1. Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights - James Peck (link)
"We divide the world in two. Those countries who choose democracy, we help. In those countries which do not choose, we create conditions where they will choose it."
-Morton Halperin, US State Department, 1994
"More can be won by illusion than coercion"
-Harold Lasswell, 1927
"Does freedom of the press extend to a paper's right to support armed, externally controlled forces (the Contras) attempting to overthrow an elected government? Human rights reports rarely delved into such questions.
In 1975, the Senate's Church Report on Cia operations against the Allende government in Chile had pointed to the funds that flowed to El Mercurio so that the paper could spread CIA-planted rumors and propaganda, showing how the CIA made Allende's censorship of the paper a centerpiece in a highly orchestrated campaign to accuse him of suppressing "freedom of the press." Did human rights groups assume such standard operation procedures of ideological intervention were myths? Irrelevant? Unworthy of investigation? They simply took no position."
-The Author
I started the new year off with an absurdly appropriate subject to dig into given *gestures around* literally everything going on right now. Based on a painstaking documentation of decades worth of American overtures towards "human rights," Peck's main accomplishment in this book is using this history to construct a fascinating synthesis. Per Peck's analysis, there are broadly speaking two existing conceptions of human rights: one that is focused on narrow, individualistic liberties, and another that speaks to more systemic and economic rights driven by material conditions. The apparent fecklessness of Western human rights organizations is repeatedly shown to be symptom of adopting a laser-like focus on the former current, largely at the behest of American hegemony. At the same time, the American government and its ilk are explicitly aware of this second current, and in fact use the concepts associated with this current in their analysis of how to keep such an ideology at bay. This contradiction between knowledge and action is made most explicit in an analysis (from none other than the CIA) of how a growing liberal bourgeois class will serve as a natural counterweight to the very possibility of insurgency:
"Yet Washington's managers were not too worried. They judged that "the widening income and regional disputes" would not be "incompatible with a growing middle class and increasing overall wealth," a situation not inimical to American power. If their guardedly argued economic predictions held true, CIA-funded task forces foresaw a planet of 2 billion somewhat-well-off people—enough to sustain the globalization process—living amid 4.7 billion others."
And yet, Peck's narrative reveals yet another level of contradiction that gives his work an additional richness. Despite the ruling class possessing a general knowledge of the ideology of their opposition, they have been bound by the shackles of their own ideology to never be able to properly synthesize their own shortcomings. Peck begins to hint at this in the introduction with this anecdote:
"Kennan, for example, puzzled over the contradiction between the Soviets' realism and their fanaticism. "I must say I admire" the Communist leaders, he said in his lectures to the National War College in 1947, "for the realism with which they look to the essential features of power and do not allow themselves to be carried away by the more petty sorts of human vanity." And yet, inexplicably, the Kremlin held fast to an ideological prism, distorting reality to suit its own needs (the class struggle, capitalism's decline, the certainty of revolution and of the economic development of Communist society). How could these men be at once so objective and yet so ideological? This was "the key question to understanding the whole system," Kennan concluded, "and I am frank to say I don't know what the answer is." Greater self-awareness might have suggested a place to start."
This is a wonderful example of how ideology (especially that of capitalism) often takes the form of unstated assumptions about how the world works; both in Kennan's inability to comprehend the Other, and in Peck's assertion that Soviet ideology was necessarily distorted. Peck subsequently demonstrates how the West's dominant conception of "freedom" is a critical part of this blinkeredness. Per the aforementioned narrow conception of "human rights," this ideal is seen less as a general humanistic freedom and more as a "freedom of capital" which "stood apart from and often against such other core values as equality, community, solidarity, and redistributive forms of justice." How a pursuit of such freedom sustains and reinforces itself is perhaps best understood through the West's usage and deployment of media. The commodification of images such an approach produces serves to "simplify and dramatize reality, disrupting the context of politics by focusing on an instantaneous present, and encouraging emotional reactions to events rather than reflective consideration of them." Within the context of the book, the treatment of human rights violations as individual events devoid of context ironically makes them easier to dismiss and to forget. And so yet again, as this blog has noted before and will continue to note ad infinitum, we can understand the American conception of freedom as fundamentally the freedom to forget. After all, when knowledge is commodified it takes on a cost; one for which few are willing (or even able) to pay the price.
2. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut (link)
"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed."
In the past, I've lodged mild complaints about otherwise great sci-fi novels giving short shrift to the story itself. So let me give full credit to Vonnegut for absolutely nailing that aspect, weaving an intricate yet simple tale while sacrificing little else. As is typical with his works, Vonnegut's wit and wisdom is worth it no matter what. That he's able to weave these strengths into a coherent story with a clear thematic purpose makes The Sirens of Titan something special. Rumfoord's plight (being strewn across time and space thanks to his encounter with a "chrono-synclastic infundibula") leads directly to founding his new religion on the basis of his knowledge of the future, while Constant's slower journey from profound ignorance to sublime wisdom leads to a wholly different relationship to "the truth." What this asks us to consider is the possibility that the only real "agency" we have as individuals (or perhaps even as a species) may be the decision of how to approach our fundamental lack of any real agency on a more cosmic scale.
3. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces - Seth Harp (link)
"One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff's warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, Robert Seward, a bearded black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam."
A useful piece of reporting on the terrifying levels of immediate blowback from the War on Islam Terror in the form of rampaging, drug-addicted special forces soldiers and veterans. The journalistic approach doesn't lend itself to any sort of analysis beyond the obvious, but it's still useful to understand how units like Delta Force operate with a level of impunity that would (and does) make the regular Army blush. It's also striking to observe the dialectic of these groups drawing people in with the promise of community (not just the obvious camaraderie but also in material concerns like the promise of free healthcare), and then, largely by means of the mental burden of performing their amoral mission, driving their operators to some combination of greed and ruin (ie. there's a story near the end of a military widow not receiving a life insurance benefit because her husband's overdose was deemed to be "misconduct").
4. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? - Gabriel Rockhill (link)
"If you demonstrate to someone that they've been ideologically inculcated, they may be able to overcome it. If you teach them how the system works that brainwashed them, they are given the tools necessary to liberate themselves and others because objective ideological criticism of this sort brings into relief the system that produces—and will continue to produce and reproduce—ideological subjects."
In many ways, this is the book I would write if I was so inclined to write a book. Not only does Rockhill's work draw extensively on some of my favorite reads from the past six years (The Cultural Cold War, The Mighty Wurlitzer), but it also ties the sordid history of our three-letter agencies' exploits into a broader Marxist analysis of knowledge production. Specifically, Rockhill looks at the "social totality, encompassing various state agencies, non-governmental organizations, and corporate soft power initiatives" to show how "socioeconomic conditions—in the macroscopic sense—are ultimately the primary driving forces, but they do not mechanically determine ideology." Put more simply, money is the language of capital, and thus, knowledge created at its behest will inherently be influenced and shaped by that social relation.
What is specifically fascinating about this approach is how Rockhill's own method (dialectical historical materialism) is simultaneously useful towards his analytical ends, and serves as a direct contrast with the methods of the titular Western Marxists. This is perhaps best exemplified by Rockhill's use of this blog's favorite watchword—complexity—in a constructive (and necessary) sense rather than reductive sense. Indeed, the process of knowledge creation can only be truly understood through a thorough accounting of al of its inputs, both material and ideological, which categorically requires something more than vulgar materialism or rank ideology:
"Unlike the extremes of idealism and empiricism, materialism draws on as much concrete data as possible to account for the socio-actual totality, but it concretely abstracts from the minutia of empirical details in order to integrate and synthesize them at a higher level by establishing the most coherent explanatory framework, which in continues to test and modify based on practical trials. It is important in this regard, and it needs to be emphasized, that DHM does not simply scrap all of the work done within the framework of bourgeois knowledge production. On the contrary, it draws on whatever aspects of it that can make valuable contributions, but it seeks to move knowledge to a higher level of synthesis, coherence, and practical relevance by developing superior explanatory and transformative Wissenschaft of human life on planet Earth."
Subsequently, Rockhill draws on the work of Lukacs to generalize this idea. It is not just the process of knowledge production that is irreducible to simple concepts, but indeed, knowledge itself:
"...a dialectical approach recognizes that "objective reality is fundamentally richer, more diverse and more intricate than the best developed concepts of our thinking can ever be," while at the same time it strives to improve our apprehension of the real through an ongoing process of scientific elucidation. [...] One of the strengths of the materialist approach is precisely that it dialectically situates subjects within a broader objective world and understands full well that the former cannot completely and absolutely grasp the latter."
