What's in a Motto?

Saw another silly tweet over the weekend:

Ignoring his misrepresentation of the concept behind the slogan "abolish the family," we now have another instance of a leftist movement being criticized more for its messaging rather than its merits.  This is not novel and is actually a predictable response at this point, harkening back to liberals who quibbled over "defund the police" or reactionaries who decried "black lives matter."  Given that this strategy is now being deployed for relatively fringe ideas, it's good to examine why attacking the message is foolish, even when done in good faith.

It Is Literally Impossible to Convey the Richness of Something in Three Words

This should be obvious, but it isn't always.  People who argue against specific messaging often posit that everything would be fine if only the ambiguities were removed.  But this has never once been true!  Just look at the myriad ways the word "freedom" is used across the entire spectrum of our polity.  Or how the concept of "promoting democracy" is used as a cudgel by American foreign policy to enforce the will of capital.  As such, it's silly to expect any three word phrase to meet this impossible standard of clarity.  Perhaps you could swap it for something like "abolish the commodification and enforcement of the family" or "abolish the social relation of children as property," but a) those are too long, and b) I bet you $100 that the same people are still going to take issue with them.

A Motto as an Invitation to Engage

In the context of activism, this inability to communicate ideas unambiguously with three simple words may seem daunting.  But I would argue it's actually freeing, and perhaps even useful.  Rather than focusing on the inherent shortcoming of language, I would recommend recognizing the opportunity that exists in trying to bridge a potential misunderstanding.  This thought echoes something I've read before with respect to identity politics—namely, that a concept such as identity politics has no absolute moral value, but rather is good when used to start a conversation and bad when used to shut down a conversation.  In the same way, a movement's slogan should be thought of not as "good" or "bad' in and of itself, and instead should be evaluated on the extent to which it invites a conversation.  And given that genuine political change in individuals generally doesn't come directly from catchy slogans, inviting someone to engage is really the only tangible goal of a motto.  Sneaking into your brain, like a sort of Inception for left-wing agitation, if you will.

Provocation is Fine and Good

The obvious counter-argument to the previous paragraph is that unnecessary provocation is counter-productive.  While I very much agree, this misses the point when applied to prescriptive statements.  As such declarations inherently call for change to the current state of things, they will by their very nature provoke the people who benefit from existing hegemony.  This is why it's called a struggle!  This is what politics is!  To quote Gramsci:

"If one applies ones 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 terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it.  What "ought to be" is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics."

One Person's Trash Is Another Person's Treasure

This last point is especially relevant here.  As much as one may genuinely be taken aback by a slogan like "abolish the family," it is likely because that person has positive associations with the concept of family.  But I can assure you that is not the case for everyone.  As such, I would ask anyone who take issue with this or any other activist slogan to perhaps consider that you are not the primary target for the message (especially in this case, where current efforts disproportionately come from the queer community).  Capitalism expresses itself through many vectors, so it follows that meaningful anti-capitalist advocacy must at least try to engage with and seek to understand as many of these vectors as it can.  This is one such vector.  Don't lose the forest for the trees.

Chicken Little

 Saw this take today that I wanted to briefly remark on:

The take itself is good (for those of you that don't use Twitter, that's what the little heart thingy is for), and refers to a current on the internet that goes back months if not years.  Of course, not everyone agreed:

The disconnect here (and elsewhere) is that the original post specifically addresses "fear-mongering" which has a very specific and purposeful definition.  Namely:

And if you spend anytime on the internet, you will see plenty of this.  For example:

And for good measure, some old fear-mongery posts from the person who took issue with claims of fear-mongering:

And this is a bigger subject for a longer post, but I would be remiss not to note that a lot of this crosses over into anti-vax sentiment, sometimes explicitly:

Normally I would not remark on this disconnect but for one thing.  Actually existing Covid is bad enough...millions dead, billions infected, a new endemic virus to manage in perpetuity, a largely indifferent ruling class facing zero repercussions for their crimes, and a society still feeling every single after-effect possible.  Indeed, it's the sort of event that should inspire a mass movement to address the shortcomings of our political economy and ensure that we're in a place to actually confront the next such challenge, whenever it happens.  But the fear-mongering doesn't just not help with this, it actively works against this.  It creates a reality so perilous, so fraught with certain doom, that fighting for change becomes inherently impossible.  It's effectively a call to inaction.  I still believe that we can use the shared suffering of the past three years as a rallying cry to demand something better, but we're never going to do that if we can't engage with reality as it actually exists.  And that means never, ever resorting to fear-mongering.

2023 Book List

Another year, another list of books.  I did pretty well with my pledge to put less effort into last year's mini-blogs, which helped give me extra time to read what has to be a personal record 39 books.  Surely I must have learned everything there is to know, and yet, I am not sure what else to do but keep reading and learning even more. 

1. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism - Quinn Slobodian (link)

"Most galling for [Jan] Tumlir was the appropriation of the term "order" itself.  As he noted, the word has two meanings: "There is the order of observed results (the streets are safe and prices stable)," but "in a more analytical sense, the concept is used to denote the set of rules and institutions which produce the observed regularity and orderliness."  The goal of order was not to give the people what they want but to prevent them from taking what they want—and thereby destroying the system as a whole.  His apodictic phrase could serve as a slogan for the entire Geneva school of neoliberalism: "International rules protect the world market against governments.""

This is a great book regardless of the context in which it is read, but it was especially illuminating to read all about the winding road of neoliberal economic and legal philosophy with 500+ pages of Gramsci fresh in my mind.  Through this lens, I came to view some of the architects of neoliberal thought less as purposefully evil and more as cursed by the motivated reasoning required to get a seat at the table of capital.  Sure, some of these guys are indeed evil, whether they are driven by barely-disguised racism (boy, Wilhelm Röpke really loved apartheid) or are too blinkered by their adherence to existing capitalism to remember basic humanity (see the pull quote).  But there was also a fundamental desire by many others to understand how the world actually works and there's even a patina of concern for the collective good that lays beneath the desire for world order.  In this way they are like Gramsci, looking for a deeper understanding of reality to help "dominate and transcend" it, just from the other side of things.  Of course, the events depicted in the book depict the natural outcome (per Gramsci, among others) of such a struggle between well-meaning but fundamentally ignorant liberals and hardline right-wingers, as the latter group ends up exerting a disproportionate amount of influence on the creation of the institutions that govern global capital to this day.  And so here we are, left to decipher the actual philosophies of the men who helped create the world we know, in order to dominate and transcend it ourselves.

Neoliberal philosophy as Slobodian depicts it contains an interesting contradiction, best illustrated by two of its central tenets: a negative epistemology of economics which holds that we cannot fully understand how the world works and a commitment to depoliticization of economics.  The first tenet holds at least some purchase in my view, as it roughly aligns with my previous remarks on complexity.  To this end, the book has a good deal of information on related areas that helped inform neoliberal thought, such as cybernetics and systems theory, which I do think have some validity outside of this particular application.  While some of the first neoliberal economists sought to forge a different path, seeking to weaponize data and knowledge in service of global capital, subsequent market failures like the Great Depression helped push the discipline towards Hayekian ideals of fundamental ignorance:

"...comprehensive knowledge itself would always—and must always—elude the economist because of its necessary dispersal among all members of society.  For [Hayek], to climb the Lighthouse of the World in search of a synoptic view from which to direct and plan was only the setup for a long fall."

What this meant was that the focus of such economists turned away from the science of economics itself and towards the enforcement of global order through law, rules, and regulations.  The specific metaphor Hayek used for this was addressing disease with "prophylaxis, not treatment."  Which sounds sort of good and maybe almost in line with Marxist prescriptions but for the fact that a) Hayek and his ilk were fervently opposed to socialism, and b) his prophylaxis was offered in service of a perverse first principle:

"The chief task of economic policy would thus appear to be the creation of a framework within which the individual not only can freely decide for himself what he wants to do, but in which also this decision based on his particular knowledge will contribute as much as possible to aggregate output. [...] Principles are practically all that we have to contribute."

From all this, it naturally follows that individual political actors outside the neoliberal sphere of control do not, per neoliberal philosophers, possess the "omnipotence and omniscience" necessary to change the world.  The contradiction that arises from this is that the same actors who declared a fundamental ignorance simultaneously used their influence and power to change the world themselves.  What can help to explain this disconnect is that second tenet of depoliticization.  Because neoliberal thinkers believed in their cause so fervently (and let's be honest, because they were personally insulated from the negative externalities of their favored policies), the very idea of the demos held no significant purchase with them.  While they did sometimes explicitly state this belief (Mises literally called for an "actual depoliticization of the economic"), the book depicts time and again a logic and reasoning that fundamentally and obviously rests upon this central assumption that the demos can make no worthy contribution to economic matters.  What's more is that such a worldview is reinforced by the neoliberal concept of "consumer sovereignty," which both serves to further atomize citizens as well as necessitate (for its protection) the superstructure of the economic federation.  This in turn makes the system (and the people who control it) the protagonist of reality—a perverse reality in which the only way for a "consumer" to express their "sovereignty" is to set a price.  To bring this full circle, Hayek himself ties this back to the first tenet:

"If we are to make use of the distinct factual knowledge of the individuals inhabiting different locations on this world, we must allow them to be told by the impersonal signals of the market how they had best use them in their own as well as in the general interest."

In the end, not only do we better understand the twisted logic that has birthed our world order, but we also see a prime example of how seemingly benevolent language and appeals to the collective can be used against us.  Good start to the year.

2. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 - Eric Foner (link)

"In my youth, in my manhood, in my old age, I had fondly dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for awhile the foundation of our institutions, and released us from obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom, that the intelligent, pure, and just men of this Republic...would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich...This bright dream has vanished 'like the baseless fabric of a dream.'  I find that we shall be obliged to be content with patching up the worst portions of the ancient edifice, and leaving it, in many of its parts, to be swept through by...the storms of despotism."

-Thaddeus Stevens, on the passage of the 14th Amendment

Fascinating tome that covers everything you could ever want to know about Reconstruction and the myriad reasons that it failed.  Foner's kitchen sink approach (this is a 600+ pager) sacrifices some depth for breadth, but that's fine as the breadth is the whole point.  His largely chronological narrative achieves even more than the massive sum of its parts, as it deftly interweaves the social, political, and economic drivers that both instigated Reconstruction and led to its downfall.  Rather than deal with each cause on its own, Foner keeps coming back to the same themes under different context.  I think this approach largely works for two main reasons.  For one, it allows the reader to piece things together and to build certain themes up over time.  It's far more engaging in my opinion to have something like ineffectual "moderate" governance keep rearing its head throughout the narrative instead of having a 50-page beast of a chapter that hammers you over the head with it.  And second, while Foner is probably a smidge too credulous in some instances, he's largely not afraid to say outright what is clearly implied in his story.  If something sounds motivated by racism he'll tell you explicitly that it was, and if something appears to be dictated by the whims of capital he'll tell you to what degree that was true.

Doing justice to the thematic richness of the book would essentially require me to re-write the entire thing in a different order.  Short of that, I'll still remark on a few specific items of note.  The first is how the very notion of what freedom actually is became the primary "terrain of conflict" which remains a battleground today.  The primary context of this conflict was in the realm of labor, so much so that even other areas of freedman struggle (churches, schools, family autonomy) were fundamentally dependent on "winning control of their working lives and gaining access to the economic resources of the South."  But even the concept of "free labor" as it was known at the time was rife with disparate interpretations of the term.  Freedmen correctly viewed themselves as "a working class of people who had been unjustly deprived of the fruit of their labor" who, per Wendell Phillips, did not "trust the welfare of the dependent class to the good will and moral sense of the upper class."  But allies like the Freedmen's Bureau and well-meaning Northern carpetbaggers did not understand the irreconcilability of the interests of former slaves and former masters, defaulting instead to their ideological commitments to "respect for private property and the individual initiative" and the "social benefits of capitalist development."  What's more is that the inherent contradictions of the "free labor" ethos led directly to its downfall as it "simultaneously inspired efforts to guarantee civil and political equality...and inhibited efforts to provide an economic underpinning for blacks' new freedom."  Revisiting the class-based framing, this "opportunity [for freedmen] to work their way out of the wage-earning class," ignores both the necessity of the labor performed by such a class as well as the extreme power differentials that limit the scope of that mobility.  Foner best summarizes this all as such:

"American planters believed that the South's prosperity and their own survival as a class depended, as a Georgia newspaper put it, upon "on single condition—the ability of the planter to command labor."  And the conflict between former masters attempting to re-create a disciplined labor force and blacks seeking to infuse meaning into their freedom by carving out autonomy in every aspect of their lives, profoundly affected the course of Reconstruction.  For as Christopher G. Memminger, the Confederacy's Secretary of the Treasury, wrote in 1865, politics, race relations, and the very definition of "what is included in emancipation" all turned "upon the decision which shall be made upon the mode of organizing the labor of the African race.""

While questions of labor are central to Foner's narrative, what's even more remarkable is how every other aspect of Reconstruction can be viewed as analogous to, or even in many cases the root of, much of the existing conflict in modern America.  Oliver Otis Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, might as well have been discussing "welfare queens" when talking about government assistance: "A man who can work has no right to be supported by the government.  No really respectable person wishes to be supported by others."  The slow collapse of Republican political hegemony reads similar to the failures of the modern "big tent" Democratic Party, right down to taking black votes for granted (conversely, it's also funny to see Foner literally describe the old Democratic Party as going after "disaffected Republicans" like some sort of time-traveling Lincoln Project).  Just like now, the whims of the market are sacrosanct, which leads to problems that minimal planning would easily prevent: "The soil and climate of the cotton states doomed agricultural diversification without massive applications of fertilizer, an expense only the wealthiest planters could afford. [...] Loans were readily available to finance cotton cultivation , but not to promote agricultural modernization."  The decentralized, stochastic terror of the Klan sounds just like the terror of today.  And the budding relationship between the Republican Party and the industrial bourgeoisie feels like the first step on the journey to what the party is today.  Reconstruction, simply put, is the story of America:

"Democracy, it has been said, functions best when politics does not directly mirror deep social divisions, and each side can accept the victory of the other because both share many values and defeat does not imply "a fatal surrender of...vital interests."  This was the situations in the North, where, an Alabama Republican observed, "it matters not who is elected."  But too much was at stake in Reconstruction for "normal politics" to prevail."

3. Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) - Eric Blanc (link) 

"The case of Poland dramatically illustrates that social crises, state collapse, and mass proletarian radicalisation did not inevitably lead to the downfall of moderate socialists, the rise of Marxists, and successful working-class revolutions. In 1917—18, such conditions created a favourable context for radicals to expand their influence and contend for state power. But the result of the revolutionary struggle was by no means preordained by the social structure. Deep social crisis, state collapse, and labour insurgency were necessary but insufficient conditions for anti-capitalist rupture in imperial Russia. At least one other factor was needed: socialist parties that were sufficiently influential, radical, and tactically flexible to help the working-class majority effectively unite to break with capitalist rule."

Much like The Dawn of Everything, this is a book that a) exists primarily to correct misconceptions I never had, but b) is nevertheless useful in its demonstration of the complexity and richness of past events.  This second point is important, as (like with Graeber) it is explicitly invoked to disabuse the reader of adherence to overly rigid dogmas.  Blanc is able to fairly convincingly demonstrate that a key variable in the success of revolutionary efforts within the Russian Empire was the ability of a given party structure to capitalize on the moment.  Besides the passage above, he quotes Rosa Luxemburg to this effect:

"...the strength of a socialist party consist not in superficially cobbling together a plethora of members, nor in opulent cashboxes or an abundance of rubbish party leaflets, but rather in the stability and clarity of its views, in the concordance and spiritual unity of its ranks, in the concurrence between its words and deeds."

