Peter Frase

Peculiar Luxembourg fact of the week: my co-workers informed me today that this is the weekend of ["Coat Sunday"](http://www.wort.lu/wort/web/en/luxembourg/articles/2011/10/165173/index.php), the one day all year when shops open on Sunday, so that people can buy their winter coats. Seriously: "originally this was to allow residents living in the countryside to come down to the towns and buy their new winter outfit". Anyway, for those of you not too busy travelling to the city for your coats:

- This [story](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44908122/ns/us_news-life/t/homeowner-taps-occupy-protest-avoid-foreclosure/) about Occupy L.A. protestors defending a woman from foreclosure and Mike Konczal's [post](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/the-sword-and-the-shield-occupy-foreclosures/) about the general intersection between Occupy and the anti-foreclosure movement gave me big time [nerd chills](http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/10/17/nerd-chills-for-starcraft-my-sport-of-choice/2/). I've had countless discussions over the years about how modern socialists could learn from the Communist Party's [anti-eviction work](http://www.tenant.net/Community/history/hist03c.html) in the 1930's. In my arsenal of talking points about how socialists need to relate to people's everyday experience, it's rivaled only by "the Daily Worker had a sports page".

- This is kind of on the abstruse philosophy tip, but as someone who does a lot of Critique and finds Spinoza/Nietszche/Deleuze annoying, this from Benjamin Noys [spoke to me](http://leniency.blogspot.com/2011/10/bye-bye-mr-critique.html). And I think it actually bears on the marvellously contentious [Jacobin OWS debate](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1937) in an oblique way. Perry Anderson argued in *Considerations on Western Marxism* that the Western Marxists (Frankfurt School, Coletti, Althusser, etc.) all tried to tie Marxism back to some prior trend in the history of philosophy, and there was kind of a three-way split between those who went with Hegel, those who went to Kant, and those who went with Spinoza. The "anti-critique" tendency derives in some ways from the encounter between Marx and Spinoza in this period, of which Althusser was the primary exponent, but it's filtered down in many ways to the type of anarchism you see in the Jacobin debate. "The invocations of radical imagination, of the valence of utopia, of transcendental 'ideas of communism', and so on, seem to me to forgo or forget this labour [of critique]. Motivational as they may be the effect of such receding moments, whose empirical instantiations are often questionable or vague, is to offer false consolation."

- A faction of the Occupy Wall Street crew (including some of my friends and comrades) is trying to win people over to a demand: [jobs for all](http://lbo-news.com/2011/10/20/ows-demands-working-group-jobs-for-all). I share some of Jodi Dean's [discomforts](http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/10/on-the-demands-occupywallstreet.html), which won't be a surprise if you've read me [on jobs](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/) and [full employment](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/). But I'm enough of a political pragmatist to think that this is probably the best program to get behind right now, and one that could lead in more promising radical directions in the future.

- Ari Berman's profile of ["the Austerity Class"](http://www.thenation.com/article/164073/how-austerity-class-rules-washington) fits in nicely with my post from [a few days ago](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/10/the-partisan-and-the-political/), in which I identified austerity politics as the ideology hiding behind post-partism "centrist" posturing. The open question about these people, as Mike Konczal [says](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/the-austerity-class-and-the-deficit/), is whether the anti-growth agenda of the austerians represents a material interest or merely false consciousness among the capitalist class.

- On a related note, ["Economists say"](http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2011/10/philosophers-support-greek-austerity.html) is one of the most ubiquitous ways that reporters launder their right-wing opinions into "objective" news.

- ["These are the dwindling options facing the Obama administration now that it's gone down the road of killing an American citizen without due process and covering up the rationale for doing so under the veil of state secrecy. Welcome to absurdity."](http://spencerackerman.typepad.com/attackerman/2011/10/so-is-it-a-state-secret-or-not.html)

- Great line from Jorge Albor's [discussion](http://www.experiencepoints.net/2011/10/darker-knight.html) of *Batman: Arkham Asylum*: "I find it hard to relate to a rich white playboy who secretly buys expensive toys and uses them to beat people up."

- I, too, tend to tune out when I hear the phrase "peak oil", but [this](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/peak-oil-and-great-recession) really could be a problem.

- Democratic feudalism watch (cf. Corey Robin): you can get corporate donations to your nonprofit, but only if you're willing to [lobby on behalf](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/10/20/doing-well-by-doing-good/) of your corporate masters.