Welcome to year two of this "reading books" thing. If you take a quick glance at my post from year one, it clearly morphed from me wanting to share some quick thoughts on what I read to something more time-consuming. I certainly find the latter helpful in terms of synthesizing what I read, but I also want to stop getting bogged down in the need to "produce something" with my new hobby. Thus, my goal is to split the difference and spend a medium amount of energy summarizing my thoughts. Good luck to me.
1. Fidel Castro: My Life - A Spoken Autobiography - Ignacio Ramonet and Fidel Castro (link)
The first thing to note is that the format (akin to a long podcast transcript) is both good and bad. It's good in that we get the mostly unfiltered words of one of recent history's greatest leaders with added citations and context. It's bad in that, like most old men (Fidel was almost 80 at the time), he tends to ramble and repeat himself. So while it's an easy and entertaining 600 pages, it probably didn't need to be 600 pages.
The running theme I found most interesting was how his approach to building socialism was a pragmatic one that focuses on centering the people. This is especially illuminating in contrast to Mao, whose idealistic excesses helped lead to his downfall (Fidel himself notes this, saying that Mao's "harsh, unjust policies" explicitly led to a "turn to the right within the Chinese revolutionary process"). Fidel describes how his education made him a "utopian communist," but then his experience in creating and sustaining the revolution made him profoundly "anti-dogma." He constantly refers to the high levels of education of the Cuban people and how that collective brainpower (and not abstract socialist theory) is the lifeblood that sustains the revolution. He also attributes mistakes in the revolutionary process to "errors of idealism" and specifically says that the greatest errors in the beginning owed to the belief that "somebody knew how Socialism ought to be constructed." If nothing else, Fidel's words are a welcome antidote to all the voices that claim to have everything figured out.
There's about a million other fascinating things here. He speaks of how his Jesuit education formed him and how the teachings of Jesus evoke a sense of eternal socialist principles ("with the teachings of Christ you can formulate a radical Socialist programme, whether your a believer or not"). He speaks of how fundamental ethics (such as taking a hard line against torture) are tactically critical to fomenting a movement. He provides a detailed analysis of the roots of racism in Cuba (it's slavery, just like the US) and gives an honest accounting of where they were in terms of eradicating it. He describes the propagandistic nature of mass media as invoking a "conditioned reflex" that "has a negative effect on the ability to think." And he absolutely tears into the US on its War on Terror and gives an incisive analysis of our political situation — namely that international hegemony is a bigger threat to the people than the unlikely specter of American fascism and that the real crime of 9/11 was our response. This passage in particular, referring to the Patriot Act-ification of America, is wiser than almost any domestic pundit could possibly muster:
"This policy on the part of President Bush didn't emerge as a consequence of the terrorist attack against the people of the United States by members of a fanatical organization which in earlier times had served other American administrations. I'm convinced that it was a policy coldly formulated [beforehand], which explains the rearmament and the colossal weapons spending when there was no longer any Cold War and when the events of September 11 were still far in the future. The events of that black September 11 served as an ideal pretext for setting that policy in motion."
Finally, I think Fidel's understanding of humanity syncs with mine to an almost uncanny degree. In one way this is a natural extension of his inherent pragmatism. "A human being is a human being" he says, continuing with "we can't idealize him." In another way this patient but understanding view of man reflects his identity as "a dreamer who's had the privilege of seeing realities that he was never even capable of dreaming." A man who has personally seen both the best and the worst humanity has to offer can likely come to no other conclusion as this:
"Human society has made colossal errors, and will continue to make them, but I am profoundly convinced that human beings are capable of conceiving the noblest ideas, harbouring the most generous sentiments, and overcoming the powerful instincts that nature has imposed on us — we are capable of giving our lives for what we feel and what we think. That has been shown many, many times down through history."
2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré (link)
My second foray back into reading fiction stays within the world of the clandestine. Whereas The Crying of Lot 49 was a fever dream of paranoia, this work is much more of a straightforward page turner. While the former may be more up my alley, le Carré's story and prose are obviously great, and there's still enough to chew on to keep me thinking about it long after I've put it down.
To that end, I'll start by noting that I got the idea to read this book from The Cultural Cold War, which describes its publication as part of the progression where "the myths upon which (Cold Warriors) relied were being systematically exploded." Le Carré's preface in my copy reinforces this by saying the point of the book is to ask "how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?" But these assertions are in direct conflict with the fact that the book's protagonist is explicitly not an ideologue. Alec Leamas, a spy going on one last mission (before such a thing was cliché), repeatedly denies believing in anything. Liz, his lover, astutely observes him to be "a fanatic who doesn't want to convert people." He is not a defender of capitalism nor explicitly a nihilist, but rather a man with a job, pragmatic to the point of disbelief.
Maybe the way to square my reading of the text with its supposed reputation is to examine the book's ideological conflict in perhaps its most relevant passage. The paragraphs below are a lightly condensed selection from an argument between Leamas and Liz in the closing pages. Focus less on the substance of the argument and more on the nature of their argument.
"What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I'd have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me. [...] This is a war. It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars—the last or the next."
"Oh God," said Liz softly. "You don't understand. You don't want to. You're trying to persuade yourself. It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill."
"Christ Almighty!" Leamas cried. "What else have men done since the world began? I don't believe in anything, don't you see—not even destruction or anarchy. I'm sick, sick of killing but I don't see what else they can do. They don't proselytise; they don't stand in pulpits or on party platforms and tell us to fight for Peace or for God Or whatever it is. They're the poor sods who try to keep the preachers from blowing each other sky high."
"You're wrong," Liz declared hopelessly; "they're more wicked than all of us. Because of their contempt, contempt for what is real and good; contempt for love, contempt for—"
"Yes," Leamas agreed, suddenly weary. "That is the price they pay; to despise God and Karl Marx in the same sentence. If that is what you mean."
"It makes you the same," Liz continued; "the same as Mundt and all the rest ... I should know, I was the one who was kicked about, wasn't I? By them, by you because you don't care. Only Fiedler didn't ... But the rest of you, you all treated me as if I was nothing, just currency to pay with. You're all the same, Alec."
"Oh, Liz," he said desperately, "for God's sake believe me: I hate it, I hate it all; I'm tired. But it's the world, it's mankind that's gone mad. We're a tiny price to pay ... but everywhere's the same, people cheated and misled, whole lives thrown away, people shot and in prison, whole groups and classes of men written off for nothing. And you, your party—God knows it was built on the bodies of ordinary people. You've never seen men die as I have, Liz."
There's a fundamental disagreement here, but it's hard to describe succinctly. This slipperiness owes to the fact that this is fundamentally an is-ought argument that the characters aren't aware they're having. To make matter worse, Leamas' views of reality are hopelessly blinkered by his unique but narrow experience as a spy while Liz isn't fully able to articulate her ethics, perhaps due to her naiveté (she's half his age and isn't part of the spy game). In this light, the story le Carré tells is less a definitive political statement and more a reflection of how the fundamental incomprehensibility of the Cold War produced interpersonal conflict, which in turn led to alienation on a societal level. I make no claim that this is *the* way to interpret to the book, but I feel that this deeper meaning gives it the credit its remarkable prose deserves.
3. The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America - Peter Dale Scott (link)
"The erosions of American civil liberties since 9/11 cannot just be blamed on the Bush administration. They are the outcome of tensions, between the public state and covert notions of security, that has been deforming U.S. politics since the special powers assumed at the outset of the Cold War."
"The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Smith, discussing economic activity, wrote famously in The Wealth of Nations that an individual is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." It is almost as if there is a comparable invisible hand operating in political affairs as well—an impersonal calculus that dictates where a presidency, when guided only by the pursuit of power, will end up, despite the president's stated intentions."
The Road to 9/11 bridges a few gaps for me. The first quote above reflects the most obvious one — the debauchery of the Dulles clan and the dementedness of modern times clearly exist on the same continuum, but the connection between the two had been largely absent in my reading to date (Perlstein's books hint at this transition, but his work is primarily archival in nature and doesn't touch on the "deep" history necessary to fully understand How We Got Here). In telling the detailed story of how covert maneuvers subverted our democracy and led to the security state of the Bush administration, Scott builds a compelling theory of how those in power actually operate. There's a good deal of nuance in his telling of the transition from the old boy's club of the Cold War to a military industrial complex fueled by oil speculation. But still, the 30,000-foot view is as stark as it is true:
"But there is a significant difference between Dulles in the 1950s and (William) Casey in the 1980s. The instrument of Dulles's covert policies was CIA, which Congress, rightly or wrongly, had authorized by the National Security Act of 1947. Casey and Bush supplemented their vigorous CIA programs with other activities, often illegal, that were supported by unauthorized networks."
What's equally fascinating about Scott's work is how he addresses the implications of this evolution towards the long-awaited "continuity of government." The CIA and its ilk are often treated like a bogeyman in the discourse, and not without good reason. But that is an incomplete analysis, as these parallel structures are less a manifestation of pure evil and more a sclerotic mess focused in large part on maintaining itself:
"Why did CIA tolerate ISI's abuse of the program? Partly because it is a general characteristic of CIA, like other intelligence agencies, to put the preservation of structural relationships ahead of promoting particular national policies. (This is probably less a conscious doctrine than the result of a promotional system that rewards individuals for the number of assets they recruit.) Furthermore, intelligence agencies tend to share covert assets, like the BCCI bank; and the milieu of these connections becomes independent of the policy decisions to establish contact in the first place. Thus CIA would have been unlikely to break completely with the ISI, or any other unsavory agency, even if ordered to do so."
To that end, it's also useful to consider how an institution as separate from civil society as the CIA is inherently unable to benevolently address the complexity of the world, even if it wanted to:
"The story of CIA's involvement shows how its cover powers are governed by secret decision-making processes that are far too restricted to cope wisely with today's complex world. It is these powers, rather than the individuals who compose CIA, that are the source of the problem. CIA officers opposed the decision, backed by Casey against his advisers, to send Islamist terrorists across the Amu Darya to conduct raids in the Soviet Union. And CIA officers voiced concern about the decision to equip the mujahideen in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles."
All of this is essential, but it leaves an open question: How exactly do we fight back against all this? This has been a common weakness of my previous reading, perhaps because diagnosis is much easier than prognosis. I remarked specifically on the futility of the recommendations in Bowling Alone, but other, far better books also fall short. Reign of Terror is all fiery damnation, The Jakarta Method mostly leaves you reading between the lines, and Conspiracy Theory in America makes too optimistic of an appeal to classical liberalism and the founding fathers for my taste. So it's a welcome touch that Scott makes his own proposals in the final chapter. His ideas are not a perfect roadmap: much of what he suggested in 2007 is now functionally impossible, he borders on Third Way-ism with its quick dismissal of more revolutionary solutions, and he omits the elephant in the room (climate) entirely. His appeal to mass religion as a potential source of unity is interesting, but he doesn't dig deep enough on that front. What's most useful is where he borrows Daniel Singer's idea of a "realistic utopia" to advocate for "restoring the political process by first strengthening civil society." This may sound similar to the claptrap from Bowling Alone, but the critical difference is that Scott emphasizes that this realistic utopia must be built on an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the anti-democratic rule of the modern deep state. This is most clear in his invocation of how Poland undertook a similar process:
"How was it possible? It was preceded by an almost two-decade effort to build institutions of civil society. Political thought within the democratic opposition in Poland took as its main objective the creation of alternative structures in politics, labor, culture, media, and publishing. From this there emerged a complex network of communities independent from the state. Those communities developed alternative practices of thinking and acting, taught intellectual independence and a new kind of resourcefulness, along with self-reliant decision making, and a spirit of creativity."
Finally I will note that this is perhaps the only book on this list written by an actual English professor, and as such I appreciated the straightforwardness of the prose. His little touches (calling the CIA simply "CIA") and his clear demarcations of uncertainty and opinion made for a very pleasant read.
4. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs - Ray Ginger (link)
"During the last twenty years of his life, Debs spoke often about his early manhood, mainly because he thought his own experience might be helpful to others. The Socialist leader recognized that he was, in many ways, a typical American workingman. His own intellectual progress had been uncertain and painful; events had always kicked him into the next step forward. In several cases, repeated kicks had been needed before he would move. Eugene Debs, in his entire life, had never based an important decision on words written by somebody else. But certain writers—Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine, Edward Bellamy, Karl Kautsky—had clarified and strengthened the results of his own observation. Debs hoped that the story of his life could perform this same function for the men who came after him."
Eugene Debs, the prolific union organizer and socialist leader, is one of those rare beings who makes me Proud To Be An American. I knew the broad strokes of his story and was familiar with his most famous speeches, but was short on details. Thus I turned to the pre-eminent telling of his life story to fill those gaps. And after breezing through all 460 pages in a little over a week, consider my gaps filled.
There's almost too much to properly summarize, so I'll try to limit myself. Debs' upbringing echoes that of others famous leaders on the left. Like Mao and Castro, Debs was not born a revolutionary but became one through careful reflection on his experiences. What's unique about his journey is that it resided almost entirely on the "practice" end of the theory-practice spectrum ("he could only learn by actively taking part in the battles of the outside world...it was useless to give him books or to argue with him" Ginger remarks to that end). As such, his progression from a kindly but naïve worker to the leading firebrand of the workers' movement is more gradual and organic than other origin stories. The entire first third of the book depicts the trials (some literal) that led him to his positions. This extremely detailed story of an unmistakably American becoming is probably the most valuable and meaningful part of the book. When Debs makes his first truly "radical" statement below, you really have a sense of everything that went into it:
"I care nothing about public sentiment. Public sentiment hanged John Brown. I haven't forgotten that public sentiment supported slavery for years. If organized labor has a mission it is to make war on the public sentiment that makes these conditions possible."
The rest of Debs' story essentially consists of him turning this and other revelations into a coherent Marxist argument for American socialism (without really citing Marx all that often, of course). While his tireless union work addressed workers' material concerns, his most useful contribution to the cause might be his singular skill for oratory. The late 1800s featured not only economic volatility and rampant consolidation/greed, but also a miasma of despair regarding what could actually be done. Debs echoed this feeling in his turn towards explicit anti-capitalism ("Big Business...had a firm grip on the American mind"), and it just so happened that his peculiar gift was the perfect antidote. While there are legitimate criticisms to make of Debs (his focus on class minimized racial struggles, he probably played too nice with facile reformers like Samuel Gompers, and his gentle hand with regards to petty disputes in his own party belied a sliver of cowardice borne out of his deficiency of theory), you cannot argue that his cult of personality was cynical or focused on self-aggrandizement in any way. Even his closing speech in the 1918 trial that would put him away for years explicitly minimizes his own importance ("I have lived long enough to appreciate my own personal insignificance in relation to a great issue that involves the welfare of the whole people"). His consistent sense of solidarity, duty, and generosity demonstrates an earnest love for mankind that's nearly unrivaled among historical figures.