One of the more practical and relevant aspects of Blanc's narrative is that workers' actions are going to happen regardless of the existence of a workers' party (as we have seen here).  Because of this, having a workers' party is critical, lest such a fervor co-opted by bourgeois interests.  Probably a painfully obvious lesson for us, but nonetheless a useful one.  Also, this sounds like it could have been written about roughly any modern leftist publication:

"(political newspaper) Iskra in particular was often accused of excessive polemics against its rivals.  For example, a 1901 'Joint Letter' issued by activists inside Russia argued that "Iskra, in the heat of controversy, at times forgets the truth and, picking on isolated unfortunate expressions, attributes to its opponents views they do not hold, emphasizes points of disagreement that are frequently of little material importance, and obstinately ignores the numerous points of contacts in views.""

4. The Twenty Days of Turin - Giorgio de Maria (link)

"I don't think we can establish any trail of concrete evidence joining those murderers with whomever—at least to our appearance—happens to command them.  The evil is too deep-rooted, yet also too widely sown, entangling people, objects, and objectives...The physical executors of its crimes are entities far beyond suspicion, since one cannot even mention them without feeling reason crumbling.  Absolute evil couldn't have taken a more unassailable form..."

A wonderful fever dream of a novel that transposes the paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49 to a setting both unique to its time and yet all too familiar in the present.  Turin as envisioned in these pages becomes something of a funhouse mirror version of itself that works to capture the mood of the actual events being depicted.  An idea that would be revisited decades later in Twin Peaks (BOB being born of nuclear weapons testing), the spectre that haunts Turin and inspires the titular crime wave is revealed to be the literal echo of ghosts from colonial times, suggesting a spiritual debt from the origins of capitalism that can only be repaid in blood.  But what makes this book truly special is de Maria's conception of The Library, the catalyst behind the twenty days that fomented a sense of false community which was marshalled along by a group of mysterious "polite young lads."  All of this feels almost impossibly insightful given that this was written years before public revelation of such overt manipulation.  And yet it's all sadly timeless as well:

"Even those infamous contributions, those dialogues across the ether that were later purged by the Library, helped break that cycle of loneliness in which our citizens were confined.  Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation.  The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!"

5. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time - Ira Katznelson (link)

"The South made this happen. The country's profound change in law and attitude toward the circumstances of organized labor was the direct result of shifts in southern legislative behavior during the 1940s. Faced with the surprising rise of labor in their region, and with the union movement's increasing command of resources and issues in the Democratic Party, southern members of Congress came to believe that they no longer could afford to treat labor as an issue that should command party loyalty. Labor organizing, they saw, stimulated civil rights activism. A powerful labor movement that pressed against employment discrimination threatened to level wages across racial lines and directly challenge Jim Crow. It also encouraged blacks to leave the South, and diminished the southern establishment's control over those who stayed. Even the 1930s arrangements excluding the occupations in which the majority of southern blacks worked from federal social welfare and labor laws had become precarious. 

[...]

Distressed by these developments and keenly aware of the dangers that threatened the South's racial order, southern members closed ranks in Congress to reshape the framework within which unions and the labor market could operate. For their Republican partners, labor remained an issue of party and ideology. For southern legislators, labor had become race."

On one hand, this is a very useful book.  Katznelson's analysis of the New Deal goes to great lengths to demonstrate how its dependence on support from Southern Democratic Congressmen neutered its impact and led to the premature demise of its coalition.  The New Deal encouraged the alignment of labor interests and civil rights interests (a good thing), which in turn inspired the especially racist members of the Democratic caucus to join forces with Northern Republicans to berth the GOP that we know today (a very bad thing).  This same realignment also contributed to the construction of the military-industrial complex after World War II (fun fact: shell-shock from WWI led to the banning of foreign arms sales in 1935, but Allen Dulles and friends made sure that didn't last).  And the denouement of the New Deal order led directly to the economic style of reasoning that plagues us today:

"The new public philosophy of group competition abdicated any democratic, as distinct from dictatorial, notions of a civic interest.  Placed under great stress, public authority to achieve common goals thus lacked means to articulate why private interests should not dominate decision making about public policy."

On the other hand, Katznelson's narrative performs the incongruous two-step of repeatedly depicting the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy while implicitly assuming that liberal democracy is the only valid form of government.  Based on this, I expected the conclusion to mount an affirmative defense of our system, but it...never does?  To be sure, there is copious praise for the New Deal's greatest accomplishments, but when he ventures beyond that it gets weird.  For one, he flattens competing worldviews to an absurd degree, which leads to some preposterous comparisons, such as this:

"In embracing features of planning that had been identified mainly with the radical program of the Bolsheviks, in supporting features of corporatism that principally had been associated with Fascist Italy, and in backing the delegation of great power to administrative agencies that regulated the private economy in a manner that had a family resemblance to the active economic project of Nazi Germany, the South helped show that each of these policies could be turned in a democratic, not totalitarian, direction."

To this end, he even goes so far as to say "Stalin was a much more corrosive despot than Mussolini" in the closing pages—While I am used to liberals trashing Stalin, it's still wild to see someone say they actually prefer the fascists.  This all is especially weird considering how often he seemingly chides Southern Democrats for characterizing mild New Deal reforms as "totalitarian" or "communist" or as "coming from Nazi Germany."  What's even weirder is that Katznelson is fairly incisive when it comes to diagnosing the specific problems of American liberal democracy.  His description of nuclear paranoia is spot-on, and his concluding list of "deep problems" (below) of our "particular type of democratic state" is incredibly insightful.  Oh well, pobody's nerfect.

"First, is a narrowing of politics to thin, confined, restricted, and potentially polarized interests. [...] Second is how putatively neutral rules favored those with more resources. [...] Third is how, with "sovereignty parceled out among the groups" and with public values trumped by private-regarding goals and power, the procedural state generates recurring crises of public authority and civic trust."

6. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire - Andreas Malm (link)

"The insistence on sweeping militancy under the rug of civility is itself a symptom of one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics.  It barely exists any longer as a living praxis in powerful movements or as a foil against which their demands can be set.  From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed , antiquated, unlearned, and turned unreal.  With the consequent deskilling of movements comes the reluctance to recognize revolutionary violence as an integral component.  This is the impasse in which the climate movement finds itself: the historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing.  To break out of it, we have to learn how to fight all over again, in what might be the most unpropitious moment so far in the history of human habitation on this planet."

A quick, pleasant read that takes a rather obvious lesson of history (namely, that the threat of violence is necessary for a struggle for liberation to succeed) and clarifies what that lesson does and does not mean for the fight for climate justice.  Specifically, it's important to understand that violence against property is wholly distinct from violence against people (but it's still foolish to pretend that the former isn't still violence, per se).  It's also obvious that climate-related violence will happen regardless of whether it exists within a movement for climate justice, so per Mandela, it's best to try to wield this fervor towards organized, productive ends.  And finally, while despair is understandable, it's also undeniably anti-political, and thus must be pushed back against with great urgency and purpose.

7. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America - Hugh Wilford (link)

"We believe that the Democratic Way of Life rests firmly upon the assumption that means must be consonant with ends.  The use of CIA funds for the Committee's work seems to us to have been contrary to this ideal, so basic to the democratic way of life."

-Statement from the Committee of Correspondence

"My political experience has taught me that one should never conduct a fight on grounds chose by others and for ends that are not one's own."

-Richard Wright

I'm back in my element again, with a necessary companion to one of my favs, The Cultural Cold War.  Wilford's prose is far less polemic than Saunders, and at time appears to be sympathetic to the US' larger goals in the Cold War, if not its tactics in this particular area.  Regardless, he makes a concerted effort to offer objective analysis of his narrative (eg. the wittingness of various assets, how likely CIA involvement was in areas where there is no smoking gun) that informs the reader well enough to draw their own conclusions, regardless of ideology.  Wilford does push back on some of Saunders' conclusions, and while he's eminently reasonable and logical in his alternative arguments, I get the impression that he's wrongly painting Saunders as over-determining the CIA's actions.  The obvious problem with this is that this simplistic thinking is directly refuted throughout her book:

"We didn't tell them what to do, that would've been inconsistent with the American tradition. That doesn't mean there weren't themes we wanted to see discussed, but...we did not feed the line to anyone."

"The purpose of supporting leftist groups was not to destroy or even dominate but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and monitor the thinking of such groups; to provide them with a mouthpiece so they could blow off steam; and, in extremis, to exercise a final veto on their publicity and possibly their actions if they ever got too "radical.""

Regardless of this disconnect, Wilford's narrative ultimately serves to impart the same lessons across a broader set of CIA efforts (Saunders' focused mainly on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its associated organizations; Wilford expands this reach to Africa, South America, and beyond).  Propaganda and ideology display no one source, regularly flowing both from the top down and the bottom up.  The twin forces of money and political conviction helped lubricate this exchange, but also occasionally led to conflict when a benefactor didn't want to tow the line.  And the overlap between CIA-sponsored pass-throughs and like-minded non-governmental funding (ie The Ford Foundation) and the presence of already-existing ideological forces (The Hays Code already effectively made movies pro-American) demonstrate that the CIA's efforts were really just one part of a larger cultural momentum towards anti-communism.

But ultimately, what this book reinforces more than anything (ironically, given its emphasis on establishing if conspirators were witting or not) is my growing sense that the degree of one's knowing complicity is not analytically relevant as long as one is promoting the wishes of capital.  The tale of Al Lowenstein and the National Student Association demonstrates this well.  Evidence appears to confirm that Lowenstein was never aware of the CIA's funding of his organization or of its meddling to defer his draft status.  But this doesn't really matter as Wilford himself points out: "More important is the broader significance of [Lowenstein's] presidency, which definitively established the NSA's characteristic combination of hard-line anti-communism in foreign affairs and dynamic liberalism on domestic issues."  The CIA's involvement in women's movements was the same: "...the CIA did not have to impose terms on the Committee [of Correspondence] because the women involved tended to share many of its values anyway."  If an asset is so closely aligned with the capitalist aims of the CIA, there is little practical reason to evaluate them on their own terms.  And given that the CIA often controlled the purse strings (and sometimes far more), it's fair to conclude that whatever independence these assets conveyed was merely a fig leaf, and that they ultimately served at the pleasure of (and were subject to veto by) the CIA.

8. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition - Cedric J. Robinson (link)

"The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being.  It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma.  It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it.  It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.  I have attempted here to demonstrate its authority.  More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization.  We are that (because we must be) but much more."

A fantastic work of history that suggests its titular phenomenon is not Marxism nor a rebuttal of Marxism but a secret third thing.  This tradition understands (per the works of Richard Wright, among others) that Marxism is useful as a method of social analysis but falls short of being a load-bearing ideology sufficient for liberation.  Part of this is its minimal focus on the role of racial classification in creating a persistent social order semi-independent from class dating all the way back to pre-capitalist Europe.  But the most important part is the specific way in which shared history and knowledge shapes and forms Black radical consciousness.  The tradition is an "accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle."  It's a revolutionary consciousness that "proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism."  Accordingly, thinkers like Du Bois identify the lack of widespread organization/revolt in America as a result of "the fact that it has no intelligent democracy," which echoes Mills' conception of an "epistemology of ignorance."  I recommend reading the whole thing for its sheer breadth of analysis, but Chapter 7, which bridges the gap between the broad history of slavery/capitalism and the particular history of Black Marxism, is a short and sweet summary if you're strapped for time.

9. M.I.A: Mythmaking in America - H. Bruce Franklin (link)

A compact and devastating tale of the precursor to QAnon.  The myth in question (that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam) is not a perfect analogue to what ails us today.  It originated explicitly at Nixon's behest (to support his desire to build popular support for the continuation of the war) and not from a message board.  Its cause was heightened by the disproportionate number of high-ranking officers involved, as their status and assignments made them more likely to be classified as MIA.  And the theory was not shunned in popular media, as major Hollywood pictures like Rambo and The Deer Hunter gave credence to the movement's claims.

All that said, when you find the parallels, they're downright eerie.  Take this section on the seeming cognitive dissonance that arose when true believer Reagan was elected:

"With the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in early 1981, the myth evolved a new twist: the good president amid the evil officials.  Ronald Reagan's heart yearned to save the POWs, but the president was surrounded and kept in ignorance by the claque of scheming bureaucrats and liberals now know collectively as the "doorkeepers" or "gatekeepers.""

In this same vein, the real enemy of Rambo isn't the Vietnamese but "the bureaucrats and politicians who run the system with marvelous technology and utter cynicism."  All of this serves to "project a vast government cover-up and conspiracy."  One of the primary believers, a colorful character by the name of Colonel Bo Gritz, went so far as to publish a book with its thesis described as such:

"A parallel government has existed for decades, which led us into a war that cost more than 58,000 lives and infused our nation with drugs.  This shadow government has used drug and arms trafficking to fund illegal covert operations and the agents of this cancerous bureaucracy realizing that the discovery of American POWs would lead to the unmasking of their own sinister activities in Indochina, have systematically sabotaged every effort to find and rescue the prisoners."

The thing is that this is a very good summary of reality right up to the point where he starts talking about POWs.  It's almost as though right-wing conspiracy theories originate from legitimate grievances but then powerful moneyed interests twist them into narratives that ultimately support their own devious aims.  It only stands to reason that as long as the covert agencies and deep pockets of this "shadow government" exist, they'll keep churning out tall tales to keep us chasing ghosts, both literally and figuratively.

10. Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1929-1941 - Stephen Kotkin (link)

""A great deal is said about great leaders. But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist, And the main thing here is the middle cadres—party, economic, military. They're the ones who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They don't try to climb above their station; you don't even notice them." Dimitrov again tried to object that Stalin was nonetheless more important, prompting him to insist yet again, "The fundamental thing is the middle cadres. That must be noted, and it must never be forgotten that, other conditions being equal, the middle cadres decide the outcome of our cause.""

Most of the history I've read the past few years has been authored by contemporary American historians, which means most of it is accompanied by some flavor of left-liberal worldview.  A few times along the way I've noted where such an approach leads to knee-jerk anti-communism, which is often supported by something Hannah Arendt said about Stalin and little else of substance.  Stalin is a departure from this, most obviously because it might be the most meticulously researched thing I've read.  But it's also written by someone even more anti-communist than the libs.  This bizarre combination of aspects (I though conservatives were supposed to be incurious!) leads to something that in a strange way is far more honest, if still blinkered by the views of the author.

