TL;DR: Long Live the Post Horn! is just like Albert Camus' the Stranger, except instead of doing a racism and being condemned to death in order to discover the interconnectedness of all things and the value of life, the protagonist simply receives a letter.
Though it may not seem like it, Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth is actually a call to arms. Set in Norway, the novel follows a deadened PR exec named Ellinor. Hjorth seems to dwell in that wonderful Scandanavian tradition of being able to write absolutely depressingly dry internal monologues, and the skill lends itself well to imparting just how bleak Ellinor's life is.
The interesting thing about Norweigan bleakness is that Ellinor's life is not materially downtrodden in any way. While poverty is certainly in the wings, Ellinor has brushes with homeless refugees, for example, the bleakness is more of a spiritual nature. We first meet Ellinor as she stumbles across an old diary she used to keep. Disgusted at what she's read, we are quickly embraced by the idea that Ellinor lives a passive life, one devoid of any meaning. Spending her time working and drifting through everything else. This becomes increasingly evident as we watch Ellinor joylessly interact with her family, lover, and co-workers as well as the world around her. She can barely write, she lacks focus.
Meanwhile, Ellinor's PR firm has been tasked by the postal workers union to try and defeat a bit of famous EU bureaucracy; something known as the Postal Directive. While the directive is a looming threat, all we really know is that it's an effort to force the post office to complete, cost cut, privatize etc. After the mysterious disappearance of her co-worker Dag, who was previously tasked with the work, Ellinor is forced to take the project on herself.
What follows is a journey not just of self-discovery but the value of universality. Hjorth writes movingly about the post office; how its commitment to deliver an essential service to all regardless of any is an affirmation of human dignity. A socialist spin on the existentialist call to live an awakened, active life. Ellinor plunges into a bitter struggle with the forces of Neo-Liberalism because what is more existentially liberating than fighting for the *literal* interconnectedness of all.
The trope that automation is coming for your job is a discourse trend as old as Aristotle. The discussion generally asserts automation and technology are developing at such a rapid rate that eventually all employment sectors will cease using human labor or else disappear entirely. Today the banner is carried by self-identified Futurists, Automation Theorists, and Tech Entrepreneurs all of whom I prefer to refer to as Tech Bros. Not just because the overwhelming majority of them are men but also because they seem to peddle in the Stoner-Older-Brother branch of philosophy.
The recognizable cast ranges from people I find infuriating like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to people I have a lot of respect for like Robert Reich or Andrew Yang. Of course, these are just the big names, there is a whole host of academic writers and other bros who argue that jobs like truck driver, grocery store clerk, manufacturing laborer, etc are going to rapidly disappear, and indeed already have due to technological innovations.
That's all in one corner, in the other corner is Aaron Benanav; New Left Review contributor and researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. In Automation and the Future of Work, Benanav sets out to dispel the biggest myths in the automation discourse. While he certainly appreciates the spirit and value of the post-scarcity world that the Tech Bros articulate, his skepticism is reserved for the main thrust of the proposed narrative. Automation theorists have gotten wrong what's happened, what's going to happen, and what we should do about it.
What Happened? This challenge takes up the lion's share of the argument. For one, it's really the crux of the whole premise; if automation theorists are wrong about what happened thus far, their predictions for what's to come, being based largely on that narrative, are also less likely. It's also a pervasive and widely held belief, espoused by high profile people like Barack Obama, that automation has decimated our employment sector and many jobs with it.
Not only is this largely untrue, it doesn't even make the argument the Tech Bro's often think it does. Benanave takes on two favored examples; the disappearance of jobs and the deindustrialization phenomenon.
The history of unemployment suggests it's caused by shitty economies
To the extent that jobs have disappeared, human labor has not. Some ancillary and illustrative examples are in fields like sewing or construction. Robots have yet to be able to mass-produce tiny assembled components or sew garments, these jobs weren't automated out of existence in the US they were traded away, offshored, they're still done by humans at a massive scale. Construction fields still use tons of humans, while automated tools help make the jobs easier, they don't eliminate the work any more than getting a vacuum or a dishwasher means you don't have to do any labor associated with those tasks. While some skilled jobs no longer exist, a larger number of unskilled, lower-paying jobs have emerged. Using the elimination of certain jobs simply does not prove that the need for human labor is decreasing.
