Dan Little: Non-generative social facts

Dan Little writes about Non-generative social facts.

So this complicated example of a fairly routine social process seems to be one that throws attention on the causal and intentional properties of the meso-level social structures rather than on the states of agency of the individuals who constitute those structures. And this in turn suggests that it is not the case that all social events are "generated" by the states of mind and action of the individuals who constitute them, even though each of the subordinate events in the sequences possesses microfoundations at the level of the individual actors.

Emphasis Mine

My understanding of what Little is saying is that there is an interplay between objective and subjective conditions within a class system. This is a common Marxist concept.

The subjective conditions are what the agent percieves the world as allowing to them to do. This is equivalent to the states of mind…of the individuals. Here the agent has a limited set of actions that they can perform.

The objective conditions are the sum of all social events [that] are "generated" by the various agents up to the present time. The objective conditions have a historical component and the currently occurring component. Agents can only directly affect the currently occurring component.

I see microfoundations as consisting of:

• the history of the agent—what has the agent seen and done in the past
• where the agent is situated in society. This is a dialetic between:
• where the agent sees themselves being situated in society, and
• where others see the agent being situated in society
• an internal model of how society works according to the agent

Agents with similar micro-foundations constitute a class. The wider the definition of the class, the looser the similarity between micro-foundations.

Unfortunately, the looser the definition of a class, the less likely that class is able to act in unison. Action requires compelling need on part of the agents.

This is probably one of the problems with working class agitation: the working class is extremely diverse with multiple dimensions of gender, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, political orientation, geographical locality, language, age, etc. These dimensions make it easy for the Capitalists to keep the working class divided against itself.

Thus, we have a need of a political party to develop a theoretical understanding of what it means to be working class, and develop a unified action in support of the needs and aspirations of the working class.

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Michael Klare: A Take-No-Prisoners World of Oil

Michael Klare writes about A Take-No-Prisoners World of Oil.

In the end, the oil attrition wars may lead us not into a future of North American triumphalism, nor even to a more modest Saudi version of the same, but into a strange new world in which an unlimited capacity to produce oil meets an increasingly crippled capitalist system without the capacity to absorb it.

Think of it this way: in the conflagration of the take-no-prisoners war the Saudis let loose, a centuries-old world based on oil may be ending in both a glut and a hollowing out on an increasingly overheated planet. A war of attrition indeed.

Emphasis Mine

Klare also writes that cheap oil threatens banks who invested heavily in the shale-oil business. This was a very short bubble. The shortness may be a blessing in that the damage is limited when the shale-oil bubble collapses.

And, Yes, I was one of the peak-oil enthusiasts in the day.

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Paul Street: The US is a Center-Left Country; Why is its politics FrankenRight?

Paul Street writes that The US is a Center-Left Country; Why is its politics FrankenRight?.

Progressives must not let Sanders’ inevitable defeat fuel the illusion that progressive, social-democratic policies lack majority support in the U.S. They should remind their fellow Americans that candidate-centered politics is not the sum total of all the politics that matters. There’s also the more imperative job of building a great grassroots social movement to organize mass worker and citizen action beneath and beyond the quadrennial electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcomes.

Such a movement should include in its list of demands the call for an electoral system that honors the longstanding majority’S view that two big business and empire parties are simply not enough to capture to the actual spectrum of public opinion. That would be an elections and party system that is truly worthy of passionate citizen engagement.

Emphasis Mine

Street is correct to remind people that politics is not just elections—it is an integral part of daily life.

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