While this acknowledgement of (but not surrender to) complexity is critical to dialectical thought, the defining difference between it and Western Marxism is one of the fundamentals of the discipline: class struggle. In this light, the atomized views of Western Marxists can be read as a negation of class struggle, and indeed, thinkers like Adorno often explicitly address this in their works. But to what end? Let's start with Walter Rodney:
"The bourgeois class—the capitalist class—has an interest in specifically mystifying the application of scientific principles to society; because the same application of scientific principles to society would suggest that we must understand the changes—the transitions by which capitalism itself came into being, and by which the particular class in power will be removed from power."
Rockhill subsequently expands on this, and explicitly associates the two modes of thought with two separate value systems:
"These theoretical practices, one based primarily on exchange-value and the other principally on use-value, are largely incompatible. One is a product of the intellectual sector of the bourgeois superstructure. The other endeavors to develop a scientific apprehension of reality in order to transform it."
Where this leaves us is trying to understand how a thinker can possibly be "Marxist" while espousing (and furthermore, working to develop) an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to revolutionary praxis. Perhaps I have spent too much time learning about conservatives (peep the next book on this blog), but so much of the output of these Western Marxists (at least in Rockhill's accounting) reads as the fundamental conservative truism of valuing what's directly in front of your face above all else:
"Sense-perception is the lowest level of socialist consciousness. It simply consists in looking at the world and comparing it to a picture in one's mind, without necessarily understanding the nature of the world or the struggles at hand. This reductive approach is characteristic of imperial—and imperious—Marxists, and their analysis of socialism usually consists in comparing a preconceived image of socialism or communism to what they perceive in the world, which is powerfully mediated by the ideological propaganda that they consume via the bourgeois media and academic world."
Why then does this ultimately matter? On one hand it's very obvious: by borrowing from both the Marxist and the conservative traditions, these thinkers lend tacit support to the American empire while boxing in "the left" and preventing more radical thought. In a way, I would even go so far as to say Western Marxists synthesize the two poles to "dominate and transcend" the worse excess of either inclination, for better or worse. But given that the worse end of this distorts both the meaning and the causes of the most infamous crime of the right, I think it is clear that it represent a false and amoral equilibrium that should not be pursued by any serious Marxist:
"[The Holocaust] industry has distorted the history of the Nazi Holocaust, and fascism more generally, by promoting a cultural and exceptionalist misrepresentation of it that works to shore up imperialist interests (especially Zioimperialism), while obscuring the actual history of fascism as an anticommunist project bankrolled by the capitalist class and deeply rooted in Western colonial traditions. The Frankfurt school, for its part, caught the rising postwar wave of the Holocaust industry, under the forlorn banner of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, while writing theory that was funded in part by investments in the corporation that produced the poison gas used at Auschwitz."
5. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump - Corey Robin (link)
"This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior...is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."
The latest in the "Mike pulls a book off the shelf he might not have previously read to completion" series is a fun collection of essays that doesn't quite live up to the "book that predicted Trump" hype. While Robin's primary definition of conservatism (above) is indeed somewhat related to my own (an undying deference to that which is directly in front of your face), there is still plenty of material to support my simpler estimation. Most of that material is from Michael Oakeshott, which suggests maybe I should have just read him. Oops! In all seriousness, beyond the highly relevant quotes from Oakeshott's work ("[conservatism] is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition...to enjoy the present."), Robin synthesizes and builds on the work of others enough to make it a useful compendium nonetheless. Here, for example, we see how conservative thought is not merely counter-revolutionary in spirit but in its very mode of thought, where one must forego the very possibility of dialectical synthesis in favor of unending zero-sum games:
"Take Michael Oakeshott's famous definition in his essay "On Being Conservative": "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the super-abundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott's either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation."
6. America, América: A New History of the New World - Greg Grandin (link)
"The Truman administration insisted that "business and private capital could easily flow more freely into countries to the south of us if obstacles which now stand in the way were removed."