By far the most useful part of Stalin is how Kotkin directly refutes some of the most pernicious myths and misunderstandings perpetuated by mainstream liberal historians. He rejects the idea of the 1932-33 famine as genocide saying "the famine was not intentional" and more specifically, he cites 1933 efforts to allocate scarce supplies to the areas most in need to clarify that "there was no "Ukrainian" famine; the famine was Soviet."  He takes full account of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact noting the simultaneous truths that 1) it empowered the USSR to eventually defeat Hitler (with his own weapons, natch), and 2) that Britain did not take the idea of an alliance with the Soviets seriously, at least until war broke out in earnest.  Hilariously enough, Kotkin reserves his spiciest criticism for pre-Churchill Britain and those who carry water for them: "Scholars who continue to deny that Stalin ever wanted a military alliance with the West have to explain why he offered one, in written form."  Moreover, he points out Britain's lack of seriousness in negotiating with the USSR when 1) they were far more lenient to the Nazis in Munich, and 2) their objections were incredibly hypocritical: "The British imperialists had seized one quarter of the earth, across oceans, and yet they kept invoking "principle" in a refusal to allow [Stalin] to protect himself in connection with microscopic territories contiguous with the Soviet homeland, that until recently had belonged to Russia and that represented a threat?"  And despite some struggles on his part (he implies that the "conspiratorial worldview and logic of Communism, a Manichean universe of two camps and pervasive enemies" was a necessary condition that enabled Stalin's purges), Kotkin does manage to separate the particular events of 1930s Russia from the idea of socialism itself: "To be clear, the challenges of running and conceptualizing the state under socialism did not cause the terror."

And yet, in these same passages we see the author's inability to grasp that just maybe the USSR was...good?  At least kind of?  In spite of Kotkin's incisive criticism of Britain he still ultimately characterizes their choice between Germany and Russia as "two odious options."  And when he tries to wrestle with just why there was surprisingly little open revolt during the famine, he treats a collective, class-aware mindset as seemingly foreign to him: "...even the reluctant came to employ the language and through processes of the regime to view the world through party directives and official reportage—class and enemies, factory output, and imperialist threats, false versus genuine consciousness.  This is what gave Stalin's regime its extraordinary power."  Later he confirms this, saying "the cult's power was that it was not just about Stalin, it was about them."  And not surprisingly given his ideology, Kotkin treats the very idea of economic collectivization as impossible: "A few socialists began, painfully, to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property."

In spite of this ideological barrier, Kotkin at least manages to illuminate how the USSR's approach to art and culture was more honest and nurturing than the US/CIA's approach I've remarked on before.  Stalin's concept of socialist realism understood art as a mirror and not a hammer, and shared Trotsky's view that "the literary sphere had its own relatively autonomous dynamic and therefore should not be administered the same way as the economy or politics."  He justified non-communist art with his own flavor of death of the author: "Bulgakov was "alien," "not ours," for failing to depict exploitation properly, but [Stalin] insisted that The Days of the Turbins remained "useful" to the cause, whatever the author's intent."  He preferred the portrayal of enemies "not as beasts, but as people," and called writers "the engineers of human souls," remarking that "your tanks would be worth little if the souls inside them were rotten."  Efforts to encourage such engineering were supported by a Literary Fund, supported by taxes on publishing houses and performance houses instead of dark CIA money.  All of this led to the near-unanimous view of Stalin as "a great liberal and patron in the best sense of that word."

11. Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming - Lyle Jeremy Rubin (link)

"No, the point of the story is he belonged right where he was, in Beirut, killing or being killed.  This despite him just witnessing so many of his comrades get killed, or because he just witnessed them get killed.  The reason for the destruction was immaterial, and the demand for a reason offensive.  The marine's purpose in life was to be wherever distant powerbrokers ordered him to be, for whatever reason they have or didn't give.  It wasn't a job but a calling.  He was proud to wait for whatever it was he was waiting for."

A fantastic memoir of self-reflection that serves as a window into how many of the seemingly self-evident pathologies of American empire replicate themselves in even the most conscientious of minds.  In many ways, this feels like exactly the sort of thing I would write myself if only my life were more interesting.  Alas, a former marine and college republican (was reminded of how small and incestuous right-wing networks are by his story of staying at Dennis Prager's house) becoming a lefty partly by way of traumatic events is a much more interesting journey than a former left-liberal slowly peeling back the onion of American propaganda.  But while the particulars of Rubin's story are interesting, the best parts are typically where he works to tie it in to a larger history of societal decay:

"I was raised not only to celebrate the achievements of those like [Elliott] Abrams and fear the motives of those like [Angela] Davis but also to see them as existing in separate historical and moral universes altogether.  No matter ho much Jews like me or my parents—liberal or conservative—swore by the civil rights movement, we never afforded the same generosity to the most committed warriors of the black freedom movement as we did the most strident fighters for Jewish liberation.  More tragically, we never acknowledged how our bipartisan embrace of the status quo had worked to ensure this incapacity, to blind us to our shared covenant on enslavement and emancipation, and to poison that bond."

12. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture - Oswaldo Zavala (link)

"According to [Charles] Bowden, there are two discursive versions of Mexico.  One the one hand, there is the Mexico of the brave President Calderón who has decided not to tolerate drug trafficking organizations any longer, risking his political capital for the good of the nation.  Seen from the United States, this Mexico appears as a "sister" republic where there is a functional civil society, laws and its corresponding rule of law.  But that Mexico simply "does not exist."  In the second version of Mexico, Bowden writes: the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed."

If you can only take one word away from this summary of how the drug war replaced communism as the national security concern du jour, make it "depoliticization."  Specifically, Zavala's work serves to describe how the largely false narrative of "drug cartels" and "narcos" serve to obscure the link between governments, the drug trade, and the violence perpetrated in its name.  This obfuscation is not limited to official government communication, as Zavala spends a great deal of his time describing how this false understanding of the world is diffused into contemporary literature and other forms of narrative art.  This "state thinking" also pervades and thus limits the boundaries of what journalism can say on the matter.  All of this conforms directly to the neoliberal idea of a supposedly decentralized state with little to no agency; indeed a state that wants to appear non-political.  The specific mechanism that unites all these threads is how the state's narrative serves to flatten and reduce the real experience of violence to a Manichean battle between good and evil (which you may remember from everything I've read/written about the Cold War):

"When forms of representation are articulated from the literary point of view that reproduce the stereotype of the victimizes young woman, the most significant conditions of the phenomenon disappear, such as unemployment, extreme income inequality, the vulnerability of institutions, institutional corruption.  In their place are machismo and misogyny of supposedly inherent to Mexican "culture"" 

In short, what we think of as the inherent violence of drug trade is really just a lie put forth by the very state that itself manages (if not controls) the "plaza" in which reality unfolds.  To this you may ask, Why?  To which Zavala answers that it's the same reason as everything else:

"The War on Drugs is a cipher that masks the political strategy of large-scale community displacement for the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources that, if not for the War on Drugs, would remain unattainable for national and transnational capital." 

13. White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa - Susan Williams (link)

"In the West, the ignorance of Africa is palpable, like a monster that invades our brains with disbelief, deception, and disinterest, yet is everywhere around us.  We are victims of probably the most uninformed educated people in the world on the subject of Africa."

-Molefi Kete Asante

"He is indeed aware of the precepts of right and wrong, but if he is given an assignment which may be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience.  In a word, he can rationalize all actions."

-CIA Africa Division description of its agent code-named WIROGUE

This detailed story of the African theater of the Cold War reinforces and builds on a lot of what I've internalized from what I've read previously (to Williams' credit many of those same books are explicitly mentioned in the text).  American interests were relentless in their pursuit of maintaining control of African resources; specifically, the large Uranium deposits in the Congo.  African leaders were not ignorant of their enemies or of their ultimate needs (Lumumba specifically spoke of how only independence would allow his people to truly flourish), but were inherently limited by the economic remnants of colonialism as well as the fecklessness of multi-national bodies (like the UN) on which they relied for help.  And even the less explicitly evil Westerners still helped doom African independence movements by way of their fundamental inability to grasp the concept of non-alignment (for example, see how the valid moral concerns of nuclear scientists Engelbert Broda and Alan Nunn May were weaponized against them in their efforts to help power the world).  In all, the sheer scope of America's operations in Africa was the theme that pummeled my brain the most while reading this.  Despite the terrifying description of the CIA agent above, there were no "bad apples" sent to Africa but rather an overwhelming and systematic occupying force deployed with the utmost dedication to achieving dominion over the land and its people:

"...the CIA appears to have been riding several horses at once that were going in different directions: it supported Tshombe's war on the UN; it supported the UN mission in the Congo; and it supported the Congolese Air Force, the air arm of the Leopoldville government.  All these efforts, however, contributed to the objective of keeping the whole of the Congo under America's influence and guarding the Shinkolobwe mine against Soviet incursion."

14. Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism - Justin Joque (link)

"In sum, we must theoretically and practically engage the production of knowledge, imagining different forms and different computations.  But let us be clear: this does not and cannot mean a simple fetishism of the future for its own sake.  We cannot be so hopeful as to assume that the force of these contradictions promises any respite.  At best, they provide an opening, an opportunity to reconfigure the very force of objectification and the production of knowledge and value."

A sober and yet hopeful rumination on where the statistical revolution has left us in terms of...well, actual revolutionary potential.  Joque both fully understands and adequately describes how algorithms borne of a capitalist logic can only recreate capitalist hierarchies, and thus serve to establish "a smooth, universal lingua franca of epistemic and economic commensurability that always produces its truth at the exact local moment of exchange."  Where this line of thinking is of most use is when he describes how this necessarily limits the production of communal knowledge, favoring instead "relative knowledge and with it dissimulation."  This serves to "enclose knowledge itself" by establishing a knowledge economy defined by "the unproductive theft and privatization of knowledge, and hence the theft and privatization of the general intellect."  At a base political level, this creates a context where all that matters is discovering "the rules of the game—not how to change them."  Which is where Joque's prescription of a revolutionary mathematics becomes the only logical antidote.

I will quibble a bit when it comes to his conception of how statistical methods serve the broader concept of "truth."  He correctly identifies Bayesian methods as supporting the recent turn toward the economic way of thinking.  But the way he describes the bridge from frequentism to the present state of things is odd.  Specifically, he regularly conflates the "truth" of an event happening (ie. whether it rains or not on a given day) with our ability to predict such a thing.  The problem with this is that the latter item is an entirely different conception of "truth."  That our predictions for the future correspond to a real thing is immaterial to the truth value of the prediction itself.  The prediction instead simply reflects the available knowledge at a point in time, which can only be falsified given a larger body of knowledge—namely, one that includes the future event we're trying to predict.  Our fundamental inability to pull future knowledge backwards in time does not invalidate the truth value of a prediction, even if that prediction turns out to be nominally wrong.  This oversight doesn't necessarily render Joque's central arguments incorrect—this complaint is actually pretty incidental.  This just bugged me the few times it came up in the text so I wanted to write about it, which is the whole point of this exercise after all!

15. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade - Alfred W. McCoy (link)

"Necessity knows no law.  That is why we deal with opium.  We have to continue to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money.  In these mountains the only money is opium."

-KMT General Tuan Shi-wen, 1967 

"What is most important to the history of the world?  The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?  Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

-Zbigniew Brzezinski

"Market response to imperfect coercion renders prohibition, over the long term, counterproductive.  Since the 1920s, syndicate reaction to suppression has been supple, sophisticated, and subversive.  Even the most effective suppression efforts can have unforeseen consequences.  Nevertheless, the U.S. and UN have persisted, for over fifty, years, in a Quixotic, self-defeating strategy that defies the dynamics of the global drug market."

-McCoy

An overwhelming series of tales of the rise and fall of drug empires, set across several decades and continents.  The key word for McCoy's contribution to this narrative is right there in the title: Complicity.  There's a popular misconception of the CIA as an omnipresent force, which serves to over-determine the last eighty years of events (which people will get mad at you for even implying).  The reality is more complex.  Yes, the CIA is guilty of many overt atrocities, but their modus operandi tends to stress the "I" part of their name—namely, they use superior knowledge of existing political divisions to deploy money and resources appropriately for the advancement of the interests of American capital.  Per McCoy: "By drawing on the resources of a powerful tribal leader or local warlord, a CIA agent could achieve a covert operational capacity far beyond his budgetary limits.  Thus, an effective covert warrior had to find a strong local leader willing to merge his people's resources with the agency's operations."  This merging of interests led repeatedly to situations where the initiative of right-wing militias and the CIA were effectively one and the same; the only difference being that the CIA operated on a higher plane of criminality: "The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide it's drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection."

What gives McCoy's work added richness is his depiction of this complicity as being infused with every imaginable American pathology, giving the phenomenon a sort of perverse intersectionality.  The social Darwinism of the Progressive Era and its resulting prohibition of drugs led to the self-inflicted cost of skyrocketing prices on the world market, which encouraged right-wing warlords to increase production to both fund and empower their operations.  These same drug lords were almost invariably virulently anti-Communist, which fit neatly with the prevailing American ideology.  America's soft power apparatus was used with aplomb, with USAID increasing its supply of rice when it wanted to encourage poppy farming and cutting it off when certain communities didn't comply.  Operations such as Iran-Contra operated with a level of plausible deniability so credulous as to be absurd: ties to drug traffickers were effectively sanctioned as long as "the agents involved maintained a cynical, studied ignorance of any wrongdoing."  And of course there's the weird myopia where American officials assumed everything they didn't understand, from a French strike to the PRC's explicit anti-opium policies, was a Communist plot against America that had to be explicitly defeated for reasons of "national security."

There's also frequent callbacks to what I read in Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.  McCoy practically echoes this thesis in the preface: "We only capture a drug lord when he is no longer a drug lord" effectively says that the right-wing organizations we enable only operate at our pleasure.  Throughout his narrative, the difference between operations that endure for a decade or more and those that are quickly dissolved is often shown to be one of varying political protection (see Harold Meltzer's failure in Mexico for an example).  Furthermore, he understands who wields the power in these situations: "Almost without exception it had been governmental bodies—not criminals—whose decisions made the major changes in the international narcotics trade."  What's more is that this larger theme is repeated through the narratives of individual countries: The Thai opium trade prospered because "it served the financial interests of the nation's military rulers."  Vietnam's drug wars were actually a "fairly disciplined power struggle between the leaders of Saigon's three most powerful political factions."  The Burmese government encouraged local militias to control the opium harvest in order to prevent rebels from financing their struggle.  And our "wars on drugs" are summarized as "waging war on a global commodity," as U.S. officials tacitly admit that local drug lords have no ability to truly control a drug market ruled by global supply and demand.

Finally, while the last version of this book is twenty years old at this point, there's a pointed sense of timelessness about it.  At each point in his journey, McCoy is able to speak credibly and in great detail about the distant past, but the covert nature of these operations prevents him from gaining the same level of insight about more current events.  This speaks to the contradiction inherent in the larger field of "conspiracism," where we're both fully aware that powerful interests bend reality to their will and yet necessarily unable to fully comprehend the nature of this influence in real time.  McCoy's resolution to this problem is both simple and revolutionary: to use his training and the tools available to him to understand history, discern the patterns present throughout it, and induce a special form of knowledge about the unknown: 

"Clearly, blundering about Saigon calling for the names of top drug dealers was not going to work. Instead, I would start in the French colonial past when the trade was legal and noncontroversial. Year by year, I would work my way forward, noting the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production, distribution, and consumption. As I reached the present, where the trade was illegal and dangerously controversial, I would use pieces from this past to assemble the puzzle slowly, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. Instead of confronting these principals with direct accusations, a dubious method, I would try circumspect, apparently unrelated questions, seeking to confirm the patterns extracted from this history. In short, I would use historical methods to probe the present instead of the past."

16. The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland - Toni Gilpin (link)

"After many years in the labor movement we are convinced that labor will suffer depressions, inflations and wars so long as industry—the lifeblood of the nation—is allowed to remain in the private and unrestricted hands of a small group of wealthy families.  Only when labor learns to demand that the means of their livelihood be owned and operated in the best interests of the people, and not for wealthy stockholders, will workers be able to look forward to a life of security, abundance and peace for themselves and their children."

