be carried out through the use of state power.

The strategy of the political revolution is therefore at odds with the intellectual tradition that Robinson professes. Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and generations of anarchists would read Why You Should Be a Socialist and be baffled to find one of their ideological progeny advocating such a strategy. Theyd likely apply the same accusations of authoritarianism and state-power worship they once lobbed at Karl Marx at one Nathan J. Robinson.

All this matters because were sure to see a new and forceful moral indictment of redistribution made by libertarian capitalists as part of an ideological offensive against democratic socialism in the years to come. If as a movement we cant compellingly defend the moral desirability and necessity of using state power to redistribute resources, we open ourselves up to defeat in the battle of ideas.

The defense of the use of state power as a means to achieve democratic-socialist ends is readily supplied. Democratic majorities have a right in any society to make decisions for the whole as long as basic minority rights to dissent, dignity, and personal freedom are respected. And massive majorities exist for all the key points of Bernies program. The real activists undermining democracy are precisely todays libertarian capitalists who defend a system that has so far blocked these majorities.

But making that case depends on jettisoning the debilitating anarchist misgivings about majority rule and state power that are still too common even among socialists.

Robinsons views on Marxism and libertarian socialism are inconsistent with the politics he so effectively puts forward elsewhere in the book. But they make up only a small selection from an otherwise admirable work. And I imagine Robinson himself has embraced a kind of cognitive dissonance on this front, enjoying the entertaining prose of Bakunin and friends while advocating for a democratic-socialist strategy for using state power to rebuild the United States.

But if Why You Should Be a Socialist is intended as an introduction to socialist politics, Robinsons false starts on the question of strategy deserve a critical look. After all, as Robinson rightly notes, the battle of ideas is an essential part of the struggle, and getting our ideas right about strategy and history matters. And Robinson himself would be more than welcome in the Marxist-influenced democratic-socialist movement. On every other question, his ideas line up precisely with our tradition.

Still, none of this is to diminish an otherwise rich book that deserves to be read. We need more talented writers and thinkers like Nathan Robinson in the fight for socialism, and his work is a much-needed contribution to our shared project.

Go here to read the rest:

Why You Should Be a Socialist and a Marxist - Jacobin magazine

Tony Robinson grills a sausage for an order. Top Dog, a Berkeley food institution, has stayed open with take out orders during the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order in Berkeley, Calif. on April 14, 2020.

Tony Robinson grills a sausage for an order. Top Dog, a Berkeley food institution, has stayed open with take out orders during the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order in Berkeley, Calif. on April 14, 2020.

Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate

Tony Robinson grills a sausage for an order. Top Dog, a Berkeley food institution, has stayed open with take out orders during the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order in Berkeley, Calif. on April 14, 2020.

Tony Robinson grills a sausage for an order. Top Dog, a Berkeley food institution, has stayed open with take out orders during the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order in Berkeley, Calif. on April 14, 2020.

Berkeley institution Top Dog is on the ropes. But they still wont take federal aid.

For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

You never forget your first trip to Top Dog.

The tiny, Berkeley-born grab-and-go grill is a rite of passage for Cal students, slinging superlative sausages late night til 3 a.m. along with a side of libertarian literature.

Top Dog opened in 1966, during the heart of the Free Speech Movement, and 54 years later, it still features walls plastered with everything from yellow-ish newspaper clippings pushing for the privatization of the postal service to "Freedom Works Better Than Government" bumper stickers.

All of which has made the coronavirus pandemic uniquely difficult for its owners, Richard and Renie Riemann.

"We dont want to take money from the government," Renie says. "Our political background is for smaller government regulations how can we turn around and do the opposite? This will challenge what we believe in."

Will it ever.

Top Dog has closed two of its three locations since the coronavirus pandemic forced a shelter-in-place order for six Bay Area counties including Alameda County and was forced to lay off one-third of its 19-person staff.

Renie, who graduated from Cal in 1967 and married Richard in 1968, said shes hopeful Top Dog can last through April.

