What Is Democratic Socialism?

IN OUR HISTORICAL MOMENT, the fundamental questions of how we should organize our societies — how we should live and work together — are felt with a new urgency. As we find ourselves implicated in the accelerating destruction of our ecosystem, the environmental crisis has reanimated questions regarding the viability of capitalism even in mainstream political debates. Yet exactly what is meant by “capitalism” is far from clear in the diagnoses of our predicament. Inequality, exploitation, and commodification are regularly denounced, but their systematic relation to the capitalist mode of production is rarely taken into account. Likewise, the proposed solutions to our current crisis are increasingly gathered under the banner of “democratic socialism.” But in almost all cases, democratic socialism is a name for the reformation — rather than the overcoming — of capitalism. As a result, the critical injunctions are reduced to calls for the redistribution of wealth, which do not question how the wealth itself is generated by wage labor and how capital accumulation is required for there to be any wealth to distribute in the first place...

Martin Hagglund, What Is Democratic Socialism? Part I: Reclaiming Freedom - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/democratic-socialism-part-1-reclaiming-freedom/ What Is Democratic Socialism? Part I: Reclaiming Freedom

Faith hammer (Red Mars)

"You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated. 

"Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!" John stood and took his tray to the kitchen. The rest looked at each other in silence. It must have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation class... Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

==

Also:

• “The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.”
• “And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other’s company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.”
• Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.”
• “It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.” [What a thing for an author to say!]

g'r

Darwin on life & death

On this day in 1831, Darwin boarded the Beagle, about to revolutionize now only how we understand life but how we live with death.

If, once, we could think of ourselves as (sinful) animals aspiring to be more God-like, now we can wonder what, as animals without sin (though more than capable of doing harm), we might aspire to.

https://t.co/vHpi8mj3S3
(https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1343375365859848192?s=02)

This Life: Secular Faith & Spiritual Freedom

...It has been said that philosophy is the study of how to die. Hägglund's work continues this tradition. In order to learn to live, we must first learn to die. It is only in accepting our transience that we can embrace it, only by recognizing that our spiritual freedom lies on the other side of our fear of death that we can truly engage with reality as it is here, now, on this planet — in this concrete life instead of an abstract afterlife.

In the end, Hägglund's most important contribution may be his insight that acknowledging death instead of denying it changes how we think about the value of our time, which in turn has normative implications not only for our individual lives but, more importantly, for our collective (political) lives.

Give Hägglund a read. It is time well spent in a life as short as ours.

https://medium.com/amateur-book-reviews/book-review-this-life-secular-faith-spiritual-freedom-6eb8038f3920

This Life

Delighted that the Swedish version of *This Life* (*Vårt enda liv*) is selected as one of the best books of the year in Dagens Nyheter (@dagensnyheter):
https://t.co/aSqMyCS6Ml

(https://twitter.com/martinhaegglund/status/1337750994051076098?s=02)

Sabbath at home

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —
Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I'm going, all along.

"Some keep the Sabbath going to church" by Emily Dickinson. 

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-december-10-2020/

Baggini's Godless Gospel

Do Jesus's teachings add up to a coherent moral system that is still relevant today? @JulianBaggini puts his mind to the question. Buy yours for half price here: https://t.co/9uxQjjWy1i https://t.co/5tP4epIGeI
(https://twitter.com/GrantaBooks/status/1335896691371806722?s=02)