Debs' story fascinates me on a couple other fronts. With respect to spirituality, although he was "unblessed by the sanctions of organized religion" he found a liking to the story of Jesus, calling him "the great Divine Tramp who never had a dollar, but who understood and loved the common folk, the ordinary ruck of men, with an absorbing and abiding affection." Ginger peppers his narrative with enough anecdotes to this affect that it almost paints Debs as a secular Christian of sorts, which is an illuminating read to say the least.
Debs' relationship to the press is also interesting in that it maps disturbingly well to modern times. His early work agitating for strikes was treated as an apocalypse of sorts. "Destruction of railroad property has been widespread...but the press made it seem that the entire city had been despoiled" echoes similar exaggerations regarding the protests of 1968 and 2020. Smears of Debs' Socialist Party as "foreign" in nature mirror the accusations of "outside agitators" in protest movements or "foreign influence" in Bernie Sanders' campaigns (which to be clear were BS). And of course there was the classic tendency to focus on obvious atrocities while ignoring their structural causes: "The commercial papers, while they were eager to publish sensational exposes of the Federal prisons, were unwilling to consider "the prison in its relation to society."" Perhaps nothing sums up the obvious antagonism of the corporate press better than this passage:
"The Chicago Chronicle said of this man: "Debs is opposed to government, to society, to all political parties and to all labor organizations.... What he and other revolutionists desire is a state of affairs that will be intolerable and, therefore, a direct incentive to revolt." These newspaper attacks seldom ruffed the Socialist nominee, but he was infuriated by an obvious conspiracy between the California railroads and the Los Angeles Times. Debs had not ridden in a Pullman since the boycott of 1894. But, as he was going south from San Francisco, the conductor announced that every coach on the train would be side-tracked at Bakersfield. Debs was thus forced to abandon his boycott of Pullman, or to arrive in Los Angeles too late for his scheduled meeting. He did the former. When his train pulled into Los Angeles, newsboys were already hawking the local Times: "All about Debs riding into Los Angeles in a Pullman." General H. G. Otis, owner of the Times, obviously remembered the tongue-lashing that Debs had administered in 1896."
In the end, Debs' story is one of equal parts righteous struggle and qualified failure. Did he lead the revolution, oversee the creation of a consolidated industrial union, or build a lasting and viable third party? No. But along with all the real, tangible victories along the way, the unmistakable and lasting success he had was establishing an unbreakable spirit of hope. Probably the best summary comes from Mike Davis' introduction to the most recent version of this book.
"In these unheroic times—a cynical "age of lead" much like the 1920s—it is easy to lose faith in human transformation: by age thirty, at the latest, most contemporary activists have seen the ranks of their cause winnowed more by ambition and selfishness than by repression or fatigue. It is easy to believe that our species lacks the requisite gene for socialist fellowship and the cooperative commonwealth. We see so little evidence of radical selflessness or unwavering commitment to principle that we are almost obligated to accept reactionary definitions of human nature as inherently competitive, acquisitive, and small-minded. Perhaps it is inevitable that young radicals become middle-aged conservatives, that shop-floor rebels become autocratic trade-union bureaucrats, and that yesterday's civil rights heroes end up as jaded pols in the moral wasteland of the Democratic Party. And perhaps in consequence, it is better to quietly cultivate anarchy in the woods of Oregon or simply throw in the towel and get an MBA.
In contrast, The Bending Cross offers us an old-fashioned—and, yes, incorrigibly romantic—ethos for activism; an antidote to jaded postmodernist cynicism, made compelling and coherent by the example of Debs' own life. It is ironic that the Socialist leader was imprisoned for "disloyalty," since what most distinguished Debs was his moral steadfastness and unbreakable loyalty to the labor movement."
PS. If you think the "establishing an unbreakable spirit of hope" from the last paragraph was mere puffery, perhaps take a gander at this article about a Starbucks organizer that came out like three days after I wrote this. Or you could also control-f in this article for the Sara Nelson quote.
5. Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet - Yasha Levine (link)
Next up is a brisk tale about the founding of the internet and how the perceived "freedom" often attributed to it is largely illusory. Following the pattern of what I've read, it's yet another story about how our government shapes seemingly independent institutions to serve its ends. While this book involves some of the same players as previous entries (CIA, military, etc.), the inclusion of Silicon Valley is novel. Regardless, a lot of the same themes come up here, too. Like the development of other intelligence programs, the government's involvement in the creation of the internet was fundamentally a counterinsurgency operation. Groups and individuals that did not overly support U.S. interests were considered "dissident forces deployed against the established order" and the stated goal was to "change their minds." Like many of the stories from License to be Bad, there are numerous examples of creators turning on their creations once they realize they are being used for malign purposes (ie. Norbert Weiner came out against cybernetics once he saw it being used primarily for "more efficient systems of surveillance and control and exploitation"). Because much of the events of this book happened during the Cold War, there's a bunch of the dumbest anti-communist rhetoric you'll ever see (one influential player was driven by a "nightmare scenario...that America would be invaded by the Red Army and that communism would take away his free will to think and do whatever he wanted"). And underneath all of this is the age-old story of private businesses reaping the rewards of public investment, as IBM did when it absorbed one of the networks that was a precursor to the modern internet.
What's especially worthwhile is how Levine ties in the Silicon Valley mindset as the ideology that undergirds all of this. The main story of the building of the internet is gripping in its own right, but the regular bits of semi-coherent philosophizing from weird tech dudes (and they're all dudes) help to form an underlying narrative that's even more fascinating. In short, the adherents of cybernetics reduce the concepts of human solidarity and connectedness to a far more stark "notion that all life on earth (is) one big, harmonious interlocking information machine." This simplistic view of the world as it is then predictably leads to obviously ludicrous ideas of what the world might become. One such character "was among a group of Cold War technocrats who envisioned computer technology and networked systems deployed in a way that directly intervened in people's lives, creating a kind of safety net that spanned the world and helped run societies in a harmonious manner, managing strife and conflict out of existence." This idea of technology as inherently leading to peaceful order is directly refuted by the narrative of the book (Google, an "equal partner" of government agencies seemingly relishes its role in fomenting regime change in the Middle East), but still none other than Edward Snowden continues to take up this mantle in the present day:
"If you want to build a better future, you're going to have to do it yourself. Politics will only take us so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change...They're not going to jump up and protect your rights. Technology works different than the law. Technology knows no jurisdiction."
More than anything, this sort of anti-politics/post-politics/whatever is the product of how little salience actual mass politics has in modern life. Levine correctly diagnoses tech evangelists as "(having) a very limited conception of who The Man was and what it would mean in real political terms to fight him." But the very nature of technology and big data does raise one valid counterargument. Levine says that executives at Google "look into the future and see Internet companies morphing into operating systems for society. To them, the world is too big, and moves too quickly, for traditional governments to keep up." Regardless of whatever vision one may have of the path forward, it's clear that the present state of things is not only more complex than ever, but also lends us the ability to comprehend this complexity more readily thanks to the very systems described in this book. I do think any good Marxist analysis needs to address this reality, and I do think such an analysis would require an explicit acknowledgment of the role technology/data should play moving forward. But still, I don't think it necessarily follows that this requires one to adopt an anti-political stance.
To his credit, Levine makes this stance clear in the closing pages. "The internet...does not transcend the human world" he says as a direct refutation of Silicon Valley's twisted sense of techno-optimism. But popping this bubble doesn't lead to doom and gloom. Rather, like Peter Dale Scott in his closing chapter of The Road to 9/11, Levine views the future of the internet with a more informed and cautious sense of optimism. "Not all control is equal. Not all surveillance is bad. Without them, there can be no democratic oversight of society." Contrary to what Silicon Valley evangelists would like you to believe, government itself is not bad. But if we want our government to be this vehicle for proper oversight, the first step is understanding where we've gone wrong. To that specific end, this book is extremely useful.
6. The Concept of Representation - Hanna F Pitkin (link)
"We need these two great moods [form and substance], and both together. To define representation institutionally, operationally, is to give up all hope of judging, assessing, improving, or reforming it, or even of instructing someone in the role of representative—or at least it is to give up all hope of doing these things in a rational, non-arbitrary way. Thus, if representation is "whatever representatives actually do when you watch them," nothing they do can fail to be representation. To define representation ideally, on the other hand, to concentrate on its virtue or essence to the exclusion of institutions, is likely to mean abandoning all hope of its practical implementation. It could lead us, as it led Burke, to accept gross inequities in an institutional system, because at any given time the system seems to be producing the essence of representation despite them. It might incline us to accept moment-to-moment, short-range performance as our criterion, which would make impossible any systematic, sustained implementation—in short, institutionalization—of our ideal purpose. What representatives, in fact, do would seem irrelevant to us, and thus our conception would remain forever impotently in the realm of Platonic forms."
If you're looking for a grand statement on what the concept of representation should mean in a political context, this is not the book for you. The quote above is fairly prescriptive, but that's mostly a product of its placement in the closing pages of the book. Rather, the goal here is to give the reader the philosophical tools to discern one's position on the matter more thoughtfully. The idea behind Pitkin's approach is that most prior conceptions of representation are wrong in that they "generalize too readily" and thus are incomplete. She uses her gift for rhetorical flourish to describe these views as "flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles" that are "built up, like pearls, around a grain of truth." When using all available evidence to then discern this larger truth, we are left with the paradox of representation as "being made present in some sense, while not really being present literally or fully in fact." Representation is but it also does. Representatives have a mandate from the people but also have independence to act as they see fit. And the interests they seek to represent range from the specific and the personal to the theoretical and the collective. Given all of this there can't be any definitive bite-size answer, and it's to Pitkin's credit that she never tries to force one.
In spite of Pitkin's support of a holistic understanding of representation, her argument is still very specific to its time and place, and as such is an abstraction of sorts. The book was published in 1967, so there's obviously no discussion of the effects of the modern developments of neoliberalism. Furthermore, practical concerns such as the class consciousness of individuals, media influence on political discourse, or disenfranchisement of individuals are rarely remarked upon. I'm undecided on whether such discussions would necessarily add richness to Pitkin's argument, largely because Pitkin's particular philosophical focus does not make her arguments naïve or overly idealistic. She understands that "voting decisions depend largely on habit, sentiment, and disposition rather than on rational, informed consideration" and is acutely aware of the specific limitations of descriptiveness as representation:
"The fact that a man or an assembly is a very good descriptive representation does not automatically guarantee that they will be good representatives in the sense of acting for, that their activity will really be representing. In the realm of action, the representative's characteristics are relevant only insofar as they affect what he does."
This sort of insight may not directly address the issues of our time, but it does gives us the philosophical ammunition to not only conceive of the concept of representation more clearly, but also to address our problems more incisively.
Pitkin's arguments touch on a number of recurring themes in my reading. There are many passages in the book where the idea of complexity comes into play. America's founders are quoted as saying "Representation is made necessary only because it is impossible for people to act collectively," which I would only accept categorically with some extensive caveats. But the very next line offers a corrective: "In a community consisting of large numbers, inhabiting an extensive country, it is not possible that the whole should assemble." This is just obviously true, and is a good practical basis for the necessity of this very book. Later discussion of the "action for" aspect of representation doubles down on this: "One person cannot be wise in all matters, and he cannot be in all places at once. And since the pursuit of his goals in a complex society requires him to be in many "places" at once, he has to have help [...] It is thus essentially a matter of the division of labor in a society, and the more advanced and complex a society becomes, the more need exists for representation." In effect, one who desires to exist in a modern society (and all that entails) has no choice but to submit to being represented by others in some regards. Pitkin makes clear that while this logic can be taken to unsavory extremes (there's a whole chapter on Edmund Burke's thoughts on the merits of representation, the crux of which essentially amounts to elitism), it is absolutely crucial to understanding the necessity of the concept.
Finally, the use of historic thinkers like Burke and Madison makes for fascinating analysis. Burke's conceit of political representation quickly gives way to the basic ethos of conservatism: Essentially, seeing only that which is directly in front of your face and then making an argument for its eternal, necessary existence. But in spite of this small-mindedness, it's still worthwhile to engage with it from time-to-time, if only to better know your enemy. The discussion of Madison and other American founders is almost equally frustrating for entirely different reasons. Many previous readings have prescribed a return to American ideals as a cure to what ails us, which to be clear is a fine sentiment. But when reflecting on some of the logic underpinning these ideals, it becomes clear that the founders were somewhat naïve regarding what exactly constitutes a more perfect union. Madison conceived of representative government as being able to nullify discordant factions because "superior, dispassionate men...will refuse to give way to the factious desires of their constituents." Increased diversity and/or size of a state would produce "more separate interests, and therefore less likelihood that they can combine for effective factious action." Furthermore, "when positive action is required, (Madison) assumes that there will be no difficulty in securing a substantial majority to support it." It should go without saying that this logic has been proven incorrect by our current state of affairs. Perhaps our 230-year-old constitution might be hampering our ability to govern in the modern era.
7. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Naomi Klein (link)
"Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
-Milton Friedman
Naomi Klein's magnum opus is such a foundational work that I felt at times that I had already read it. The story of how Friedman's Chicago School of neoliberal capital makes use of disasters (and sometimes encourages them) in order to achieve their political goals is so fundamental to our times that it's hard not to have already absorbed part of its message before turning the first page. Regardless of how well versed in the topic you think you are, Shock Doctrine is still a worthwhile read. Its massive scope, its detailed focus on the mechanism of this phenomenon, and its central metaphor of shock doctrine as torture/mind control makes for a good companion to the much dryer A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.
There's too much to summarize properly, but I wanted to note two things. The first is how Klein makes it clear that this mechanism is at the root of everything that perverts the very notion of society. Central to this is how the threat of violence "demand(s) everything: our attention, our compassion, our outrage" and "has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests is serves." Put more starkly by an Iraqi interviewee in 2004: "No one here cares about privatization. What they care about is surviving." This stripping away of the foundations of life erodes notions of human solidarity and leads to a "cruel and divided future in which money and race buy survival." This world consists of an ever more viciously self-reinforcing economy which "generates huge profits for the high-tech security sector, for heavy construction, for private health care companies treating wounded soldiers, for the oil and gas sectors—and of course for defense contractors." Klein specifically describes Israel's version of this model, where the burgeoning homeland security sector puts its economy fundamentally in opposition to peace, but this sort of pathology is sprinkled throughout almost every chapter. The book doesn't necessarily have hard answers on how to counter this, but its closing pages do emphasize the need to create new narratives from the memories of the survivors to be able to imagine a better world. To that specific end, the book makes an excellent case for its own existence.
The second thing I wanted to note is how this book makes a good companion to License to Be Bad regarding how right-wing ideology is filtered through bad science and discreet propaganda. Whereas the narrative of the latter is focused specifically on this theme, Shock Doctrine lets it crop up in the undercurrent from time to time. Whether it's in the section on Chile (Pinochet's belief that "nature shows us basic order and hierarchy are necessary") or later on during the discussion of Iraq (where the voices advocating for war on TV are often people who stand to directly benefit), there's always some analysis of how Friedman's desired "monopoly on ideology" was manufactured by various structures. One such structure is my regular nemesis The Ford Foundation, which rears its head as a supposed moderating force, fighting for "human rights." The problem with this is that they worked to "define the field (of human rights) as narrowly as possible" and "favored groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for "the rule of law," "transparency" and "good governance."" Fundamentally, what this misdirection aims to achieve is to constrain the range of acceptable views such that Chicago School policy becomes the only acceptable outcome. This in turn leads to "infantilization" of transitional governments that leaves them with no real power to actually govern, except within the narrow bounds of what the IMF dictates.