"Its a pretty scary time," she admits from inside of a tiny office behind Top Dogs Durant Avenue location the only one still open. "Were trying to stay afloat, but the hardest part is bringing in enough money for rent for all three places and utilities."

The city of Berkeley launched a $3 million relief fund on March 22, offering $10,000 grants to struggling small businesses with 50 or fewer employees to help cover operational expenses (payroll, rent, working capital).

The federal government approved the CARES Act on March 27, which includes the Paycheck Protection Program. The government assistance program offers loans to brick-and-mortars like Top Dog that they promise to fully forgive provided at least 75% of the borrowed dollars are going to payroll costs, and the other 25% are to interest on mortgages, rent, and/or utilities.

Riemann has zero interest in both.

"Theres always something of a catch," she said of borrowing money from the government. "We need a lot more transparency in general. Ive talked to other businesses and customers, and theyre all disgusted by the way money is taken in and we dont know whats happening to it.

"Were fixing our own potholes it just doesnt make sense."

Renie, 76, spends her days in the office and still eats a sausage almost every day (for "quality control"). Like everyone else, she shouts her order from Top Dogs doorway to keep the recommended 6 feet of social distance, and marvels at a grill thats slightly less full of sizzling dogs than usual.

She wears a mask and remembers to wash her hands, but generally feels a bit helpless.

"With the '89 earthquake, my first thought was I need to help somehow. I need to work in a cafeteria, or help at a hospital. But now, Ive realized Im not 30 anymore. I feel 30, but Im 76, and I cant expose myself that would put my husband at risk."

And Renie is at risk, but that seems beside the point for her.

Instead, her full attention is on keeping the business alive not only for her and her husbands legacy, but for the Top Dog employees in their wills. Thats right: Four Top Dog employees will be bequeathed the Top Dog empire when the owners pass.

"A lot of our staff has been around for a long time our main manager, Jeremy (Bower), hes gonna be 60. I think he came on board when he was 18. Theyre all in the will," she says. "My husband and I said, 'You know, we have to keep this going, because when we depart we want to leave this to you guys.'"

To that end, Top Dog has asked for some forgiveness from local suppliers that have deferred bills, plus it haspartnered with Uber Eats to expand its reach locally ("thats been helpful," she says), and, less locally, theres been a slight uptick in mail orders from Old Blues.

"Cal has had so many people come through it; theres still a nostalgia for us," she says. "We just got an order back East, somebodys father who was a Cal grad, probably my age, and they remembered he liked Top Dog. It was costly to them, but I can appreciate it. Id do something like that. And every little bit helps.

"Most businesses like us have a thin profit margin, thats the scary part. You dont have a big buildup of back money to ride this out. Were staying afloat as long as we can."

Its just not entirely clear how long that will be.

"Were struggling along, weve got a skeleton crew, were just hoping the pandemic wont last too much longer for peoples health first of all, but also so we can all go back to business."

The one still-open Top Dog is located at 2534 Durant Ave. in Berkeley and open 10 a.m. to midnight. You can mail order sausages and buns at topdoghotdogs.com.

Grant Marek is the Editorial Director of SFGATE. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twitter: @grant_marek

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Berkeley institution Top Dog is on the ropes. But they still wont take federal aid. - SFGate

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said Sunday that he would not rule out running for president this year. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team and is one of the shark investors on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.

I would've never considered it prior to a month ago. Now things are changing rapidly and dramatically, Cuban said on the Fox News Sunday program. Im not saying no, but it's not something Im actively pursuing. Im just keeping the door open.

Cuban, who is worth an estimated $4.1billion according to Forbes, has previously described himself as somewhat of a libertarian.

"Not so much libertarian as much as I'd like to be libertarian, he told ABC Dallas-based affiliate WFAA in 2015. "When I think libertarian, it's 'as small of a government as we can get, right now you just cut right through it and you make it [smaller] right now.' That's not real. There's got to be a process. There's got to be a transition. As a country, we make decisions. We make decisions that we're going to provide healthcare, right? We don't just let people die on the street. You can go into any hospital and they have to treat you."

