Welcome to the third 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 #3 (MARCH 2020)

This edition will be, for obvious reasons, focused on COVID-19 and responses to the global pandemic. Before getting into the amazing socialist writing on this subject, I want to engage in some (un?)healthy self-promotion. While I try to keep the editorializing to a minimum here, if you’re curious for my take on COVID-19, you can check out my essay published with the Hampton Institute.

COVID-19

While there have indeed by many great pieces on COVID-19 in March, there is one piece that is truly incredible: “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital” by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace (with Monthly Review). Noteworthy here is actually that this piece will be the lead in the May edition of MR, but no doubt due to the combination of its timeliness and extraordinary quality, in a rare move for MR, the editors decided to release the essay online in March (despite the April 1 publication date, it was posted online on March 27)—and we’re all much better off for it. This piece should serve as a foundation for all future discussions on this pandemic. Hats off to MR and these authors. It is a testament to their work here that this article has already, pardon the pun, gone viral.

The quality of the research and nuanced, critical, and, still at times, polemical argumentation epitomizes what the left can offer in these trying times. If you read nothing else on COVID-19, this should be that one thing.

But it shouldn’t be the only thing! The Hampton Institute, which is the home of LeftHooked, has also been a leading outlet for great COVID-19 political analysis. While there are too many to include here, some of the more intriguing and important pieces include: “The Future of Unions during COVID-19” by Cameron Mancini and Brendan Muckian-Bates (of the IWW), Matthew Dolezal’s “Under Capitalism, a Pandemic is a Time of Political Awakening,” and “Time, Money, and Lives: The Simple Math of Viral Mass Murder” by J.E. Karla.

Delving into the labor struggles connected with COVID-19, Dan La Botz wrote a great piece for New Politics. I suspect there will be future articles that expand upon the list he compiles and discusses here.

Writing for Current Affairs, Daniel Walden’s “Cults of Capital,” deals with the intersection of the religiously sadistic ideology of neoliberal capitalism in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ideology is one of those subjects that when it is focused on exclusively, can miss the material exploitations and oppressions of capitalism—but without ideologiekritik we cannot fully understand the energetic yet zombie-like reproduction of capitalism. Walden’s piece, with its attention to the Democratic Party, is able to capture the intersection of ideology and material oppression quite well.

As someone with a particular interest in debates about universal basic income (UBI), I was excited to read David Calnitsky’s newest piece on UBI and COVID-19 policy responses. I highly recommend this article, no matter what your position on UBI is.

What would a discussion of socialist praxis be without a slight tangent into metatheory. For some quick hits in this vein, check out “Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis” by Benjamin P. Davis and Jonathan Catlin with Public Seminar.

It would be impossible to understand the causes and future implications of the COVID-19 pandemic without an exploration of the global political contexts involved. Kojo Koram’s article “Coronavirus Could Transform the International Order” for Tribune provides a productive first-step in what will necessarily be an on-going discussion on the internationalist left.

The emerging debate that will likely steal away much of the oxygen from these other great contributions, is based on Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s very hot take on early governmental responses to COVID-19, his attempted clarifications here and here, and Slavoj Žižek’s uncharacteristically coherent and poignant reply. This debate is grabbing a lot of attention, particularly among academic leftists (which, speaking as one myself, our concerns should never be automatically taken to be identical to the priorities or perspectives of oppressed and exploited peoples—though that’s not to say that academics cannot be oppressed and exploited particularly given the intensification of adjunctification; I think we can be assured at neither Agamben nor Žižek are especially exploited or oppressed, and so on and so on). Panagiotis Sotiris also contributed a response to Agamben for Viewpoint that is more thorough and sophisticated than Žižek’s but probably less fun to read.

Here’s a list of other “famous” takes on COVID-19: David Harvey, Mike Davis, Michael Roberts, Bruno Latour, and Joshua Clover.

Last, but not least, check out the thirteenth newsletter on COVID-19 from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (which is a great resource that I encourage everyone to check out regularly, headed by Vijay Prashad), entitled “We Won’t Go Back to Normal, Because Normal Was the Problem.”

Non-COVID-19

March was a great month for Monthly Review; their March issue included two great essays that were not COVID-19 related (though I’m sure they could be relevant to discussions about the effects of the pandemic and responses to it). First, is an excellent contribution by David Matthews entitled “A Theory of Mental Health and Monopoly Capitalism” which explores, as the title indicates, the psychological causes and effects of (monopoly) capitalism. The piece also does a superb job connecting the monopoly capitalism school of thought to the oft-perceived antagonistic tradition of the Frankfurt School, particularly the oeuvre’s of Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. In the print edition, Matthews essay is followed up by Baran and Sweezy’s original work on the subject, introduced by John Bellamy Foster. The second noteworthy article, is Andy Merrifield’s thought-provoking “Mystified Consciousness,” which explores the contemporary relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s contribution to debates about (class) consciousness and reification.

On left politics and foreign policy, check out the great original work by Fouâd Oveisy entitled “A Mutating Neoliberalism, Socialist Transitions, and their Foreign Policies” published with the Hampton Institute. This is a truly insightful read that should reorient how many on the left are currently thinking about foreign policy.

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

While March produced a number of awesome COVID-19 related podcasts, here are two that are undoubtedly worth checking out that are not COVID-19 related.

I was fortunate enough to have participated in a great conversation about Bernie Sanders, socialism, and electoral politics with Devon Bowers of A Different Lens, the Hampton Institute podcast, along with several other leftist activists and organizers. I rarely listen to recordings of myself, so you’ll have to take my word that this was an intriguing conversation worth listening to.

Additionally, check out Rafael Khachaturian’s conversation with Samuel Moyn on human rights and other adjacent topics for the Andrea Mitchell Center. While not a particularly radical venue, this conversation is sure to be insightful and useful for those on the left.

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.

U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted on calling the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, by racially-tinged, xenophobic labels such as “the Chinese virus” and “the Wuhan virus.” While his crude nationalistic motivations for doing so are, to many on the left obvious (though sadly not universally so), I want to ask: what can the COVID-19 pandemic teach us about the enduring relevance of nation-state boundaries and borders in general?

While there remains debate on the left, particularly in relation to short-term socialist strategy, as to precisely how the left should take up the problematic question of national solutions to what are almost always global, or at least international, problems, it seems that COVID-19 should catalyze a renewed debate about the endurance of national sovereignty in a globalized world. While not identical to left debates about the European Union and Brexit, there seem to be many overlapping concerns.

Specifically, we are left with the question: how can socialists formulate active responses to a global virus, responses to which currently seem to be entirely based in nationally-bounded labor actions, and more generally rooted in an outmoded conception and practice of national sovereign power (e.g., national stay-at-home orders, government command orders over nationally-based companies [such as the American Defense Production Act], and inter-governmental competition for medical resources)?

If you’ve read this far, please do consider supporting the Hampton Institute by becoming a patron, if you haven’t already.

Under socialism, there will be no bills to be paid. Sadly, under capitalism, reader/listener support is the only way projects like the Hampton Institute, A Different Lens, and LeftHooked can continue!

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