-Farm Equipment Workers union (FE) statement, 1948

Authors often spend time in their opening or closing pages (or both) justifying to themselves and their readers as to why they specifically are spending time with a given topic.  The first entry on this year's list was offered as an apology for not being present at the protests detailed in its closing pages.  I've noted how many other works stem from authors' disillusion at the failures of the Obama administration.  But nothing I've read is as evidently justified as this one, as the author's own father helped build, expand, and maintain the protagonist of this story, the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) labor union.  While Gilpin is rarely sentimental or nakedly biased, it's still patently clear how the honor she feels in telling this tale, which gives an added sense of care that few other things I've read have managed.

Gilpin's narrative makes clear how the left-wing nature of FE directly led to its success and its tenacity in the face of great odds (specifically in their long battle with International Harvester and the McCormick clan that ran it).  While I might have preferred more emphasis on this specific aspect of the story (it's understandable from an archival perspective that lefties would have committed relatively little to paper in the era of HUAC), what we do get is still incredibly valuable.  They correctly understood control as the primary concern of management, and used this understanding to promote worker power/democracy as the antidote.  This same mode of analysis also served to quickly dismiss Harvester's concessions of "works councils" and "fair employment" as ultimately serving to discipline labor.  Additionally, it's interesting to compare the liberal ideals of UAW leader Walter Reuther (quoted as saying "Labor is not fighting a larger slice of the national pie...Labor is fighting for a larger pie" and "American society could transcend the class conflicts that arose from scarcity by enhancing productive efficiency") to the more explicitly Marxist views of FE that Gilpin describes as such:

"The resolutely class-conscious FE leadership viewed the accumulation of profit—or what they obstinately regarded as "surplus value"—not as a pathway toward general prosperity but as the crucial mechanism by which management maintained its ongoing power.  FE leaders believed that Harvester workers were being purposely shortchanged every minute of every day they were on the job, a reality that a collective bargaining agreement could ameliorate but not eliminate."

All this said, nothing defined the nature of FE's success quite like its commitment to promoting racial harmony.  Throughout the story, we see numerous examples where, to quote Gilpin, "FE eroded the prejudices that had been part and parcel of their Southern Heritage and fostered relationships that had been previously unthinkable."  This is turn "engendered a fierce mutual commitment to the FE" which Gilpin makes a strong argument was the key factor in explaining FE's success relative to other unions during their heyday.  FE correctly identified that bosses (especially in the South) pitted white workers against black workers and used that animosity to drive wages down.  As such, radical solidarity was the only real path to regaining the power that had been ceded.  In turn, this solidarity led to victories outside of the context of the union: namely, the overlap of FE's efforts with the Henry Wallace campaign for president may not have led to electoral victory, but there's strong evidence that "the roots of the civil rights movement in Kentucky came from that campaign."

In spite of all FE's success, it was not meant to last.  The union was folded into UAW in the fifties and International Harvester closed numerous plants and eventually went under a couple of decades later.  Gilpin is far from fatalistic is describing these developments, but it's still hard (especially given all the Marxism floating around) not to read this as inevitable given the larger historical forces at play.  Specifically, the economic situation of WW2 seem to have both created the circumstances to empower FE, while its subsequent absence hamstrung them to a permanent end.  The need for war materiel and the governmental bodies created to ensure such a supply (in combination with the NLRB) gave workers a degree of institutional power unmatched ever since.  And the post-war glut of veterans (specifically black veterans) looking for work created a workforce that felt justified in accepting nothing less than the entirety of their demands.  But Taft-Hartley, economic constriction, and Republican governments served to counter this power, and eventually broke FE and other radical labor movements, scattering them to the wind.  But to quote Haymarket martyr August Spies, the unofficial patron saint of FE, the radical spirit of labor cannot be extinguished: "...everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out."

17. Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh - Wendy S. Painting (link)

"Thus far, previously published works, oral testimony, and archival documents have demonstrated the ways in which all of the competing narratives about McVeigh and the bombing originated with McVeigh, who told variations of them all, prior to and after his arrest. Only afterwards were his stories expanded upon and circulated by other individuals and groups with diverse motives, including the government, the victims' family members and survivors, investigative journalists, and conspiracy theorists. With a few exceptions, in numerous instances (perhaps most instances), those telling any one of the many conflicting versions did so without knowing that they originated with McVeigh. Also demonstrated are the ways in which McVeigh's many questionable stories were rooted in works of popular culture, shared public histories, collective "subcultural knowledges" and, most notably, his actual experiences."

If you want a history and analysis of the OKC bombing, this book does that and does it well.  But as the passage above indicates, Painting's foremost contribution is her meta-analysis of the competing stories of the bombing and their multi-faceted origins.  This approach serves to inform and enrich the former aspect without settling for easy answers (she explicitly says "I do hope to undermine any version that insultingly argues that the reality of either can be understood by a few Simple Truths").  The result is a gripping read that takes great care to detail the minutiae of the case while properly situating it within the larger context in which it occurred.

The specifics of the meta-analysis are summarized in a series of narratives used to describe the stories that different groups tell about the bombing.  The official story (known as "Lone Wolf" in the book) is dismissed as overly simplistic and unlikely to be the full truth, not just because of the facts, but because it serves the interests of those who promote that story: "It seems to me, they don't want McVeigh to die, that his absence would rob them of a convenient spectral demon who reliably offers a means of reducing the complexities of actual threats to buzzwords, pop psychology, and politically expedient narratives."  But this does not mean that the more outlandish theories (such as "Experimental Wolf," essentially a continuation of MKULTRA lore to its logical end) are fully correct either, as they commit their own fundamental errors: "Experimental Wolf...reconciles the many contradictions between all of the stories...into a grand-master narrative in which everything fits neatly—much like the Lone Wolf story, except that Experimental Wolf stories incorporate, rather than ignore and dismiss, contradictions."

While the book leaves the reader with more questions than answers about the bombing, Painting's specific approach leaves us with even more to chew on from a larger philosophical standpoint.  I won't recount the details of the case here other than to say that it's very weird that all the cameras trained on the building cut out right before the bombing.  But the larger story she weaves is worth remarking on.  The slow rise of conspiratorial thinking is depicted as a result of growing distrust in political and economic leaders, stemming from both the revelation of actual conspiracies as well as the advance of neoliberal capitalism.  Logically then, the stories that are told about mysterious occurrences reflect this reality while filling in the blanks with supernatural or otherwise fantastical explanations.  The section on UFOlogy is especially illuminating in this regard as the people who influenced McVeigh in this area are a perfect example of this.  Specifically, the story told by Milton William Cooper to explain aliens sightings ranges from the banal and/or real (the Trilateral Commission, JFK assassination, and the CIA) to the extraordinary and/or ludicrous (aliens creating AIDS to establish the New World Order).  In a way, this reminds me of the mythologies from Bo Gritz in the POW/MIA book, which is further reinforced by Bo Gritz himself showing up multiple times in this book.  The takeaway from this is that while many conspiracy theories are obviously incorrect, their existence is nonetheless real as an inevitable cry of the people in response to the sins of our government.  This section in particular is especially relevant (and prescient, given that this book came out in 2016) to the events of the past three years:

"The continued belief in conspiracy theories of this type is founded upon actual experiments on humans involving radioactive isotopes, viruses, psychoactive drugs, cancer cells, mustard gas, fluoride, various vaccines, as well as chemical and biological weapons that continued well into the 1990s. The unwitting test subjects included, among others: soldiers, prisoners, veterans, cancer patients, and children. [Margaret] Cook, for one, did not discount out of hand such seemingly paranoid scenarios as ridiculous or implausible and, like Dean, opined that suspicions and conspiracy theories about government science experiments were not as outlandish or unfounded as they may first appear when the practices of the U.S. after Nuremburg are considered. Cook warned that, even if the government did not create AIDS, its previous abusive research practices posed a danger nonetheless, as victimized individuals and populations may be suspicious of and reject (for good reason) harmless protective measures such as vaccines, when offered."

18. Heat 2 - Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (link)

This is obviously different from everything else I've been reading the past 2.5 years, but when you're at the beach for a week, why not?  And while this may appear to be part of the wave of corporate-backed nostalgia that has seemingly replaced the concept of coming up with new stories, I think it more than justifies itself.  Indeed, it's a natural continuation of the story from the film that both enriches the original text while also creating something worthwhile on its own.  And those moments where you start to see everything coming together (there are several of these), which both inform and are informed by the movie, which answer questions about the story you never thought to ask...the weight of those moments is difficult if not impossible to re-create outside of a "nostalgia" project like this.

19. The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin (link)

A fascinating, mind-expanding book with a merely fine story.  The narrative jumps back and forth between the past and the present such that revelations of the main character's past development seem to conflict with his actions in the present, at least at first.  It's only natural that the physicist Shevek would appear as a fish out of water when first arriving in Urras, but his revolutionary consciousness in those early chapters seems to be muted and/or hidden for the explicit purpose of simplifying the narrative.  This is a minor complaint though, as Le Guin's prose is maximally insightful and revealing and would be worth the time even if accompanied by no story at all.

The part of the story that works best is its central conceit: two worlds, one (primarily) capitalist and one anarchist, closed off to each other for more than a century.  It's this specific dynamic that allows the characters' relative naivety to illuminate many things about our world in a way that avoids banality.  Take Shevek's initial stroll around Urras, where his inability to comprehend the ways of a capitalist society echoes observations one could make here:

"He could not force himself to understand how bans functioned and so forth, because all operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.  In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistake and terrible beauty; in the rites of the money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.  Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest.  He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him."

At the same time, Le Guin doesn't treat Anarres (the satellite of Arras that Odonian anarchists settled 150+ years ago) as any sort of utopia.  While the people of Anarres have maintained an equitable society in spite of great hardship, they have not truly broken free from capitalist logic.  Shevek realizes early in his academic career that it, and thus the society it resides in, is dependent on "the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract."  When his career later stalls, his friend diagnoses the power preventing Shevek's success as belonging to the "unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind."  He shares a story of a friend being reprimanded which effectively made him "stop thinking for himself" but also generalizes this as such:

"You can't crush ideas by suppressing them.  You can only crush them by ignoring them.  And that's precisely what our society is doing!"

Le Guin squares this contradiction in her narrative by showing how the same ideas, and more broadly knowledge, is that which provides revolutionary impetus.  In this light, the Odonians half-purposeful, half-necessary ignorance of everything outside Anarres is paradoxically what has grounded their revolution to a halt.  When Shevek finally discerns his theory, when he "sees the foundations of the universe," he immediately finds the difference between the worlds, real as they may be, to be of relative insignificance.  It is through this revelation that Shevek realizes his work had never been cutting him off from his fellow man but rather "engaged him with them absolutely."  Ultimately, he finds that the revolution is in all of us:

"Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life.  The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution and the revolution begins in the mind."

Finally, with the endless pushback against the shift to WFH in my mind, I couldn't help but feel Le Guin speaking to the current moment in this passage:

"Shevek's first reaction to being put in a private room, then, was half disapproval and half shame.  Why had they stuck him in here?  He soon found out why.  It was the right kind of place for his kind of work.  If ideas arrived at midnight, he could turn on the light and write them down; if they came at dawn, they weren't jostled out of his head by the conversation and commotion of four or five roommates getting up; if they didn't come at all and he had to spend whole days sitting at his desk staring out the window, there was nobody behind his back to wonder why he was slacking.  Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.  But all the same, was it necessary?"

20. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California - Ruth Wilson Gilmore (link)

"California began to come apart during the world recession of 1973-1975.  After a false boom in the late 1970s, fueled by federal outlays that created jobs in both the military and aerospace industries and at the community 'level, California entered a new phase of political and economic restructuring in the early 1980s, during which time the bifurcation between rich and poor deepened and widened. While profits rose, capital's need for new infusions of investment dollars was increasingly met out of retained earnings: Deep reductions in well-waged urban jobs that had employed modestly educated men of color—especially African Americans and Chicanos—overlapped with changes in rural industrial processes and a long drought. These forces produced surpluses of capital, labor, and land, which the state, suffering a prolonged period of delegitimation, manifested in the taxpayers revolts, could not put back to work under its declining military Keynesian aegis. However; by renovating and making "critical already-existing activities", power blocs in Sacramento and elsewhere throughout California did recombine these surpluses—and mixed them with the state's aggressive capacity to act—by embarking on the biggest prison Construction program in the history of the world."

Another book that falls into the "everything went to shit in the 1970s" category that simultaneously feels like a universal rumination on the very nature of capitalism.  This trick is the direct result of Gilmore's combination of clear prose and comprehensive analysis that reads as easy as perhaps anything on this list.  As such it has the punch of a Mike Davis-esque lament about every failure that led to this moment (he's quoted on the cover) while remaining laser focused on the larger truth that the growth imperative inherent to capitalism will necessarily create the various surpluses that can lead to mass incarceration.  This approach leaves the reader with wisdom to spare, as seemingly thrown-off thoughts are actually the most insightful thing you will read on a topic (for one of my hobbyhorses, Gilmore ties the accumulation of knowledge to success in organizing: "Solidarity increased with increased knowledge about the complexity of how power blocs have built the new state by building new prisons.")  But ultimately, this is another one of those texts so rich that I feel foolish trying to summarize everything in a few paragraphs, so I will let Gilmore's summaries of the causes (above) and the potential solutions (below) do the talking for me.

"If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a Single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions' all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order. 

[...]

Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frameworks, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings (the lived ideology, or "taking to heart") through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it. 

[...]

The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of genocide on a planetary scale, then in order to avoid repeating history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group's ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages. In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories. Old races die, through extermination or assimilation, and new races come into being. The process is not biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters that ground contemporary political culture."

21. The Shortest History of the Soviet Union - Sheila Fitzpatrick (link)

A useful way to fill in the blanks in my knowledge of Soviet history, even though the text often defaults into a "how dare you try anything different from liberal orthodoxy" schoolmarm tone.  For one example of this, Fitzpatrick says the USSR economy was "inhospitable to innovation" while documenting the period of time that encompassed the launch of Sputnik.  She also describes the USSR as displaying "cultural insularity" without seeming to grasp the effective necessity of such a thing given capitalist hegemony in most of the developed world.  And of course, there's very little room (partially because of the book's format) for anything more than a surface-level description of Marxism, ideology, or anything of the sort.  But I still found several threads to be worth the effort, most notably the persistent description through the eras of how the Soviet "intelligentsia" was conceived of and developed successfully but did not maintain revolutionary consciousness, which behooved the collapse of the USSR as a whole.

22. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing - Stuart Schrader (link)

"Tear gas before riots was better than pistol fire after they had begun.  But the ability to preempt crime or unrest with nonlethal weapons meant that police could treaty political dissent as incipient rioting.  Police tactics and technologies transformed political contention into risk management.  Categorical spatial distinctions—foreign/domestic, periphery/metropole—eroded in this context."

From Golden Gulag to The End of the Myth, from Aberration in the Heartland of the Real to Reign of Terror, and most certainly from The Wretched of the Earth, my reading has invoked a near-constant narrative of the terror unleashed by police within the imperial core as a function of colonial practices (or more generally speaking, "the war") coming home.  Badges without Borders does not dispute this interpretation, but it makes use of detailed historical data to show that this diffusion of policing practices is both more complex than you might think and far from unidirectional.  Part of this is that American empire clearly learned from its forebears ("critics of US empire...often fail to grasp the specificity of US empire and unreflexively analogize it to European empires, as if policymakers in Washington did not attempt to learn from other empires' mistakes").  But more importantly, the key uniting principle of police forces the world over is deference to the interests of capital.  It's through this shared worldview that these forces come to view all of their "dissident" subjects as "third-world" in nature, thus permitting and encouraging their fundamentally illiberal behavior in service of the counterinsurgent mindset.  To summarize:

"...counterrevolution in both zones developed in advance of and simultaneously to insurgency in both zones.  Policing was already global, already counterinsurgent.  US empire operations according to an implacably expansive vision of its field of operations."