Finally, Klein's prose is very good and her critiques are incisive, but I'm not sure there's a useful takeaway outside of the "new narratives" I mentioned above. The title phrase of "disaster capitalism" is evocative, but accidentally (?) performs the neat trick of suggesting that some other form of capitalism wouldn't lead to the same outcomes. The prescriptive final chapter is good, but she never necessitates any firm changes to the political economy that led to this. Furthermore, there's some subtle phrasing that suggests socialism/communism is not something she would consider a solution (ie. she compares Allende to Fidel Castro by saying the latter believed change needed to come through "the barrel of a gun" without acknowledging the differences in previous regimes. Batista was never going to be voted out!). In all, the lack of an alternative doesn't necessarily hurt the impact of the book, but it's still a noticeable absence if you're expecting it.
8. Capitalism and Slavery - Eric Williams (link)
"The West Indians, pampered and petted and spoiled for a century and a half, made the mistake of elevating into a law of nature what was actually only a law of mercantilism. They thought themselves indispensable and carried over to an age of anti-imperialism the lessons they had been taught in an age of commercial imperialism. When, to their surprise, the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith turned against them, they could turn only to the invisible hand of God. The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery."
Most things I read leave me with a bounty of competing and overlapping thoughts. Eric Williams' seminal research on the British slave trade does not do this, but that is not an insult. Rather, it's reflective of a work that possesses such a focused and contained argument for the fundamentally economic nature of slavery, that there's not much left for me to say. Sure there were dedicated abolitionists that contributed to the cause of emancipation, and people with vested interests eventually echoed their rhetoric. But in the end, capital pulled the strings. It built chattel slavery in the West when it was needed and destroyed it when it was no longer profitable...simple as. While Williams explicitly says that his narrative should not be considered prescriptive towards present-day problems, I will leave you with one quote that seems relevant nonetheless:
"The ideas built on these interests continue long after the interests have been destroyed and work their old mischief, which is all the more mischievous because the interests to which they corresponded no longer exist."
9. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom - Derecka Purnell (link)
Derecka is one of those rare people whose appearance on a podcast is so good and so revelatory that I am immediately compelled to follow them on Twitter. Naturally, my next step was to read her book when it came out, and thus here we are. Her prose isn't as incisive and precise as her oration, and the book covers a lot of familiar ground for me, but I found it extremely worthwhile nonetheless. Purnell's narrative is built around her personal journey towards developing an abolitionist worldview but does not take the form of a straight memoir, as she (in great detail!) links her journey to the larger world of abolitionist thought and activism. Even though the latter aspect is the more robust aspect of the book, I found her personal journey to be the more rewarding part. After all, we know that abolitionist theory exists, and we know that the George Floyd protests made it clear there is a broad base of opposition to police misconduct. But in spite of this, the vast majority of people are not abolitionists and the very notion seems politically untenable! If we're ever going to square this contradiction, then we need to understand how to facilitate a similar journey on a mass scale.
To that end, Purnell's insights about her own political development are illuminating. The most important takeaway is that her radicalization* did not require fundamental changes to her temperament or morality or even her person, but simply a more complete understanding of the world. At one point she describes the evolution of her worldview as having "revealed a belief I hadn't realized I held." Such an education also requires a specific humility in that "just because I did not know the answers to questions, that didn't mean that they did not exist." The holistic nature of an abolitionist mindset relies on the intersection of different struggles, as Purnell shows through her overlapping work with those in South Africa, Brazil, and Palestine. And her paradigm of reframing valid, good-faith questions that only respond to problems ("what about murderers") toward questions that address preventing these same problems ("why do people kill people") is a good, practical model for truly engaging people on these matters.
*I am remiss to use the word "radical" when discussing left politics as I feel that the connotation of the word serves to ghettoize anything described as such, but Purnell explicitly (and convincingly) ties the word to the idea of relentlessly searching for the true root cause of a problem, so I'll make an exception here
10. Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War - Eric Bennett (link)
"They were free...from "isms": They didn't find it necessary to explain the reasons that lay behind their choices, or articulate their taste and methodology. They simply discussed good and great stories — masterpieces by their definition — and masters of the form. The word masterpieces meant something in those days and signaled a benchmark of excellence that most readers (and writers) could agree on."
Hey look it's another book I discovered through a podcast episode. This one, which makes a perfect companion to The Cultural Cold War, explores how the intersection of monetary influence, prevailing anti-communist ideology, and conservative pedagogy conspired to impose a stultifying set of norms on multiple generations of American creative writers. These norms reflected a very American sense of individualism; one that favored personal experience and interpretation over all else. This ethos drew on a sense of aesthetic purity, seeking "religion's anti-nihilistic certitude without its antiliberal limitations." And in grand American tradition it was a self-replicating ideology:
"The logic made circles: patriotism attracted publicity; publicity raised consciousness; consciousness inspired donations; donations bankrolled famous writers; famous writers raised the profile of a program; a raised profile impressed the globe; international students, arriving from Europe and Asia, vindicated the claims of patriotism; patriotism attracted publicity, and again."
More than just describing this phenomenon, the book does a good job of answering the more important question of "Why does this really matter?" To echo the quote from Eric Williams from two books ago, "the ideas built on these interests continue long after the interests have been destroyed." We're not fighting the Cold War anymore (well, at least not that Cold War), but the Manichean, individualistic mindset behind it still pervades American life. Bennett notes this when describing the works of notable descendants of these writing programs: "They were following an aesthetic whose provenance resided in a forgotten set of concerns." This is not to say that one can't write a personal narrative or that Hemingway was bad, but rather that a good writer or reader should give deep and meaningful consideration to the assumptions that underlay both the form and function of their chosen medium. Without such reflection, it's all too easy to unknowingly espouse an ideology that helps to build and reinforce a political economy that is fundamentally at odds with your beliefs.
Of course, this book is primarily not about unwitting accomplices to American hegemony. The title duo were both more than happy to usher in a fundamentally conservative turn in American literature. In this way, Workshops of Empire is an excellent rumination on the conservative mind through the prism of literary criticism. Bennett details the precepts of the New Humanism school of literary thought and how it laid the groundwork for the developments detailed in the book. But where this analysis really shines is in the examination of how Engle and Stegner applied their particular pathologies to the world of creative writing. Engle is the simpler case; his reign at the University of Iowa was more a matter of rising up to meet the opportunity at hand. "[Engle] envisioned an empire of letters in which the figure of the autonomous and individualistic poet or novelist would matter to the destiny of nations." Accordingly, the climate of the late 1940s gave him a perfect angle: "because he kept a finger on the pulse of his age, he became a cold warrior." This malleability reflected a cunning brand of genius put to service elevating his own sense of self-importance above all else. In this way, Engle was as much a scion of the quiet depravity of American individualism as anyone.
Stegner on the other hand, ruled over his perch at Stanford as more of a true believer in his cause, which makes him the more fascinating character. One writer called him "the steadiest man I have ever known" and Bennett makes clear that Stegner strongly desired rules, systems, and order. Yet within this rigid mindset lurked contradictions aplenty. Even though he had a sort of fundamental faith in his idea of goodness and order, he was suspicious of passionate faith in others, and "wanted religion's anti-nihilistic certitude without its antiliberal limitations." To that end, he was "a moral writer but not a moralizer" and often emphasized that things should be one way "just because, like an ardent patriarch with no God to back him up." Instead, his seemingly religious fervor was made incarnate in his fealty to the ideas of New Humanism: "Humanity is always moving towards oneness, the oneness that is expressed in great art." This idea of art as the key to salvation may seem as self-serving as any of Engle's motives, but my reading of his oeuvre suggests something more pure to Stegner's beliefs, if also more foolhardy.
Furthermore, it's in Bennett's analysis of Stegner's novels that we see something of a tragedy of limited imagination. Stegner's work (and the work of the movement as a whole) was focused on squaring the (largely false) contradiction of the particular and the universal, but was always blinkered by a devotion to a particular way of seeing the world. In this way he falls victim to the fundamental conservative flaw of not being able to see outside of yourself. In "The Preacher and The Slave" an agnostic minister (clearly a stand-in for Stegner) seemingly tries to understand the mind of a man sentenced to die. But ultimately he fails to do so and the overall message is a contextless, and thus worthless, "be responsible and this won't happen." His best work "Angle of Repose" seemingly goes farther in inhabiting the mind of multiple characters, across time and across gender. But reality would soon reveal that much of one female character was lifted from the notes of a real-live nineteenth century writer, without attribution of course. Per Bennett, this work was something genuine, perhaps even genius, but was done in by the context surrounding it: "It mourned, within itself, a set of changes; it illuminated, outside the text, other changes. It poignantly protested the downside of cultural shifts whose upsides justified the indictment of the text in the real world."
In the end, Engle and Stegner's efforts served to do two things: Convince the literary world that all can be imagined, and stress communication across the world as the key to lasting contentment. This sounds like another contradiction until you realize that the "communication" in question is something more like indoctrination to a world order founded on liberal democracy and nothing else (and it's not one of the "nice" liberal democracies either). As such, Engle, Stegner, and the writing programs they birthed were true professors of their cause. Only through understanding the full scope of their reach, both big and small, can we hope to turn the tide towards a more inclusive and just conception of the world.
11. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism - Kristin Dombek (link)
"If there's one thing I've learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what may patients tell me is likely to be true — that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, in turned out, though only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound."
-Heinz Kohut
Do you know someone who is a narcissist? If you answered yes, consider this follow-up question: How do you know you know that person is a narcissist? If that question didn't give you pause, here's another: Are you sure you trust your own perception of that person enough to pass definitive judgment on them? And if you are indeed sure, one last thing to ponder: Is it possible that this judgment is compensating for fear of your dependence on this other person?
As you might guess from the nature of my questions, my view is that passing such judgment on others is virtually impossible, and as such you should regard others as valid humans and treat them generously and without judgment (lest you think this attitude of mine was only formed upon reading this book, I've touched on this in this blog before). To this end, this series of essays is a useful resource for one hoping to entertain and/or actually attain this mindset. Dombek's work is equal parts ponderous and rigorous, and accordingly, her personal philosophy consists of the right mix of research-backed definitiveness and informed speculation (the proposal for diagnostic criteria for "narciphobia" that closes the book is directly preceded by a chapter that consists largely of personal musings and reflections). And also...it's short...just go read it! Not much for me to say beyond that.
12. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years - Russ Baker (link)
If you want to take a full accounting of George H.W. Bush, this is the book to read. And upon reading it, I don't think it is unreasonable to consider him a candidate for most malign influence in American history. Baker's work covers a lot of ground, much of it incidental, speculative, and covered in more specific detail elsewhere (to his credit, he is very open about directly citing these other works). But even if you're not inspired to take the maximal interpretation implied by the totality of Bush's web of intrigue (ie. direct involvement in the Kennedy assassination), the sheer scope of his story leaves us with a man who was either complicit in or directly a proponent of basically every bad thing that happened in the half-century depicted in the book. As such, the comprehensive nature of this tome is its biggest asset.
For all the valuable details of the story, the lessons are the same as with other narratives of recent American history. It's even explicitly spelled out in the preface: "there are unseen forces at work in every presidency, and their interests are rarely, if ever, the same as those of the electorate." The narrative then makes clear that there might be no better personification of those "unseen forces" than Bush himself. This is obviously ironic given that Bush himself was far from invisible, but the book counters this by characterizes many of Bush's actions as having a "sustained fuzziness" that allowed him to "build an uneasy alliance between social issue ground troops and the corporate libertarians who finance the party." This secrecy was aided in part by groups like the Masons, who served to enforce discipline among competing interests, and the press, who unwittingly served as gatekeepers for a sanitized version of the truth (to this end, there's a good story near the end about how Bush's people would plant stories in such a manner that allowed reporters to "discover" them and subsequently defend them as a point of pride).
Perhaps the most interesting part of this is a recurring thread that rears its head here—that is, the fear of being labeled a "conspiracy theorist" for simply acknowledging the world as it is. Tom O'Neill spoke to this in Chaos as did Stephen Kinzer in Poisoner in Chief. Conspiracy Theory in America goes into detail about the "conspiracy theory conspiracy theory" and how righteous dissent has perversely come to be viewed as "unpatriotic" and "paranoid" (thanks a lot, Hofstadter). But for my money, the best distillation of this phenomenon comes in Baker's closing thoughts, copied below:
"Time and again, there has been a rush to bury inquiries into the most perplexing events of our time, along with a determination to subject dissenting views to ridicule. And the media weren't just enabling these efforts; they were complicit in them—not least by labeling anyone who dared to subject conventional views to a fresh and quizzical eye as a conspiracy theorist.
I'll admit it. Fear of being so labeled has haunted me throughout this work. Ifs been an internal censor that I've had to resist again and again. And also an external one, as friends within the journalistic establishment reviewed my findings, found them both credible and highly disturbing, and yet urged me to stay away from them for my own good.
I began to realize that I was experiencing the very thing the process is designed to induce. The boundaries of permissible thought are staked out and enforced. We accept the conventional narratives because they are repeated and approved, while conflicting ones are scorned. Isn't this how authoritarian regimes work? They get inside your mind so that overt repression becomes less necessary."
One final note: A thing I find curious is how Bush's political project was more explicitly and successfully advanced when he was not actually the president. His work as CIA director* under Ford set the stage for the covert structures that support the current oil-based political economy. Reagan's administration did the bulk of the work establishing domestic neoliberalism. And his son implemented the security state and continuity of government that Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc had been planning for decades. It's almost as though our democracy is largely illusory or something.
*Bush's single biggest "accomplishment" came during his brief stint as head of the CIA. On the heels of revelations of numerous crimes in the mid 70's, Bush was installed to, in his words "not see the agency compromised further by reckless disclosure." To this end, he consolidated power, took a harder line in the Cold War than Nixon/Kissinger, entered into an alliance with the Saudis that persists to this day, and privatized most covert operations.
13. The End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale (link)
I downloaded the e-book for this during the George Floyd protests when it was free. I browsed through it at the time, but never really felt the need to dig in. Part of this is that I am bad at reading e-books, but the bigger reason is that the subject matter preaches to my personal choir and I generally try to spend my time reading things that expand my thinking rather than just reinforce it. But seeing as my wife recently got a hard copy from the library I felt I should swoop in and knock this one out. As I suspected no new ground was broken for me here, but a couple things were still of use. From a practical standpoint, few books have been as good at summarizing the totality of a broad subject as this one. The compendium of citations and further reading is and will always be a useful resource. From a narrative standpoint, Vitale offers the rare American story where everything didn't go to shit precisely in the years cited elsewhere (1877, 1929, 1945, 1964, 1980, 2001...good Lord there's a lot of bad years). The story of criminal "reform" in America has a distinctly nineties flavor to it, and as such, most chapters have a distinct rightward turn during the heyday of Bill Clinton. Of course it's not surprising or even new knowledge that much of the policy that dictates our police state was signed by a Democratic president, but it's still enlightening in a way to see this echoed again and again throughout the book.
14. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe (link)
The things that most claw at my mind regarding the Nakba (aside from the sheer brutality, heartbreak, and mass death) are a) how a subset of the people who were victims of the most famous genocide in history perpetrated their own crime against humanity within the same decade, and b) how it was immediately forgotten, only to slowly drift back into the larger public conscience decades later. Pappe's work is excellent throughout, but to my mind, its most important contributions are demystifying what happened and helping to answer why these two things happened as they did.
The idea of the oppressed becoming the oppressor is complicated, as early Zionists clearly understood the need to clear the land of its native inhabitants. As such, the vestiges of British colonial rule and the presence of ideologically committed Zionist immigrants before the Holocaust likely made ethnic cleansing an inevitability. Still, righteous pain was perversely weaponized in extremely bad faith:
"In public, the leaders of the Jewish community portrayed doomsday scenarios and warned their audiences of an immediate 'second Holocaust.' In private, however, they never used this discourse. They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparation on the ground."
"The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill, and destroy other human beings."
"Israeli, and in particular American, public opinion, however, succeeded in perpetuating the myth of potential destruction or a 'second Holocaust' awaiting the future Jewish state. Exploiting this mythology, Israel was later able to secure massive support for the state in Jewish communities around the world, while demonizing the Arabs as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular, in the eyes of the general public in the US. The reality on the ground was, of course, almost the complete opposite: Palestinians were facing massive expulsion. The month that Israeli historiography singles out as the 'toughest' actually saw the Palestinians simply attempting to be saved from that fate, rather than being preoccupied with the destruction of the Jewish community. When it was over, nothing stood in the way of the cleansing troops of Israel."
As for the almost immediate amnesia, it appears to have been imposed by design. Pappe notes the fecklessness and the one-sided nature of the Western press multiple times, but a purposeful and sustained propaganda campaign by the new Israeli government served to erase atrocities as they happened. Add in a lack of critical support from most other Arab nations and a general malaise among most unaffiliated governments, and everything was in place for the profound level of denial necessary to forget such a crime. Pappe details it best here:
"Indeed, the Nakba had been so effectively kept off the agenda of the peace process that when it suddenly appeared on the scene at Camp David, the Israelis felt as if a Pandora's box had been opened in front of them. The worst fear of the Israeli negotiators was the looming possibility that Israel's responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe would become a negotiable issue. Needless to say, this 'danger' was immediately confronted. The Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, lost no time in formulating a wall-to-wall consensus: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes that had been theirs before 1948. The Knesset swiftly passed a law to this effect, 4 with Barak publicly committing himself to upholding it as he climbed the steps of the plane that was taking him to Camp David.
Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear vis-à-vis any debate over 1948, as Israel's 'treatment' of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. This makes it crucial for Israelis to keep a strong mechanism of denial in place, not only to help them defeat the counter-claims Palestinians were making in the peace process, but — far more importantly — so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundations of Zionism."
The most impactful depiction of this, however, takes place on a much more granular level. Denial didn't just occur because of an edict from above. Rather, it was constructed purposefully, by way of building over the ruins of Palestinian villages, one at a time. Pappe illustrates this throughout, often concluding passages on the fates of specific villages with a straightforward description of the tackiness and/or emptiness that now resides in its place.
"Today, a cactus hedge surrounds the rubble that was Sirin. Jews never succeeded in repeating the success of the Palestinians in holding on to the tough soil in the valley, but the springs in the vicinity are still there — an eerie sight as they serve no one."
Other times he details the specific history of the village to give an idea of the full cultural and human loss. His discussion of Mujaydil is exemplary, going into detail about the simultaneous modernization and care for its tradition that was subsequently erased. Other times he gets downright lyrical when describing the perseverance of native flora—how olive trees still poke through the pine forests planted to cover up Israeli crimes. It's in describing this exact phenomenon where Pappe ties everything together best:
"The true mission of the Jewish National Fund, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence. Whether on the JNF website or in the parks themselves, the most sophisticated audio-visual equipment displays the official Zionist story, contextualizing any given location within the national meta-narrative of the Jewish people and Eretz Israel. This version continues to spout the familiar myths of the narrative — Palestine as an 'empty' and 'arid' land before the arrival of Zionism — that Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past.
As Israel's 'green lungs', these recreational sites do not so much commemorate history as seek to totally erase it. Through the literature the JNF attaches to the items that are still visible from before 1948 a local history is intentionally denied. This is not part of a need to tell a different story in its own right, but is designed to annihilate all memory of the Palestinian villages that these 'green lungs' have replaced. In this way, the information provided at these JNF sites is a pre-eminent model for the all-pervading mechanism of denial Israelis activate in the realm of representation. Deeply rooted in the people's psyche, this mechanism works through exactly this replacement of Palestinian sites of trauma and memory by spaces of leisure and entertainment for Israelis. In other words, what the JNF texts represent as an 'ecological concern' is yet one more official Israeli effort to deny the Nakba and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy."
15. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters - James W. Douglass (link)
"That reconciling method of dialogue—where mutual respect overcomes fear, and thus war—is again regarded as heretical in our dominant political theology. As a result, seeking truth in our opponents instead of victory over them can lead, as it did in the case of Kennedy, to one's isolation and death as a traitor. That ultimate crown is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "the cost of discipleship." There is no better reason for it than loving one's enemies—not a sentimental love but, first of all, respect. Respect means recognizing and acknowledging our enemies' part of the truth, whether or not that makes life more difficult for us. Recognizing his enemies' truths made life much more difficult, and finally impossible, for Kennedy—leaving us with the responsibility of recognizing the painfully obvious truth of Kennedy's death."
-Douglass, in the preface to this book
"Every slightest effort at opening up new areas of thought, every attempt to perceive new aspects of truth, or just a little truth, is of inestimable value in preparing the way for the light we cannot see."
-Thomas Merton
If you want the story and the facts of the Kennedy assassination, JFK and the Unspeakable is a solid resource. If nothing else, reading the 160-page final chapter is a useful way to disabuse yourself of the notion of the Kennedy assassination being the product of a "lone gunman" or a "Cuban plot." But as Conspiracy Theory in America posited, it's oftentimes counterproductive to get bogged down in the details — covert actions have important, lasting consequences and focusing on/debating the particulars of something as intriguing as JFK's assassination can distract from that. To that end, this book is masterful, as it never strays far from the big picture and even ventures into discussion of the sublime and the spiritual.
JFK and the Unspeakable does this in large part by synthesizing the historical record. Through this, we come to understand how intelligence agencies, business leaders, and the Pentagon became aligned against Kennedy. We understand how JFK was able to connect with his adversaries to begin the process of envisioning a different world. And we understand how, echoing The Jakarta Method and The Brothers, Kennedy became one of the "good ones" who was able to see the world through others' eyes and then use this skill to build coalitions that were previous unthinkable. But Douglass' most striking method of connecting his narrative to these more profound ideas is to incorporate the contemporaneous writings of American monk Thomas Merton. His informal collection of writing titled "The Cold War Letters" diagnosed the disease of the era in real time in a way that perhaps only a theologian could have. Merton protested explicitly against war but also against "a suicidal moral evil and a total lack of ethics and rationality with which international policies tend to be conducted." In writing to Cuban émigrés, he observes that "surrounded by the noise of hate and propaganda...you are forced against your will to take an aggressive and belligerent attitude which your conscience, in its depth, tells you is wrong." He saw that "our weapons dictate what we are to do" and that "if they continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them." And more generally, he observed that Americans "are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us." Merton best summed up the bankrupt morality of the time, which unwittingly echoes our own time, here:
"The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril of the cold war is the progressive deadening of conscience."
Merton's words were the most revelatory part of this work, effortlessly chronicling the personal impact of the political developments of the time. But Douglass himself is able to reframe certain ideas in his writing in a way that, while perhaps not as unique or prescient, is still able to shine a specific light on what all of this means. His titular concept of the "unspeakable" is at times a hokey rhetorical device, but it's also a useful way to conceptualize the sheer horror of knowing that the forces that conspired to kill Kennedy exist and are still with us today. His description of Kennedy's ideas representing "a different kind of security" flips our defense department's dominant ideology on its head. And his idea of peace as something you work towards rather than a state of being, is both practical and essential:
"Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace—based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions—on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace—no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process—a way of solving problems."
16. Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present - Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (link)
"Imperialism is a relationship between capitalism and its setting, central to which is an imposition of a regime upon the setting that entails income deflation as a means of preventing the threat of increasing supply price. No matter what happens to the bourgeoises of the South or the workers of the North, this relationship, which existed in the colonial era, persists to this day and the system cannot do without it. But though the content of this relationship remains unchanged, the form of it has changed over time."
This book breaks little new ground for me. The deep economic analysis (especially in the first section) appears to be solid, but it illuminates very little that can't be achieved with other methods and narratives. The definition of imperialism above is a) essentially something I already knew years ago, and b) is inherent to several other works on this list (Shock Doctrine, Capitalism and Slavery, etc). But still, in explicit service of countering imperialism in all its forms, Capital and Imperialism reframes and defines so many concepts critical to understanding the modern world, that its sheer focus, clarity, and morality make it something worthwhile to any reader.
To this end, I found the most value in the parts of the book that describe the nature of capitalism after World War 2, which makes sense as post-colonial imperialism is an inherently tougher concept to nail down. One of the most obvious contradictions in America since the war is capital's strong reluctance to manage demand through state intervention, even though per Keynes it would ostensibly benefit everyone. The book makes a compelling argument that "this opposition is not of an economic but of an epistemic character. Direct state intervention in demand management, which bypasses the capitalists, undermines the social legitimacy of the system. The capitalists' class instinct therefore tells them to oppose such intervention, to project an intellectual position that helps to enforce an "epistemic closure," where there is no scope for looking beyond the capitalists to generate a recovery." This idea of the "social power of capital" is buttressed by the inherent opaqueness of the demand controls that imperialism makes use of, which in turn allows those in power to escape blame and wrongly attribute the spoils of such policies (such as the famine in Bengal during the war) to exogenous factors.
At the same time, the book makes sure to stress that more practical considerations also played a part in getting us to where we are. The Keynesian compromise of the post-war period was not able to be sustained because capitalism requires a "drain" to control inflation and thus sustain itself. That "drain" had been the spoils of explicit colonialism, but as America and others withdrew from that practice the powers that be turned to the dreaded f-word: financialization. There are two particularly pernicious consequences of this turn that the book details. First, this financialization is global in nature, which means individual nations' ability to manage demand is greatly muted. Second, the new "drain" on which the system relies are asset bubbles, the regular and predictable collapse of which have obviously deleterious effects on the populace at large. This leads to yet another definition of neoliberalism, which I actually quite like: That is, a bespoke flavor of hegemonic imperialism where proletarian demand is controlled not through commodity prices, but through the wages of workers. As the book puts it, "neoliberalism entails not a retreat or withdrawal of the state, not a shift from a regime of state intervention to a regime of 'leaving things to the market'...but rather as a change in the nature of state intervention. [...] which in turn reflect a change in the nature of the classes and the correlation between them." As such, we now live in a funhouse world where "the market signals under a neoliberal regime point always in a direction opposite to what social rationality would demand." The book then goes into detail about how this leads to a neo-fascist political structure that is driven by the right but accepted by liberal parties as well. Inspite of the seeming doom and gloom, the book is not nihilistic, and in its closing pages it concludes that this system cannot hold and whatever comes next will necessarily have to transcend capitalism. Here's hoping.
17. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (link)
A short, straightforward book about how the structure of our organizations and of our society conspire, often unconsciously, to elevate the ideology of the elites to the forefront. Most chapters begin with a description of how past radicals affected change in their time as a direct counter to how modern progressives (especially in America) invite defeat by way of shallow applications of identity politics. This narrative approach is enlightening and helps to tell a straightforward and easily digestible story. Ultimately though, this is a theoretical work explicitly written for an audience of long-time organizers, which left a layman like me wanting more in-depth description of how the mechanism of deference politics fails us today.
Still, the theory is good. Táíwò establishes that the gradual capture of the political sphere by elite interest is what has effectively minimized our democracy, which, duh. But it's then they "why" behind this where his work is most insightful. He remarks that we often perceive of such elite capture as a change in people's beliefs, but by using the extended metaphor of "the emperor has no clothes" he demonstrates that this phenomenon acts more as a "common epistemic resource" to marshal people's actions:
"But we get a different answer if we ask not why the townspeople believe the emperor, but rather why they are active as if they believe the emperor. Put another way, from this perspective it is not beliefs that are being systematically organized, but behavior. This way of thinking about the situation still allows the possibility that the townspeople in fact hold belief structures that inform their behavior. But unlike the first approach, it concerns itself seriously with what's in it for the townsfolk if they play along—and what's at stake for them if they do not."
The primary takeaway from this is that "who ends up in what room shapes our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have made it inside." This leads Táíwò to advocate for a more inclusionary politics than what our current tools allow for. He sums up his position best here:
"The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism and disagreement insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people—a prerequisite of coalitional politics.
Moreover, as identities become more and more fine grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that "coalitional politics" (understood as struggle against difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political."
PS. I just listened to this podcast with the author as a guest and it summarized two critical points in such a clear way, that I had to add them here: One, identity politics, as the Combahee River Collective envisioned them, is a great way to start the conversation. Our captured institutions on the other hand, use this concept to end the conversation. Two, with respect to "being in the room," this elite capture of existing "rooms" means that it is generally more worth our time to build new rooms rather than fight to enter existing ones.
18. Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game - Craig Calcaterra (link)
A book about how capitalism has corrupted sports written by someone who lives in my suburb...seems right up my alley. And while such a thing might be so far up my alley that it feels like it was pulled directly from my brain, this was still worth my while. Calcaterra's explicit goal of "finding a way to hold on to that which we love about sports while not be used or taken advantage of by a sports-industrial complex that wants to leverage our loyalty for its own purposes" is as clear of a thesis statement as you'll see. His analysis of how we apply the zero-sum nature of a sporting contest to our political processes is a perfect addition to my ongoing quest to better understand politics through understanding sports. His description of how sports franchises have ingratiated themselves with local real estate developers to the point where their business interests are one and the same is probably the most important thing to know about how your local team's bread is buttered. And his analysis of how "tanking" went from a reaction to a situation (having a bad roster) to a situation that sports leagues actively try to encourage is as trenchant as anything I've read on the matter. Good, fun, quick book...no other notes.