Those "obstacles" were human beings. They were trade unionists, peasant activists, students, intellectuals, voters, economic nationalists, dissenting priests—they were the "democratic leftists" who were then being eliminated across the region, anyone who might scare off investment or increase a nation's loan risk [...] Politicians and businessmen who wanted to modernize their economies had to eliminate dissent, since, as George Marshall told them in Bogota, and Washington constantly reiterated, they needed to attract private capital. For that, they had to show they had matters in hand."
A wonderful journey from the terrors of conquest to the promise of pan-Americanism that harkens back to Ada Ferrer's Cuba for both its wide scope and its dual-path narrative. This dialectical nature is especially useful in two particular sections of the book. The first of these goes back to the start, contrasting the idealism of English colonialism with the "black legend" of the Spanish conquest. In fact, the critique of colonialism encouraged by the inquisitive, humanist spirit of Las Casas and other Spaniards actually helped England imagine itself to be relatively benevolent. If the chronicles of Spanish terror in Brevisima Relacion were correct, well then, they must be worse stewards of the native population than the English. While outright denial of their own atrocities helped England (and later the United States) grow and maintain this fiction, a sleight of hand with respect to property claims helped as well. A Locke-ian notion of labor (specifically labor as practiced by the settlers) as that which elevates the natural bounty into the realm of private property served to dispossess those who did not "activate right of possession" nor "create value." By contrast, the constitutions of newly independent nations in Latin American spoke of the social rights that came from eschewing unlimited freedom in order to live in harmony with others. Indeed, it is this competing normative vision of society that provides the basis of Grandin's narrative:
"Latin Americans love "everything that unites," [Francisco] Bilbao wrote, "we prefer the social over the individual, beauty over wealth, justice over power, art over calculations, duty over interest." Over the years, what has often been taken for "Anti-Americanism" in Latin America is better thought of as a competing version of Americanism."
The second notable contrast is both the focus of the pull quote above and the most common subject matter of this blog: the Cold War. As we already know, the New Deal order that preceded the Cold War was one built on a certain level of cooperation between capital and the people. Specifically within the context of Grandin's narrative, the "Good Neighbor" policy towards Latin America was both a boon towards those nations and benefitted businessmen who desired more liberal trade policies. The overall goal of such an approach was not just to beat back fascism but to "support the virtuous in creating a social-democratic order in which all could eat, work, and live in health with dignity." This positive vision of liberalism succeeded for a time in part because of this holistic approach:
"This is what a coalition rising to dominance sounds like, able to seamlessly unite domestic and foreign interests, to reconcile isolationist and internationalist impulses in a moral vision that offered citizens a new way to think about the world. Roosevelt himself made this point. The Good Neighbor Policy "has the virtue of explaining itself," he told a conference of Anglican and Episcopal clergy."
Of course, the contradictions inherent to such an arrangement couldn't hold once the specter of fascism became less immediate. The story of America's role in the weakening of Latin America's liberal democracies has been told in more detail elsewhere (so much so that Grandin simply points us to some of his other works). But it is striking how directly and efficiently the security state the US helped build to combat Nazi influence in Latin America was immediately turned towards "not just Communists but all labor and peasant activists." In one particularly illustrative example, Pinochet used the Pisagua penal colony in the Atacama (originally constructed to hold Germans, Japanese, and Italians during the war) to round up dissenting miners, and later, to torture, kill, and dispose in mass graves the victims of his regime. The lesson from this is not just the simplistic (but correct) Chekhovian instinct regarding military/police/surveillance buildup, but something greater: that the domestic politics of Latin America "couldn't be stabilized until the interstate system that destabilized them was reformed." Grandin himself isn't willing to go further, but I will: these polities can't be made permanent and durable until this same interstate system is abolished and transcended.
7. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism - Thea Riofrancos (link)
"In so many of these places, mining wasn't an isolated threat or a discrete harm. It was yet another wound on landscapes parched by global warming, yet another injustice in a community relegated to the margins, yet another false hope for those long promised, and long denied, a share of the riches of our global economy. Put simply, each of these locales I visited felt like the wrong sport for a large-scale, intrusive mine. But this inevitably raised the question: What would be the right place?"
Early in this book, the author describes the delicate desert ecosystems of the unique places that house much of the world's lithium reserves. It's a fascinating picture of the complexity and interdependence that exists in even the most seemingly barren corners of our planet. Riofrancos then spends the rest of her narrative discussing the ins and outs of the political economy of the extraction of these natural resources in a manner that almost seems like a purposeful extension of the opening section. After all, if what we're fundamentally discussing here is man's desire to dominate nature, then it only makes sense to highlight the fundamental folly and impossibility of ultimately transcending the limits that nature places on us.
To demonstrate how these natural processes are recapitulated in our politics, Riofrancos spends her time detailing the overlapping and conflicting goals of the different groups attempting to mitigate climate (which is very reminiscent of another book I recently read). She makes it clear that, while we can't truly know the inner workings of the private companies that dominate the mining industry, those companies are both made up of and subject to a series of bureaucrats who "command an intimate, workaday knowledge of otherwise concepts." By doggedly tracking down and speaking with these people, Riofrancos is able to piece together overarching theories about the system at hand, such as how the idea of sustainability has effectively become just another tradable commodity. And while she appears to give green capitalism a fair hearing, everything in her narrative, from the origins of the unequal exchange of colonialism to the very real and obvious shortcomings of modern greenwashing efforts, shows how it can't overcome the unbroken power relations that inherently lead to displacement and ruin. Riofrancos smartly avoids overdetermining her prescriptions while making it clear that the desire for "circularity" (a combination of state power and environmentalism housed within national borders for reasons of "security") is ultimately a dead end.
8. A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn (link)
"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."
-Helen Keller
Continuing my year-long theme of dusting off the bookshelf, here's a classic I was gifted on a lark a decade ago but never read. Given that background, it's fun to consider what this might have done for me then versus what it does for me now. Even though I've covered many of the themes and ideas here elsewhere with more targeted precision, it's easy to trace the root of most of the things I believe (and know) about our sordid history back to this seminal text. Indeed, seeing everything laid out in a breezy, completist manner is informative in its own right, as it allows the reader to make connections you might not otherwise make (ie. there's a George Floyd for everything, our conquest of the Native Americans reads like Israel's current policy towards its neighbors, and the bipartisan consensus on war powers long predates the rise of American Empire). And even if reading this tome constitutes preaching to my own choir, there is still value in seeing these self-evident truths repeated back to me in stark, often witty prose:
"The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the system stabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poor intact. It was a common sequence in American history."
"The last words heard from the platform were: "Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us." Then the police charged, using their clubs."
One particularly interesting aspect of this book is Zinn's deft approach to class analysis. In the introduction, he is clear that his approach here differs from that of the typical American historian:
"The historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations [...] If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win."
True to his word, Zinn centers much of his narrative on explicit class conflict. Moreover, he refuses to be overly simplistic or binary in his analysis. Throughout the book, he makes clear how the ruling class uses the "middle class" (he doesn't really use the word bourgeois for reasons that will become clear) as a "buffer between the rich and the dispossessed." He summarizes this best near the end:
"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority."
That the dispossessed become a literal minority appears to be a key part of his point; this middle class is not just the academics he mentions in the beginning, nor the classical definition of the bourgeois, but rather the majority of the country. Indeed, it is these exact people to whom he implores his message in the closing pararaph of the original version:
"The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards."
9. Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right - Quinn Slobodian (link)
There's very little here that isn't covered in spirit in Slobodian's other work, or in other similar encyclopedias of the modern right. Regardless, there's tons of "fun" anecdotes and a deep enough dive into newer pathologies (ie. the goldbugs) to stir some new thoughts in my brain. The first is a further development in my central thesis of conservatism as valuing only what is directly in front of your face. In Slobodian's narrative, you can almost imagine the words of Hayek and his ilk offered in support of a humanist utopia, albeit one that is profoundly corrupted by its devotion to the value-form. In this way, it's the blinkeredness of only focusing on the political economy directly in front of your face that limits conservative thinkers. Take this passage for one:
"Hayek seemed to demand something elusive: a small group without the group feeling that might move in the direction of sharing, a society absent of demands for social justice, a troop with no impulse toward redistribution: communal cohesion without a sense of community."
