Will Shetterly's Blog, page 143

Socialism must reclaim the language of individualism

 I tweeted a link to Sara Salem's excellent Marxist feminism as a critique of intersectionality. In a following conversation, Jeremiah Aviles suggested individualism and neoliberal capitalism are essentially the same thing, and Ms. Salem agreed with him, and I think, for twitter purposes, they're right.

But.

They're right because right-libertarianism and neoliberalism both cast the conflict between socialism and capitalism as a conflict between the group and the individual. To capital...

I (sort of) have a character in Milestones, an art show about African American Comics!

A few years ago, Vince Stone and I created Life Force - a short comic for a good cause to encourage people to sign up as bone marrow donors. In honor of Heal Emru / Aide Emru, we updated some public domain superheroes and made the majority black.

Kristopher M. Mosby liked what we did with our main character and did his own version:


That piece will be in Milestones: African Americans in Comics, Pop Culture and Beyond:

Geppi’s Entertainment Museum President Melissa Geppi-Bowers...

Engels saw what would go wrong in Cuba, China, and the USSR

From 

Engels, in his criticism of August Blanqui, a French socialist who believed that revolution would be brought to the masses by a minority, wrote: "From Blanqui's assumption, that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary class, the prol...

Black Sci-Fi: bits from a 1992 documentary with Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Nichelle Nichols, Steven Barnes, and others

a point about "derailment"

You cannot "derail" a conversation. Conversations flow freely. You can derail agendas, lectures, rants, indoctrination, and propaganda, but if someone says you've derailed a conversation, you weren't in one.

Identitarian unity photo: American Nazis at a Nation of Islam rally

In "Bigotry and the English Language", Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that Nazi George Rockwell praised the Nation of Islam for having...

gathered millions of the dirty, immoral, drunken, filthy-mouthed, lazy and repulsive people sneeringly called ‘niggers’ and inspired them to the point where they are clean, sober, honest, hard working, dignified, dedicated and admirable human beings in spite of their color.

Historically, segregationists approve of segregationists. I wish I could find a...

Socialist Bible Verse: Luke 12:15

"And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." —Luke 12:15

Brother Will notes that bit about covetousness should be considered by all self-proclaimed Christians who complain about taxes that help poor folks.

today's news for identitarians

I stumbled on two stories that made me think about the identitarian belief that race matters more than class when understanding justice in the US.

The first, for people who think the Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride cases must be racist: Alzheimer's sufferer Ronald Westbrook killed in 'stand your ground' shooting.

The second, for people who think only black people get railroaded: 25 years gone: Texas inmate Michael Morton cleared in wife's murder. If Michael Morton had the resources...

Honey, I bubble-wrapped the windows!

I did a little googling about bubble-wrapping windows as cheap insulation, then took a roll that had been in the basement and started in. People are right: it's easy and effective, so long as you don't mind the effect. I used a foot-wide roll of the small bubbles. I didn't do the windows with my favorite views, and in a couple of cases, I only did the bottom three-fourths. The house seems much cozier now.

Doris Lessing on political correctness

From Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer:

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. 

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual langu...