Cuban has also said that while he would be interested in joining the Republican party, he feels the party is too rigid.

"I'm a Republican in the respect that I like smaller government and I like less intrusion in some areas. But there's sometimes where I think we have to intrude. I think there's sometimes when you have to do things," he continued.

The November election will likely be a race between Republicanincumbent Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term, and Democratic rival former Vice President Joe Biden. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders exited the race last week, leaving Biden as the almost certain Democratic nominee.

Cuban and Trump have feuded since 2016. Cuba, who endorsed Hillary Clinton,had harsh words for Trump at a Clinton campaign stop in Pittsburgh.

"You know what we call a person like that in Pittsburgh? A jagoff," Cuban said. "Is there any bigger jagoff in the world than Donald Trump?"

Trump would later callCubandopey" andnot smart.

The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has canceled in-person campaign rallies, forcing candidates to resort to digital events. As of Monday at 2:15 p.m. ET, there have been560,891 cases and 22,681-coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S.

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Mark Cuban To Run For President? Billionaire Dallas Mavericks Owner Does Not Rule Out 2020 White House Bid - International Business Times

Photo by Tom Webster

No one is coming.

A simple phrase, but one that is rich with meaning. Three of those meanings weighed on my mind this morning while I took my morning constitutional around Boston Common.

My friend Jen Iannolo has an entire manifesto built around the phrase, No One Is Coming. Jens use of the phrase is empowering exhilarating, even. We do not wait for our future. We create our future. To realize that no one is coming to help you achieve your dreams is to kick you in the ass to go get what you want however you can with the resources available to you (and you always have more resources than you think.) In its use as an empowerment mantra, it doesnt mean that you are alone in this world. But it does mean that the CEO, COO, and CMO of the entity that will engineer the future you want is you, because no one else is coming.

Its also a very common phrase in movies and TV. Often, no one is coming means the coast is clear! Frequently, it portends a sense of false security. Cmon, Frank theres no one out there. Lets make our move! is the last thing Frank hears before he becomes Body #2 on Law & Order. This second connotation of no one is coming is very worrisome to me, because we are seeing it play out right now, with human lives, amongst elements of the US population who are chafing against social distancing and business shutdowns and what they see as a draconian infringement upon their civil liberties.

Where I live, in Boston, we are right in the middle of a terrible surge of COVID-19. The recent news that 147 out of 396 people tested positive at a local homeless shelter was concerning. The revelation that they were all asymptomatic is terrifying. Its terrifying to me because we all, no matter how smart, rely on empirical evidence. Its easy to poke fun at Florida beachgoers, or the people protesting COVID-related policies on the steps of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas and other places around the country with their misspelled signs, gleefully photographed for us by a media that doesnt exactly trip over itself to paint these people sympathetically. But these protesters, like poor Frank, think that the coast is clear because the facts on the ground suggest that no one is coming. No one they know is sick, and the sickest thing in America right now is our economy.

But you cant know that no one is coming. 400 homeless people at the Pine Street Inn thought no one was coming because none of them were visibly sick. The difference: testing. This is what concerns me about some of my smartest friends who say things like: Im pretty sure Ive already had it to justify their re-entry into society and the opening of their businesses. They cant know it because they werent tested. And they cant know if they are carrying it because it can be asymptomatic and it is virulent and contagious for a very long time. Many of these smart people I know also equate COVID-19 to the flu, which is another false equivalency. Unlike the flu, we are all getting COVID-19 at once.

In last Sundays Boston Globe, there were 15 pages of obituaries.

The flu doesnt do that.

And consider this Massachusetts is pretty sick right now. We are right behind NY/NJ and closing in on 40,000 cases with a 4% mortality rate. This is happening now. But we started isolation and closing down businesses four weeks ago. Imagine what our state would look like if we had not taken these measures?