Elsewhere, Hayek's Austrian descendants saw "society as an interpretive process which translates meaningful utterances of the human mind into socially useful knowledge." Again, this sounds positively humanistic and correct on a surface level, but when it's twisted through the perversions of neoliberal philosophy, we see that this "knowledge problem" can only be solved through dutiful adherence to market logic. And most notably, when these folks turn towards the topic of racial inequity, the historical record that clearly demonstrates the cause of such phenomena is at fundamental odds with the gospel they preach. So to a man, they all eschew the very notion of history as having explanatory power for lazy and reductive appeals to "biological reality."
The constant stream of racism on display here serves an additional point; one related to the endless class vs race debate. As much as one might want to treat racism as sui generis to the conservative project, it's instructive to see just how often these thinkers explicitly ground their racism in appeals to the economic base. As Slobodian puts it, this "importance of the human factor and the endowments of culture in economic success" is seen everywhere. Take Peter Bauer:
"Bauer noted that "differences in economic abilities and attitudes are especially wide between people who belongs to different cultures," seeing this as the biggest obstacle to economic development. "What holds back many poor countries," he put it bluntly, "Is the people who live there.""
More generally, pundits like Peter Brimelow opined that market logic itself may be at odds with certain cultural conditions. Conveniently for him, advances in technology could ameliorate the need for cultural considerations:
"...you don't actually need immigration to smooth out any demographic imbalances: the greying of the baby boomers, the social security problem, as long as you have technical innovation. [...] ...what this means is that massive immigration is not necessary for economic reasons."
Finally, Slobodian doesn't go quite this far, but it's not hard to read some sections of this and get the sense that overt political racism acts as something of a red herring (or perhaps, more accurately, red meat) in the modern landscape. In his section on the dreaded goldbugs, we get a sense of why the AfD really exists:
"Yet the original "alternative" they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or "Islamification" but an alternative to the euro as a German currency."
In summation, a political tendency whose first principle is to be subject to no one is going to find it easiest to advocate for that fundamentally unpopular principle by finding an outgroup to act as the sin-eater for all the problems capital has created. Don't let them get away with it.
10. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - Barbara Ehrenreich (link)
"When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."
Transitioning from dusting off my bookshelf to dusting off my wife's, I decided to finally read this classic. I remembered hearing a lengthy discussion of this here after Ehrenreich's passing, and I remembered there being two distinct takeaways. The first seems obvious but isn't always: that you, by yourself, do not have much power to affect even your own working conditions, let alone that of all your co-workers. The second I...couldn't immediately remember. There's a few other noteworthy points made along the way (how economic theories about bullish labor market break down in reality, how societal change created new markets to offload "women's work"), but nothing that I identified or remembered as that second thing. Luckily, as I read the closing page a slow grin came over my face as I realized this was the thing I had forgotten. Goosebumps!
"When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give."
Someday, of course—and I will make no predictions as to exactly when—they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end."
11. Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis - Giri Nathan (link)
I always enjoy Giri's writing at Defector, so it was a no-brainer to pick up his book-length story of the 2024 men's tennis season, where two ascendent superstars took their place at the top of the sport. It's a breezy read that my wife correctly describes as "a really good magazine article," but I did find his analysis of how Alcaraz appears to divine tennis knowledge through practice to be an interesting reflection on the idea of knowledge generation in general. One part of this was his coach understanding that rigid orthodoxy wouldn't bring out the best in Carlos, leading him to "offer [Alcaraz] a structure to climb onto without restricting what he might grow into." But more generally, it seems that Carlos' specialness comes from his innate understanding of this learning process as much as anything:
"It isn't incuriosity, just a case of tacit bodily wisdom winning over explicit analytical fact. To tear around the court and hit balls at the speed Alcaraz does seems to require an uncluttered mind. Getting wrapped up in the minutiae of equipment or injury could only lead to overthinking, to the gestation of doubts. Alcaraz knew as much as he needed to know and would not be weighed down by a grain of superfluous information. In that, he was like so many other intuitive high performers: It was better to feel than to know."
"As I watched Alcaraz lift the trophy [...] I was reminded again of his admission at the start of the fortnight. He'd been watching videos of himself. Why go elsewhere for knowledge? Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside. Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz. How quickly we'd arrived at the juncture where there was so little for him to learn from other people's examples, where he was writing the future of the sport by himself, expanding its possibilities with every half-volley and high-pressure triumph."
12. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History - David McNally (link)
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