19. The Quiet American - Graham Greene (link)
As I continue to dip my toes back into the world of written fiction, let's read another classic concerning covert activities of the early Cold War. Whereas The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was more of a adroit page turner than anything else, Greene's most famous work is much more incisive against its titular target. To be sure, this is made explicit a few pages in, when the narrator (Fowler, a world-weary English journalist stationed in Vietnam) notes the ironic nature of said title: "'A quiet American.' I summed him precisely up as I might have said 'a blue lizard' 'a white elephant'." It's easy to draw a parallel between Fowler's lack of beliefs and Leamas' insistence that he's just doing a job, but the difference here is that Fowler is ultimately forced to come to terms with the fact that his supposed lack of ideology is still itself an ideology. And while the Brechtian disdain Greene shows towards the utter foolhardiness of Pyle (the doomed but well-meaning (?) American spy) is a worthy backbone for the narrative, I found the best contribution of his prose to be the semi-related nuggets of wisdom peppered in between the beats of the story. So to exemplify the primary strength of the novel in my estimation, I'll leave you with a sampling of my favorite examples of those sublime passages.
On Death, Enemies, and Friends: "Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people everywhere, always, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity."
On Not Being Able to Hold a Thought (also applies to us parents): "So much of the war is sitting around doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth starting even a train of thought."
On God: "Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God—A being capable of understanding."
On Bad Punditry: "He's a superior sort of journalist—they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea."
On the "Innocence" of Our Quiet American: "They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about and you gave him money...and said "Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy." He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn't even see the wounds."
"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering around the world, meaning no harm."
"...he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity. [...] He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance."
20. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future - Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright (link)
"...we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of our society."
-Albert Einstein
"Mitigation is proactive...it involves doing things to reduce the pace and magnitude of the changes by altering the underlying causes. Adaptation is reactive. It involves reducing the potential adverse impacts resulting from the by-products of climate change...Our third option, suffering, means enduring the adverse impacts that cannot be staved off by mitigation or adaptation."
-Lonnie G. Thompson
"The basic innovation introduced by the philosophy of praxis into the science of politics and of history is the demonstration that there is no abstract "human nature" fixed and immutable...but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact."
-Antonio Gramsci
When I read as rich of a text as this, a) I actually feel dumber after reading it (but in a good way), b) I feel compelled to learn even more (I bought two more books based on the citations alone), and c) there's no way I can do this justice with a short summary. To the last point, I refer you to the distinct purposes of the three pull quotes above. Climate Leviathan uses this diverse knowledge of theory and its authors' mastery of synthesis to build a treatise on the future of our planet that is equal parts clear, caring, damning, and hopeful.
The gist of the authors' argument is that the inescapability of climate change dictates that our current world order will morph into something else. Specifically, the threat of deteriorating environmental conditions will both directly and indirectly challenge existing hegemony, necessitating a coordinated response from the ruling class. The authors make a case that the most likely formulation of this future state is the titular "Climate Leviathan," in which the core political economy of capitalism is maintained while transitioning the shared understanding of sovereignty to something more planetary in scope. This outcome is deemed most likely in part because we're already headed this way, as maneuvers such as the Paris Climate Accords indicate. The book then argues that this is a bad thing (duh), and stresses the need for a formulation that is both non-capitalist* and opposed to planetary sovereignty.
*The book addresses Naomi Klein's writing on climate. The authors are very complimentary of her work, but also conclude that her emphasis on blaming exclusively neoliberalism lets capitalism in general off the hook, which jives with my previous light criticisms of The Shock Doctrine. Good to get occasional confirmation that I'm not crazy.
To fully understand why this is the case requires a lot of the reader. Specifically, the book spends a lot of time describing why Climate Leviathan is the preferred option of liberalism and accordingly, why liberalism is not up to the task of addressing climate change in an acceptable way. To this end, the authors cite the latest IPCC report and demonstrate how its contents simultaneous overstate the inherent stability of liberal world order and downplay the human suffering that would result from their stated goals. The aggregate effect of liberalism as such then, is to de-politicize the masses, substitute vague normative ideals for political reality, subject all "freedoms" to state discretion, and ultimately to obscure the fundamental struggle between the dominant and the dominated. In short, "liberalism is defined by the sovereign naturalization of a narrowly defined conception of what counts as politics, of what is legitimately politicizable." The end goal of this, as you may already observe with concepts like carbon footprints, is to render citizens nothing more than an emission source, to be regulated and ultimately minimized.
Because this is unacceptable, and because all other options for addressing this are worse, the authors conclude that we must try to envision a more just future, as unlikely as it sometimes may seem. Like other prescriptive final chapters from this list, the authors touch on religion as a unifying force, but ultimately reject it as the idea of sovereignty is too fundamental to its very conception. Where they end up is with a broad call for a "Climate X" where the "X" represents an unknown variable. The main two formulations the authors put forward to solve for X consist of the Marxist tradition (duh) and the collection of struggles of Indigenous/colonized people. The latter is an especially ideal tradition to follow due to the centrality of reciprocity and "the long historical experience with ways of being that are not overdetermined by capital and the sovereign state." It is through exploring these traditions and coming to some positive vision of the future that we can hope to move forward, to find a world where "natural history and human history intersect in the moment of transience."
21. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America - Greg Grandin (link)
Weird book. One that literally says "socialism or barbarism" in its final line, but spends most of its time avoiding materialist analysis in favor of exploring its particular narrative (you can perhaps square this circle by noting that the same final line offers a third option of "social democracy"). The narrative in question (the myth of the frontier) is often compelling and is most certainly real, but given the wide scope of the book (basically all of American history) the central metaphor is treated as a load-bearing ideology in some places where it really wasn't. Ultimately, Grandin's book is most useful for three things 1) wielding and elucidating the frontier narrative when it makes sense to do so, 2) cataloguing the history of American revanchism that has led us to this point (ie. Trump is a continuation and not an anomaly), and 3) weaving a frankly much more compelling sub-narrative about how endless imperial war does nothing to stem resentment and ameliorate racism, and in fact, actually serves to further entrench those aspects of America.
This separate narrative of war as a solution to what ails us begins with the Spanish-American War in 1898, which "transformed the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy—the preservation of slavery—into humanity's cause for world freedom." Proponents of the time claimed that the war would be "wholesome" and "purgatorial" in that it would help smooth over lasting tensions. In reality, such efforts only served to legitimize and empower Confederates. This pattern continues throughout every subsequent imperial intervention, but the specific impact slowly morphs from legitimization into metastization. As a result, modern blowback is more stochastic in nature as illustrated by the anti-refugee sentiment resulting from Reagan's Central American activities and the increase in border vigilantism driven in large part by Afghanistan/Iraq veterans. Grandin manages to tie all of this to his central thesis (with some success) by saying that the post-frontier mindset is still the same ethos, but one that focuses less on literal land and more on "a cultural zone or civilizational struggle." But he also notes that around the same time, America was able to bring the other nations that now represented the frontier (starting with Mexico) to heel by using capital to both entice (through investment) and trap (through leveraged debt) other countries into doing our will. You may notice how this echoes the "drain" concept from Capital and Imperialism, which is a more incisive analysis of post-Civil War (and especially post-World War) economic developments.
Where the primary metaphor works best is in pre-Civil War history, which is best exemplified in the "safety valve" chapter. That sub-metaphor both makes sense in this context—pundits of the time thought that sending people to the frontier would allow them to "blow off steam" and thus resolve disputes—and is backed up by numerous citations. Like, it is shocking how many instances he finds of different people using it in different contexts to mean the same thing. But what's even more compelling is when he is able to tie this to the material interests of the ruling class:
"The metaphor of the "safety valve" was deployed in proposals to solve the class problem. That problem was two problems, actually. The first, economic: How to ensure that wages would remain high enough to support the rapidly growing number of urban laborers? The second, political: How to protect against the threat of increasing numbers of illiterate, unpropertied male voters (Andrew Jackson's key constituency)? How to stop them from coalescing into a faction—a "Labor Party "—and casting their ballots for a program trespassing on property rights? The answer, for many, was simple: have them go west, and give them land."
Maybe the best way to understand the usefulness of Grandin's argument is to go back to the beginning. In the opening pages, he describes the idea of the American Revolution as a "permanent revolution" consisting of the "constant invention of itself." The ideals ensconced in the first iteration of this strived for equality on the political level without the same equality on an economic level. But Grandin notes that "endless revolution requires power and force, of the kind that makes little distinction between politics and economics, between the state and the economy." The idea that extant notions of American equality are nominal at best is self-evident, but I've never seen the discrepancy between our ideals and our reality expressed so succinctly. Grandin cites a political scientist who calls the resulting "obsessive individualism" a "timeless innocence of mind," which harkens back to Greene's analysis of his titular character in The Quiet American. This timeless innocence then led to (around the time of the Spanish-American War, not coincidentally) a lasting conception of American where "Individual, inherent rights, found in nature, were legitimate, as was the state that protected them. Social rights made possible by state intervention were perverse." Yes, all of this is expressed in a more theoretical realm than I would prefer, but it's hard to argue with his ultimate synthesis, expressed best in the closing pages:
"The frontier was, ultimately, a mirage, an ideological relic of a now-exhausted universalism that promised, either naively or dishonestly, that a limitless world meant that nations didn't have to be organized around lines of domination. All could benefit; all could rise and share earth's riches. The wall, in contrast, is a monument to disenchantment, to a kind of brutal geopolitical realism: racism was never transcended; there's not enough to go around; the global economy will have winners and losers; not all can sit at the table; and government policies should be organized around accepting these truths [...] Whether that wall gets built or not, it is America's new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks "freedom" means freedom from restraint, but no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism."
22. Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate - Jefferson Morley (link)
"As one very wise American said to me one day, 'Look, this is simple. The American people want you to go out and do these things, they just don't want to be told about them, and they don't want to have them on their conscience.' Period. I think that's true. That's part of our Puritan ethic."
-Richard Helms
Good, straightforward entry point to Watergate for the uninitiated. Formatted as dueling narratives of both Nixon's and the CIA's involvement in the scandal, Morley's work both refutes the simplistic story of Woodward/Bernstein while hinting at (but never outright suggesting) the possibility of something more sinister. Morley's prose is sharp and damning when it needs to be, but on the whole his "just the facts" style means the book has very little opining or speculating beyond the hard evidence he presents. Which to be clear is fine, because his position in interviews — that Nixon and the CIA were broadly aligned in their goals, and that seemingly nefarious events surrounding Watergate were more a matter of incompetence, post-facto maneuvers to shift blame, and keeping the "family jewels" under wraps — is a perfectly reasonable stance to have, if perhaps a little overly credulous toward the CIA (ie. it feels odd that they would get blackmailed by Nixon and then just let things play out). Still, I find this summary hard to argue with:
"[Richard] Helms was truthful when he said the CIA was not involved in organizing the Watergate break-in. No CIA official told the burglars where to enter surreptitiously—those orders emanated from the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President and the intelligence collected by the burglars went back to their sponsors. But the Agency harvested the fruit of Hunt and McCord's work. McCord kept copies of the wiretap logs at his home; Hunt passed material to Helms through the Agency's office at the NSC. The burglars worked for the White House and the Agency shared in the take. It wasn't a CIA conspiracy. It was opportunistic intelligence collection, which was Helms' métier."
To that end, the one other really useful thing about this book is how its straightforward treatment of the material reinforces a lot of what we already know/suspect about American spycraft. The detail from Northwoods about how "engineered provocations" are preferred to fomented revolt due to increased control; the summary of how the Huston Plan (a proposal to consolidate agency efforts to spy on Americans) was less of a power grab and more of an attempt to formally justify already existing operations; the description of how secrecy serves to both create plausible deniability for those in power and generate an unearned sense of "innocence" for the American populace — everything here is consistent with myriad other sources to paint a picture of the utter nefariousness of our nation's actions during the Cold War.
23. American Exception: Empire and the Deep State - Aaron Good (link)
On one hand, I loved this book. Good's summary of deep state activities and his tripartite theory that he devises to explain it all is as clear a treatise on the matter as you will find anywhere. Absent the flourishes of other, more polemic works in this post, American Exception serves as a sobering reminder of the reality that lies just beneath the artifice of our nominal democracy. On the other hand, I wish Good went just one step further, and explicitly indicted the far-reaching machinations of the tripartite state for what it is—the natural progression of the expression of power under unipolar capitalist hegemony. This isn't to say that Good doesn't realize this—he almost certainly does. And this also isn't to say he doesn't directly indict capitalism, cite Marx, or use a materialist lens (he does all of these things and more). It's just that his work does such a good job of conveying the overwhelming inevitability of these forces that the absence of the seemingly obvious conclusion is somewhat glaring.
Still, there is enough in American Exception to piece this together ourselves. Doing this, you will quickly find that there is no one overarching reason why capitalist dominance naturally takes the form of the American deep state, which is perhaps part of why Good doesn't directly make the case. My old bugaboo of "complexity" comes up first, with Good noting that advanced non-centralized societies naturally create more and more "milieus and institutions" such that the public will struggle to perform the necessary oversight to keep them in check. He draws on the work of C. Wright Mills to demonstrate how the rationalist, striving "Trumanite" mind is incentivized to defend the state by military means and not diplomacy (to this end, he quotes another author who says the atomic bomb essentially birthed the deep state, echoing the theme of one of the best episodes of TV). Mills also notes that while the gradual creation of the deep state leads to an "institutionalization of conspiracy" to some degree, it is not useful to view "all history as conspiracy or all history as drift." Rather, we need to understand how "shifting social structure affords opportunities to elites...who then capitalize or fail to capitalize on them."
Who then are these elites that stand to capitalize? Good draws on Mills' conception of the three loci of power (military, politics, and business) to illustrate his idea of the tripartite state. Specifically, an alliance of military contractors, arms dealers, and willing politicians helped to create the very demand for war that subsequently served to entrench and strengthen their power. Good ties together the crackpot realism of the Cold Warriors (he quotes George Kennan saying if not for the Soviet Union "some other adversary [would have to] be invented") with the material realties of the post-war era. The military industry, corporations that benefitted from work with the military (ie. GE), and big banks like Chase all relied on the financial windfall of World War II to help further establish their dominance. All of these organizations stood to benefit from the exaggerated threat of the decimated post-war Soviet state. That threat in turn helped justify the creation of our modern security state as well as the Korean War. Finally in the seventies, the two factions of so-called "Prussians" (war-hungry neoconservatives) and "traders" (market-hungry neoliberals) were able to set aside what relatively little conflict they previously had when the abandonment of the gold standard "facilitated US dominance of world trade and endless deficits for military spending." By the time Reagan was elected, the "coup" was complete and whatever strands of democracy we used to have were completely subsumed by capital in the form of the deep state.
Where this leaves us is a very, very bad place. Manufactured/exaggerated threats are used by the powerful to "securitize" public goods and remove them from the realm of the political. This leads to an "inverted totalitarianism" where the populace is demobilized rather than mobilized. How then do we get out from under this oppressive force? To his credit, Good lightly criticizes his forbears Lance deHaven-Smith and Peter Dale Scott as having naïve conceptions of how to fix this (he finds the half measures they propose as underwhelming as I did a little further up in this post). His main prescription of exposing the public to the crimes of the deep state isn't exactly revolutionary either (and it's a bit self-serving), but I find myself fairly convinced that it's almost necessary for some sort of reckoning to happen before we can move forward. As Eve Sedgwick asks "what does knowledge do?" Maybe a whole lot.
