PE of Fash Week VI: Fake News and Mutual Aid (Reading List)

This last class in the political economy of fascism minicourse is meant to emulate the periodic "debriefs" I have programmed into the full-semester version of the course. I believe it is extremely important that, after rendering the coherence of fascism on its own terms, one take the time to debunk its central claims. Although I do this throughout the course during the lecture/discussion, designating an entire week's readings to such an exercise is, in my view, crucial in distinguishing this course from one of simple fascist indoctrination.

As I repeatedly say, fascism is disturbingly compelling. When one takes the time to piece it together into its coherent esoteric ideology, one is engaged in the exact game that draws people into fascism -- a game driven by curiosity and the self-satisfaction of figuring it out. In addition, fascism does point out valid contradictions about the way society operates (largely borrowing from leftist rhetoric). These critiques are then used to leverage a political race to the bottom, justifying underhandedness on the basis of a perceived supernatural enemy's underhandedness.

PE of Fash Week V: Free Speech and the Fascist Creep (Reading List)

The "required" readings in this week's class provided three levels of analysis of the phenomenon of fascist recruitment. The Simi and Futrell piece provides the most intimate portrait with a focus on white power activists, mostly neo-nazi skinheads, navigating normal society. The Berbrier piece provides an analysis of white power activist's public rhetoric since the transformation of the movement one based on militias to one based on conferences. The Perry piece provides the most zoomed-out picture, giving an overall account of the transformation of the white power movement in the post-Civil Rights era.

All three authors note the untenability of their subjects' core beliefs in public. Whereas Berbrier investigates how white power activists reframe their rhetoric for a post-WWII audience, Simi and Futrell explore the justification of individual white power activists in selectively hiding their leanings altogether. Perry provides a general overview of the development of the former phenomenon.

PE of Fash Week IV: Confederate Monuments and the Historic Imaginary (Reading List)

This class is directed at tracing the line from fascist social theory through fascist philosophy of history to fascist aesthetics. For the most part, the class focuses on Italian Fascism and its parallels with US white nationalism in this regard. This is important not only because of the central place that mythologizing the past around artifacts has in fascist political practice, but also because of the central place that culture has in fascist political theory.

For the fascist, social change goes from culture to politics to economics. Marxists, it should be noted, perceive this chain of causality in exactly the reverse order, though beginning in the 1920's, Marxists began to explore a mutual determination between these three phenomenon. The fascist reasoning, grafted onto liberal Enlightenment reasoning, posits that any nation is driven by the will of its people through culture. This culture shapes the form of political outcomes which ultimately shape economic outcomes through policy. For fascists, the form of government is irrelevant to this phenomenon. In actuality, this is a far more compelling argument under representative systems than authoritarian or directly democratic ones.

PE of Fash Week III: Eugenics and the Alt-Right (Reading List)

This class is intended to address what I consider to be the closest historical precedent to the alt-right: the eugenics movement. I say this not only by manner of ideological comparison, nor only manner of social insertion. I say this because the core organizations the bred the original alt-right - VDare, New Century Foundation (American Renaissance), and the National Policy Institute - are part of a non-profit financial network that has preserved eugenics since its decline following the discovery of DNA and the sequencing of the human genome.

The "required" readings cover the history and present of the eugenics movement. The Belkhir & Duyme piece explores the core assertions and fallacies of the eugenics movement both in its historical manifestation, but also in the present day. The Smedley & Smedley piece adds color to the Belkhir & Duyme piece, going beyond the mere refutation of biological, especially genetic, origins of social identity and aptitude constructs to give an accounting of the historical and social origins of these constructs using race as its case study.

The piece by Baker is presented as a means of focusing on how eugenics functioned logistically to popularize their approach. Baker's piece, which highlights the attempts by the organized eugenics movement to appeal to Christianity, is especially illustrative given that the movement ultimately wasn't able to get enthusiastic support on the basis of tying eugenic beliefs to Christianity. However, in the process the movement underwent numerous, ultimately cosmetic changes, hiding and repackaging core principles to appeal to an audience averse to themes of biological evolution, birth control, and selective breeding.

PE of Fash Week II: Economic Anxiety and Angry White Men (Reading List)

Tonight was the second night of my six-class minicourse on the political economy of fascism. The readings for this class touch on a debate that cropped up in the wake of Donald Trump's ascendancy to the presidency: was his base motivated by racism or economic anxiety. I picked readings that problematized this dichotomy and the epistemology that would assert that these two phenomena are unrelated.

In the sphere of fascist ideology, economic outcomes are critically tied to the composition of the citizenry. On the one hand, fascists take the promise of democratic representation at face value, and thus political power is fundamentally a matter of the demography of the electorate. On the other hand, fascists see extra-electoral and extra-political factors bearing down on political, and hence economic, outcomes. In either instance, the fascist sees representative democracy as systemically corrupted.

PE of Fash Week I: How to Talk to a Nazi (Reading List)

Tonight was the first of a six week course I designed for the New York Public Library. The course begins with an overview of the course in the form of my "How to Talk to a Nazi" workshop based on my zine "You Can't Punch Every Nazi." I gave students a copy of the zine. The course then goes through investigating fascist ideology at four levels: as a political religion, a social science, a governmental theory, and a political praxis. The course then concludes with an exploration of alternative perspectives that answer some of the legitimate critiques of liberalism that fascists appropriate from the far left but resolve with cynical authoritarianism.

