“Microverses – Observations from a Shattered Present” by Dylan Riley, 2022
This book is a series of notes by a Marxist sociologist, tiled
in a mosaic of short chapters that run from one paragraph to a couple of pages,
covering the period of the pandemic, Trump’s reign to Biden. It is mostly easy, bite-size thinking with
some notes covering the same issue. They
remind one of Zizek except less chaotic.
Riley’s a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and works for New Left Review, so there is a bit of
obscure academia included here too.
Riley debates post-modernism, post-colonial relativism,
Bourdieu, ‘racial’ capitalism, anti-political sociology, Judith Butler, Polyani
and various anti-Marxist methods, using references to Durkheim, Weber, Gramsci,
Lukács, Hayek, Marx and others in his analysis of ‘political capitalism’ – i.e.
the heavily state-involved form of capital we now have. He champions a ‘critical sociology’
interested in ideas. The two ghosts that
hang over these notes are 1, anti-materialist ‘identity’ academia and 2, a social-democracy
that limits itself to a philosophy of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness,’ a method he
opposes.
Here are some good quotes:
1. “Marxism … sociology’s ‘ur-antagonist.’”
2. “Did Emperor Hirohito suffer politically from the monumentally idiotic attack on Pearl Harbor?”
3.
“The increasing importance of political power
as a determinant of the rate of return is one of the basic reasons for the
hollowing out of democracy. Market power
and political power tend to fuse.”
4.
Re: “… in the ideology of the capitalist state…
it is not the person or the class that rules, but the subject-less order.”
5.
“Trump … unmasked the fiction of the impersonal
state.”
6.
“Socialism is already here … it only needs a
crisis to reveal it.” (re: government interventions during the pandemic,
2007-2008, etc.)
7.
Riley opposes the ‘stay in your own lane’ privileging of individual experience and
identity, as real knowledge is not just personal, anecdotal or through ‘stories,’
but mediated by history, theory, materialism and facts.
8.
The pandemic revealed: “…the agony of the petit-bourgeoisie.” (Shop-keepers,
farmers, etc.)
9.
Centrism…”chloroforms the young DSA left.”
10. “Mitch
McConnell, that … mediocre, white-collar dad…” And: “When will the crackers produce a Bernie?”
11. ‘Woke’
politics “is not being fought on the ground of political economy.”
12. “Social democracy is the actual attempt to
violate, and in that way test, the Marxian universal statement” … that “there
is no legal transition to socialism.”
13. Riley
understands that ‘anti-theoretical’ people reveal their own theories in denying
theory.
14. Riley
wants the Left to “…spend less energy on outrage…” (Note to FB users.)
15. “The
state is an object of struggle among competing political capitalist elites.”
16. “Why
are there so many mediocrities in power with all the incessant chatter about
the value of education?” Remember, Ted
Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law and most
prominent politicians are law grads with JDs.
17. “As if
difficult ideas themselves were obstacles to the smooth circulation of
commodities...”
18. Riley
understands socialism to be: “…an
absolute flourishing of individuality where people are neither equal to one
another, nor unequal to one another; they are instead irreducibly unique…”
19. Under
advanced capitalism “there is no class culture.”
20. Re
academics: “…a challenge to the ‘canon’
poses the threat of the rapid devaluation of fixed assets.” (i.e. a professor’s
intellectual ‘property’ ideas have become outmoded and hence, less valuable.)
21. Riley
points out that the change from direct slavery to share-cropping was not an
economically-advanced method of agriculture, and helped keep the south in
poverty-stricken, racist backwardness for at least 100 years.
22. Riley
attacks the concept of the ‘culture’ of the misnamed ‘underclass.’ Poverty is
riven with the homogenization and goals of bourgeois culture too.
23. Most
people experience capitalism as “a society of small-scale traders.”
24. Capitalism
is far more than ‘unfair’ or ‘unjust’ – “it is a system of social production of
historically unprecedented complexity and scope…”
25. “The
preliminary task of a socialist politics is to decrease the cost of acting
politically in class ways.”
26. Socialism
could be described as ‘the extended order of human cooperation…”
27. “…decolonizers
never get around to the analysis of ideas.”
28. To the
liberals – “…history is the history of court battles” with movements acting as
cheerleaders. Lawyers become the cadre
and ‘general organizers.’
29. “…anti-corruption
… becomes an alternative to the politics of redistribution.” Scandal also plays this role.
30. “…
gender is the product of the division of social labor between productive and
reproductive functions.”
31. “…racism
becomes a lay theory that explains uneven development.”
32. Marx
understood human emancipation to require “the elimination of race as a social
category.” (Riley still erroneously uses ‘race’ instead of skin color…)
33. “… the
union leader has an interest in the maintenance of capitalism through his
interest in maintaining the group called ‘workers’.”
 |
| Lukacs - a Riley inspiration |
Riley claims that the petit-bourgeoisie is not analyzed in
the U.S., which is patently false. The
obsessive “PMC” chatter in Jacobin is
evidence of that. So is the observation
of the small owner base of Trumpism, fascist groups and the Republican Party or
the professional strata of Democratic Party loyalists by many leftists. He also seems to think that nationalism still
has a future, when all around us there is evidence of the interconnectedness of
economies, politics, the environment, war and peoples. Nationalism, like racism and sexism, is an
archaic ideology due to objective changes in the world – which is not to say it
is not still useful to national ruling classes.
It seems he also does not grasp the labor exploitation and social labor of
many white and pink collar workers.
But given these caveats, a somewhat ‘fun’ book to read.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use search box, upper
left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Zizek,” “Marxism versus PostModernism,”
“Fashionable Nonsense,” “From Factory to Metropolis,” “The Ten Assumptions of
Science,” “Elite Capture,” “Mistaken Identity,” “Toward Freedom – the Case
Against Race Reductionism,” “Understanding Class,” “Riot, Strike, Riot,”
“Giants – The Global Power Elite,” “Rich People Things,” "Georg Lukacs - Record of a Life."
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
September 20, 2022
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