“Socialism” is assailed by the political right on the grounds that it afflicts “individual freedom” and stifles “innovation”. Let’s be clear right away that “socialism” is a MODERN response to MODERN predicaments, arising during the emergence of industrial capitalism, specifically as it has evolved since the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The earliest use of the word itself only dates to about the year 1800. The most notable, early popular revolts against industrial automation in England prominently include the Luddites, who destroyed factory machinery under the banner of an imagined “General Ned Ludd”.

As I continue reading EP Thompson lately (“Making of the English Working Class”), I think one of the outstanding points he makes in his work is the enduring propensity of the opulent class to suck all the cultural oxygen out of our ambient environment. It’s a power which, more than brute, physical force, accounts for their astonishing ability to sap all resistance against them by their vastly numerically superior adversaries in the rest of population.

Reading radical British historian EP Thompson’s “Making of the English Working Class” recently, the shocking parallels between 19th century Britain and 20th and 21stcenturies United States deeply struck me. In particular, the extraordinary challenges faced in both places by proponents of both majoritarian political democracy as well as the interests of the vast, working class majority stood out for me. Thompson emphasizes how inextricably linked the decades long struggle in England for both labor rights and political rights always were.

It’s amazing how Congressional Dems fail to do the absolute, bare minimum they could to rein in GOP abuses by federal judicial appointees, who since Reagan increasingly include disproportionate numbers of grossly unqualified, rank partisan political hacks. The “bare minimum”, I have pointed out before, would be invoking the Constitution’s Article 3, Section 2, which empowers Congress to prescribe the precise constraints on who and which cases enjoy standing to pursue remedies in the federal courts, and under which conditions.

We can learn important lessons from the cutting edge theory of dynamical systems. “Dynamical systems” are systems that obey a small number of simple, physical laws, but out of which can emerge complicated and surprising consequences. They provide models for approximating essentially all nontrivial physical systems in our world. It turns out that, even when we limit the applicable physical laws exclusively to Newtonian mechanics, all but the very simplest models of our physical reality have a large number of states, the vast majority of which are completely chaotic, in the sense that their detailed and precise evolution defies any computation.

It should come as no great surprise or mystery that social élites of all times and places are generally enamored of rosy depictions of social reality, and not keen on changes to it, or, if changes need to be made, they prefer them to proceed at a slow and stately pace. Voltaire famously lampooned such rose-colored outlooks on reality in his character of the philosopher, Pangloss, whose singular teaching to his student, Candide, in Voltaire’s novel by the same name, was “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”.

I had a conversation recently with a friend about what seems like the now perennial (though actually only very recently vastly metastasized) housing crisis in US cities, that reminded me of this little cartoon. My friend rehashed the usual arguments about how “the homeless don’t care about all your ideas for earning a little income, or getting off the streets, or what have you. And even if they did, for 90% of them, their nerves are too shot by drugs, or alcohol, or trauma, or what have you, to even act on them!

If you think about it, Vladimir Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine, while a violation of ordinary, bourgeois ethics, as well as international norms, is perfectlly in keeping with street hoodlum ethics, or “omertà”. “Revenge is a dish best served up cold”, goes the saying. And Putin’s reaction to Ukraine – and Ukraine’s EU and NATO ambitions – stays true to that principle. There was no new, immediate, credible casus belli – at least none that hasn’t already existed for almost a decade.

Although there’s no shortage of negativity to sample from when it comes to the subject of the cultural and intellectual prospects facing the political left, all is not nearly as bleak, comparatively speaking, as the direst prognoses constantly seem to suggest. I actually agree with the more cheerful outlooks shared by intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, or politicians like Bernie Sanders. As both of them never tire of emphasizing, our own times and contemporary generations are vastly more enlightened, in myriad ways, than any previous ones.

I am generally sympathetic to the many arguments of ardent civil libertarians like Noam Chomsky, who take up the cause of defending the rights of unpopular people across the political spectrum. And yet, some of his and others’ arguments lack historical depth and nuance, in my opinion, and also suffer from a kind of North American centrism that fails to reach Chomsky’s usual level of acute comparative national analysis. Indeed, from the standpoint of civil liberties, arguably some of our biggest problems today stem from a marked historical failure to sufficiently crush the “civil liberties” of landed Southern aristocrats in the wake of the Civil War, along the lines of, say, the Allies and their denazification program of Germany after WW2, but for which the program of the original Reconstruction era may have been vastly more successful in bringing about a full political democracy in the United States, the legacy of whose failure still haunts us to this day.