Liberalism Is Probably Impossible Reader

Since the Democratic Party and its enabling non-profits have recently staked their hopes on an electoral process that they have insisted for over a year was compromised by foreign actors, I have been thinking about the consistent failure of electoral strategy in light of fascist upsurge. What history demonstrates time and again, from the Pact of Pacification to the Sermon on the Mount, is that a brutal government cannot be thwarted through obsequiousness. Liberalism, understood not as a political orientation but a governmental paradigm, ultimately proves impossible. Whatever is won in the moral spectacle of violence cannot make up for the literally everything that is materially lost. Suffering is suffering. Dying is dying. Below, I present five texts that tackle different aspects of the logic and application of liberalism which prefigures its own demise.

Shawn Rosenberg - Against Neoclassical Political Economy: A Political Psychological Critique

Ed White - The Value of Conspiracy Theory

Frederick Shauer - Uncoupling Free Speech

Mitch Berbrier - "Half the Battle": Cultural Resonance, Framing Processes, and Ethnic Affectations in Contemporary White Separatist Rhetoric

Frantz Fanon - On Violence (from Wretched of the Earth)

Jean Paul Sartre - Preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth

Debunking Eugenics Reader

Back in August, I wrote an article for Red Pepper magazine asserting the synonymy of the alt-right and its historical antecedents in the eugenics movement. The breadth of the movement's influence at its height in late 2016 had it reaching in political spheres well beyond its original core in the white nationalist movement connected to Richard Spencer. That I catalogued this reach into GamerGate earned me quite a bit of impotent ire on the r/KotakuInAction Reddit where they claimed I didn't know what eugenics, the alt-right, or GamerGate are.

One of the more worrying claims on the Reddit was that my account and rejection of eugenics rejects evolutionary biology and sociology. Barring a restriction to literature from before 1950, little could be further from the truth. In actuality, these disciplines widely reject the key claims of biological determinism made by eugenicists by accounting for existing legal, economic, and political institutions. What follows is a list of readings that articulate contemporary critiques of eugenics.

Jean Belkhir - Intelligence and Race, Gender, Class: The Fallacy of Genetic Determinism

Francis Collins - What We Do and Don't Know About 'Race', 'Ethnicity', Genetics, and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era

Audrey Smedley - "Race" and the Construction of Human Identity

Michael Barnshad et al. - Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race

Graham Baker - Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907–1940

Economics in Historical Perspectives Syllabus

I have been fortunate enough to be given the privilege to teach a 300-level course in the Spring. The course, Economics in Historical Perspectives, takes students from the Paleolithic era up to the present day exploring economic history, history of economic thought, and historiography.

The course is designed through the lens of my politics (left anarchist, what have you), and the readings reflect that. Because of this I urge you (and my students) to be critical of the readings contained within. You should consider who you're reading, their historical context, their motivations, their social status. This approach to scholarship, probably above all else, is what I hope for my students to get out of the class.

For your approval (or disgust, whatever), I give you the course syllabus and the recommended additional readings.

Neoclassical Production Function Reader

Two-Factor Production Function

Charles Cobb & Paul Douglas - A Theory of Production

Robert Solow - Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function

Anwar Shaikh - Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: Humbug II

CES Function

Kenneth Arrow, et al. - Capital Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency

Jesus Felipe & John McCombie - The CES Production Function, the accounting identity, and Occam's razor

Endogenous Technical Change

Paul Romer - Endogenous Technological Change

Francesco Caselli - Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences

Michael Isaacson - Braaaaaaaains! The Undead Humbug Production Function: Now With Human Capital

"White Pride" Matters Reader

I have been saying since at least 2012 that we have to be paying serious attention to what Nazis are doing and how they are organizing. In the past three decades, we have seen a huge number of mass shootings in the United States. This climate provides cover for the strategies of White Nationalists.

It is important to recognize that the term "lone wolf" is not a way for law enforcement to distinguish political violence they tacitly approve of from that which they explicitly do not (although they do this in plenty of other ways). Rather the term was coined by White Nationalists themselves to describe a distributed strategy of (accelerating) political violence. Nazis love that woodland imagery and shit. The adoption of this tactic is largely the result of unintended consequences of the FBI's counterintelligence program operating in the early 70's which fractured white hate organizations, drove them underground, and caused them to merge in new (and probably to them, exciting) ways.

What follows is a reading list on the history of White Nationalism in the United States. Given the confusing and perhaps disturbingly compelling nature of fascist writing, I present first a list of scholarly historical, anthropological, and sociological research on White Nationalist activities in the United States.

Zionism and Antisemitism Reader

Ahad Ha'am - The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem

Steve Cohen - That's Funny, You Don't Look Antisemitic

Bernard Lazare - Antisemitism: Its History and Causes

Ella Shohat - Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims

Edward Said - Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims

Meyrav Wurmsur - Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question

Interview with Daniel Kahn on "A Tradition of Subversion and a Subversive Tradition"

Minimum Wage Reader

CEPR - Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?

Richard Eskow - Real Faces of the Minimum Wage

Claire Goldstene - Republican Nostalgia for the Gilded Age

David Howell, et al. - Low Pay, Employment and Labor Market Regulation: A Lesson from France?

Robert Reich - The 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Myth

Labor Theory of Value Reader

Samir Amin - Critical Review of Debunking Economics

Michael A. Leibowitz - If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?

Robert Vienneau - How To and How Not To Attack Marx's Economics

Unlearning Economics - Reconsidering the Labour Theory of Value

Matias Vernengo - Sraffa and Marxism On the Labor Theory of Value, What Is It Good For?

Suresh Naidu - What Marx Really Meant