24. The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan - Rick Perlstein (link)
"I hope we never are prompted by either fear or resentment of Communism into compromising any of our democratic principles in order to fight it."
-Ronald Reagan
Like Perlstein's first two books, The Invisible Bridge is a thorough and propulsive history of a moment in a time that makes said moment appear simultaneously peculiar and also just like the rest of history. Before the Storm is still my favorite (its in depth analysis of the burgeoning political machine of the New Right is fascinating) but this book is superior to Nixonland in my estimation, as Perlstein has a more useful and incisive narrative grip of Reagan than he ever did Nixon. This understanding, communicated succinctly in the introduction and reinforced throughout, is that Reagan represented the personification of the modern conservative mind, where the perceived self-evidence of one's own moral conviction leads to and reinforces an incurious, child-like, black and white understanding of the world. The resulting "truthiness" of Reagan's messaging was in turn a departure from the more straightforward (if not always true) rhetoric of yesteryear. This new ethos of an inherent slipperiness and fuzziness in conservative communication (that persists to this day) is as good of a non-materialist explanation for our country's decades-long erosion of civic trust as you'll read anywhere. For that central narrative alone, this is a worthwhile read.
There's a lot of other interesting stuff here as well. Perlstein's approach of blowing through things is mostly used to good affect, but also leads to a lot of unanswered follow-up questions (Irving Kristol was financed by a former CIA agent? Can we get more than a sentence on that?). He continues to indict the media when they deserve it, detailing complacency and ineffectiveness throughout. The section on Lemuel Boulware using GE as a propaganda machine is as good as anything in Before the Storm. And the recurrent updates on the "grassroots" movements of the time are useful echoes of the present (ie. groups of parents in West Virginia looking to ban books because they were "looking for a scapegoat" and "the books (were) an accessible target").
25. Liberalism: A Counter-History - Domenico Losurdo (link)
"What is well-known, precisely because it is well-known, is not known. In the knowledge process, the commonest way to mislead oneself and others is to assume that something is well-known and to accept it as such."
-Hegel
Throughout this meticulous examination of liberal thought and philosophy, Losurdo keeps asking the rhetorical question "what is liberalism?" He does this because, per the quote above, the very idea of liberalism is generally assumed to be many things that, in practice, it is not. Is liberalism defined by its unwavering commitment to individual freedom? It is not, as Burke, de Tocqueville, and Bentham all agree that the security (or 'social interest') of a society should take priority. Does this mean that all within a society should be at least able to share in that security? Also no, as such privilege and power is limited only to those deemed worthy of the 'sacred space' in which the freedom to dominate those in the 'profane space' is absolute. But surely liberalism must have at least advocated for the abolition of humanity's worst crimes, such as chattel slavery? Wrong again, as de Tocqueville and others found themselves nominally opposed to the practice while advising against radical action for fear of upsetting the economic "stability" of the time. Through his work, Losurdo not only demonstrates that famous liberal thinkers held surprisingly few worthwhile principles, but also that these fundamentally amoral philosophies implicitly supported the dehumanization of their chosen out-groups and the depoliticization of the supposedly free societies they heralded. This discrepancy between the ideals of the liberal mind and the actual practice of their politics is best summed up here:
"Thus emerges the somewhat problematic character of the pathos of the individual, which was the flag waved by liberalism in its conflict with radicalism and socialism. Who was more individualist? Toussaint L'Ouverture, the great protagonist of the slave revolution? Or Calhoun, the great US theorist of the slaveholding South? Who demonstrated respect for the dignity of the individual as such? The black Jacobin who, taking the Declaration of the Rights of Man seriously, considered that it was always inadmissible to reduce a man to an object of 'property' of one of 'his follow men'? Or Jefferson, who kept silent about his doubts about slavery out of a conviction of white superiority and his concern not to endanger the peace and stability of the South and the Union? Who expressed individualism better? Mill and his English and French followers, who considered the subjection and even slavery (albeit temporary) of colonial peoples beneficial and necessary? Or the French radicals who began to question colonial despotism as such ('Let the colonies perish if they are to cost honour, freedom')?"
One interesting sub-narrative that runs throughout the book is how liberal thinkers repeatedly appeal to religion in order to further legitimize their views. Slavery, as well as other ill treatment of out-groups is repeatedly justified as the Lord's will (which is almost definitively shown to be a post-hoc rationalization after similar religious fervor played a key role in the abolition movement). Liberal thinkers associated with the temperance movement explicitly argued against freedom of choice when it came to activities that "might allure or draw them from attending church." When revolutionaries threatened the dominance of liberal institutions, de Tocqueville claimed it was an explicit attack on "the ancient, holy laws of property and family on which Christian civilization is based" while Burke called it an attack on "the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations." Perhaps this recurring theme is just an obvious result of religion's conservative impulse, but it feels like there might be a richer story there. Maybe one day I'll find a book that tells it.
26. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History - Norman Finkelstein (link)
"Like The Holocaust, "anti-Semitism" is an ideological weapon to deflect justified criticism of Israel and, concomitantly, powerful Jewish interests. In its current usage, "anti-Semitism," alongside the "war against terrorism," serves as a cloak for a massive assault on international law and human rights. Those Jews committed to the struggle against the real anti-Semitism must, in the first instance, expose this specious "anti-Semitism" for the sham it is."
It's nice to read a straight-up polemic every now and then. It's doubly nice when the primary subject of said polemic is one of the foremost clowns of recent years, Alan Dershowitz. But more than just being the book form of this legendary takedown, Finkelstein's work is an indispensable catalogue of rebuttals to every wrong-headed Zionist argument under the sun. For example, I have previously remarked on how Zionists wield the seeming complexity of the conflict to suit their arguments. Finkelstein echoes my objection almost exactly when he says "such formulations obfuscate rather than illuminate." In that same post, I used Angela Davis' argument for solidarity to illustrate how the struggle for Palestinian freedom is fundamentally inseparable from other liberation movements. Finkelstein repeatedly demonstrates how Zionists take the opposite tack, by painting the Holocaust as a "specifically Jewish tragedy." Not only does such "repellant chauvinism" divide Jews from others, but it also grants a "unique moral dispensation." Besides the obvious consequences towards Palestinians from this line of thinking, Finkelstein details how this mentality (interspersed with related issues of class and race) led many Jewish organizations to grow apart from other civil rights movements. Finally, he makes it clear that the culmination of all this reasoning is, per human right organization B'Tselem, the Israeli state's "unique [and] relentless efforts to justify what cannot be justified." The instigation of terror as an excuse for atrocities is an undeniable and common practice used to ruthlessly further Israeli goals:
"In July 2002 militant Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, reached a preliminary accord to suspend all attacks inside Israel, perhaps paving the way for a return to the negotiating table. Just ninety minutes before it was to be announced, however, Israeli leaders—fully apprised of the imminent declaration—ordered an F-16 to drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood in Gaza, killing, alongside a Hamas leader, fourteen Palestinian civilians, nine of them children, and injuring 140. Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and Palestinian attacks resumed with a vengeance. "What is the wisdom here?" a Meretz party leader wondered. "At the very moment that it appeared that we were on the very brink of a chance for reaching something of a cease-fire, or diplomatic activity, we always go back to this experience—just when there is a period of calm, we liquidate."
I do want to note that despite his gruff exterior, Finkelstein makes it clear how much he cares for those who he advocates for. Even in a book primarily concerned with dispelling myths, the humanity of the Palestinian people shines through. From a World Bank report that he quotes referencing the aftermath of the second intifada:
"Palestinian society has displayed great cohesion and resilience. Despite violence, economic hardship and the daily frustrations of living under curfew and closure, lending and sharing are widespread and families for the most part remain functional. Even with a dearth of formal safety nets, outright destitution is still limited—those who have income generally share it with those who do not. The West Bank and Gaza have absorbed levels of unemployment that would have torn the social fabric in many other societies."
27. Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics - Kim Phillips-Fein (link)
"When the MAC board told [Mayor] Beame to impose tuition at CUNY, he seemed "stricken," as one observer put it. He objected that the money tuition would raise—about $32 million—would only be a drop in the bucket of what the city needed, while the poor and working-class population that the university served would find the fees a real burden. Rohatyn told him that he didn't get it: it wasn't the money that mattered but the symbolism of it, the evidence that the city was changing its "lifestyle" for good."
"The MAC board was careful to insist that it did not want to infringe on the city's self-governance [...] But the unmistakable message was that the locally elected leaders were subject to the demands of the bond market—the people across the country who bought the city's notes and bonds. As one city official said to the Times, "Our problems have reached the point where we have to consider the money lender in Chicago and Los Angeles, and not just the homeowner in Queens.""
"[Jimmy] Carter defined himself as a Democrat who represented a break from the past. "Government cannot solve our problems," he said in his 1978 State of the Union address. "In cannot set our goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.""
The internet is awash with memes of people placing Ronald Reagan's face on various charts to show where everything went wrong in America. Of course everything has always been wrong in America (source: all the other books in this post), but laying the blame for the neoliberal turn entirely at Reagan's feet puts the cart slightly before the horse. Seventies shenanigans laid the groundwork of our decline with such clear determination that I feel comfortable thinking of Reagan as more of a symptom of the problem than its primary cause. From this vantage point Fear City, which details the "shock therapy" administered to mid-70s New York City (which is somehow missing from the otherwise comprehensive Shock Doctrine), is an essential piece of evidence supporting my claim that American austerity wasn't born in the eighties.
While the text is far less polemic than it could very justifiably be, Phillips-Fein does such an exemplary job laying out the themes of the narrative and causes of the crisis that explicitly angry rhetoric isn't necessary. The federal government rightfully gets its share of the blame, both for policies that encouraged the capital flight and white flight that set the stage, and for its tepid response to the growing crisis under the Ford administration that only exacerbated the suffering. At the same time, the liberal governance of the city is excoriated for "using debt to settle problems that were at heart political"—in other words, neglecting to put forward an affirmative defense of the public programs that made the city a bastion of liberal ideals. Finally, the financiers that brokered all of this come off as barely human, "encouraging indebtedness when it suited their purposes to do so." The end result of this "planned shrinkage" of not just "luxuries" like free college but also of the city's essential services (the story of Engine Company 212 is particularly heartbreaking) reads as one of the first and certainly one of the most brazen examples of the demands of a newly globalized capital coming home to roost. As the subsequent mayor Ed Koch put it: "As a city, we must live within our means, and we must adjust our estimate of those means to allow the city to compete successfully in an ever-more-competitive world economy."
28. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana - William M. LeoGrande, Peter Kornbluh (link)
"[Raul Castro] read a passage from Fidel's speech to the 1986 Congress of the Cuban Communist Party: "Cuba is not remiss to discussing its prolonged differences with the United States and to go out in search of peace and better relations between our people...This would be possible only when the United States decides to negotiate with seriousness and is willing to treat us with a spirit of equality, reciprocity, and the fullest mutual respect." In the twenty years since Fidel's address, this had been Cuba's position and remained so, Raul said. In response to Raul's offer to negotiate, the State Department insulted him, calling him "Fidel's baby brother" and "Fidel Lite." US policy remained committed to promoting regime change, and the administration would "do everything we can to hasten that day.""
A comprehensive history of the last sixty years of US-Cuba diplomacy that both reinforces what I know about the underlying conflict and expands on it with one exasperating detail after another. The narrative here is far more US-centric than the equivalent section in We Are Cuba! (from last year's list). This leads to a far less incisive analysis of, among other things, Obama's motivations for rapprochement. But this is fine because the main (and perhaps only) takeaway you need from this tome is just how profoundly close-minded our approach towards Cuba has been across virtually every administration.
There are myriad dimensions to American short-sightedness on this matter, but three specific pathologies stick out. The first of these echoes what Bevins, Kinzer, and others have postulated: That most American officials have too blinkered a worldview to truly understand those who think differently from them. This is most clear in the United States' posture towards Cuba's support of liberation struggles in Africa and South America. The withdrawal of Cuban troops from other nations was a near constant demand of Washington throughout several presidencies, but Cuba rarely budged when it came to their commitments to the people who needed them. LeoGrande and Kornbluh state that for US officials under Nixon, "it seemed inconceivable that Castro would pass up a chance to finally establish normal relations with the United States in order to support an anticolonial struggle in distant Africa." Conversely, representatives of Reagan assumed that "Castro's ideological commitment to communism foreclosed any prospect of compromise." What makes this the global politics version of The Gift of the Magi is that Cuba did work with the US on this but to absolutely no avail. The cherry on top is that the handshake between Raul Castro and Obama that preceded rapprochement was at Nelson Mandela's funeral.
The second, complementary point is that so many setbacks have been caused by the United States' eternal need to invoke a posture of unforgiving strength above all else. LBJ privately wished that the Coast Guard wouldn't apprehend Cuban fishing boats, but "publicly...the president had to flex Washington's muscles." When Brzezinski's intelligence apparatus mistakenly* identified an existing Soviet military advisory group as a "combat brigade," this led Carter to forgo his diplomatic efforts and enabled hard-liners to scuttle Cuba's plans to join the UN Security Council and further influence the Non-Aligned Movement. And when the return of Elian Gonzalez became a hot-button issue, it forestalled any attempts by the Clinton administration to thaw relations. Per one official "it was sort of like, well if we do anything that's forthcoming with the Cubans, then that would indicate that we're on their side, that we're not impartial." America's blustery temperament may not always be a direct result of malign influence, but it most certainly serves to advance the position of the most cantankerous voices in the room.
*Yes, I'm aware it might not have been a "mistake" to do so, but the book is pretty credulous towards US activities towards Cuba post-Mongoose, so this is all I have to go off of for now
Finally, to that end, it's remarkable how often the authors tiptoe right up to an explicit theory of deep state bureaucracy without ever quite saying the magic words. This is not necessarily a mark against the book, and I would even argue that such a treatment of the subject is probably a better introduction to the concept than more explicit works like The Road to 9/11 and American Exception. The concept of the deep state takes several different forms in Back Channel to Cuba. There's the near-constant flow of incompetent officials buffeted by a bloated mess of bureaucracy that only serves to prevent changes to the status quo (a Clinton official describes this as "retrograde forces, entrenched bureaucrats who...make it impossible to pull [diplomacy] off"). There's also an inherent sense of dread when it comes to those that actually want to move forward with Cuba; Eisenhower's ambassador Philip Bonsal's earnest but futile efforts to connect with Castro reads a lot like Howard P. Jones' similar experience with Sukarno in The Jakarta Method. In both cases, the ambassadors came to realize that the larger state of things precluded them from exercising their agency to any meaningful degree. And of course, there are literal spooks like Luis Posada Carilles, who worked with Cuban-American benefactors to organize terror campaigns against Cuba. When speaking with Senator Frank Church, Castro correctly identified such forces as "a monster that has been created and will be difficult to control." In this light, it's hard not to read Brothers to the Rescue as a deliberate provocation to encourage passage of Helms-Burton (which removed presidential authority to lift the embargo). Furthermore, the book consistently describes how this "monster" directly influences the overt political state, as virtually every presidential candidate adopted an explicitly hostile attitude toward Castro to court the Cuban expat vote in Florida.
29. Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy - Elizabeth Popp Berman (link)
"Despite the fact that the initial pushback to these rights-based regulations came almost entirely from industry, advocates of the economic style understood their own position not as political but neutral and almost self-evident. How could one defend regulations that cost more than their expected benefits, or choose on regulatory path when another was more cost-effective? The economic style discounted the idea that some rights—like the right of those with disabilities to access public facilities—might be invaluable, and thus that cost-benefit analysis was morally inappropriate."
The latest read in my "the seventies are when everything went to shit" series, Thinking like an Economist elucidates how the neoliberal mindset burrowed its way into academia, the law, and the administrative state. This happened because influential actors implemented the so-called "economic style"—the methodology of valuing efficiency above all else—into every avenue of analysis and decision making, to the point where simple normative statements (ie. people have a right to clean drinking water) no longer hold any political purchase.
Berman's narrative has its flaws (more on that later), but I was struck by how unrelentingly resonant every stupid detail was. To that end, her work is so good at reinforcing and enriching everything I know about How We Got Here that I'm just going to do a list. Sometimes you just can't beat a good ole list:
- Berman begins her argument by noting her surprise at the fundamental continuity of the Obama presidency in spite of its promise of "hope and change." This motivation reads almost exactly the same as Aaron Good's in American Exception, which suggests that a) a lot of narratives put forth by this generation of academics are going to be explicitly framed around disappointment in Obama's tenure (thanks Obama?), and b) perhaps the spheres of economics and foreign policy are so firmly intertwined that these two books are really just two sides of the same coin.
- Berman stresses that the economic style has ruled for so long because the methods of institutionalization (legal frameworks, administrative rules, and organizational change) served to make it, and the ideology surrounding it, durable. The very nature of cost-benefit analysis allows for the flexibility of putting prices on things that don't normally have them, then incorporating the dissemination of these things into the neoliberal model. Once these agencies and offices became tasked with their newfound power, they propagated the ideology simply by seeking to sustain their own operations. Community-led programs were now "threatening because they decentralized decision-making authority, putting it into the hands of the people." Gotta love our democracy, baby.
- The goal of liberals involved in this project was to depoliticize as much as possible. This is most clear in their treatment of anti-trust law, in which they "redefined the purpose of anti-trust as promoting the efficient working of markets. They placed discussion of the political power of big business...outside its bounds." Such actors saw themselves as fundamentally "neutral" even as they redefined the utility of sectors like education and healthcare as primarily benefiting "human capital." The book cites Carter, not Nixon or Reagan, as the president most responsible for the establishment of the technocracy that ultimately serves right-wing aims.
- Conservatives, while broadly aligned with the liberals policy-wise, had a slightly different motivation; something which sounds a lot like my bespoke definition of such thought as "seeing what is directly in front of you and saying it is good." To wit, their own thoughts on anti-trust and market concentration echo this almost exactly: "the existence of the trend towards concentration is prima facie evidence that social concentration is socially desirable. The trend indicates that there are emerging efficiencies...which make larger size more efficient." Berman notes that while Reagan made use of the economic style, he was not a true believer in it and only employed such rhetoric when it served his larger goals.
- Ultimately, all of this comes down to a difference in values. Berman makes clear that "efficiency is a value of its own," one that assumes the validity of its own constraints—specifically, constraints imposed on behalf of capital. Competing frameworks that make use of ideas outside of these constraints (ie. "technology forcing," the idea that regulatory bodies setting ambitious standards constitutes its own market force on behalf of people subject to the externalities of the market) are therefore seen as invalid. The problem is that the positions and interests outside of these constraints are held by actual subjects of the democracy that purports to do their bidding.
Despite the detail Berman provides to support this narrative, it still feels like something is missing. Berman offers repeated, explicit reminders that this shift was not overdetermined by the economic style and that other forces were critical to the neoliberal turn. But still, her approach seems to take the justifications provided by technocrats at face value, which serves to paper over what else is known about the era. This shift was a dedicated political effort on behalf of capital, which required not only dedicated and purposeful monetary backing (largely absent from the book), but also a continuation of the red scare mindset used to discredit any and all left-leaning ideology. I think Berman does make an effort to avoid an "incompetence not malevolence" reading of history, but her lack of incisiveness fundamentally neuters her work and renders her conclusions less forceful than they should be.
All of this said, it's also absolutely the case that some people involved in this process were catastrophically stupid. Just real dum-dums. I had to put the book down for a minute after reading this part:
"[Bill] Drayton believed that instituting a market-based approach to regulation would not only increase efficiency relative to command-and-control regulation, but would also sidestep the latter's tendencies to produce endless litigation. Instead, [the economic style] would usher in "a Golden Age where we could get totally beyond the confrontational relationship between environmental advocates and industry.""
30. The Racial Contract - Charles W. Mills (link)
"The requirements of "objective" cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.
Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. [...] One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity."
If you're inclined towards the left, you may have noticed that the authors on this list are generally not doctrinaire Marxists. I've been very focused on history written mostly by Americans, and the majority of that is necessarily going to skew left-liberal. In that light, this book is something of an end boss of such an exercise (to wit, the forward describes Mills as trying to "radicalize liberalism"). And to that end at least, Mills' re-working of contract theory to describe the reality of white supremacy is possibly the most incisive and meaningful non-Marxist criticism of our world I've read yet.
The epistemology of ignorance that Mills introduces in the quote above gets to the heart of one of my favorite rhetorical questions, which he plainly states as: "How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking they were doing the right thing?" Specific to the problem of racism, Mills argues (much like Losurdo) that the "conceptual apparatus of liberalism," with its appeals to liberty and its other lofty moral commitments, "has no room for the peculiar post-Emancipation status of blacks, simultaneously citizens and non-citizens." A large part of this concerns the "conceptual" nature of such thinking—these ideals of liberalism have shaped our social and political structures to such a degree that any facts that may conflict with these ideals are systematically suppressed and ignored. This ignorance in turn creates the perception that most of what we observe about our world is simply "the way things are," rather than the reflection of brutal European domination and its after-effects. And while the transition away from the de jure white supremacy of slavery and Jim Crow is obviously a positive, Mills demonstrates that it has also had the effect of making de facto white supremacy less obvious, and thus easier to ignore. This then reinforces the assumptions of white supremacy (ie. Europe must have come to dominate the world because they are a superior race), and creates a reality akin to that of the slave colonies, where one necessarily cannot grasp the whole and thus cannot find a way out:
"The silence of mainstream moral and political philosophy on issues of race is a sign of the continuing power of the Contract over its signatories, an illusory color blindness that actually entrenches white privilege. A genuine transcendence of its terms would require, as a preliminary, the acknowledgment of its past and present existence...By treating the present as a somehow neutral baseline, with its given configuration of wealth, property, social standing and psychological willingness to sacrifice, the idealizes social contract renders permanent the legacy of the Racial Contract."
Mills' prescription for this requires us to fully comprehend the nature of this ignorance. More precisely, "...to bring about the ideal polity, one needs to understand how the workings and structure of the actual polity may interfere with our perceptions of the social truth." Not only do we need to understand "the ways in which these realities were made invisible" but also how this ignorance has led to a collective "moral handicap." Mills analogizes this to post-mortems from Nazi Germany, where, more precisely "it is not knowledge we lack [but the] courage to understand what we know and draw conclusion." What follows is that the real political struggle of our time is the struggle to defeat this overarching structure that maintains white supremacy, the very Racial Contract itself.
There's too much else to properly summarize here, but I will close by saying that Mills' argument works in large part because of its fundamentally dialectic nature. It is open-minded but incisive, describes the world as it is while staying true to his normative convictions, and carries a pessimistic tone while charting a hopeful course forward. I also liked that in one sentence he manages to both describes the economic structure of white supremacy while implicitly dispelling the idea that notions of individual purity will be able to topple it:
"Economic structures have been set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/good will, racist/antiracist feelings of particular individuals."
31. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow (link)
The Dawn of Everything is similar to the other Graeber book I've read (Debt: The First 5000 Years) in one important way—that is, its narrative is framed around the dispelling of myths. In the case of Debt this makes sense for the lay reader, as many of the myths at hand (ie. the barter system) are things I had internalized through my education. But the central myth here (that current social/political formations are the natural, inevitable result of human progress) is one I rejected long ago, so building a lengthy narrative around it didn't do much for me.* I don't really need tales of long-lost peoples to make affirmative arguments for alternative possibilities for our current society. I would have almost rather the 500+ pages been dedicated entirely to the insightful stories about ancient cultures, as a) it is fascinating, and b) I get almost none of that elsewhere.
*They do start their concluding chapter by asking the question "why is it that well-meaning attempts to fix society's problems so often end up making things worse?"—basically the same framing as The Racial Contract—but it's less effective because they don't commit to building a robust "epistemology of ignorance."
To that latter end, there's still plenty to chew on here. The authors say early on that "lack of imagination is not an argument" and then spend the rest of the book using recent archaeological findings to exhibit an abundance of imagination. They remark that the apparent lack of modern bureaucracy in prehistoric times may not imply ignorance but rather "societies against the state" built to explicitly counter forms of arbitrary power and violence that come with such a bureaucracy. The idea that foraging people didn't "own" their land is shown to be a self-serving myth on which the accumulation of private property is built. There's an interesting thought on my recurring theme of "complexity" in the final pages—specifically, that densely populated cities haven't always translated into "complexity" and that "complexity" hasn't always translated into hierarchy—but they don't dive much deeper than that, unfortunately. And finally, they close on what could be read as yet enough riff on the Sedgwick chapter:
"In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our 'social science'—what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom: the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality?"
32. Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism - Paul Sabin (link)
Part 1 of 2 of the "Mike reads a book he may not agree with" challenge. I came across this book a couple of times, read the description, and was equally skeptical each time. But then I remembered that libraries exist, and that I don't have to commit to buying every single book that I read. Anyway, it turns out that my skepticism was correct. Hooray for me.
33. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality - Kathryn Paige Harden (link)
Part 2 of 2 of the "Mike reads a book he may not agree with" challenge. I heard a lot about this book both positive and negative, so I thought I would give it a spin. While I felt this was an enjoyable and valuable read, its thesis boils down to "genetic information clearly influences every part of our lives to some degree so we should develop a set of practices around its use that ensure this knowledge will be used to further egalitarian ends." Which to me is not a controversial nor novel statement. Still, I did appreciate how Harden went to great lengths to detail the larger implications of the eugenic mindset and explain why such ideas are fundamentally corrosive to building a better world:
"Since Francis Galton, eugenic thinkers have steadily and successfully engaged in a misinformation campaign, convincing people that the reimagination of society is futile. Their propaganda is this: if genetic differences between people cause differences in their life outcomes, then social change will be possible only by editing people's genes, not by changing the social world. [...]
This hereditarian pessimism about the possibility of social change, however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between genetic causes and environmental interventions. As the economist Art Goldberger quipped in the late 1970s, your genetics caused your poor eyesight, but your eyeglasses still work just fine. That is, eyeglasses don't just help with the environmentally caused portion of bad eyesight. They help with all of your eyesight, regardless of whether it is genetically or environmentally caused. In so doing, they serve as an outside intervention that severs the association between one's myopia genes and having functional vision. [...]
But both things can be true at the same time: genetics can be causes of stratification in society, and measures to address systematic social forces can be effective at enacting social change. Once you have a clear understanding of this dual truth, a huge part of the controversy surrounding behavioral genetics dissipates, leaving space to address two much more interesting—and much more complicated—questions."
34. Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis - Martin J. Sherwin (link)
"To start or risk starting a nuclear war is bound to be divisive at best, and the judgments of history rarely coincide with the tempers of the moment. [...] It should be clear as a pikestaff that the US was, is, and will be ready to negotiate the elimination of bases and anything else...blackmail and intimidation never, negotiation and sanity always."
-Adlai Stevenson to JFK on October 17, 1962
"The real lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis—the lesson that is consistently resisted because it marginalizes the value of nuclear weapons—is that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them."
-Sherwin
Another coincidentally timely book on my list, Gambling with Armageddon reads as the final passion project of a dedicated researcher. The book is divided into two parts, with the larger second section exploring the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in great detail. Because of my previous reading on JFK era, there is nothing earth-shattering here, but the way Sherwin pieces through the story makes it intriguing regardless. Specifically, he does a great job of conveying the progression of Kennedy's opposition to the NatSec state without overdetermining it. Sherwin describes JFK's distrust of the Dulles clan and how early in his presidency "he did not know how to challenge them, nor could he offer an acceptable alternative." But by the time of the missile crisis it's clear that Kennedy understands the root of the problem to be of a political (and not military) nature, and that he's looking for a diplomatic way out even if he can't fully express such a feeling. Luckily, voices in the room (like Stevenson above) were able to guide him around the wishes of his hawkish advisors to a resolution that did not involve the end of the world. One can only hope that such voices still hold purchase with the president today.
The first section is shorter and less dramatic, but no less intriguing. In it, Sherwin details the two decades of nuclear build-up that led to the crisis, and makes the case that such a showdown was essentially baked in once we started down the road of nuclear proliferation. Indeed, the irony of the arms race, undertaken ostensibly to boost national security, was that each additional bomb in our arsenal made us proportionally less safe (this can be taken literally; during the crisis, JFK's advisors tell him that the US missiles deployed to NATO nations that precipitated the crisis were sent there "because we had so many of them we did not know where to put them"). And while some did understand this at the time (outgoing Secretary of War Henry Stimson called the bomb "too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into the old concepts" and urged cooperation with the Soviets), those voices were ignored in favor of Cold War hysteria. Eisenhower, for one, viewed the situation as a "battle to extinction" and asserted that "if you are imposing a moral program in this world, you have to stand behind it with strength." This idea of displaying strength at all costs was supported by the burgeoning Cold War economy, which pitched nuclear buildup as a "cost-effective" way to both benefit military contractors and counter the USSR. Ultimately, cooler heads diffused the most explicit threat borne of this aggression, but many of the fundamental ideas of "defense" by show of strength and "nuclear diplomacy" were never dismantled and still exist today. And some of those who promoted restraint then continued to echo concerns when we kept up the same practices post-Cold War. Something something about being doomed to repeat history for whatever reason.
35. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles - Mike Davis (link)
"Possibly there is a significant internal divide in non-Anglo communities between renters and homeowners, with the latter more inclined toward slow growth. But the crucial point is that the polls themselves, by the exclusive way they frame questions (pro and contra economic development, for instance), simply reproduce the distorted dichotomies of growth war ideology. It is not surprising that poor people, especially renters, will choose jobs over environmental quality when the two are artificially counterposed. If it were the only choice offered, most people would also opt to cut their toe off rather than their leg. Such dubious, but ubiquitous survey methods only reveal people's relative anxieties, not their substantive opinions.