Soon, I fear, we wont have to imagine. There are absolutely parts of the country that are experiencing this crisis differently to how we are seeing it in Boston. One of these two things will be true: that will continue, and these areas wont be affected by the virus, or that they, like their urban-dwelling fellow citizens in our densely-packed coastal population centers, will still get it, eventually. The future, wrote William Gibson, is already here its just unevenly distributed.

If more sparsely populated areas of the country dont, in fact, get sick, it will be hard for those spared by this crisis to acknowledge anything other than what their eyes can see that they lived their lives without restriction and didnt get sick. There will be no thought that it might, in fact, have been the draconian, liberties-infringing actions of cities like New York City and Boston that sharply blunted the spread of the virus. Well never know, so well just believe what we see.

But if those parts of the country are wrong about this, if accelerating a return to normalcy brings this highly contagious pathogen to places that have not been staying at home and wearing masks and closing businesses, let me assure youno one is coming.

And this is the third and most sinister connotation of this phrase that has me deeply troubled. The groups protesting business closures and isolation are a small minority, but eventually, as the economic toll of this disease mounts, these cries will become more strident and the protests more numerous. Underlying them is a sharp libertarian streak the government has no right to infringe on our personal liberties. I have a few smart libertarian friends, and they speak articulately of the tightrope government has to walk to avoid becoming worse than the problem. I get that. Libertarianism isnt anarchy, though. Libertarians do believe in minimal intrusion from the government. Now, I might posit that slowing global pandemic warrants at least minimal intrusion, but lets set that aside. I am sympathetic to the libertarian argument here, and when the story of this crisis is written, years from now, there will no doubt be chapters about the cities and states that went too far. But heres my question for the protesters seeking a return to normalcy:

Whats the libertarian plan, here? Is there one? What is the plan to restore your familys economic prospects that doesnt potentially deprive other families of their life, liberty, or their pursuit of happiness, which last I checked were also inalienable rights? This question may seem harsh and harshly posed. But the pointedness of the question is due to the awful truth of what we saw last week at a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There was a report of one sick person there on March 25th. By April 15th, there were 644 cases and the plant was closed, eliminating the citys fourth-largest employer and a noticeable chunk of our nations pork supply. The people who went to work, even perhaps knowing that they were sick, went because they were a missed paycheck from ruin, and no one is coming. Today they are sick and home and still, no one is coming.

What I would respectfully ask re-openers to consider is that Massachusetts, today devoid of both its great marathon and our beloved Red Sox on this Patriots Day, is not different, but first. And part of being first is noticing what the stats say, and dont say, about the hidden impacts of this disease that other, less-affected areas havent had to consider. Here are a few unintended consequences of COVID-19 here in Mass., all reported by the Boston Globe: reports of child abuse cases, domestic violence cases, and heart attacks are all down significantly since we started sheltering in place here. This sounds like good news. It is not. In the cases of abuse and assault, many of these cases are first spotted in public, as victims bearing the marks of that abuse can be seen by co-workers and friends. Now? They are home, locked down potentially with their abusers, and unseen. No one is coming for them. In the case of the decline in heart attacks, there are reports of people experiencing the symptoms of a heart attack (which can present as indigestion) who didnt call an ambulance because they didnt want to risk getting sicker or even dying with COVID-19. We have no idea what is happening with people who live alone. No one is coming.

If Boston and NYC and Sioux Falls are not different, but first then this is what awaits many of the areas of the country that can least afford the disruption that COVID-19 has caused us. I grew up in a part of Maine that has a strong libertarian streak, and count many friends in that part of the world. When the response to COVID-19 or indeed any public policy doesnt seem to affect your corner of the world, I can understand the urge to cry out to a meddlesome government, leave us alone!

But what if, in the blink of an eye, you are?

Link:

No One Is Coming - Tom Webster - Elemental