I have lost count how many times I have heard somebody coming from a leftist orientation sing the praises of the reactionary “Tea Party” and bemoan the lack of (or call for the creation of) a “Tea Party of the left”. But more remarkable than that, in none of these paeans to the supposed manly political virtues of the reactionary Tea Party have I ever run across any concrete materialist analyses attempting to explain its successes, and which of those factors it might actually be possible to reproduce.

“Choice” is very often bad, actually. In the secular religion of consumer capitalism, however, such a statement, on the face of it, will come across as the most obscene sort of profanity. “Choice is good!” we are constantly told, with evangelical fervor. By definition, in the political sphere, in theory, we are meant to make choices aggregated into collective decisions that in principle should serve the greater good. But, in practice, when choice operates on a disaggregated, amoebic, indivual consumer level, the results are often highly perverse and deleterious to society as a whole, whether those disaggregated, amoebic choices are being made in the economic marketplace, or in the so-called political “marketplace of ideas”.

Capitalism and a certain dominant set of social relations associated with its now planet-straddling circuits of trade and capital circulation are phenomena we now take for granted. But, as David Harvey points out, in the larger span of human history, these are remarkably new phenomena, whose trajectories were only starting to become really apparent in Marx’s time – but which were then still relatively marginal, in the sense that they had yet to sweep up the vast majority of humanity into their orbits.

Certain public investments have shaped the entire character of our modern world, in ways which would otherwise make it practically unrecognizable, but for their initial and ongoing funding. And the impacts of these investments are visible and implicated in every aspect of our economy, including all accumulated wealth, public and private. It is easy to name just a couple right now. For instance, it is hard to imagine (for better or worse) anything resembling the current automotive, oil, petrochemical, steel, and numerous other allied industries existing in anything like their current forms, nor the fortunes of any of their industrial titans worldwide, absent the development of the US interstate highway system starting in the 1940s.

The reality is, no matter how long we study and work at something, we DON’T ever just “know what to do to achieve ‘success’”, at much of anything. Were that the case, then the vast majority of new businesses wouldn’t fail. It can’t just be that all those failures were doomed because of the flaws of their founders, which contradicts everything else we know about innovation. Instead, a massive amount of pure luck and unforeseeable accidents are involved in any long term endeavor, as a result of which, all the “business development experts” universally tell us to “fail early and fail often”.

Bourgeois democracy is a stage managed democracy, whose success is predicated on a sufficiently convincing simulacrum of popular sovereignty so as to fend off threats of real class struggle with the potential of eroding bourgeois power long term (as opposed to unidirectional class warfare always favoring economic élites). But calling it a mere “simulacrum” probably discounts too cavalierly its need to manage and in some cases involuntarily extract sufficiently generous concessions from those economic élites to ensure sufficiently broad buy-in from the rest of the population.

Keeping people housed and protecting their tenure in their local communities is a crucial part of a larger theme, which gets short shrift even from the left: protecting social stability in general from the chaos and so-called “creative destruction” wrought by capitalism. Social stability, “stable families”, security of tenure in one’s home and possessions, these are all commonly associated with “conservative values”. But not so coincidentally, what passes for “conservatism” these days is merely an endless game of distractions to draw attention away from the chaos caused by precisely the same oligarchs who bankroll both major political parties.

B. Traven’s novel, “La Carreta”, is one of his series of dramas set in southern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution – then and now the country’s most heavily indigenous and least industrialized (as well as least fully capitalist integrated) regions. In it, he tells the story of the operations of cargo caravan companies who supply remote cities and towns with goods from the rest of the world. The operators of these freight companies, despite having excellent recordkeeping tracking their operating costs at all times, in order to maximize profits, routinely shortchange their drivers on the costs of spare parts and other necessities for keeping their vehicles operating, expecting the drivers to “wing it” somehow.

A long history of jurisprudence in the US proves conclusively that courts cannot and will not ever protect majorities against powerful and predatory minorities. Courts rightly defer to legislatures in many cases, arguing that “political questions” should be decided by the “majority”, and not by judicial fiat. The trouble is, most legislatures themselves are increasingly minoritarian, and wildly diverge from being representative of the larger population. Moreover, private power can dispense with a lot of public goods and services altogether, and increasingly does not need or depend on them.

Civil rights are a CLASS issue. While it should be obvious to anybody, nonetheless, it’s long past time we carefully and patiently explain this elementary fact to our libertarian friends, among others. Ask anybody without “legal” housing about the respect shown by the cops for their first, fourth, and fifth amendment rights in the United States, notably. The ability to exclude unwanted intruders on your personal property is a right reserved to those who OWN property.