The trickier argument to be made is in manufacturing. Living in Metro-Detroit, it's easy to juxtapose images of hundreds of people on an assembly line piecing a car together in the past with the modern spider-like automation lines that assemble car frames with minimal human input. And to be clear, many people's jobs have been replaced with robots in this way, but the question still remains; is the reduced demand for human labor in manufacturing for that reason entirely? The fact is there are many jobs done by humans in manufacturing facilities (some are even complaining about skilled labor shortages). The real problem as Benanav's data shows is that plants don't need to hire as many people because fewer people are buying the shit we produce. Lower productivity levels mean fewer people hired, this can happen even when there is a high demand for human labor. This is called the productivity paradox, a phenomenon that would not exist if automation had obliterated a genuine need for people.
Put another way, technology has allowed us to deindustrialize while still producing a large quantity of goods, but without the accelerated demand for these goods, there is no need to hire more people or even, as GM recently showed, keep plants open. This drove many workers into the land of underemployment in the service sector, where the demand for human labor is still high.
So while technology has killed some jobs, we are still facing a massive demand for human labor as evidenced by our abundance of labor shortages; teacher shortages, truck driver shortages, engineering shortages, medical and home care worker shortages. Automation hasn't killed even a fraction of the jobs that our poor economy has and it hasn't met the demand for human labor in key employment sectors. What are the Tech Bros talking about?
What's Going to Happen? So far it seems that automation has just worsened a job distribution problem. It's killed certain jobs, but not the demand for human labor. Just because the Tech Bros were wrong about what has happened so far, doesn't mean they're wrong about what will happen. No, automated checkout stations have far from decimated the service sector, barely autonomous vehicles haven't driven armies of drivers out of their field (quite the opposite), but will rapidly emerging technologies? Benanav joins a number of commenters noting we're more likely headed to a "good jobless future" rather than a "jobless one".
Benanav draws attention to studies like those from the Oxford Martin School or the OECD that predict anywhere from 32 - 47% of jobs are "at high risk of automation". Lots of these studies are cited by the Tech Bros who hold them aloft like "the End is Nigh" signs. A lot of implications are developed from "graphs of exponentially rising computing capacities - with Moore's law of rising processor speeds standing in for technical change in general".
Benanav's central beef with what the future holds is one of the more convincing arguments in the book and is worth quoting at length:
"In reality, technological development is highly resource intensive, forcing researchers to pursue certain paths of inquiry at the expense of others. In our society, firms must focus on developing technologies that lead to profitable outcomes. Turning profits off of digital services which are mostly offered to end users for free online, has proven elusive. Rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements. The result is that, like all modern technologies, these digital offerings are far from socially neutral. The internet, as developed by the US government and shaped by capitalist enterprises, is not the only internet that could exist. The same can be said of robotics: in choosing among possible pathways of technological progress, capital's command over the work process remains paramount. Technologies that would empower line workers are not pursued, whereas technologies allowing for detailed surveillance of those same workers are fast becoming hot commodities. These features of technological change in capitalist societies have important implications for anyone seeking to turn existing technical means toward new, emancipatory aims. Profit-driven technological advances are highly unlikely to overcome human drudgery as such, at least on their own, especially where labor remains cheap, plentiful, and easily exploited" (from page 41).
What To Do? One thing Automation Theorists get right is that losing a job in a country like the US (interestingly enough Benanav points out in European and Asian countries automation is seen as a job creator) does a substantial amount of harm. While job loss isn't an indicator of massive automation takeover of employment sectors, it does hurt those most affected. The problem is that because the Tech Bros got the rest of their narratives wrong, their solutions aren't aimed in the right place.
Benanav focuses on two Tech Bro solutions; the UBI and Keynesian stimulus. I'm going to focus on UBI specifically because I've never seen anyone of any profile suggest that a Keynesian stimulus is a solution to automation in the job sector and the inclusion of this solution is weird because it would assume those making it agree that it's an economic slowdown and not automation killing the jobs in the first place.
To be clear, supporting a UBI is nothing to be too critical of, but Benanav even supports it as part of a broader solution to capitalism, just not as a solution to automation. The issue with the Tech Bro notion of a UBI is that it tries to answer the question; what to do with the unemployed. This seems like the right question to ask, except if masses of people aren't already permanently unemployed and they're not going to be, UBI will only address the issues of unemployed people. The rest of those who moved from the industrial sector to the service industry, or the mass of employees across the globe who are still engaged in human labor, will not stand to benefit as much if at all.
This is mainly because the Tech Bro UBI, although it's worthy of support as a distributive policy, still leaves systems of exploitation of human labor in place. It does this precisely becauseTech Bros don't believe that human labor will even exist. Except it will, all over the world. Benanav's solution to the death of individual jobs is a more robust welfare state (it might even feature a UBI) for the unemployed, but also expanded worker representation, protections, and share of profits for workers who will still be doing human labor across the globe.