The specific historical subject matter of the book is the actual mechanism for this purposeful construction of modern police epistemology.  A combination of military actions, CIA maneuvers, and direct consulting from active American police officers all served to transmit strategies and tactics across the world.  The primary institution of Schrader's focus was an offshoot of USAID, demonically titled the Office of Public Safety, which focused largely on training foreign operatives and communicating the latest standards for law enforcement.  While these activities were often decentralized, the multi-faceted nature of the collaboration still led to "common objects, vocabularies, and grammars" that made policing "context-independent, functionality useful anywhere, without even the necessity of US presence." There was of course little to no consideration of how or why increased police activity tended to "exacerbate destructiveness of civil violence," as that was rarely a primary concern of such coordination (and sometimes it was even the explicit goal).  In total, such malign influence only served to destabilize nations and incarcerate their people:

"Magnifying resources for punishment and policing rather than other types of state social programming, in a move toward risk management rather than risk eradication, meant that everyday experience with crime would predominate among people least able to affect the social conditions that gave rise to it."  

There is myriad other things I could say about this book, which manages to weave a comprehensive narrative around the Cold War, the rise of neoliberalism, and the advent of mass incarceration without over-complicating its central message.  For one example of this, Schrader dips his toes into a specific economic explanation for the increase in policing: "This newly dominant form of policing came to match an emerging political economy; police now primarily protected rentiers who profited from symbols of urban order."  That he doesn't expand much on this nugget is largely beside the point, as his narrative is all the richer for including small nods towards the larger picture.  In the end I'll refrain from going too much further other than to say Read This Book!

"What police assistance aimed to do, even as it often focused on rooting out ideological opponents to a US-superintended world-system of capitalist accumulation, was to reformat the social terrain from which revolutionary impulses and organizations could grow. In its fostering of state connectivity across borders, it would sever organic, solidary connections of political fellowship. Policing, through its shaping of social subjects by preemptive, proactive insinuation into manifold realms of social regulation, aims to make insurgency impossible, not ideologically but practically."

23. Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood - Maureen Ryan (link)

A perfectly good polemic against the abuse and marginalization present in the entertainment industry.  While it does nod to the larger structural issues that reify these behaviors, it's ultimately not an academic work, so it lacks some of the heft that I am used to.  But that's fine as its specific purpose is to communicate stories that are not told often enough by people who are underrepresented in crafting the narrative of what Hollywood actually is.

On those terms, there are still a few shortcomings.  The most notable is how the variety of tales Ryan conveys range from severe (sex crimes, assault) to bad (poor treatment, bad workplace dynamics) to relatively trivial (studios not respecting fans' desires) with very little change in tone or rhetoric.  Furthermore, some of the stories in that middle category are not interrogated to a sufficient degree to satisfy the reader that the interviewee isn't overstating harm.  This combination of great intentions, useful analysis, but muddled focus is evident in passages like this:

"I also know this: sometimes patterns of ignorance morph into systematic contempt, and while intent does matter, intent is not magic. If you are the target of a sustained set of actions that make you (as a viewer, an actor, or a writer) feel less-than, ignored, condescended to, insulted, or unheard, whether or not it was intentional ends up being beside the point. It still takes a toll. Another tragedy, and that word is appropriate because I saw fans' excitement crushed in real time: many of the people frustrated by what transpired on-screen at Sleepy Hollow were Black women who had been led to believe the show might be different. And then it very much wasn't. The thing is, thanks to social media, their voices were louder than they would have been in the past."

That passage is from a chapter that focuses on Nicole Beharie's starring role in Sleepy Hollow and her subsequent exit from the show.  While Ryan's reporting makes me remiss to think that everything was above board on set, most of her narrative rests on mere suspicion that Beharie's eventual marginalization was based on misogyny and/or racism.  Ryan goes so far as to suggest a conspiracy with little evidence, which is odd because she mostly avoids this sort of speculation:

"Kelly told me that Nicole Beharie Was not just a disruptive presence on the set of Sleepy Hollow, she had bitten someone there. I was so stunned that this call had been made at all that I did not ask when this was alleged to have happened. Given the breathless way Kelly delivered the information, assumed that if this incident happened, it was recent. Only during the reporting for this book have I found out this allegation first surfaced two years earlier: If Beharie was purportedly such a danger to others, why wait two years to write her off the show? "As someone who was there," a well-placed source told me, "I was not aware of that, alleged incident" being a factor in Beharie's departure from the show. 

[...]

But to get a call in which the lead on a project was trashed by an employee of the company responsible for that project, as part of an apparent campaign to spread damaging information about that person—very few industry developments have shocked or enraged me more. Yet it happened. And the only time I've heard of it ever happening, the actor in question was a Black woman. Who was, in real life, depicted by people associated with her own show as not just unprofessional but potentially dangerous. 

Kelly is still in the industry. She did not return my emails asking for comment. I don't think she and others made calls like the one I got of their own accord; I think they were asked to spread that story. It was Kelly's decision to comply, and I'd like to know why she did, but I'm even more interested in the names of those who made that request."

What's doubly surprising about this is how Ryan never seems to entertain the possibility that Beharie, a Julliard-trained daughter of a US diplomat, could be guilty of the exact behavior she depicts elsewhere in the book:

"New ideas about culpability, abuse, and responsibility are trickling through the industry, but, in some cases, toxic people have adopted those terms and concepts to their own ends. 

"I can tell you firsthand, the bullies have gotten smarter," said writer/producer Christopher. "The second you try to stand up to a bully, now you can get painted as being the problem. The pendulum has swung in a direction where automatically, the first person who says 'I'm offended' is the person who gets the platform. I've seen a situation where a person who has a lot of power passive-aggressively bullies a production to get what they want—playing people against each other in these power-hungry games, saying one, thing to one person, and something else to another And when you try to call them on it, they go running up the chain, saying, 'This person's being negative.' In a way, I'm like, 'Whoa, that's clever—getting out in front of it,' There are all kinds of crafty, cunning people out there."" 

There's also a certain inadequacy to the lengthy "Call to Change" section of the book.  There's good discussions of union/guild power and restorative justice (Mariame Kaba even makes an appearance!), but it's undermined by a lack of imagination.  Take this passage (emphasis Ryan's):

"The goal here is not that everybody should do their jobs with grim efficiency and have no fun at all.  What would be the point of that? Enjoyable and fruitful collaborations can be the best part of being in this industry.  The point is, bosses, supervisors, and others with power should not ask workers for things that are not theirs to request."

While I appreciate the sentiment, it still seems odd to spend 250+ pages describing how the power structure in Hollywood naturally leads to abuse and not suggest a change to that structure.  The very title, Burn It Down, seemingly invokes something more than modifying expectations of personal interactions or demanding everyone play by the rules, but Ryan never gets to the point of questioning why the rules exist or who they really serve.  Which serves to render the proceedings useful but ultimately hollow.  After all, if the relation Ryan describes above is fundamentally built on exploitation, a little more exploitation can't hurt, right? 

24. Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn - Asa Winstanley (link)

There's a common theory on the left that right-wing "comedians" fail at their craft because they get so angry at the premise of their jokes that they forget to deliver the punchline.  Well, here is the left-wing version of that: a book that suffers because the author is too personally invested in the (admittedly very righteous) cause to properly structure and support his argument.  Yes, the recounting of the smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn based on several years of Winstanley's own reporting is a valuable and revealing resource.  But the larger, structural lessons of this tale are either left to the reader or presented as conjecture.  A more balanced and well-researched approach would have been more effective.  That said, it's to Winstanley's credit that he also spends time highlighting Corbyn's insufficient response to the smear, which is probably the main strength of the book.  We know powerful interests will move heaven and earth to advance their goals, but what we don't necessarily know is if a properly prepared opposition can overcome that.  Winstanley's argument suggests that perhaps it can, if only those claiming to represent the people would fully commit:

"Activist Steven Garside explained...that conceding to the Israel lobby was a fool's game.  It was a race to the bottom which could only lead to further concessions.  "Thwarting the cause of Palestine in the party is for the Jewish Labor Movement and Labour Friends of Israel a war without end.  It can only be repelled by a muscular, vigorous counter-narrative, one based on unqualified support for the Palestinian cause and emphatic denunciation of Israel's past and present crimes."  The muscular counter-narrative was never built."

25. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World - Mike Davis (link)

"The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant).  These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society. [...] Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian Village community had been demolished."

-Karl Polanyi

Yet another work from the late great Mike Davis that perfectly combines moral clarity, sardonic wit, and rapturous attention to detail.  This serves as a great companion piece to Shock Doctrine, but its similarity serves as far more than an echo of that book.  In my blurb from last year's book post, I noted how Klein's term "disaster capitalism" implicitly suggests that a kinder form of capitalism exists.  Davis' history of colonial famines in the late 19th century quickly disabuses the reader of that notion:

"Yet some sectors of the Nordeste's ruling class discovered that the "drought industry" was more profitable than the declining regional staples of sugar and cotton. [...] A precedent was thus set for allowing the coroneis (the landowners who dominated provincial and local politics in the Nordeste) to plunder disaster aid.  "Development" became simply a euphemism for subsidizing a reactionary social order, and over the next century vast sums of "drought relief" disappeared into the sertão without leaving behind a single irrigation ditch or or usable reservoir for its long-suffering population."

There is of course a depth to this book beyond "capitalism bad."  Some of this comes from its deep dive into the ecology of El Niño and other such climatic cycles, which makes it clear that periodic disturbances in weather patterns do not inherently translate into mass death.  Indeed, there was contemporary scientific awareness that famines in India and elsewhere were the direct result of colonial practices, but colonial interests reacted by capturing enough of the scientific apparatus to reorient the common wisdom to blame sunspots and other such celestial causes.  Davis also posits a corrective with regards to how current inequality came to be—notably, eighteenth century Europe was actually slightly poorer than the lands it would soon colonize, and the class divisions present in individual societies was not replicated in the relatively small differences between those societies.  Which means the third world we observe today was not inherent or inevitable or permanent, but rather deliberately created to enrich capital.  And finally, the story of Canudos, an autonomous Brazilian community created to protect refugees from drought, is instructive.  Like similar third-world nations depicted in The Jakarta Method, "Canudos' simple desire to be left alone in peace was "perceived as a dire threat the social order."  As you might guess, this means it was eventually destroyed and is today nothing but ruins.

26. The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World - Michael Marmot (link)

I decided to participate in a DEI reading group at work and this is what came up first.  Overall, I am torn on whether or not this book is useful.  On one hand this is a perfectly fine left-liberal guide to examining disparities in health outcomes, with insights ranging from banal and obvious (but still useful to explicitly say) to legitimately thought-provoking.  It will probably lead to some interesting discussions when we meet, which is as much as you can ask for with a relatively breezy read.  On the other hand, Marmot's general rejection of political analysis neuters the possibility of truly incisive diagnoses and prescriptions.  To wit, I called him "left-liberal" a couple sentences ago, but he explicitly rejects even that milquetoast designation.

How specifically does this personal fear of political analysis undermine his work?  Let's turn to the two explicit reasons for avoiding politics that he provides in the closing pages.  The first is that "a political level of analysis requires research all of its own."  While this is certainly true, and while I prefer a humble approach such as this to someone who barrels in and speaks about that which they don't know, you simply cannot separate the policies he supports from the political consideration of how to enact them.  You can't discuss broad recommendations like comprehensive childcare, employment, or elder care without at least touching on what it would take to actually accomplish these things.  And yet, while I might prefer a version of this book that makes some attempt to address this shortcoming, there's enough signs throughout the book that Marmot is indeed correct in his assertion that he doesn't know enough of politics to opine on them (at least he is self-aware!).  To wit:

"The food industry plays a crucial role, as do governments and others, in getting food to people.  If you are critical of markets, as I am when it comes to health care and education, spend a moment imagining how a Soviet minister of food in Moscow might have ensured that 10 million people and their food were matched up every day, without the help of markets.  The market works amazingly to match people to food.  That said, there are market failures.  Some people have too little food to eat, and some too much."

"There will always be less medical care to go around than we might like.  Choices will always have to be made."

"I am not even for a millisecond entertaining the proposition that we set salaries by polling the population on what they think they should be.  It is clear, though, that the population take the view that we have a grossly unfair distribution of income."

"...there is great disagreement among economists when it comes to discussing macroeconomic policy.  There are devotees of austerity and Keynesians, and they argue their positions with religious fervour.  My own view, as a non-economist, is that data should really settle it."

"In the US, child poverty is higher than in Lithuania [...] I challenge my American colleagues: you live in a functioning democracy.  This must be the level of child poverty you want, otherwise you would do something about it.  Once again, I argue that this should be above party politics."

"It is entirely possible, and desirable, to run profitable companies that do not pursue profit at the expense of the physical and mental health of employees.  Experience shows that it is not wise to rely on the altruism of company owners.  Both health and safety regulations and effective trade unions make a difference."

"The US has been in the lead in developing approaches to combatting gang violence."

The best way to summarize these disparate statements is to view them as a combination of both a lack of imagination and a willful ignorance, which in turn support and reinforce each other.  This allows us to connect statements that assume scarcity is inherent ("choices will always have to be made") to ones that presuppose that only capitalist economic theories are valid ("austerity and Keynesians") to ones that seemingly deny the very existence of political struggle ("this should be above party politics").  Which leads us directly into his second reason for avoiding political analysis: 

"I want political parties of whatever complexion to take on the agenda that I am promoting.  We are talking about creating societies that meet the needs and create the opportunities for flourishing of all their members.  That should not be the province of one political party."

All of this indicates that his views, though somewhat obliquely stated, are something of an "end of history" capitalist anti-politics.  Things that are reasonable, things that should be true, should simply come to pass as a matter of due course, no matter the political conditions or material reality at hand.  This leads to the most telling contradiction of all in his chapter titled "Fair Societies":

"Once you start to sign up for or against 'isms' there is the danger of joining clans and stopping the analysis. [A couple paragraphs of wishy-washy analysis] The question should no longer be capitalism or not, but what kind of capitalistic society do we want to have."

Capitalism is most certainly an 'ism'!  That you are most definitely 'signing up for'!  To further this contradiction, Marmot frequently identifies "disempowerment" of workers as a key driver of negative outcomes.  The identification of that problem is indeed good and correct, and is backed up by a good deal of both data and anecdotes in the text.  And yet, the political economy where workers control the means of production is fully off the table for Marmot, both implicitly and explicitly!  I would be slightly less annoyed if this position was the result of a good faith investigation into the full range of possibilities for our future, but it's really just the same dumb Western assumptions borne out of decades of Cold War hysteria and capitalist propaganda.

To bring it home, nothing epitomizes Marmot's fundamental incuriosity like his discussion of Cuba.  Like the good liberal that he is, he praises their health outcomes and says they are not a "communist pariah."  But he completely ignores the reality that Cuba literally is a pariah in that they are still excluded from building wealth in the world market by the ongoing American embargo.  Moreover, his analysis as to why they do have positive health outcomes is paper-thin and completely ignores the role their political economy plays in the actual provisioning of these factors:

"The question is: what has Cuba been doing?  Cubans tell me that it has much to do with their highly developed health-care system.  It is also likely to connect with their emphasis on education and social protection."

In the end, you cannot be serious about change if you do not have a theory of change.  Marmot clearly does not, and his works suffers for it. 

27. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend - Domenico Losurdo (link)

"To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral plane, in that both would be totalitarian, is superficial at best, fascism at worst. Whoever insists on this equation may well consider himself a democrat, in truth and in the bottom of his heart he is in fact already a fascist, and certainly only in a hypocritical and insincere way will he fight fascism, while reserving all his hatred for communism."

-Thomas Mann, 1942

I've now read two large tomes on Stalin; one by a conservative who largely avoids reflexive anti-communism and one by a communist who largely avoids uncritical support.  Balance!  While the former is useful as a straightforward compendium of everything that happened leading up to WW2, the latter is useful as a specific counter to one of the most pernicious false equivalencies in existence.  This utility takes many forms, the most obvious being Losurdo's detailed account of the construction of the Western conception of Stalin.  The West was most certainly the primary author of this "black legend," using equal parts ideology, projection, and paranoia, but they were not afraid to crib from communist dissidents like Trotsky and Bukharin when it suited them.  While this analysis alone makes Losurdo's work worthwhile, I think the larger implications of this mythmaking are what make it special.

These larger implications fall primarily into three buckets.  First, Losurdo identifies the lack of self-awareness and historical rigor present in liberal analysis, which inherently serves to treat liberalism more as a default assumption of reality and less as an actual ideology.  As such, it's an easy (and self-serving) step to then attribute any deviation from liberal orthodoxy to simple "madness":

"What is most striking in these texts is the absence of history and even, in a certain sense, politics. Colonialism, imperialism, the World Wars, the struggles for national liberation, and the different and opposing political projects all disappear. Nor do they even ask about the relationship between the liberal West with fascism and Nazism (the former pretending to be the champions of the most authentic and significant ideas of the West), nor of its relationship with the old Russian regime, whose contradictions had been tending for a long time to precipitate into a huge catastrophe. All this is substantially overshadowed by the absolute centrality conferred to two creative, albeit wickedly creative, personalities." 

Second, Losurdo stresses that these facile Hitler-Stalin comparisons not only trivialize Hitler's crimes, but serve to actively paper over Western influence and complicity:

"even to understand Nazism it is necessary in the first place to investigate the political project underlying it, and this political project not only does not refer back to a single criminal or mad personality, but, beyond Germany and Nazism, calls into question in different ways other countries and other political movements. In this sense, whatever the judgment on the artistic level, Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is not convincing. In order to illustrate Hitler’s personality, Brecht employed a literary genre (the crime story) that is misleading. A presupposed moral was thus highlighted that is actually constructed a posteriori. Nazism has its roots in a historical period in which the “evidence” is constituted by, if anything, the hierarchization of races and a colonial expansionism based on genocidal practices."

Finally, the direct equivalence present in Western analysis is shown to be irrelevant, as the historical and political contexts in which Russia and the West existed led to fundamentally different conditions: 

"In conclusion, the usual juxtaposition between the communist movement on the one hand and the liberal West on the other makes abstraction as far as the latter is concerned from the fate reserved for colonial or colonized people and the measures enacted in situations of more or less acute crisis. Manichaeism is the result of the comparison between two heterogeneous quantities. A world analyzed exclusively in its sacred space and its periods of normality is triumphally contrasted with a world that, in questioning the barrier between sacred and profane space, between civilized and barbarian, is forced to face a prolonged state of exception and the irreducible hostility of the custodians of the exclusionary sacred space."

One final note: In the course of advancing and supporting its argument, Stalin contains so much wonderful detail that there's almost too much to remark upon.  I was well aware that Stalin himself was not a "intellectual" along the lines of Lenin and Trotsky, but it's still illuminating to comprehend the value of his writing, which regularly manages to communicate his firm grasp of Marxist theory in a uniquely straightforward and practical manner.  This passage in particular was fun because it speaks to one of sillier debates of the present:

"Equalization in the sphere of requirements and personal, everyday life is a reactionary petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of some primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines; for we cannot expect all people to have the same requirements and tastes, and all people to mould their personal, everyday life on the same model [...]. By equality Marxism means, not equalization of personal requirements and everyday life, but the abolition of classes."

28. Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times - Samuel Moyn (link)

"So we must face squarely that Cold War liberals had a geographical morality.  They offered Cold War libertarianism for the trans-Atlantic "West," a Hegelian statism (with violence if necessary) in their Zionist politics, and a caustic skepticism about the fate of freedom in either form elsewhere, based on an implicitly hierarchical set of assumptions about the world's peoples."

On one hand, this is a fantastic story of liberal thought's slow journey through the funhouse mirror that was the Cold War.  The chapters are each named after individual philosophers, but smartly, Moyn structures his narrative more by the specific shifts in liberal thought during this time (abandoning Romanticism, embracing an ecumenical religiosity, etc...).  None of these shifts are as central to the Cold War ethos, however, as the promotion of individual liberty.  So much so even that rejection of previously assumed liberal tenets was necessary to advance Cold War liberals' seemingly singular goal:

"Where liberalism had emerged in the nineteenth century as a consequence of Enlightenment and entangled with Romanticism and progressivism, Cold War liberalism purified it of these legacies in the name of a nearly exclusive priority of individual freedom that all three allegedly threatened." 

If this sounds cynical or perhaps even misanthropic, well, it was!  Per Judith Shklar (whose contemporaneous critique of Cold War liberal thought After Utopia serves as Moyn's most frequent citation), promoting this primacy of the individual will meant relinquishing the "belief that people can control and improve themselves and, collectively, their social environment."  Incorporating historic conservatives like John Acton into the liberal canon meant viewing those seeking emancipation as "people who hunger now not after freedom but after other people's property."  This elevation of the individual was of course accompanied by a permanent linking of the concepts of "God-fearing and free" by way of mainstreaming the pernicious "Judeo-Christian" conception of civilization.  The semi-ironic result was the creation of a polity that required "brutal self-subjugation and self-policing for the sake of personal and collective order" partially because of Freudian assumptions that the "discontents" of civilization arose from inherent human limitations.  If I'm being generous, the sum total of this ethos strikes me an appeal to an infantile understanding of "free will" that outright refuses to wrestle with the contradictions between self-determination and actual human limitations (not to mention, you know, actual collective interests).  If I'm being less generous, Cold War liberals were just a bunch of expats that had pledged fealty to capitalism working backwards to justify the logical conclusions of its inherent excesses.

On the other hand, the depiction of this journey towards both economic and cultural conservatism sometimes misses the larger point.  That this shift invoked a sort of perverse concept of individual freedom does not infer a new development; liberalism has always been concerned with this.  From the other meta-analysis of liberal thought I have read (which is cited in this book, but only in passing):

"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')?"

So while I'm obviously not a scholar of liberal philosophy, the vibe I get from everything I do know lines up pretty well with the journey of Zionist thought, where a mushy centrism gave way to something more sinister and explicitly right-wing once a legitimate challenge emerged.   In the case of liberalism, this specific challenge was the success of communism, which developed a nation and defeated the Nazis in the time it took the West to merely recover from the Great Depression.  Moyn says as much, once again with some help from Judith Shklar:

"Cold War liberals were not sure they could defend the Enlightenment from Soviet appropriation, or even that they wanted emancipation, when communists arrogated the project for themselves.  It is both regrettable and revealing that, instead of opposing the claim of enemy communists to inherit the Enlightenment by showing how opportunistic it was, Cold War liberals accepted the communists' claim and indicted the Enlightenment instead."

This response from the Western academy served to enshrine a group of thinkers that appeared to work backwards from an assumption that the sacredness of individual agency trumps all other concerns, even those collective interests that might indirectly bolster its endurance.  As such, the journey depicted in Liberalism Against Itself is less a battle between warring factions and more the (final?) realization of the tradition's rotten core as the true face of liberalism.  In the closing sentences, Moyn invokes "nineteenth-century impulses" such as "emancipation," "creation of the new," and "a story that connects our past and our future" as a template with which liberalism can redeem itself.  While that certainly sounds nice, this prescription is largely at odds with the story he presents, where an entire world order was built on a set of ideals that it did not and more importantly could not meaningfully espouse.  Thus, the cure to "bad" liberalism cannot simply be "good" liberalism but instead something else entirely.  Moyn's apparent disgust with the Cold War liberals he depicts is commendable, but it's clear that alone isn't enough to get him to the correct conclusion.

29. How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement - Fredrik deBoer (link)

A perfectly fine polemic that would work better as a memoir about two decades-plus of left-wing organizing.  Yeah, framing your narrative around a hot topic (ie. see all the books that wedge Trump in there where he only kind of belongs) is a good way to sell a book, so no hate towards deBoer for doing just that.  At the same time, this sort of analysis would be better served by a deeper investigation into the specifics rather than an overview based on the author's (largely correct) impressions of the movement.

This shortcoming is most obvious in areas where deBoer appears to contradict himself.  The most notable example of this is his chapter on "defund the police."  While he does mostly avoid my biggest pet peeve of attacking the message, his analysis is too contradictory to hold water.  In general, he correctly understands left-wing agitation as requiring a long view.  He says that "...demands serve an essential purpose even when they are unlikely to be met in the short term.  Building a movement is like rolling a small ball of snow down a hill so that it gathers more and more size over time.  Every individual inch you gain adds very little to the ball, but over a long enough period of time the ball can grow large enough to knock your enemies down."  He explicitly mentions "abolitionism" as one such example of this and later emphasizes that "we can't give up on core goals simply because those goals are currently unpopular."  

All this makes it especially strange that he spends a good deal of time making the opposite argument with respect to prison/police abolition (literally the direct heir of abolitionism).  His chapter on the matter decries it largely because "abolishing the police or drastically defunding them...was simply never in the cards," which appears to conflate the long-term goals associated with a revolutionary demand with a simple policy prescription.  He cites opinion polls showing it to be unpopular, directly contradicting his stated understanding of the long-term outlook of most left-wing agitation.  And he cites a couple of studies in support of concluding that "more policing does reduce crime," which largely misses the point of what abolitionists are saying.  Perhaps the way I can square all of this (while also considering what I've written about the author in the past) is that he's just generally ignorant about what abolition is.  Which is actually the optimistic view, because it allows for the possibility of him coming around on this in the future.

The other specific issue I want to remark on concerns deBoer's discussion of political violence, where he appears to misunderstand the fundamental relation between Malcolm X and MLK.  In his analysis, he contrasts the two and strongly favors MLK due to his "effectiveness."  What this analysis misses is that political action is not inherently a competition and that the more militant agitation of the vanguard (represented by Malcolm X in this case) can directly serve the interests of the more "moderate" option, making their demands seem more palatable in comparison.  Additionally, he likely puts too much weight on this one domestic example and gives short shrift to international movements (where leaders like Mandela have said that violence is going to happen regardless, so you might as well harness it towards your specific ends).  So while I may generally agree with deBoer's conclusion that there's little strategic use for violence in leftist movements in America, his lack of imagination limits the persuasiveness of his argument.

30. Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income - Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas (link)

"The guaranteed-income proposal is based on the fundamental American belief in the right and the ability of the individual to decide what he wishes and ought to do."

-Robert Theobald

If you've ever found it odd that the 2020 election cycle gave us weird technocrat Andrew Yang as the most prominent promoter of a seemingly lefty political demand like UBI, this is the book for you.  I'll fully admit that, at the time of that election, I considered a policy like UBI to be something of a "cherry on top" that would account for everything that a robust welfare state could not or would not provide.  Instead, the full history of the idea paints a far messier, and largely more cynical picture.  In short, UBI proponents on the right, center, and left all seemed to acknowledge that their advocacy for such a policy represented the best hope for a minimum standard of living for the general populace in an age of austerity, automation, and capital entrenchment.  For the left in particular, support for UBI signaled a Faustian bargain of sacrificing the hope of seizing collective power in exchange for a modest increase in each individual's power to control the course of their life.

The dismal calculus that went into this took many forms, many of which are familiar from previous reading on neoliberal theory.  There's talk of "efficiency" as a neutral goal, of people as "sovereign consumers," and consideration of the market as an "indispensable anthropological tool."  One interesting addition to this goes all the way back to Thomas Paine, whose conception of basic income was "for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."  This lack of imagination that precluded questioning the necessity of private property, markets, and money led to a seeming reversal of causality: instead of inequality causing poverty, poverty came about almost seemingly out of nowhere, which meant that welfare-based solutions to the matter were seen by some as "enslaving" the poor.  Things weren't much better on the left, as prominent thinkers were too enamored by the spectre of automation in the first-world to properly consider the third-world exploitation inherent to globalization, much less the potential power and dignity of labor outside the grip of capitalism.  This tunnel vision and lack of imagination led many to recommend UBI as effectively the best we could hope for under the circumstances.

In the last third of the book, Jäger and Zamora synthesize all of this into their most useful insight: that support for UBI was a critical part of the de-politicization endemic to the neoliberal turn.  Indeed, the idea of UBI was seen as attractive specifically because of its ability to "unsettle notions of left and right."  Because it addressed market failures while fundamentally relying on market logic, it represented a "middle way between two utopias."  Ultimately though, this "middle way" was anything but, as it patently refused to "filter collective wills through intermediary bodies."  For an example, the authors point to the Alaska Permanent Fund—specifically, how its desirability contributed to voters roundly rejecting using even a small portion of it to help cover shortfalls to government programs.  In the end, we live in paradoxical times, where there is a surfeit of ways to alleviate poverty (to some degree) but seemingly no understanding of what actually causes poverty or how to marshal the political will to address the root causes:

"To critics, the Global South's antipoverty turn seemed premised on evasion of the classical debates regarding the creation and division of wealth within and across societies, not on how this is related to social and economic structural transformations associated with modern capitalist development. The world in which basic income thrived separated poverty as such from the more uncomfortable questions about whether modern poverty in developing countries is fundamentally due to a lack of integration of poor people into local, national and global socio-economic systems, or whether it is due to the manner by which they have already been integrated. Development as a state-led enterprise was soon dissolved in the vast impersonal ocean of aggregated consumer choices."

31. The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq - Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt (link)

"In both Saudi Arabia and Iran, US-allied monarchies blocked the efforts of their own most able citizens to advance the cause of oil sovereignty.  But a wholly different political dynamic prevailed in Iraq.  There, the Nasserists' regime did just the opposite.  Under Prime Minister Tahir Yahya, Iraq brought in the best oil experts in the region and asked them to build the institutions and relationships that would allow the government to exercise true sovereignty over its natural resources.

[...]

...before 1964, violating the sanctity of contracts was seen in Washington as suspicious of Communist ties.  And suspicion of Communist ties was quite often sufficient to spring the CIA into covert action to bring about regime change.  But by 1965, the idea that CIA covert operations could hold back the tide of resource nationalism was appearing less and less realistic."

This book did a great job filling in the blank spot in my knowledge regarding the formation of the Iraqi state.  Its title is slightly misleading as American malfeasance/paranoia is only part of the story Wolfe-Hunnicutt tells.  As the passage above suggests, the motivations for American actions in Iraq are revealed to be as much if not more about material interests and ideology than rank fear and paranoia.  Indeed, John Foster Dulles' stated worry of "continued access to the oil of the area" was both unfounded and incorrect, and was summarily dismissed.  The actual concern was potential overproduction and the effect it could (and later did) have on American control of the market:

"For decades, Cold Warriors had warned that if the Soviets gained a foothold in the Middle East they would be able to use that position to cut off the West's access to the oil of the region.  But of course the exact opposite happened as a result of the 1972 Iraqi-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and the IPC nationalization.  Between 1972 and 1980, Iraqi exports doubled." 

There are several other interesting tidbits and recurring themes.  Like with other areas of intrigue, a good deal of the documents regarding American actions in Iraq in the fifties and sixties are still classified, which isn't suspicious at all.  The Iraqi Ba'ath Party (Saddam's party that took power briefly in 1963 and then later for much longer) is yet another example of American support for the "non-communist left" that served to simultaneously benefit American interests (sort of) and hurt local communist parties (the ICP was marginalized under both instance of Ba'ath rule).  Regardless, the Ba'ath Party still developed the country in many of the same ways a communist government of the time would have (forging ethnic alliances, nationalizing industry, doing land reform).  And circling back to my first point, the power struggle to control the flow of oil was as much if not more about the fight between legacy oil barons and new money American producers as it was spying and dirty tricks.  Specifically, the latter group developed a fervent eschatological worldview that complemented their no-holds-barred struggle in many ways—most notably by allying with Israel to help secure a relatively stable position in the Middle East.

32. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech - Brian Merchant (link)

"One can lazily claim that all of this has simply been inevitable, and it will always be thus that technology, not people, creates winners and losers, and because it eventually makes more of us winners, allegedly, then it is absurd to protest its march.

But it is much more absurd to pretend there are no possible alternative arrangements—to think that technology, the product of concerted human invention and innovation, can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption, or that it's unthinkable that advancements in technology might be integrated into our lives democratically and with care. If we are ingenious enough to automate large-scale production, build spacecraft, and invent artificial intelligences, are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?

True Luddism was about locating exactly where elites were using technologies to the disadvantage of the human being, and organizing to fight back."

A worthwhile counter to the popular conception of the Luddites as backwards technophobes that properly re-frames their struggle as inimical to the very birth of capitalism itself.  And while the specific object of the struggle was the titular machines, Merchant's narrative reveals that the underlying desire to "control the productive energy of the many" was the real locus of the fight.  Indeed, the newly-built factories that housed the machines came to be seen by many as a veritable prison, associated with "places of confinement and loss of liberty."  As historian Adrian Randall demonstrates, the plight of the Luddites was really that of a new world struggling to be born:

"The debate over the old laws was not simply a question of removing obsolete impediments to economic growth.  It revealed a powerful ideological struggle between an old political economy based on order, stability, regulation, and control supplemented by custom and the new political economy based on a faith in free-market forces and the power of capital.  Here we can see the real issues which the Industrial Revolution raised.  It was not just a question of more and more machines.  It involved a complete reorientation of perceptions of economic and social relationships."

The broader point of this, that "the explosion comes not when technology itself advances [...], but when it's used to disrupt the way we work and live" is the insight that Merchant uses to tie his narrative to our modern situation.  If we understand innovation less as the motor of history and more as the tool used to instigate class struggle, then we can begin to understand that the current trends toward automation, gig work, and the like are less a unstoppable force of nature and more a purposeful choice made by the capital class to discipline workers:

"This relentless, technologically dictated pace of work is ultimately driven, just as it was in the Luddite days, by an entrepreneur exercising a more audacious will to profit than anyone else, and an openness to implementing systems that others might deem too inhumane, in order to realize those profits. And, as with the first tech titans two hundred years ago, the net effect is to force all other individuals and companies who might hope to compete to adopt similar technologies and policies. Jeff Bezos has said that he believes people are "inherently lazy," which is why they must be surveilled and goaded to labor at a grueling pace with an array of technologized incentives and digital tracking devices. Amazon's labor policies have been engineered to maximize worker productivity, no matter the human cost, and to purposefully discard workers after they are no longer operating at peak efficiency, And since Amazon does it, everyone else must make their employees machinelike as well? if they hope to keep pace."

33. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution - Vincent Bevins (link)

"I had coffee with Solomiia Bobrovska, a member of the Euromaidan SOS Group who entered Congress with the liberal "Voice" Party in 2019.  I was mostly asking about Maidan—its tactics and goals, and the lessons she had learned—and not trying to talk about extremists.  But she began to complain that she had received criticism for working with C14, the far-right youth group, when in reality people should realize they are allies united with people like her against Russia.  After the interview finished, I texted Artem (Ed: a young leftist who participated in Ukrainian protests) to ask where we were meeting.  He would need a minute, he said.  He and his friends had just been attacked by C14."

Vincent Bevins' follow-up to his wonderful The Jakarta Method (the very book that triggered my thirst for knowledge) is a welcome antidote to a problem I've remarked on.  Rather than relying on appeals to purity, victim-blaming, or armchair quarterbacking, Bevins' journalistic approach helps inform the reader as to why exactly modern protest movements rarely achieve their goals.  His blend of reporting, theory, and analysis differs from the typical academic approach I am used to, but it works to clearly communicate practical applications of radical thought in a very digestible and utilitarian way.

The diagnosis is largely one of structure, or more specifically, the lack thereof.  Horizontal, anarchic collectives that took inspiration from American protest movements of the sixties failed largely because there was rarely a specific, positive vision for the future state of things.  And even when there was a shared vision, there was not the infrastructure in place to actually take power and/or implement it.  And because these protest movements do often manage to create a temporary power vacuum, this leaves plenty of room for the actually organized forces of capital to further entrench themselves in a sort of "anti-politics machine."  This machine is both mature and robust, and stretches from a media apparatus that twists and flattens the true nature of opposition to a corporate ruling class that has effectively captured and poisoned once-useful concepts like "corruption" and "representation."  Bevins is careful to situate all of this in its time and place, saying that "a preexisting set of ideological currents, developed in moments of anti-Soviet and neo-anarchist thinking, gained particular momentum in the era of the "the end of history" (the 1990s) and then found elective affinity with technological and corporate developments made in the 2000s."  Luckily, it seems like most veterans of these protests (person in the pull quote excepted) have learned a valuable lesson.  As Egyptian activist Hossam Baghat puts it: "Organize.  Create an organized movement.  And don't be afraid of representation.  We thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy."

34. Discourse on Colonialism - Aimé Césaire (link)

"Oh! the racism of these gentlemen does not bother me. I do not become indignant over it. I merely examine it. I note it, and that is all. I am almost grateful to it for expressing itself openly and appearing in broad daylight, as a sign."

While I am familiar with this text because of its ubiquity, I had never actually sat down and read it.  So what better time than now, when the colonial question is back in the news (not that it ever really left).  I'm not going to claim that Discourse provides special insight to the Palestinian struggle, in large part because Césaire speaks mostly of the contemporaneous struggle for Africa (which calls back to my previous reading of The Dawn of Everything for its reclamation of supposedly "barbaric" cultures, and to Black Marxism for the same conception of a radicalism primarily focused on decolonization).  But searching for a specific, perfect link to any modern struggle is an almost comically irrelevant endeavor, as the universality of Césaire's work makes it something greater.  That something is a diagnosis of the liberal, colonial mind that is as incisive as it is timeless.  So I'll just leave you with a few snippets that I found particularly resonant:

"One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything. Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois's dear conscience."

"And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally-that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul--they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism." 

"To go further, I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed-far surpassed, it is true-by the barbarism of the United States.

And I am not talking about Hitler, or the prison guard, or the adventurer, but about the "decent fellow" across the way; not about the member of the SS, or the gangster, but about the respectable bourgeois. [...] I repeat that I am not talking about Hitler, or the SS, or pogroms, or summary executions. But about a reaction caught unawares, a reflex permitted, a piece of cynicism tolerated." 

35. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam - Nick Turse (link)

"A decade into the war, and six years after Lyndon Johnson had flooded the country with combat troops, enough evidence had emerged to leave increasing numbers of Americans asking questions. What was really happening in Southeast Asia? What did it mean when reports described different units in different parts of the country at different times doing the same horrible things? Could there really be that many "bad apples" with the same inclinations? Or was something more sinister at work? Could America—the world's "good guys"—have implemented a system of destruction that turned rural zones into killing fields and made war crimes all but inevitable?"

I originally picked this book off my pile (yes I have a pile) because a litany of atrocities perpetuated upon the people of Vietnam felt relevant to the daily atrocities I see being perpetuated upon the people of Gaza.  While that connection is certainly valid, in reading this I was actually far more struck by the parallels between the American military's lack of control and accountability in Vietnam and the similar state of modern American policing.  Training for the mostly young and inexperienced soldiers relied heavily on fear and creating the instinct to kill, not unlike the current pedagogy for police.  And what little time was actually spent on the Geneva Conventions or Rules of Engagement was both inadequate and served largely as an exculpatory device granting plausible deniability to those committing atrocities.  For one example: "According to the official inquiry, they had "fired in good faith, convinced that they were engaging a hostile force"—which under the ROE, automatically made their action legal."  Elsewhere, dead civilians were often said to have been taking "evasive actions" prior to their murder, which echoes the defenses proffered in some of the most notable police shootings.  This, combined with the systematic lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting the military feels analogous to the similar treatment of police, as well as to relevant legal doctrines like qualified immunity.  And a large part of the reason that American troops had the ability to cause so much damage in the first place was that they literally had to use the overwhelming surplus of ammo provided by our military-industrial complex, in a sort of "use it or lose it" type budgeting, but for death.  Once again, this phenomenon has a direct analogue in the militarization of our police.

Probably the most important parallel though, concerns racism as a driver of all this violence.  When activists against police violence invoke the systemic racism present in modern policing, the common response is to turn this systemic critique into a personal critique.  The most common iteration of this is the "bad apples" defense (mentioned in the pull quote above btw), where not every cop or solider can possible be a racist person capable of racist violence.  While this is ostensibly true, it's besides the point for two primary reasons.  One, there are absolutely a ton of obviously, overtly racist people in both forces that use this bigotry as their modus operandi.  Two, the very nature of systemic racism means that the intentions of the individual largely do not matter.  When an imperial army is sent to a foreign land and filled with propaganda that reduces its inhabitants to something less than human, the goodness of any one solider is rendered irrelevant (to this end, even the very courageous soldiers that blew the whistle on some of the worst atrocities were not able to prevent these atrocities nor enact meaningful accountability after the fact).  Likewise, when a domestic force is deployed in overwhelmingly minority neighborhoods with the indeterminant goal of fighting "crime," it's no wonder that the end effect will be a de facto racist criminalization of those minority races.  For all the valid criticisms of race-first views of American history, it's hard to read about either Vietnam or police violence and not be sympathetic to the worldview of racism as the persistent, original sin of America.

36. The Russian Revolution - Sheila Fitzpatrick (link)

I found this to be the more useful of the two short Fitzpatrick works on the Soviet Union, largely due to its focus.  Shortest History suffers from having to touch on everything, whereas the smaller scope of Russian Revolution allows Fitzpatrick to expand on relevant background and analysis when needed.  Specifically, Fitzpatrick lays the groundwork for the revolution in a detailed yet focused manner that, for a relative novice like me, clarifies the situation in which Russia found itself.  Specifically the details about the working class tending towards revolution in part because they had not had a chance to become established trade unionists, or about Marxism becoming the preferred ideology because of its constructive, positive vision relative to utopian socialism, were both aspects of the revolution I had never fully considered.  Fitzpatrick's narrative also plainly demonstrates just how empty the actual societal structures were in pre-revolutionary Russia—the reforms that arose from the 1905 revolution were toothless, Nicholas reads as a satire of monarchy, and the mood of the people was such that the radical Bolsheviks became the only party capable of leading the nation forward.  Everything from 1917 on is less revelatory (in part because of Fitzpatrick's liberal bent, which I've noted before) but is still worth the quick read.

37. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - Angela Y. Davis (link)

Last time there was an escalation of violence in Palestine I briefly read through this, which helped support and clarify one of my best (and sadly still relevant) arguments that appeals to complexity are often dishonest rhetorical traps that serve to obscure clear moral imperatives.  Given recent developments, I decided to do a more thorough reading to see what else I could glean.  The nature of the book (short, partially extemporaneous, and comprised almost entirely the text of speeches whose subject matter often overlaps) has its limitations.  But regardless, I still find this collection useful if for nothing else its unrelenting moral clarity on the "intersectionality of struggles."

Much like with Davis' thoughts on false complexity, this moral clarity serves to address many of the other specific things I've talked about on this very web site.  In her role as a prominent abolitionist, Davis provides as concise and clear of an argument as to why abolition is not utopian:

"At the same time prison abolition appears as a utopian idea precisely because the prison and its bolstering ideologies are so deeply rooted in our contemporary world. There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution. Abolitionist advocacy can and should occur in relation to demands for quality education, for antiracist job strategies, for free health care, and within other progressive movements. It can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism."

 She also repeatedly makes it clear that she views history as a Marxian history of class struggle:

"Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles."

She also talks about the apparent failures of recent protests movements which partially echoes my thoughts (as well as the thoughts of others I've recently read), but also questions if something that doesn't immediately achieve maximal (or any) results should be considered a categorical failure:

"Oftentimes people argue that in these more recent movements there were no leaders, there was no manifesto, no agenda, no demands, so therefore the movements failed. But I’d like to point out that Stuart Hall, who died just a little over a year ago, urged us to distinguish between outcome and impact. There is a difference between outcome and impact. Many people assume that because the encampments are gone and nothing tangible was produced, that there was no outcome. But when we think about the impact of these imaginative and innovative actions and these moments where people learned how to be together without the scaffolding of the state, when they learned to solve problems without succumbing to the impulse of calling the police, that should serve as a true inspiration for the work that we will do in the future to build these transnational solidarities." 

Finally, given my preclusion for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing on paranoid and reparative reading, I thought these sections on feminist methodologies rang true: 

"...feminist methodologies can assist us all in major ways as researchers, academics, and as activists and organizers. When we discover what appears to be one relatively small and marginal aspect of the category—or what is struggling to enter the category, so that it can basically bust up the category—this process can illuminate so much more than simply looking at the normative dimensions of the category. And, you know, academics are trained to fear the unexpected, but also activists always want to have a very clear idea of our trajectories and our goals. And in both instances we want control. We want control, so that oftentimes our scholarly and activist projects are formulated just so that they reconfirm what we already know. But that is not interesting. It is boring. And so how to allow for surprises, and how do we make these surprises productive?

[...]

Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together."

38. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party - Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. (link)

"The Black Panther Party offered black people more than an alternative; it promised dignity. By standing up to the police, Huey Newton showed that black people could break patterns of racial submissiveness and deference. Eldridge Cleaver claimed that Newton was the true heir to Malcolm X: "Malcolm prophesied the coming of the gun to the black liberation struggle. Huey P. Newton picked up the gun and pulled the trigger." Newton had created a black anti-imperialist politics of armed self-defense that, unlike other versions of Black Power, held strong appeal for alienated and marginalized blacks. The Panthers recognized that many black people already lived in a state of war. The violence of the ghetto rebellions reflected the raw desperation of everyday life. The Panthers believed these forces could be organized and strove to channel the desperation and violence of everyday black life into powerful political resistance."

The best works of history strike a balance between depicting the actions of its subject and describing how the circumstances and conditions in which the subject arose both informed and constrained those actions.  In short, the subject both acts and is acted upon, and any history that shies away from either of those facts is incomplete.  Black against Empire is perhaps the epitome of this dual quality, and thus is an essential read.  For instance, the rise of the Black Panther Party is shown be a result of both the success and limitations of the Civil Rights Movement.  The tangible success of the Movement was not just specific objectives like voting rights, but more generally was how it demonstrated the potential of Black Power as an organizing ethos.  But the failure to gain real economic parity and the inability of the Movement's tactics (ie. sit-ins) to combat broader problems led directly to demands for something different.

Enter the Black Panther Party, which quickly outgrew the specifics of its founding (combatting police violence) by uniting with other struggles to briefly become the unquestioned vanguard of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist action in America.  This "revolutionary intercommunalism" understood that wider alliances were mutually beneficial and helped to preclude the "divide and conquer" mindset of capital.  The Party accordingly adopted a Marxist viewpoint but "was never rigid, sectarian, or dogmatic.  Motivated by a vision of a universal and radically democratic struggle against oppression, ideology seldom got in the way of the Party's alliance building and practical politics."  Black against Empire uses a plethora of sources to detail how this ideology was built and refined, none more illustrative and unique than its near-complete collection of the Black Panther magazine.  Besides demonstrating the ideology of the Party, Bloom and Martin also describe its praxis, which sought no less than to "change the American capitalist system to a more equitable socialist one" with programs that were "revolutionary not reformist."  From breakfast for children, to free ambulance services, to providing "vital source(s) of remediation that was often unavailable from the state," Black against Empire paints a picture of a genuine attempt to grow a whole new society from the ashes of the old.

Of course, this did not last.  Bloom and Martin share both hard evidence and informed speculation about the purposeful interference from the FBI that contributed to the Party's downfall.  I've said before that it's important to understand such structural impediments to left-wing success, not necessarily to discourage such insurgency, but rather to better inform these efforts' chances of success.  Not stopping at scapegoating the (extremely guilty) FBI though, Black against Empire also shows how the revolutionary position of the Party was mitigated by changing conditions in the early 1970s.  The elimination of the draft, the development of professional paths for middle-class blacks, and the thawing of US relations with Third-World governments all served to diminish the appeal of revolutionary fervor for those not already bought in to it.  All of this suggests that even the most mildly conscientious American government is its own best bulwark against insurgency, which is simultaneously comforting and frightening.  

39. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (link)

"American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do...he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming "BANZAI!"" 

Not sure if this is a good novel, but it's a good...something.  Pynchon's most enigmatic work is at least a success on those terms, weaving not necessarily a compelling narrative but instead a whimsical fever dream.  One whose focus is not the story's ostensible setting (WW2) but rather the creation of the so-called "rocket-state" that would become the American-led post-war world order.  In this way, its resonance reminds me of one of the best works of the small screen, which was itself less a traditional narrative and more of a rumination on both the metaphysical and material nature of evil.

This approach has its benefits, the most obvious of which is how it allows the author to opine on whatever he likes, from literal rocket science to the nature of paranoia to the possibility of free will.  For another example, Pynchon remarks on the true economy of war:

"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets."

...and basically sums up all of capitalism in a short parable:

"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."

...and is as flippant towards the false virtue of colonialism as Césaire:

"What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets...Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels likes and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts...No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets..."

But Pynchon characteristically saves his most incisive words for his homeland, portrayed as both the malicious administrator and unsuspecting victim of the dawning rocket-state.  He decries America as a Masonic "practical joke" that has since "denigrated into just another businessman's club."  Slothrop, the closest thing the novel has to a protagonist, descends from a family that adhered to the "three American truths" of "shit, money, and the Word."  Ironically, that same family tradition contained within it "the fork in the road America never took" in the person of William Slothrop, a thinly veiled version of Pynchon's own same-named ancestor.  The rejection of William's "heresy" of believing in "holiness for the second Sheep" foreclosed the possibility of "fewer crimes in the name of Jesus and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot."  While it might seem that you can't get more presumptuous than to insert your own bloodline as a failed bulwark against America's own fall of Adam, the best self-insert has to be the story of Byron, an immortal, all-knowing, light bulb:

"Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul, and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it..."

40. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (link)

"Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare , so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty."

-Proust

"...we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful"

-Anonymous (but probably Oppenheimer)

"Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time , any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security."

-Niels Bohr

Basically as good as a biography can be, detailing not just the inner life of a man as unique as Oppenheimer, but also situating him firmly and meaningfully in the context that would slowly, then quickly, kill his will to continue being that man.  This context echoes many of themes of my reading, from military needs dictating economic decisions to the Manichean nature of Cold War paranoia to the inherent limitations of working within the system to affect change.  But the particulars of Oppenheimer's story are what resonates the most, telling a uniquely American story that's ultimately more tragedy than triumph.

Oppenheimer's politics are a fascinating throughline in his story, both reflecting the journey of left-wing sentiment in America at the time while still drawing upon his own unique experience.  Oppenheimer drifted from semi-explicit communist sympathies in the late thirties to a more anti-communist left stance as the Cold War blossomed, all the while carrying the allegiances of a bog-standard New Deal liberal.  This led to the not uncommon contradiction of collectivist rhetoric (he stressed the "profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation, and liberation" and the "basic dependence of man on his follows") with individualistic actions (he never meaningfully committed to any cause or organization).  Part of what explains how a brilliant man could never resolve this contradiction was his identity, first and foremost, as a scientist.  When asked to pledge loyalty to America in advance of the Manhattan project, he instead wrote "I stake my reputation as a scientist."  As the reality of the Cold War and nuclear diplomacy progressed, he openly struggled with this, saying that "we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man."  He also spoke of the need to "reconsider the relations between science and common sense."  All of this suggests that he did come to reject the all-too-common idea of science as standing outside of politics, but perhaps not quickly or thoroughly enough to realize his goals.

Perhaps the best way to bridge this gap is to understand Oppenheimer's desire for shared knowledge and openness.  The goal of such an "open world" after all was to promote the nuclear sanity that Oppenheimer was unable to achieve.  Furthermore, both he and Bohr realized that the already existing multinational scientific community was precisely the model on which the rest of society could base such an idea.  This speaks to the broader idea that, to quote Bohr, "knowledge is itself the basis of civilization, but any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life."  However, the grand irony of Oppenheimer viewing knowledge as the antidote to paranoia is how the US government kept him and other scientists at Los Alamos in the dark about the realities of the war. His own lack of knowledge of Japan's imminent surrender permitted him to support the bombing of Hiroshima, which would in actuality be the first shot of the Cold War.

The further irony is that Oppenheimer's underestimation of the forces pitted against him would help lead to his downfall.  Not only was the idea of "openness" used against him (quite literally, too, as his legal team was unable to review his extensive FBI file but for what the prosecution shared in the hearing), but the interests of the very military-industrial complex he had a hand in building would wholly reject his pleas for moderation, and would push "American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests."  This rejection of Oppenheimer himself is perhaps the most tragic part of his story, as it served as the antithesis to the Proust quote that illuminated his life 40 years earlier; indeed, his friend observed that he "no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to to fight against the cruelty of indifference."  I will finish on a note of solace, as Oppenheimer did late in his life appear to finally understand what was missing from his previous efforts:

"I don't know how to describe my life without using some word like 'responsibility' to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved.  I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do...There is no meaningful responsibility without power."

41. Hell Is a World Without You - Jason Kirk (link)

"So we spent four hours sneaking around a lock-in, committing the dirtiest sin of all: telling young people God literally loves literally everyone, literally forever."

It's very funny to read a novel that's mostly dialogue, inner dialogue, and AIM conversations almost directly after reading Gravity's Rainbow.  What's funnier still is that there is a direct throughline between the two.  In Gravity's Rainbow, one of the many digressions concerns Slothrop's ancestor who was exiled as a heretic.  Slothrop comes to view this as a possible "fork in the road America never took" and details the "heresy" as such:

"He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to've been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? Could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows."

Whereas Pynchon confines such ruminations to the margins, Kirk weaves a similar spiritual journey into the fabric of his tightly-plotted narrative.  As we follow the narrator Isaac through high school, we see how his experiences and his reflections (prayer, you might call it) lead him to question and then later reject his evangelical upbringing.  And in taking this spiritual journey, he comes to...largely the same conclusion as William Slothrop!  Eternal recurrence is real, at least for fictional characters.

"What if love so thoroughly conquers all, there's a sunrise for Lucifer and sympathy for Diablo? What if it's not about confronting [his brother], but burying what haunts him? What if [his pastor's] mightiest weapon was formed from nothing? What if the Bible's right when it says all will be made new, and that includes my father?"

42. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology - David H. Price (link) 

"[The CIA's covert support of academia] was not a matter of buying off and subverting individual writers and scholars, but of setting up an arbitrary and factitious system of values by which academic personnel were advanced, magazine editors appointed, and scholars subsidized and published, not necessarily on their merits, though these were sometimes considerable, but because of their allegiances.  The fault of the CIA was not that it corrupted the innocent but that it tried, in collusion with a group of insiders, to corner a free market."

-Jason Epstein, 1967

"Anthropologists who wished to aid the counterinsurgency efforts of the United States in Southeast Asia should do so and do so with conviction.  Such persons can at least be respected.  I would class as unethical only those who attempt to hide behind the idea of pure research while their activities aid the preservation of the status quo."

-Delmos Jones, 1971

Another fine entry in perhaps my favorite genre of history; one that shines a light on the sometimes subtle and often purposefully inscrutable nature of clandestine influence on American society during the Cold War.  Following in the footsteps of Saunders, Wilford, and others, there is more to digest than I can fully relate here.  But what this book most reinforces for me is something I tried to argue earlier this year—that CIA influence on American society is a critical aspect of class struggle and must be analyzed and comprehended as such.  While Price is not offering an explicitly Marxian analysis in this text, everything is laid out nicely for the reader to easily put one together.  What I specifically gleaned on this front was that the overlapping nature of the CIA, front organizations, and established organizations that effectively did the CIA's bidding allows one to view the CIA less as an inexorable bogeyman of capital and more as a vanguard for promoting the interests of capital.  When, for example, the Ford Foundation stepped in to continue research whose CIA funding had expired, it underlines how the differing nature of these entities are rendered meaningless by their overriding, fundamental allegiance.  Whether or not all these groups explicitly coordinated their efforts to produce scholarship on counterinsurgency and the like is less important than the obvious truth that they were all clearly aligned in their efforts to bend the will of the world towards entrenched capitalist rule.

Of course, a vast majority of the people involved in such academic efforts were not literal CIA agents, and all available evidence suggests that most were partially or fully unwitting to the larger project of weaponizing research on counterinsurgency against the Third World.  What this implies is there must have been some compelling ideological explanation for how so many seemingly conscientious people were made to repeatedly cross ethical and moral lines.  Price provides this explanation with a discussion of Walt Rostow's modernization theory, which put briefly, implied that poorer nations needed to go through the same stages of economic development that the West had in order to prosper.  But because this process "could not be reduced to economics," this transformation also required an ideological shift in its subjects (critics pejoratively summarized Rostow's work in this area as "the culmination of human social evolution was shopping").  This liberal naivety towards the true goal of military actions permeated the academy and helped lubricate the flow of CIA money.  One seemingly well-meaning researcher (Gerald Hickey) was illustrative of this inability to resolve these contradictions, as the goal of his work for RAND (reducing harm for tribal groups affected by American militarism) was subsumed by the broader application of the knowledge he produced towards American counterinsurgency efforts.  More generally, "anthropology [became] an imagined tool that could somehow repair the things that had been broken by political or military forces, as if cultural knowledge could smooth over the harsh realities of killing, invasions, or occupations."  These mental gymnastics that permitted so many to participate in Cold War anthropology is yet another example of the futility of trying to change the system from within.

The end result of all this was a sort of parallel world, where the precepts of the discipline of anthropology were flipped on their head.  Instead of the normal scientific process, where "doubts about established orthodoxies were taken to be the beginning of all inquiry," CIA funding put the cart before the horse, precluding hypotheses that didn't comport to capitalist hegemony.  Nowhere was this inverted reality more evident than in the field, where the assumption that anodyne Soviet advisors were "mysteriously moving about" is as clear a case of projection as I've ever seen.  But perhaps the most tragic outcome of this was how perverse incentives led seemingly genuine people to completely invert the meaning of their work.  The University of Michigan's Near East Study Center was one such example of this, with director George C. Cameron's reflections being a perfect illustration.  Upon discussing cartoonish American propaganda (there's a pig with a hammer and sickle tail) with a Kurdish chieftain, he received a very clear and reasonable analysis of its fundamental dishonesty: 

"I know the Baghdad man who is producing this sheet for your government.  I know how much he is being paid yearly to produce it.  If one fourth of that amount was to be made available in medicines or in some other more tangible product of your country which could be used to lessen the poverty or to better the health of my people, would it not be a far more successful propaganda approach?"

And yet, this seemed to pass right over Cameron's head, as his very next paragraph recommends doubling down on this futile approach, while also demonstrating that uniquely American brand of projection:

"According to information which came to me, this area is in truth honeycombed with propagandists for the other side. [...] I fear that we have taken inadequate accounting of the tremendous power of the radio.  In Iran, every teahouse possesses one, and the anti-British and sometimes anti-American propaganda has seriously damaged our position. [...] One does become very tired of trying to explain America's position, trying to make them see that there are other countries also which badly need some assistance.  It seemed to me constantly that America desperately needs to pass on a little of the information about widespread commitments in all parts of the world which have been made, to explain in terms of the local monetary units just how much in time as in money has been poured into each particular area."

Taken as a whole, Cold War anthropology was something of a hammer in search of nails.  But to understand why this was the case, you must comprehend both the institutions and the political economy that effectively made the hammer the only acceptable tool.  Per Price, the first step in this journey is to think critically about not just what knowledge does, but how it comes to be:

"Anthropology needs to concretely consider how regimes of power influence disciplinary developments in ways large and small.  Such considerations necessitate formulating the sort of metanarratives of power that declined with the rise of some popular postmodern strains.  Anthropologists who adapted Lyotard's "incredulity towards metanarratives" had no means of systematically interpreting recurrent intrusions of military and intelligence agencies on the discipline, leaving anthropology vulnerable to recurrent episodes of exploitation.  As William Roseberry observed, "Grand narratives...are never sufficient but they remain necessary." [...] Even with recent calls for renewed attention to ontological developments, the discipline's postmodern avoidance of grand narratives of power fosters notions that the Cold War political economy did not meaningfully alter the production of knowledge."

In Conclusion,

At the end of 2021 I wrote this:

"Things accepted as mainstream truth are anything but true, and the only way to learn this is to do the reading.  My year started with three directly provocative titles and ended with a book that refutes the hegemonic idea of American "freedom."  Much of what I read directly discussed how these false truths were weaved through faulty economics research, Zionist propaganda, and thinly-concealed race science.  Still other books detailed the mechanisms, power structures, and clandestine operations that created a reality that fostered the dismal worldview born of those false truths.  If you've read this far and take one thing from any of this, know that we live in the wake of the most effective propaganda machine in human history.  Eradicating that from your brain is humbling and takes a lot of work, but for me thus far, it has been worth it."

And at the end of 2022 I wrote this:

"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. "

Reading those passages again, I find myself without much to add.  Perhaps there is a point where this project turns more to some sort of larger synthesis and/or a greater focus on action.  But for now the grind is the only thing that remains.  Happy New Year.