Hello, and apologies for the relative silence on the link roundup front lately. I’ve recently re-entered the workforce (well, sort of - as a PhD-student-shaped cog in the knowledge production factory) and found my weekday mornings oddly full of work-like requirements. Not ideal! But I have managed to put together some link-based treats for you this week, so let’s round them up.
We recently recorded a Floodcast on conspiracy theories - their political relevance to both the left and right, why they’re emerging at this particular moment in history, and how we should respond. We also found time to take a very incomplete but nonetheless fascinating look at the history of the CIA, which probably only covered 0.05% of the weird and evil shit they’ve done. The cast should be hitting your eardrums soon (editing it is on my to-do list for tonight) but in the meantime, please enjoy the companion piece that Matt wrote. Also relevant is this absurdly cursed Atlantic piece, which we reference in the podcast, about how “the country” has “abanoned” the establishment. I quote: “Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry.”
I feel like we post a link about Kerala’s response to the pandemic approximately every third link roundup, but who am I to argue with the content gods. This piece looks particularly at the historical role of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in engendering the kinds of structures and institutions that have helped make Kerala a (relative) coronavirus success story.
Thank you to Friend of Flood Dave Eden for this brief but compelling blog post on the crisis of family and community relations under ‘turbo capitalism’, and how it (among other things) might compel members of white working class to vote for Trump, “who at least said things were worse off now as opposed to glib, New York Hillary.”
Along vaguely similar lines, Asad Haider has a piece in Salon about the lefty insult du jour of ‘class reductionist’, and what that label denotes and leaves out. Solid thinking, as always, on class, race, and the relationship between the two. (Haider also engages closely with the arguments of Adolph Reed, a Black Marxist who has recently been at the centre of his own class/race controversy.)
Finally, I LOVED this interview with Australian author Lexi Freiman about identity politics and satire. In these link roundups (and perhaps in general?) we spend a lot of time looking at these issues through an overtly political realm, and I found it so fascinating and refreshing to read the work of someone looking at them through a literary realm. “I’m suspicious of the sacrosanct, the reverent, humorless, and absolute,” she says. “History shows how they’ve been used against us. Even the self, the premise identity politics is built on, is in constant flux and is ultimately illusory.” Mood.
Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash