1. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy - Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (link)
"Every business wants to be economically irreplaceable. Few want to be so irreplaceable that their factories might be blown up in a preemptive strike."
Underground Empire serves as a welcome complement to Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, explicitly addressing the whole economic part of the equation that the latter largely ignored. It also bolsters Slobodian's narrative in Globalists in showing how the functional goal of US hegemony was (and is) to make foreign governments as subservient to global finance as possible. Farrell and Newman are a bit overly credulous towards their subject, regularly asserting that the global order it describes was not purposefully constructed, but rather weaponized by powerful forces after the fact. While this is somewhat true, and while much of their narrative does support this idea, their facile conclusion (best summarized as "let's let liberalism solve the problems that liberalism has created") and many tossed-off assertions (my favorite: "The United States was sometimes unpredictable, but it at least had the rule of law. There wasn't any law strong enough to stop the Chinese government from grabbing hold of whatever it felt it needed.") suggest a fundamental disconnect between the plain reality of American dominance they convey and the necessary prescriptions any mildly attentive reader might derive to counter it. Regardless of these shortcomings, there's more than enough useful information (the details of Trump's rejection of the JCPOA reads as the same zero-sum game that produced Maidan) and valid theorizing (ie. sanction's primary functional outcome is the chilling effect they create) to make this a worthwhile read.
Farrell and Newman's narrative is centered on the idea of international finance as once having been a "terra nullis" that the US came to dominate. Numerous factors helped contribute to the construction of the current ruling order, from the prioritization of American "intellectual capital" in response to offshoring/Chinese manufacturing prowess, to the inverted post-9/11 regulatory focus on shutting off capital flows that were once actively encouraged to be open (but heavily monitored, of course). In building this behemoth, the US became able to unilaterally bend multi-national corporations to their will, turning massive conglomerates like HSBC into what are effectively cooperating witnesses. Even more, this jurisdiction expanded beyond simple matters of dollars and finance to any "foreign-based technology companies that significantly touched US intellectual property, even indirectly." Indeed, this strategy of dominance is how the US was able to bring potential counter-hegemonic forces like Huawei and TSMC to heel. While such malign centralized power is suboptimal for all the obvious reasons, Farrell and Newman's suggest an additional theory (one in keeping with their credulousness towards capitalism): that the accumulation of "process knowledge" stored in such companies is being suppressed and limited to everyone's detriment.
The penultimate chapter where this theory of knowledge is put forth is the most useful of the book. The conflict at stake is depicted as one of dueling sovereignty: "the rights of the constituents who elected Europe's and America's governments overlapped with their needs as customers of cloud services." In staking out their sovereign claims, multinational entities like Microsoft paint themselves as a "digital Switzerland," where apparent humanitarian goals (ie. no cyber-attacks against civilians) simultaneously served such companies' bottom lines. While such an orientation might be admirable and/or useful in some contexts, the book clearly shows that such an idea is not tenable in modern geopolitics. When the US government demanded fealty upon the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Microsoft (among others) was more than happy to comply. And when the US demanded that TSMC hand over sensitive information to maintain its access to American markets, it dutifully complied. As such, it does not appear that any meaningful corporate sovereignty is possible over the long term, which is both heartening (corporations are bad) and frightening (the alternative is somehow worse).
2. Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal - Eric Rauchway (link)
A somewhat interesting narrative that has little apparent reason to exist. The story of FDR's pending re-election absolutely can and should be told as the hinge point upon which modern polarization took root. But while one certainly can (and should) read this book in such a manner, Rauchway is overly coy with what meaning he wants the reader to derive from his work. To this end, he concludes his introduction as such: "The conflict between [FDR and Hoover], and the traditions of liberalism and conservatism they established, remain central to US politics today." Well, yeah. The likely reason for this book's relative shallowness is that most of the source material is derived from the diaries and journals of the major players in the transition process, which, while revelatory in their own right, clearly lacks some heft compared to the political sea change implied by the narrative.
The most interesting thread from the book concerns just how batshit insane Hoover was—Rauchway essentially casts him as a Goldwater before Goldwater. Hoover claimed that FDR's public works proposals would "crack the timbers of our Constitution," adding that "Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die." He channeled his inner Ben Shapiro, claiming he was "fighting that the wrong course may not be adopted, not by appeal to destructive emotion, but by truth and logic." His appeal to the electorate comes right out of the David Shor playbook, as his speeches "were largely statistical, the theme being that the depression was licked and the only thing that could stop the upward movement was the election of Roosevelt." Rauchway to his credit correctly concludes that "Hooverism became central to Republicanism." The problem is more that this throughline is treated largely as an afterthought, as noted by the perfunctory handling of Hoover's post-presidential life and the minimal detail on his alliances with titans of industry like Henry Ford.
What's worse is that there is not enough detail on Roosevelt to even garner a similar broad impression of the man. For all the faults of Katznelson's Fear Itself, that book at least gives us a more complete picture of FDR's modus operandi. There's a nice section on FDR's logic with respect to farm subsidies (by "restoring purchasing power to the farming half of the country" he sought to "turn a special interest into a common concern") and a good description of how and why he sought to use economic and diplomatic methods for deterrence (military might was insufficient at the time), but other than that the cupboard is fairly bare.
3. Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 - Rick Perlstein (link)
"In the White House, a pro-labor aide wrote President Carter in sorrow, "We are within one vote of defeating the most expensive and powerful lobby ever mounted against a bill in the nation's history," pleasing that one last concerted push was not too much to ask to honor this "unusual opportunity to show our commitment to labor." But Carter's commitment to labor was never particularly strong in the first place. And 97 percent of White House mail now opposed the bill. He chose to sit on his hands."
-Perlstein, describing the failure of Labor Reform
"Die."
-Bill Winpisinger of the Machinists Union, when asked what Jimmy Carter could do to redeem himself
I took the joint occasion of Carter's death and the onset of the twelfth consecutive Reagan administration to read Perlstein's final book in this series, and hoo boy did it hit hard. There's a lot here, obviously, so let's tackle this one with some bullet points.
- The most clear throughline in Perlstein's narrative is how the political conditions of the Carter era created a sort of anti-politics that lives with us to this day. On the right, "conservatism" as it was previously known was eschewed for a myopic focus on "organizing discontent," which replaced what is generally understood as "politics" with a seemingly unending race to the bottom. This left all meaningfully contested political terrain to the Democrats, which led to the 1980 election featuring perhaps the most incongruous platform in history—one that tried to balance the varying wings of the party by promising both increased spending and a balanced budget. How this half of the political spectrum became dominated by its right-wing is beyond the purview of this book, but if you pay close attention you can still garner how the "quiet strength" approach of the national security apparatus led the way, focusing on America's imperial interests above all else. Nothing is more illustrative of this imperial drift as Carter's qualifications around it's pursuit of "human rights," which were explicitly described as subject to "fundamental US interests with respect to the nation in question."
- Within the political struggle in the Democratic Party, the pull quotes above tell you pretty much all you need to know about how things went for labor during Carter's administration. But regardless of Carter's intransigency, Perlstein's narrative makes it clear that the "boardroom Jacobins" were never going to budge, even though the prevailing political winds would favor them no matter what scraps they threw at workers. This serves as perhaps the most stark lesson that a conciliatory stance towards capital is fundamentally a dead-end. Carter's own labor secretary said it best: "We have the only labor movement in the world that embraces capitalism. [The business community] is trying to kill it."
- Also re: the Dems, it's very "fun" to see the Joe Biden we all know and love pop up at various points throughout the narrative, acting as a sort of ghost of presidents future. Perhaps the most mind-bending excerpt is his stance on a full employment bill, which he opposed because of the "limited, finite ability government has to deal with people's problems." How inspiring.
- As for the Republican side of things, Reaganland functions as a continuation of the story of Reagan's rise, begun in earnest in The Invisible Bridge. What is most noteworthy about Perlstein's narrative here is how Reagan appears as a conduit of the American Dream; free to forget and subsequently live in timeless innocence. Perlstein remarks on his "capacity to cleanse any hint of doubt regarding American innocence, [which] was the soul of his political appeal: his liturgy of absolution." He quotes Reagan describing America as "unimpressed by what others say is impossible [...] generous, and naive." And after his election, a speech in Texas sums up the Reagan ethos as clearly as ever:
"What is it that we as Americans really want? It isn't power. If we only wanted power, we long ago could have dominated the world. It isn't world leadership as an end in itself; we've had world leadership thrust upon us by events. We've never pursued it. In my view, what we want is so simple...We want to live in freedom, and in peace."
- I've remarked on mushy liberal critiques of Ralph Nader before, so I'd be remiss to give Perlstein a pass for his own dishonest framing of Nader's actions. In the section on the failure to pass a bill establishing a consumer-focused agency, does a similar two-step, where he fully understands the structural forces that led to the bill's failure and yet takes time to blame Nader anyway. Specifically, he describes Nader's efforts to hector Democratic representatives who switched their vote as "hubris," which is especially odd in the middle of a narrative depicting Carter as a failure in large part because he refused to take such measures.
- Lest you think that Perlstein is a complete liberal hack, he does manage to do pretty good material analysis at times. In particular, this background to late-seventies feminism is a good summary of the conditions that birthed it:
"The background to this ideological clash was a society whose presumptions about gender and the family were turning upside down-objectively so. It wasn't just the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. It was economic. Between the end of World War Il and the oil shocks of 1973, the real income of ordinary American working families approximately doubled -then, it flatlined or even declined. The change came so suddenly, and felt so foreign to Americans' received way of knowing the world, that it could hardly be perceived whole. It registered, instead, as millions of uncoordinated individual family decisions, in response to millions of individual family struggles keeping up with mortgage payments, car payments, tuition, grocery bills, and the rising price of everything: so Mom began working outside the home. At the height of World War II, only 26 percent of married women worked. By 1977, about half did-including half of women with children under eighteen.
Another aspect of the ordeal was built into American public policy. Whereas other industrialized nations built robust state institutions to protect citizens in times of economic stress, in laissez-faire America the task of care was mostly allotted to individual families- which is to say, wives and mothers. A housewife did not directly earn Social Security from the government, or health insurance from an employer. So if she left her husband, or if he left her, she lost both."
4. Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought - Bruno Leipold (link)
"For, as long as Marx had been combating the social ideal of republicanism, he had also been struggling against socialists who rejected the republican insistence on the need for politics. Marx thus continued to fight a struggle on two fronts: using his republican communism to critique both anticommunist republicanisms and antipolitical socialisms."
A bitter irony of perceiving Marx's focus on class struggle as "reductive" is that Marx's own words often directly contradict these supposed deficiencies. The very nature of such critiques is then self-defeating: while Marx may not have had the answer to everything (an impossible goal), he sure had the answer to a lot. In this vein, Citizen Marx is a necessary corrective on one of the most important such ideological fronts: that Marx's views were not opposed to republican/democratic thought, but rather built on top of such a framework. Leipold's dual focus on both the development of Marx's positions through time (advancing his thought on the utility of bourgeois democracy as events transpired) and the constants that guided him throughout (ie. a fundamental opposition to arbitrary power) make for a wonderfully dialectical journey through a dense and expansive corpus.
As you might expect from a broad survey of Marx, this book touches on a number of recurring themes of this blog. Marx' central focus on "freedom" is not just interesting because it dispels the common perception of communism as simple "equality," but also because it doesn't rest on the frankly tiresome freedom from/freedom to dichotomy. Rather, Marx's conception of freedom as nondomination is pulled directly from Republican thought, where "it is domination and not interference that compromises liberty," which in turn allows one to view "each person's relation to other people as the realization rather than a barrier to his freedom." What's more is that one's unfreedom under capitalism is obscured by its very nature; the seeming freedom to choose which capitalist you labor for belies the simple fact that you must work for a capitalist. In turn, the domination that marks this unfreedom is reinforced by a disciplining market that forces capitalists to "continuously expand his capital in order to keep it." This mechanism immiserates us all as it "prevent[s] society from freely deciding how to make use of the immense gains of productivity."
Marx's concept of capital-d democracy is also fascinating. Obviously, he and Engels changed their precise position on the utility of liberal democracy over time, but I found his theory regarding true democracy to be more useful. Specifically, his definition of such a concept as "a state in which the modern divide between the political sphere and civil society has been overcome." Indeed, it was the split between the two spheres (originating in the French Revolution) which "did not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, [but] only relegated those obstacles to civil society." Furthermore, in a true democracy, Marx viewed participating in the administration of such a government as an "essential, intrinsic aspect of our being" where civic knowledge flows from such participation rather than into it (through, say, a citizenship exam). Marx also touches on my old watchword of "complexity" in this discussion, as his praise for Athenian democracy is tempered in practice by the inherent inability to apply concepts such as direct democracy to a modern society. At the same time, Marx understands that complicated constitutional designs (ie. the checks and balances of the Federalists) are a deliberate ploy to thwart democratic will. The way to square these two views on "complexity" is that such complications are only "good" (or perhaps, useful) if they arise organically, and reflect a verifiable reality.
Finally, it's important to understand the practical differences between republicanism and Marx's theory of communism, if only to guard against common misconceptions. Republican advocacy for an individual right to property certainly sounds liberatory, but the contrast with the Marxist stance of abolition of private property makes it clear that social reforms regarded as explicit goals rather than as means towards a greater end cannot be meaningfully liberatory. I was also struck by Engels' correct understanding of communism not as dogma, but as the natural conclusion of earnestly pursuing scientific inquiry, which helpfully reinforces my own struggles with modern reformist thought:
"Engels consequently charges Heinzen with misunderstanding communism as if it were a doctrine...[that] proceeds from a definite theoretical principle" (i.e., the principle of the abolition of private property) in order to then analyze and judge the world. Rather, communism, in Engels's presentation, begins with an analysis of the "course of previous history" and the "actual results in the civilized countries at the present time," and from there makes predictions about the necessity of communism."
5. Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America - Erik Baker (link)
"The idea that creating work, for oneself and for others, was not just feasible for any given individual but an expression of a person's unique talents and creative potential neatly resolved the contradiction between the imperative to work under capitalism and the scarcity of work created by its advanced corporate form. If the entrepreneurial work ethic did not exist, it would have been necessary to create it."
"To be entrepreneurial is, at least potentially, not to be industrious, to substitute one's own personality and creativity for the yoke of tradition or bureaucracy. To make your own job is to refuse the job another might seek to impose on you. In this way, the entrepreneurial work ethic mirrors capitalism itself, which makes work the measure of all things at the same time that it makes it scarce, systematically producing surplus populations separated from work entirely. Capitalism is constantly creating and destroying work. One important reason why the entrepreneurial work ethic has proven so durable is that is has the flexibility to glorify both prongs of this contradictory movement—to cheer on the creation of new jobs, businesses, products, and industries, while also urging the demolition of all the sclerotic, soul-crushing, bureaucratic work that afflicts us today."
Make Your Own Job is the history of an idea promulgated almost exclusively by charlatans. This makes reading seemingly endless passages about the entrepreneurial spirit far less engaging than say, reading a history of neoliberal thought. While guys like Hayek may have been charlatans in their own right, they still attempted some level of intellectual rigor that is worthy of sparring with. And yet, I still found this book to be worth my time because the endless vapidity of the self-help set served a purpose of showing the utter foolishness of viewing work as an self-driven enterprise. Throughout the century-plus depicted in Baker's narrative, the idea of entrepreneurialism is shown to be a constant glorification of the individual that simultaneously serves to make business leaders appear as singular geniuses and to dash all hopes of working towards collective goals.
Lest I lead you to believe the book is 260 pages of pure puffery, Baker does a good job interspersing the ideological and technical developments that helped situate the idea of entrepreneurship in our society. The transition from the idea of industriousness, rooted in the republican ideals of the independent producer, came about not because of persuasion but because of technological advances that rendered the abundant labor of early capitalism moot. While capital was happy to comply with these historical developments for obvious economic reasons (ie. labor-saving technologies were also capital-saving), the path for others was more circuitous. Thinkers like Frederick Winslow Taylor implicitly denied the growing power of capital by pushing technocratic improvements as a panacea, while many workers turned towards the ideas of New Thought, which promised individuals a connection with a "reservoir of infinite cosmic energy." Ultimately, none of these took hold as hegemonic ideals, as entrepreneurialism was just too aligned with the wishes of capital to lose out.
Once the "Make Your Own Job" ethos takes hold, the ideology underpinning American capitalism becomes a series of funhouse mirrors. Basic observations about humanity like "human satisfaction depends on activities pursued in common and directed towards some future achievement or purpose" become twisted to support individual initiative. The very idea of "success" became both tautological and immaterial: "The right attitude led to success because true success, as [Norman Vincent Peale] understood it, just was having the right attitude." The concept of democracy was turned inward, and was seen as "not so much a system of government...but a dynamic process, something that was done by individuals equipped with a particular set of psychological virtues." The dreaded idea of "authoritarianism" was also turned on its head, as Erich Fromm defined it as "the tendency to give up the independence of one's own individual self and to fuse one's self with somebody or something outside oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking." Baker's narrative is not overly deterministic about where all this leads us (other than to make the obvious point that the market enforces this entrepreneurial discipline), but it is interesting to see how the closing chapters depict a failing center, looking towards austerity, fewer regulations, and lower taxes with the hope of propping up an entrepreneurial ideal long past its expiration date.
6. ¡No Pasarán! Matt Christman's Spanish Civil War - Matt Christman
"Obedience grants a reward of eternal love and happiness in heaven. A heaven that rational inquiry and the collective breakthroughs of modern science showed was fraudulent. But the love that heaven represented, the sacred presence that suffused the experience of the village and family life, the laughter in the face of suffering, had been real, was real, and could be made real again."
Our big, beautiful boy delivers a delightful crackpot summary of the Spanish Civil War that touches on all the thematic points you could possibly want. Rebellions like the Asturias Rising showed how the center would not, and could not hold. The uprising being led by generals with experience in Morocco (most notably, Franco) is a classic example of colonialism coming home to roost. The differing goals of the anarchists (social revolution) and the communists (adherence to the Soviet-backed Popular Front) paints a typical story of leftist infighting. And the failure of the Labor Charter put in place by the Nationalists to deliver on its supposed promises to workers is yet another demonstration of the perfidy of fascists.
7. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life - Theodore M. Porter (link)
"Corps measures were actually conservative, because "there were so many indirect and intangible things that you cannot evaluate by what I call the invoice methods." He also acknowledged that "no two men in this room" would agree on how to value property, and that while assessed valuation is taken into account, it is not decisive. [Representative] Clason was troubled: "If voters write into me to ask me on what basis they build a dike, I would like to be able to tell them something more definitive than guess at the increase in the value of the property." "I would not say it is a guess," [Chief Army Engineer] McCoach replied, "it is an estimate.""
An interesting look into the epistemic debate and subsequent policy developments around the idea of scientific "objectivity" that suffers slightly for its minimization of the power dynamics involved in such a process. Porter's general credulousness towards elite scientists' arguments that what they do is too specialized and complex to be subject to the judgment of the masses is fine in one sense. After all, the arguments are often convincing and are probably "true," to some degree at least. But aside from a few wickedly obvious quips (see the pull quote above), it's difficult to know from the evidence provided in the book just how full of shit advocates of a perpetual ivory tower were.
Regardless of this mild shortcoming, Porter makes it clear that the pressure to quantify and standardize scientific output came from both outside and inside the academy. What's more is that this impetus arose on several different fronts. In education, standardization was needed to "train the mind to an exact and impartial analysis of facts" in order to "provide the best possible moral instruction" and "promote sound citizenship." Quantification helped to create a mass culture that, among other things, helped to enable greater equality through numbers-based programs like Affirmative Action. Statistics were thought to promote democracy by creating a "thoroughly public knowledge." Fields of study like economics were seen by governments as "shared property of educated generalists" which required a common language of mathematics to properly parse. Statistical rigor was seen as the antidote to the seeming arbitrariness of elites, which could only be countered by a "regime of public knowledge." This broad picture of the forces that shaped this journey make it difficult to draw any simple conclusions as to the ultimate net benefit of objectification, which is perhaps the point.
The theme Porter uses to tie all of this together is one of trust. The global scope of modernity implicitly forgoes the interpersonal trust possible in smaller communities, but does not eliminate the fundamental need for the baseline of trust that allows a society to function. Because "economic concentration meant that people could no longer look their trading partners in the eye," we now "depend even more on faith in impersonal technological and regulatory mechanisms." Put more starkly, "mechanical objectivity serves as an alternative to personal trust." This is demonstrated most clearly in a discipline one wouldn't necessarily expect, actuarial science: "The government sought public knowledge, while the actuaries denied its possibility. The government sought a foundation for faith in numbers, while the actuaries demanded trust in their judgment as gentlemen and professionals." It's to this book's slight detriment that even an extreme skeptic such as myself can't fully take a side in the conflict presented here. But maybe Porter's ambivalence in his updated preface for the 2020 version of this book (originally published in 1995) hints at something of an inherently unsolvable problem. As he mentions both "radical distrust of people and institutions" and "subtle reasoning [being] devalued for the sake of administrative convenience," he reiterates that relying on numbers is always a way to avoid the messy business of politics. Perhaps then, the solution to this problem is not anything simple but rather the same thing that would address any of our anti-political impulses: mass politics for the masses.
8. Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science - Audra J. Wolfe (link)
"It was only when I got deeper into the archival and declassified records that I understood how far a distinction between overt, covert, and private propaganda activities missed the mark. [Scientists] saw no conflict in accepting any kind of US government funds to promote their version of scientific freedom, so long as they retained direct control over the message being disseminated. Put another way, these scientists' belief in their autonomy as scientists—their commitment to scientific freedom—limited their ability to recognize that their ideas were being put to use in campaigns over which they had no control."
A welcome addition to my favorite genre, Freedom's Laboratory combines the precision of The Mighty Wurlitzer with the sweeping scope of The Cultural Cold War. Wolfe's investigation of science, writ large, is not as in-depth as the subject of Cold War Anthropology, but that is largely because the discipline was never quite as aligned with the needs of American empire (see the early chapters about the fitful starts and restarts of early Cold War science organizations where no one was really sure of the ultimate purpose). And because it's fresh in my mind, Wolfe's more tangential treatment of "objectivity" is somehow more enlightening than Porter's more direct examination of the matter, in large part because Wolfe understands and more clearly communicates the power dynamics at play. In all, Wolfe's narrative serves to depict the fecklessness of the pursuit of "objectivity" in science that, like with modern journalists, is ultimately self-defeating.
Wolfe is at her strongest in the parts that emphasize how this fuzzy ideology worked to America's advantage. Her critique of the USIA's 1958 statement (containing gems like "Science is neither for nor against, moral nor immoral. It is apolitical.") becomes more incisive when accompanied by the context that US scientists were pessimistic about their ability to compete with Soviet technology. In this way, appeals to an ideal of "science" standing outside of political reality became a way to negate this deficit by laundering American ideology to a wide swath of people. Diagnosing this maneuver as such is not just paranoia; indeed, it was made explicit at times, such as in a secret report from PSAC:
"The "objective nature of science and scientific research—its independence of political belief" made science the perfect olive branch to both Communist block scientists and ambitious leaders in newly independent countries."
What gave additional purchase to this approach was that it rang true, even for some radicals and communist sympathizers, in the specific context of nuclear proliferation. One of the book's most revealing chapters concerns the rise and fall of the Pugwash Conferences, which were specifically focused on non-proliferation and other similar counters to global annihilation. By examining the output of this group, it's easy to understand how an earnest commitment to humanism and/or pacifism could inadvertently support the foreign policy goals of the biggest warmonger of them all. Take this passage describing Bertrand Russell's manifesto:
""We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt." He asked his listeners to "set aside" political commitments to capitalism or communism and instead focus on their identities as "members of a biological species...whose disappearance none of sus can desire." Russell posed the problem starkly. "shall we put and end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?""
Wolfe brings this home by showing how these efforts at scientific diplomacy ultimately led to Soviet dissidents weaponizing similar arguments in support of revanchist political projects. "Refuseniks" like Andrei Sakharov, per Wolfe, marshalled "attitudes about scientific freedom that circulated as part of the US ideological offensive during the Cold War." Sakharov specifically "saw a convergence between capitalism and socialism, driven more by a benign technocracy than by democracy, in which a science freed from the demands of politics could meet all the needs of the people." That creating and nurturing of this sort of vocabulary of opposition helped America win the Cold War is fairly obvious—Wolfe says as much in the closing pages. But a deeper reading enabled by her narrative reveals not only the hollowness of such an ideology, but also the way that American capital engineered and enabled such dissent to poke away at the growing fissures in Soviet society.
I do want to briefly acknowledge that there is a small irony that a) the author herself participated in similar diplomatic efforts under the Obama administration, and b) she doesn't seem to fully grasp the true nature of Soviet scientific inquiry (ie. her discussion of Lysenko alludes to a "dogmatism" that she never really unpacks or explains). So while her book is a very useful depiction of how American scientific diplomacy worked in the Cold War, her own actions and unexamined ideological assumptions are a wonderful demonstration of how similar forces still exert themselves to this day.
9. The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform - Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian (link)
One of those books that sneakily makes you dumber because it doesn't seem to even conceive of its own contradictions. The argument that the reforms of Deng Xiaoping have their roots in the Cultural Revolution is reasonable and logical (perhaps even obvious), but the authors' combination of focus on leadership and vitriol towards radical change serve to undermine this at every step. Take this passage from the conclusion:
"A main argument in this book is that the revolution from below did more to change China than any orders issued by the CCP. China was transformed by the millions of Chinese who took their fate in their own hands, working for a better life. The fact that many did so before economic reform was declared at the central level shows where the great transformation originated."
Again, this seems reasonable enough, but considering that the majority of the previous 300 pages talks about palace intrigue and the like, the conclusion doesn't quite follow. What's weirder still is that the authors go on to decry Dengism as leading to "harsher values" and an "emphasis on material gain." Once again this seems true enough, but it seems very odd to draw that conclusion after repeatedly decrying the bottom-up effort to counter such an ideological drift as "excessive." Ultimately, this is a book that comprehends the idea of political struggle, but does not seem to view the left-wing elements of the proletariat and/or peasantry as a valid political force.
10. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation - Eyal Weizman (link)
"From the perspective of those opposing it, the 'elastic' nature of the Wall is thus simultaneously empowering and frustrating. It is empowering because bringing pressure to bear on the route, in protests and court petitions, has been demonstrated to alleviate conditions on the ground, and further pressure may be effective in pushing the Wall further westwards, closer to the international border of the Green Line and making marginally more tolerable the lives of Palestinians who are suffocating under the weight of its regime. However, the principle of 'elasticity' is also frustrating because it demonstrates that any action directed against the Wall's route, rather than against its very concept, presence and essence (the approach the ICJ has taken), not only legitimizes it and confirms it as a fact, but effectively takes part in its making — the frontier continually remoulds itself to absorb and accommodate opposition, which gradually becomes part of its discourse and contributes to its efficiency. Oppositional action has therefore played a part in the collective, albeit diffused, authorship of the architecture of the Wall."
A towering work of genius that channels its righteous fury into a necessary mission. That mission, exposing the many built layers of the occupation of Palestine, is too broad and fascinating to do proper justice here. But the pull quote above hints at perhaps its most useful theme: how the "humanitarian paradox" renders negotiation with Israel as a reinforcement of the occupation. Humanitarian aid is necessary for continued survival but absolves Israel of their obligations under international law. Acceptance of "lesser evils" such as more "humane" methods of warfare can help extend and normalize low-level conflicts in perpetuity. False sovereign political bodies like the Palestinian Authority serve to "perpetuate the logic of the one-way mirror" in the security facilities they administrate at the behest of the Israelis behind said mirror. And quibbles over the nature of the Wall and other such structure of occupation helps deflect from the overall illegitimacy of such measures. Through this lens, all the complexity (there's that word again) that Israel invokes in these areas serves as a sort of "constructive blurring" where the "facts of domination" are obfuscated and naturalized. As Weizman puts it succinctly, "chaos has its peculiar structural advantages."
Beyond the ongoing reality of occupied Palestine, Weizman's work speaks to everyone in the world seeking to counter oppression. The idea of Israel as a "laboratory" for the world is so common in the narrative that you'd almost think that this is where other books got the idea for their title. The "perceived separation" between the different layers of the occupation is explicitly called out as an "attractive model for other countries that seek some form of population control." The idea of settlements as surveillance, where the settlers act as a sort of "visible but unverifiable" panopticon, echoes the ideas of social media and the like as a form of self-policing. And hey I think I have a guess where Trump got his idea to "rebuild" Gaza:
"Mohamed Alabbar, the flamboyant Arab businessman (who is slated to be the equivalent of Donald Trump in the pan-Arab TV show version of The Apprentice), arrived in Israel six months prior to the evacuation, met with Shimon Peres and briefly with Sharon, and offered to buy all the homes and other real estate assets in the settlements of Gush Katif for $56 million. Alabbar is the chairman of Emaar Properties, a gigantic real estate company registered in the United Arab Emirates which has been a central player in the frantic development of Dubai, specializing in rapid construction of themed onshore tourist and residential projects. He imagined Katif as the site for a possible tourist enclave. This resulted in bizarre and grotesque plans for Dubai-style, large high-rise hotel complexes, and settler homes becoming part of a set of tourist villages, on what was now dubbed 'the best beach resort of the Mediterranean'; had they come to fruition, such complexes would no doubt have become extraterritorial enclaves set against the deep poverty that surrounded them. These fantasies never got very far. But, together with other proposals for wholesale privatization, they would have robbed Palestinians of the evacuated public land to which they were entitled, and desperately needed."
11. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming - Andreas Malm (link)
"A traveller along the frontiers of climate change today—not to speak of tomorrow—might encounter a landscape even more thoroughly shaped by humans with power. Weather conditions, types of vegetation. entire biomes, even the sea itself might have fallen into place as a fallout of the combustion of fossil fuels. But where Robbins is able to trace a certain property of the Yellowstone landscape to a specific decision made in the past - the absence of natives to their historical removal — the climate change traveller can, by the nature of things, see no such straight lines. A submerged islet has born the full weight of a history lacking differentiation. No single decision, no emission of one tonne of greenhouse gases can be connected to this particular scene: the burning of this barrel of Texas oil cannot be pinned down as the cause of this Levantine drought. Every impact of anthropogenic climate change carries the imprint of every human act with a radiative forcing, such that they are infinitesimal representatives of two moving aggregates — the aftermath and the source — intimately coupled yet strangely disconnected from each other."
Framed as a rebuttal to the common "Anthropocene" interpretation of climate change as inherent to human development, Andreas Malm's seminal work actually functions better (to me at least) as a more subtle rejoinder to undercurrents of vulgar material analysis. As renewable energy has become cheaper, refrains that the market will save us have gained more purchase. While such a smooth transition is hardly impossible, blind faith in such a development belies an understanding of just how our fossil-fueled society came to be. As Malm tells it, the slow adoption of steam power was more broadly an expression of just that—power. By detailing the transition from water power to steam in the booming cotton industry of 19th-century Britain, he demonstrates how "capital prevailed over labour in the key industry of British economy by means of power, in the dual sense of the word." Harkening back to the story of the Luddites, Malm argues that the "very same desire for subordinated human labour that animated automation drove cotton capital toward steam." Thus, the ultimate driver of the fetishized commodity that portends doom for our species can (and should) be seen as the same, boring old root of every other problem: class struggle.
Malm's discussion of this phenomenon goes deep into every possible angle of the subject matter. The "fetishization" I mention above is but one part of a deeper metaphysical (and borderline hauntological) rumination on how fossil fuels warp the very nature of time, capturing fuel from the past at the expense of the future. But the more straightforward history of the transition to steam is probably the most enlightening part, if only for how clearly it paints a picture of capital's domination of labor. In some places that domination is made explicit (steam powered machines were described by titans of industry as "the most tractable, as well as the most active, laborer we can employ"), but even when capital doesn't say it out loud, Malm's narrative makes it clear that "the [steam] engine was a superior medium for extracting surplus wealth from the working class." This commodification of labor was helped along by the "mobility in space" of steam-powered machines, which didn't rely on the relatively fixed nature of water power.
What was most striking, however, was just how anti-human and illogical such an enterprise was. Yes, I may have been ground down into a cynical husk of capitalist realism at this point, but it still surprises me to read just how lazy British capitalists were above all else. While they may have followed the primrose path to capital accumulation, such a development was in no way easy or even necessary. Malm's detailing of the problems of coordination and resource distribution required to implement large-scale water schemes would render me sympathetic to the plight of the British capitalist if not for the fact that peasants the world over figured this out literal centuries earlier, as detailed in this passage on 16th-century Egypt:
"Peasants were tied together in...'communities of water.' They adhered to the physical properties of the liquid's movement, viscosity, and flow rate, and the notion that the welfare of the whole always trumped the interests and desires of the few. This ideal of cooperative and collective responsibility arose from the fact that, throughout the countryside, scores of villages relied on the function of a single set of irrigation features for their entire supply of water—some combination of a canal, a dam, a section of the Nile, a waterwheel, a sluice gate, and other irrigation works. In these hundreds of ecosystems organized around the shared usage of water and irrigation features, the actions of a few directly affected the welfare of the whole community."
12. Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) - Colette Shade (link)
"Good Night Bush found shelf space alongside plenty of other anti-Bush books that came out between the president's inauguration in January 2001 and his departure from office in January 2009. These books promised to expose or criticize or make fun of the president, or presented an expert opinion on his supposedly unique psychology (Bush on the Couch), or proposed slightly less harsh Democratic alternatives to Republican-led policies like the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act and the indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay. In a preview of the Trump Era, the fact that there were so many fake children's books here was supposed to be a kind of commentary on the childishness of Republicans and the fact that Democrats are "the adults in the room." But instead it hints at something developmentally stunted and Freudian—perhaps the desire for a mommy to read you a bedtime story and tuck you in and tell you everything will be okay, because the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Or for a strapping, shirtless daddy in a superhero cape to rescue you from the big, bad orange man. So much of liberal politics amounts to yelling "Mooooom! Daaaaaaad! He's cheating!" But even as a child myself, I could see that no one was coming to save us."
A perfectly good memoir that doubles as an analysis of how the whims of capital shaped the culture that people of my milieu grew up in. Because it's primarily the former, Shade's narrative doesn't have the rigor you would expect from a more detailed analysis. But that's fine. Passages like the one above are intriguing and insightful enough to move forward one's understanding of the era, which is all I ask of a work such as this. What's more is that Shade offers a hint of something further—an interrogation of how "nostalgia" has become an animating force of postmodern capitalism—that suggests a logical follow-up.
13. Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal - Mohammed El-Kurd (link)
"Palestine is a microcosm of the world: wretched, raging, fraught, and fragmented. On fire. Stubborn. Ineligible. Dignified. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other, how we see everything else."
"The rallying cry that We are all Palestinians must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep. Meaning we reject our complicity in this bloodshed and our inertia when confronted with all of that blood. Meaning Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice."
A wonderful compendium of memorable works by one of today's most incisive Palestinian writers. Given the hauntological nature of the last two books on this list, I was struck by how much of El-Kurd's writing strikes the same tone in a drastically different context: "[Zionism] is at war with our ability to articulate, even if only through poems and protest chants, a future in which Zionism does not reign." The primary phenomenon El-Kurd identifies to this end is that of dehumanization—not just a banal sentiment that reduces his people to pieces on a chessboard, but more generally, "the West's refusal to look us in the eye." This takes the form of not only a denial of human nature ("what is logically understood to be a man's natural reaction to subjugation is an uncontained and incomprehensible, primal behavior if it comes from us"), but a restriction of "the range of sentiments and emotions we are permitted to express openly." In turn, this serves to "divert critical scrutiny away from the colonizer and onto the colonized, obscuring the inherent injustice of colonialism, thus shielding the colonial project." In this way, the specific tactics of the forces of occupation systemically work to undermine any hope of a path forward for the occupied. Put another way:
"In situating the Holocaust outside of history, in placing it not just in the past but in an eternal future, Zionism today has created a status quo in which the possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present."
The other crucial insight of El-Kurd's work comes from his ruminations on propaganda. The hallmark of effective propaganda in his estimation is the combination of simplicity and incoherence. While the simplicity allows the propaganda to become "a melody of sorts," the incoherence "invites ceaseless argumentation." The way to counter this is not head-on, but rather to reject the premise inherent to such falsehoods:
"The idea is to "debunk" with dignity, always while naming the elephant in the room: propaganda. My mission is not to clear my name from false allegations; rather it is to unmask the deceit and duplicity of my accusers. [...] By spelling out the pernicious subtext of a particular argument (or to simply reveal it through ridicule, dismissal, or repudiation), one disarms said argument, loosening the psychological grip it has on the listeners' minds."
14. The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global - Adrian Daub (link)
"Precisely because its origins had become so thoroughly repressed, "cancel culture" was able to mean many different things to so many. It wasn't really a concept anymore; it had become a meme. But it was a meme that wasn't allowed to admit that it was a meme—rather it had to act as thought it were (still) a highly precise term denoting an acute and clearly defined problem."
"...audiences in the United States and beyond have been taught collectively not to look too closely and not to ask precise questions about campus controversies; instead they identify broad strokes and a looming danger. They zoom out impatiently from the most small-bore anecdotes to supposed global threats to the Enlightenment and democracy."
A brief study on the phenomenon of cancel culture whose length is both a blessing and a curse. The utility of this approach is that the actual substance of the anti-woke warriors is notably thin, which renders a repudiation something of a fish/barrel situation. As such, concision is all but required, lest you become the thing you mock. Part of the reason for this is the very nature of where such rhetoric comes from. Cancel culture critics invariably seek to defend existing power structures, and given that "power doesn't need to bother to justify itself," recycling hoary anecdotes and decades-old arguments against "political correctness" is all that is needed to whip up a moral panic. What's more is that such an onslaught serves to paper over the irreverence and informality of much of what preceded the panic (ie. there's a discussion of "cancel Colbert" in the book, which if you were online then, you will remember was never all that serious), and in doing so, serves to both dehumanize and misrepresent the powerless. The throughline of all of this is summed up in one line about two-thirds through: "They forget the past in order to be able to repeat it." Score another one for Mike's theory of the American Dream as the freedom to forget without having to remediate one's wrongs.
The shortcoming of this approach is most clear in the concluding chapter, where Daub tries to diagnose the panic as a symptom of a crisis of liberalism. While I (mostly) agree with the overall conclusion, Daub's arguments to this end are a bit thin, largely because his narrow text hasn't done the necessary work. I want to specifically highlight three passages from this section:
"For [Ron] Desantis, the Cold War and its logic were stil highly relevant—not in relation to Russia, power blocs, or arms races, mind you, but rather when it came to woke students and campus activities. The word "Russia" never came up, which also meant that February 24th was not, at least in Orlando, a turning point. The fears of the Cold War were present but they were almost in reenactment costumes."
"The reason why authors in YA indeed deal with something that indeed resembles descriptions of cancel culture is thus not that the young readership has opinions online—who doesn't? It is that the economic forces around YA publishing translates this readership's favor or disfavor with unusual directness into professional consequences. But that's not what we complain about when we complain about cancel culture."
"...in this discourse, liberalism comes face-to-face with its own inconsistencies. And the fury and obsessiveness with which it dwells on these stories may be a way of swatting away that contradiction."
All of these analyses certainly sound reasonable enough, but they elide the existence of a certain c-word that underpins all of this; one that might help explain all of these supposed "inconsistencies." Perhaps the reason that Russia doesn't come up in Desantis' refutation of "cultural Marxism" is that Russia is no longer a Marxist entity. Perhaps the "unusual directness" of publishers in the YA space is less a function of their own power, and more a function of a few companies owning the "means of behavioral modification" to inflict horrible damage on all of us. Perhaps these supposed inconsistencies are not inconsistencies at all, but merely window dressing for the latest iteration of capitalism. Put another way, perhaps right-wing cancel culture crankery is not a reflection of a class in crisis but rather a class that fully understand the best ideological route to maintaining its power.
15. Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist - Alexander Zevin (link)
While reading this history of liberal thought as told through the pages of The Economist, I couldn't help but think of the "money" quote from How to Hide an Empire, where the idea of stable governance was, above all else, perceived as "money at six percent." Zevin correctly identifies the three pillars of The Economist's contributions to the evolution of liberal thought over the past 180 years as democracy, empire, and finance. But that last one seems the most relevant and eternal in both his narrative and in observed reality. Indeed, Zevin demonstrates the relative diversity in the aims and ideology of The Economist's editors over the years, but with one brief exception at the outbreak of World War I, one can easily categorize this range of thought on a spectrum from free-trade rightists to free-trade centrists. As editor Walter Bagehot made clear from the start, "what was wanted in the currency was fixity of value, not competition."
The comprehensiveness of Zevin's review of Economist thought is most easily summarized with the free market ethos described above. Democracy helped to manage and justify the market, empire served to expand it, and finance allowed capital to most efficiently profit from it. It is striking then that the second leg of this, imperialism, seemed to inspire the most moderation in tone in spite of the bloody reality of the conquest that underwrote it. The ultimate goal of imperial endeavors was to make the world "safe for capital" which ironically created a "positive responsibility...to some undefined degree, for the distribution of comfort and social well-being." Francis Hirst, the one somewhat sympathetic editor in the magazine's history, went so far as to interpret this responsibility as being in at least some opposition to imperialism itself. He saw the potential debts invoked by imperial conquest and the inevitable World War that followed to be a threat to liberalism (and more importantly to him, free trade) itself:
"The bankers and brokers and shippers, merchants and financiers of the City need ever and anon to be reminded that although the increasing burden of direct taxes upon their incomes is naturally exasperating, it is infinitely preferable to indirect taxes upon their trade and commerce which will take away their business, hand it to foreign centres, and inevitably destroy the supremacy of London."
For Hirst's largely correct prophecy he was unceremoniously dumped from the magazine in 1916. Subsequent events indeed led to economic supremacy moving West towards America, at which point the magazine, seeking a fertile market like much like any of the capitalists it supported, changed its tone to match the tenor of the Cold War. For one such example, Norman Macrae spurned anything even appearing to be counter-cultural, going so far as to compare anti-apartheid protestors to Nazis:
"What I found was the dreariest old Nazism...thew cult of violence, the cult of youth, the cult of proclaiming that one is ruled by a plutocracy...anyone over the age of 45 knows where and when in Europe youth was last asked to bathe in these emotions."
The most fascinating character I learned about, though, was Robert Moss. A native Australian, he started working at The Economist in his twenties. His primary job quickly became laundering propaganda about American foreign enemies, often through direct involvement with CIA cut-outs. In this way he became an attack dog for neoliberalism, spending the entirety of the seventies creating a Manichean hallucination that justified all necessary actions. While he may have eventually been discarded once Thatcher took power, he had nonetheless served his purpose:
"What they had done in The Economist and elsewhere was to heighten ideological tensions through constant intimations of disaster and campaigns of misinformation, creating a climate in which authoritarian solutions to disarm the left became respectable."
Later, he became an author for some time, writing stories of American heroes fighting KGB infiltration that read as some of the purest projection in the history of psychology. He then moved to upstate New York to become, I shit you not, an expert on "active dreaming." Thomas Pynchon has never told a joke.
Fast forwarding to the supposed end of history, The Economist took something of an overly optimistic tone during the Bush years. Editor Bill Emmott most clearly voiced this attitude, which Zevin summarizes as "The long arc of globalization still bent towards peace, even when it looked like it might be taking a detour." Even as the second Iraq War quickly became a quagmire, he viewed America as a "stabilizing force" and as a "giant elder brother" and a "source of nervousness and uncertainty for any budding bullies." This literally childish view of things is repackaged as the ability engage in self-criticism in the conclusion, which taken together, reinforces my understanding of just what the last American frontier is—the memoryless miasma where existing power absorbs its critiques and wields them against the powerless. Can't think of a better summary for what The Economist is, and really, always has been.
16. Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism - Frank Chapman (link)
"Because of the anti-Negro policies of organized labor, the Negro has despaired of aid from this source, and he has either been driven into the camp of labor's enemies or has been compelled to develop purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims. The Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic, political, and social equality...Its task will be to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep apart the Black and white workers and bind them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our common enemy."
-The Third International
An interesting reflection on the roots of Black nationalism that is equal parts righteous fury and poorly organized narrative. There is plenty of useful insight, specifically concerning how certain groups (The Third International, The Wobblies, etc) were most effective in their labor organizing efforts because they directly advocated for Black liberation. Their marriage of idealism and pragmatism paved the way for the most successful incursion of communism onto domestic soil:
"Communists gained so much ground because they were programmatically and concretely addressing the most elemental demands of the struggle for Black Liberation. One, they recognized the existence of the Black Nation , its inalienable democratic right to determine its own political destiny. And two, they joined in the class struggle and the struggle for Black Liberation on the ground, at the grassroots level."
Chapman also provides incisive analysis of broader political conditions. His description of why some capitalist powers went fascist is part of the aforementioned "poorly organized narrative," but it also makes a useful argument about how the lack of revolutionary conditions in America led to a different capitalist formation in The New Deal. He also touches on how post-hoc celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement ignore the problem of self-determination in favor of "an appeal to the "American Creed" or the moral conscience of the ruling class." He quotes Adolph Reed, who says that such thought "assumes a teleological abstraction of social justice toward which all good men will ultimately gravitate." This view of social justice as another aspect of American naivety hits especially hard right now, given....everything.
That said, Chapman's sloppiness does detract from his work. The clearest example of this is his seeming vendetta against Cedric Robinson, which hinges largely on this passage from Black Marxism:
"Still, the historical and theoretical antecedents of the American Communist Party's work among American Blacks and its eventual positions on Black nationalism were substantially drawn from the experiences of Russian revolutionists."
Chapman interprets this sentence as making a more overly determined case than I think it actually does (he even shares it one paragraph after quoting HUAC's much starker accusations of communist influence, inviting a direct comparison). As I read it, Robinson's argument is not that there was no prior Black Nationalist sentiment in America, nor that it did not have influence on the American Communist Party. The chapter of Black Marxism in question indeed does contain discussion of the contributions of Black Americans like Harry Haywood. But an interesting quote from Haywood would seem to directly support Robinson's argument:
"I was the first American communist (with perhaps the exception of [Cyril] Briggs) to support the thesis that U.S. Blacks constituted an oppressed nation."
What's more is that Chapman repeatedly stresses the importance of Lenin in the development of the American Communist Party's development. He quotes William Z. Foster as such: "This program in theory and practice uniting the struggle of the working class and the Negro people, had to be learned from the Communist International and Lenin." He says directly that "the theoretical insights of V.I. Lenin laid the scientific basis for understanding the National Question in general and the Black liberation question in particular." And in the epilogue, he says that prior to the Third International, American communists had "failed to recognize the special characteristics of the oppression of Black people that gives the struggle for Black Liberation its national quality." In all, it's never quite clear what his specific problem with Robinson's argument is, and this lack of clarity leads me to suspect that his motives be less than pure. Oh well, he wouldn't be the first leftist to be unnecessarily catty in print.
17. What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis - Malcolm Harris (link)
18. Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers - Joel Whitney (link)
