Welcome to the second edition of LeftHooked! LeftHooked is a monthly (for now) aggregator and review of the best, or at least most important, writing from major socialist left publications, broadly defined, from the anglophone world, brought to you by the comrades at the Hampton Institute.
Especially as I get started with this new and exciting project, with the great support of Colin Jenkins and the whole Hampton team (who are still largely volunteers [to helps us change that, consider supporting our Patreon, as all of our content remains entirely free to access!]), I’m open to suggestions for improvements to the format, structure, and content, as well as interesting articles, podcast episodes, and even books to review and include in future editions of LeftHooked. For all such input, please email me at: LeftHooked[at]protonmail.com.
As always, for standard submissions to the Hampton Institute, submit at hamptonthink[at]gmail.com.
Beyond your (hopefully ongoing) support for the Hampton Institute and this new project, beyond my deep abiding hope that this project will contribute in some small way to the success of our shared struggle for a truly free, equal, and democratic world, my only request is for your patience as I work to produce and improve LeftHooked over the coming months and (fingers-crossed) years!
- Dr. Bryant William Sculos, Founding Editor and Curator of LeftHooked

LeftHooked #2 (February 2020)

Everyone should start their February reading with this passionate, thoughtful working-class response to President Trump’s grotesque State of the Union Address from the Hampton Institute. Thankfully, you won’t find any awards given to raging sexists or racists here.

2020 Presidential Politics

In the US, February was a crazy month for presidential election politics. Left Voice produced two phenomenal pieces reflecting on two of the most talked about candidates. The first piece, by Ezra Brain, offers a much needed evisceration of the horrid identity politics represented by (former) presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (“Pete Buttigieg and the Folly of Identity Politics”). LGBTQ+ candidates like Buttigieg are a disgrace to the legacy of the queer liberation movement, something that is not at all lost on those involved in, and supportive of, that movement. He is not, and quite likely never will be, a comrade. The politics he represents will never be a politics of the left, nor will they ever address the enormous oppression and magnified exploitation experienced by the LGBTQ+ working-class community.

The second piece from Left Voice I want to mention here, by James Hoff (“What A Bernie Sanders Presidency Would Really Look Like”), explores what a(n increasingly unlikely) Bernie Sanders presidency would look like in practice. The relationship between Bernie Sanders and the socialist left will continue to be hotly debated, likely for generations, but this piece is a useful retort to the overly sanguine popular-frontist, neo-Kautskyite politics that are increasingly represented in the pages of Jacobin.

Writing for the Hampton Institute, David Goodner presents a slightly more optimistic take on the radical possibilities of the 2020 Sanders’ campaign (“Bernie Sanders Should Run Solo if Democrats Dirty-Break the Democratic Process”). While I find my own perspective situated somewhere between Hoff’s and Goodner’s approaches, their perspectives are both worth reading and considering (and are actually quite close to one another, which makes my ability to find political space in-between them all the more impressive!).

My primary editorial thought on this debate is my fear that the awesome, energetic political activity that is in some form of coalescence around Sanders will deteriorate if he loses in the Democratic Party primary again, or, perhaps worse, aspirational socialists will continue to fail to learn the lessons of history: bourgeois political parties cannot be a vector for radical political change. Furthermore, there is no material, historically-predicated reason to think Sanders won’t support whoever the Democratic Party nominee is. After all, he did precisely what he said he would do in 2016 (endorsing and campaigning for Hillary Clinton), despite hundreds of thousands of people petitioning him to continue to run as an independent—and he has said even more often this time around that he will do the same in 2020 if he loses. I fear there is a detrimental cognitive dissonance among the pro-Bernie left that will do lasting damage to socialist struggle. I hope my fears are misguided and prove to be wrong, but my perhaps greatest fear is that I am not concerned enough.

Socialist Feminism

Ann Snitow, someone whose work I was sadly unfamiliar with, died in August of 2019. In her honor, Monthly Review republished an excerpt of one her most well-known works. It is a great read and will undoubtedly lead many of its readers to look into her work more deeply (or return to it, for those lucky enough to have already been familiar with it).

The Uprising in Chile & Beyond

Interested in the theoretical implications and on-going events in Chile, since the mass uprising occurred nominally in response to rate hikes for public transportation over the past several months? Check out this fascinating piece by Pierina Ferretti and Mia Dragnic in Viewpoint magazine (“Revolt in Chile: Life Against Capital”).

While we’re discussing Viewpoint, they also recently released a original translation of Mario Tronti’s (1972) “The Autonomy of the Political” (with an excellent new introduction by the translators).

Socialist Science Fiction

Virginia L. Conn offers an innovative interpretation of Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star for Cosmonaut (“Economic Circulations: Blood-Based Systems of Value in Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star”). The insights offered about the novel are intriguing in their own right, but the essay is also an exemplar of a kind of socialist-feminist interpretive lens. Whether this works as an interpretive method I’ll leave to others, but I found it compelling.

Students on Strike

As many of the readers of the Hampton Institute, and the newly minted regular readers of LeftHooked, should no doubt be aware, graduate student workers at the University of California Santa Cruz have been engaged in a wildcat strike in an effort to attain a much-needed and well-deserved cost-of-living adjustment to their salaries. These 80+ student workers have since been summarily fired by the UCSC administration for their actions. For more on this situation check out Nick Slater’s piece in Current Affairs. Also, consider donating to these courageous workers’ strike fund.

LeftUnheard (Podcast episodes I haven’t listened to…yet)

There’s no chance this episode from Nick Kiersey’s Fully Automated on the 2020 Irish elections that saw Sinn Fein make unprecedented gains isn’t awesome. Listen to it before I do.

Continuing with the theme of geographically-focused podcast episodes I haven’t listened to (yet), check out this episode of A Different Lens from Devon Bowers of the Hampton Institute on the current state of politics in Latin American (with Nino Pagliccia).

LeftUnanswered

In each edition of LeftHooked I’ll conclude by posing a question or series of related questions for readers to think about. Some will be ones that have been asked (and ostensibly answered in various ways and to varying degrees) by those on the left before, but also ones that I think have renewed relevance or call for updated consideration, for what, in each instance, will be relatively obvious reasons. Other times, hopefully more often than not, these questions will be novel in some way. At the very least, the LeftUnanswered section will reflect questions that are on my mind and to which I’ve not found current or past conversations satisfying or convincing. My primary hope is that they will resonate.

As often happens within capitalism, when non-economic crises occur, whether they are electoral surprises or “natural” disasters (which are never as “natural” as many may think), they often reveal deeper, underlying flaws, injustices, and inequalities in the system. With the rise of the novel coronavirus (and the COVID 19 condition it causes), we are already witnessing this pattern continue. The question we all need to think about is how to not only address the serious public health issues that this pandemic is causing and will continue to cause into the near-future (if not beyond), but how can those on the left organize in relation to this crisis? There are issues that all public health threats entail, whether it is expressing the utter failure of the global health system, particularly those countries that don’t have an adequate universal public health care system (e.g., the US) or the uneven and unequal deterioration of national sovereignty that capitalist globalization has meant over the past several decades, but it is worth considering if there are unique or uniquely pressing structural harms that the novel coronavirus crisis can serve as a magnifying glass for—perhaps even functioning as a tragic opportunity for more aggressive actions for radical change.

Thanks for reading. And as my dad used to say before school, be a good human being!