Like all ideology, 'slow growth' and its 'pro-growth' antipode must be understood as much from the standpoint of the questions absent, as those posed. The debate between affluent homeowners and mega-developers is, after all, waged in the language of Alice in Wonderland, with both camps conspiring to preserve false opposites, 'growth' versus 'neighborhood quality'. It is symptomatic of the current distribution of power (favoring both capital and the residential upper-middle classes) that the appalling destruction and misery within Los Angeles's inner-city areas became the great non-issue during the 1980s, while the impact of growth upon affluent neighborhoods occupied center stage. The silent majority of non-affluent homeowners and renters have remained mere pawns in the growth power struggles, their independent social interests suppressed in civic controversy."
A running theme of History is that, despite the seeming novelty of the here and now, modernity replicates the past to a far greater degree than is commonly understood. So if there's truly nothing new under the sun, we might as well turn to the late Mike Davis' detailed history of our most sunny metropolis to better understand what ails us now. In doing this, we find echoes not only of the present, but also of everything else I have read.
Take for one the high culture synonymous with L.A.: "elite capture" of art and other signifiers of this by "large-scale developers and their financial allies" can be seen as inexorably linked to their material interests by taking the form of a "cultural superstructure" that drives the development of crucial real estate and vice versa. This is part of the larger "real estate growth machine" that has defined the region, and which (a la the Patniaks) relies on "continuous transfers of wealth from the rest of the country." Once empty land began to grow scarce in the 1970s, previously competing power factions "unite[d] as an interest bloc to perpetuate the political conditions of growth," which not coincidentally birthed a bipartisan consensus in local governance where Democratic representatives "ceased to represent the distinctive interests of popular constituencies." This has been buttressed by a so-called "sunset bolshevism" where HOAs and other homeowner groups become self-sustaining political organisms that use concepts like "responsible environmentalism" to keep black people from moving into their neighborhoods. And then as always, there are the cops. Whether explicitly using gang laws as pretense to lock up whoever they want, or claiming to be the "real embattled minority" (in 1960!), they have always acted as a malign force for the interests of capital. In the book's finest section, Davis details how police aggression and wanton violence (that helped birth the Crips) went hand in hand with the growing "internal polarization" within the black community to destroy any hope of solidarity across class lines. And yet Davis never descends into cynicism and in fact remained hopeful, noting in the updated preface that labor movements and other forms of activism have since laid the groundwork for the positive change we see today.
36. Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution - C.L.R. James (link)
This is one of those books that's so brilliant in offering timeless commentary which stands entirely on its own that I would feel silly trying to offer my own short critique. So I'll just share some of the things James said best and leave it at that.
On Politics: "Chanlatte, a Mulatto officer, offered Toussaint "the protection" of the Republic if he would bring his forces over. In politics, all abstract terms conceal treachery."
On Class And Race: "The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental as an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. [...] Knowing the race question for the political and social question that it was, [Toussaint] tried to deal with it in a purely political and social way. It was a grave error."
On Imperialists: "Where imperialists do not find disorder they create it deliberately."
On Power: "The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught."
On What Makes A Historian Bad: "..there was no hostility between Toussaint and Rigaud. Hédouville's own words show that he deliberately created it, and even then was not sure of Rigaud. Before he laid the plan in from of the Directory he had acted; he had written a letter to Rigaud absolving him from all obedience to Toussaint and authorising him to take possession of the districts of Léogane and Jacmel, incorporated in the South by a previous decree not yet carried into effect. That, he hoped, would start the conflagration and keep it going until France was ready. Hédouville and his superiors belonged to the same breed as Maitland and his. Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted. Hédouville after all was a product of the great French Revolution. Voltaire and Rousseau were household words and died before the Revolution began. Jefferson, Cobbett, Tom Paine, Clarkson and Wilberforce had already raised banners and were living lives which to Maitland and his kind made them into subversive enemies of society. They had their reasons. So have their counterparts of to-day. They fill our newspapers and our radios. The type is always with us, and so are their defenders."
On The Timelessness of Revolution: "In 1911, Hilaire Belloc, writing of the French Revolution, claimed that this instinctive capacity of the masses for revolutionary organisation was something peculiarly French. It was an error. At the same time as the French, the half-savage slaves of San Domingo were themselves subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris; and over a century later the Russian masses were to prove once more that this innate power will display itself in all populations when deeply stirred and given a clear perspective by a strong and trusted leadership."
...But Also, How This One Was Different: "What happened in San Domingo is one of those pages in history which every schoolboy should learn, and most certainly will learn, some day. The national struggle against Bonaparte in Spain, the burning of Moscow by the Russians that fills the histories of the period, were anticipated and excelled by the blacks and Mulattoes of the island of San Domingo. The records are there. For self-sacrifice and heroism, the men, women and children who drove out the French stand second to no fighters for independence in any place or time. And the reason was simple. They had seen at last that without independence they could not maintain their liberty, and liberty was far more concrete for former slaves than the elusive forms of political democracy in France."
37. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power - Shoshana Zuboff (link)
In the same vein as Naomi Klein's book decrying "disaster capitalism," here is another perfectly good book whose primary fault is pretending that a specific iteration of capitalism can be analyzed as a unique phenomenon, separate from the rest. Much like Klein, Zuboff finds herself wrestling honestly with the inherent contradictions of actually-existing capitalism, but without the fundamental capability to imagine something beyond capitalism. This does not mean she is ignorant of what capitalism is; she acknowledges that it "evolves...in response to its time and place," understands that this process occurs by creating markets where previously none existed, and describes Google's needs as "ever-expanding" which reminds us of the growth imperative. She even drops this little passage that I found provocative and insightful, if slightly reductive:
"The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behavior modification."
And yet she never quite critiques the system itself, and appears to accept its existence as a given. This is clear by the end of the first section:
"If there is to be a fight, let it be a fight over capitalism. Let it be an insistence that raw surveillance capitalism is as much a threat to society as it is to capitalism itself."
Part of her confusion seems to come from confusing cause and effect. She describes how Google turned its algorithm towards generating ad revenue and "loosed a new incarnation of capitalism." Later she reiterates this, saying that "latent demand summons supplies and suppliers." But this gets it exactly backwards! Capital dictated a return on its investment in Google, so Google made a point to find one. Later in the third (and easily worst) section we get bit more insight into her underlying assumptions about the world. There's an invocation of Stalin, a critique of China's social credit experiment (without mention of our credit score reality), as well as further musings on Arendt's views of totalitarianism as humanity's eternal curse*. In spite of this, she still leads off her concluding section by directly asking "is surveillance capitalism merely 'capitalism'?" But then she...never answers that question! She does say that surveillance capitalism "propel(s) us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions" and "is best described as a market-driven coup from above" but never goes that one step further to say that hey this is just describing what capitalism always does. It almost reads as though she's trying to be cute about it, letting the reader put two and two together at their own speed. But a) I severely doubt that's the case, and b) c'mon man just say what you mean life is too short.
*The biggest criticism of perhaps my favorite read of the past two years is the "so what" of it. Yeah, the CIA poured a bunch of money into some vaguely anti-communist writing...so what? Well, this book is a useful counter-argument to that line of thinking. Decades later, Arendt's writing is so pervasive and central to Zuboff's thinking that a largely trenchant critique of modern capitalism is neutered by its anti-communist undercurrents.
Luckily for me, someone who read all 500+ pages of this, the book is still more useful than not. Much of this use is in the positive sense, as Zuboff does perform a meaningful critique of modern capitalism, previously stated misgivings aside. She defines the currency of modern Silicon Valley not as people per se (she rejects the "you are the product" mantra) but as "behavioral surplus." In other words, companies use their more obvious value propositions of free e-mail, fun games, and the like with the express purpose of harvesting data to be packaged and re-sold in a separate market. Given the ubiquity and pervasiveness of this, her central conceit then is to substitute "the means of behavioral modification" for the means of production as the primary object of struggle. The accompanying idea of how capital then wields this "instrumentation power" necessarily goes beyond traditional concepts of privacy and monopoly to something more fundamental: "Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?" The scope of this is not just limited to consumer products either, as Zuboff details how the Obama campaign was able to use this knowledge to micro-target voters, in essence becoming a perfectly reactive political organism. There's also some linkage in her narrative to what I read in Surveillance Valley when she describes how a CIA-created company helped Google to normalize the data it harvested from its street view project. While she does tend to repeat herself throughout all of this, she is still able to tie everything up really well in passages like this:
"Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, individuals do not render their experience out of choice or obligation but rather out of ignorance and the dictatorship of no alternatives. The ubiquitous apparatus operates through coercion and stealth. Our advance into life necessarily takes us through the digital, where involuntary rendition has become an inescapable fact. We are left with few right to know, or to decide who knows, or to decide who decides. The abnormal division of learning is created and sustained by secret fiat, implemented by invisible methods, and directed by companies bent to the economic imperatives of a strange new market form."
There's also a line of thought in the dreaded third section which was helpful in clarifying my opposition to it, specifically Zuboff's attachment to her conception of free will. She explains her stance by countering B.F. Skinner's ruminations against free will, claiming that the concept is necessary to stake a claim to "the right to the future tense." The problem with this is that she appears to conflate both the autonomy of beings and the agency of humans with the larger concept of free will (along these same lines, there is simultaneously a conception of this freedom as inherently individual—which stands in stark contrast to the collective "freedom to create new and different forms of social reality" from The Dawn of Everything). This is specifically important to her commentary on "self-awareness as a bulwark against self-regulatory failure." You can see how this gets a bit muddled here:
"This evasion [of individual and group awareness] is neither accidental nor incidental, but actually essential to the structure of the whole surveillance capitalist project. Individual awareness is the enemy of telestimulation because it is the necessary condition for the mobilization of cognitive and existential resources. There is no autonomous judgment without awareness. Agreement and disagreement, participation and withdrawal, resistance or collaboration;: none of these self-regulating choices can exist without awareness."
While she is absolutely correct that Silicon Valley's desire for ultimate control is perverse, this leads her down the road of conflating the theory of deterministic human behavior with the need to control said behavior. What is doubly strange is that she avoids this sort of guilt by association elsewhere; for example, she says that just because technology has been used to impure ends does not mean the technology itself necessarily leads to impure ends. If we then re-work Zuboff's argument assuming that free will does not actually exist, it leads to an even more fascinating implication: If Facebook and their ilk are able to use the behavioral surplus they capture to determine outcomes to some degree, then they are effectively shrinking the distance between what we as humans see as unexplained randomness and what an omniscient being would see as a fully determined series of events. But because of the aforementioned "lack of awareness" that surveillance capital seeks to foment, this means that they are "capturing" randomness without meaningfully reducing apparent randomness. As such, they are not committing the lesser offense of capturing behavioral surplus but, in a sense, becoming God. And while I'm not against the idea of humanity eventually transcending itself, I'd really rather such a process not be led by these fuckin' weirdos.
38. Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center - Ed Burmila (link)
"In 1997, Clinton...proposed fast-track authority for trade agreements—essentially the power to negotiate mini-NAFTAs with trading partners with only and up-or-down vote in Congress to follow. Unions were vociferously opposed to the obvious threat to domestic blue-collar jobs, and Clinton knew it. He simply didn't care. As a lame duck, he no longer needed their support, and besides, the Republicans would always be a worse deal for them than the Democrats. So, the cynical pattern of soliciting from core constituencies during elections years and then actively working against their interests while governing took shape. The Clintonian view was that the Democratic base—labor, people of color, social activists, the left, and so on—were morally obligated to vote Democratic with the understanding that, to win theoretical moderate votes in the center, Democrats would not actually deliver on any of their policy demands. Sounds like a healthy and sustainable relationship!"
Yet another book that explicitly states disappointment in Obama as the impetus for its creation. But instead of looking at separate structures (economics in Thinking Like an Economist, the deep state in American Exception), this one goes right for the Democratic Party itself. If you're a weirdo like me, little of this is new, but it's still instructive to see it laid out together in a coherent argument. Burmila tracks the party's transition from defining the premises of American politics in the New Deal era to letting itself get dragged around by the Republican Party today. This journey takes a lot of odd turns, from the Democrats of the seventies deciding that abandoning the working class was "inevitable" to Clinton basically inventing political hostage-taking in the quote above. To that latter point, Burmila turns the screws on Bill Clinton more than anyone else, depicting advisor Mark Penn as a dumber David Shor, and showing how he helped normalize using the CBO to squash spending (there's plenty of stuff on Hillary too, the best of which is his excoriation of her "breaking up the banks won't solve racism" comment). Probably the most fascinating new thing for me was learning of the existence of the DLC, a political club formed in 1985 to push the Democratic Party to the right. Boy did they succeed!
"As they sought to hold on to an existing base of support without driving away voters who liked the idea of free markets and less government, a big component of their strategy was to take existing Democratic commitments to issue activists and propose new, more broadly, appealing ways of achieving the same goals. For example, the DLC did not repudiate environmentalism; instead, it argued that environmental prosperity was a necessary precursor to protecting the environment. [...] In their growing insistence that no matter the problem, the answers would come from the private sector, the DLC sounded, in fact, suspiciously like Republicans."
39. Selections from the Prison Notebooks - Antonio Gramsci (link)
Not going to attempt the folly of writing a proper blurb on the prison notebooks, except to say that they're exactly what you might think they are: a bunch of semi-formed thoughts that alternate between the most profound insights you've ever heard and pointed takedowns of people you've never heard of from the 1930s. This compendium helps to fill in these blanks, with its 100-page background on Gramsci's life and times as well as its detailed footnotes that help fill in specific context. The one thing I will comment on is that Gramsci's work (unsurprisingly) contains a lot of ruminations on the epistemology of knowledge/ignorance that's been central to my reading. The basis of knowledge being "the discovery that the relations between the social and natural orders are mediated by work, by man's theoretical and practical activity" is the underpinning of not just society but of true democracy: "that every "citizen" can "govern" and that society places him , even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this." In this same vein, his conception of how this action (which he describes as political "predictions") drives political reality is crucial, and is a stern rebuttal to "realism": "If one applies one's will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative—basing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be progressive and strengthening it to help it to victory—one still moves on the train of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it." In all, this search for objective truth, and for common knowledge can be seen as an antidote to alienation that is needed for true governance by the people: "If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge, then and only then is the relationship one of representation." As would be expected of someone laser-focused on the concept of "praxis," Gramsci's devoted work to tie theory to action adds an invaluable dimension to my reading.
In Conclusion,
I was planning on doing a ranking of the "best of 2022," but determined that to be silly because a) roughly a third of this list would constitute the "best" so I'd just be repeating myself, and b) I can't even really decide what "best" means in this context, so why would I share it with others? The 39 books I read took me all over the place, but the fundamental journey was the same. The process of transcending the propaganda machine is long and arduous, but the process itself is part of the point. Building, creating, and shaping knowledge is precisely what is done to you in the course of a "normal" life. If instead you reclaim the agency to do this yourself, you will nurture a more organic and true sense of knowledge. 10/10, would recommend.
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