I am once again plagued by books with
important stories to tell. Late-stage capitalism has let loose a torrent of
books by journalists and political commentators that focus on storytelling as
an answer to suffering. The books center the authors as observers in individual
people's tragic stories while contextualizing them with statistics and studies
of the broader crises. Don't call it Gonzo Journalism, these authors aren't
the main character even if they represent a real presence. They're more like
hyper-knowledgeable observers, they're storytellers, disciples, Uatu; this is
Gonzeaux Journalism.
I've read a number of these. Evicted by MatthewDesmondis about individuals caught up in the housing crisis, Our Kids* andTheShort and Tragic Life of Robert Peace are about inequality. Others, I have only
heard about; The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Nickel and Dimed, Waiting
for Superman, Fast Food Nation etc etc. In all of these (and more) the author
inserts themselves as the arbiter of the tragic types of stories capitalism
breeds, but their role sort of stops there. It's as though simply communicating
the real trauma of the lives of their subjects will be enough to rally their readers
to end the plight (although in each the call to action doesn't seem to extend
beyond "think about it!").
I can now add Sarah Kessler's Gigged to the
growing list. Along with Evicted, it's probably the best demonstration of why
I'm so frustrated with this genre of book. The individual stories of those
affected by capitalism are incredibly important and powerful, but if there is
no radical vision or assessment for the improved condition of the subject (to
say nothing of a call-to-action), what importance and power is there becomes
greatly diminished.
Rather than discuss each of the subjects in
Kessler's work, it's important to assess what end she is using them for. For
example, Curtis is a technically gifted, socially aloof programmer who couldn't
stand the mundanity of his 9-5 tech job; so, he quits and joins an army of gig
workers doing programming work on his own time. Kessler presents Curtis' story
as an ideal; this is the future of work the gig economy promised. His addition
is no doubt to add a level of complication to the narrative, as though to say
"we can't get rid of the gig economy! Look how it works for people like
Curtis!".
This sort of thing drives me fucking nuts and it
is a prevalent theme in Gigged. The one gig economy exec story is that of Dan
Teran, CEO and founder of Managed by Q. MbQ is a cleaning company attempting to
bring the Uber-style, app-based contingent workforce management to office
cleaning. When the idea falls apart because the company didn't have the
management skills to match the enormous amount of startup capital it received
(another issue in the gig economy world that I feel like Kessler barely
addresses), Teran and co take a different tract. They decide to be a "good
employer", a company that attracts top tier cleaning talent by offering
higher wages and other benefits. Go figure, the age-old "pay people
more" strategy pays off. The inclusion of MbQ seems to suggest that in
order to fix the issues in Gigged is if a number of companies decide to
become "good".
The problem in all of this is that there is
actually a lot of room in capitalist eco-systems for "good employers"
and exploitation to co-exist symbiotically. The only time I was exposed to the
concept was in Nicole Ashoff's book The New Prophets of Capital. The idea is
that, not only do "good" capitalists and employers lay cover fire for
bad ones - where they represent the golden child we can consistently point to -
they actually rely on systems of exploitation inherent to capitalism.
One of these is the concept of monopsony. An easy way to think of this is to think about a
bunch of small or midsize coffee shops that pay their baristas a bad wage. Then
you have a much larger coffee chain open up that pays slightly higher, even
gives benefits. What that large coffee shop is doing is controlling the labor
market by becoming monopsonistic. You're not going to quit and go work at the shittier coffee shops,
you're going to have a hard time unionizing or demanding more workplace freedom
etc. We don't have to think that hard this is what Starbucks and a whole host
of other sector companies do. Not every employer could be a "good"
employer or the system would empower workers who could simply go to a
competitor if they didn't like their working conditions or couldn't organize
etc.
So what Kessler is doing, whether intentional or
not, is presenting people like Curtis as an obstacle in preventing the sorts of
exploitation that happens to other people she profiles, like Kristy who worked
for the online, Amazon funded Mechanical Turk or Terrance who got caught up in
the pyramid scheme reeking Samaschool. She'll write scathingly of some of Uber's
lobbying efforts but then neglect to make the connection that some of these gig
companies that "work", companies like Managed by Q, exist exactly
because they can ride the coat tales of those exact lobbying efforts. What is
emphatically missing from the whole of Gigged is a radical reassessment of the
entire system.
The conclusion of Gigged is also outright
dastardly. Because Kessler has believed she's simply peeled back the curtain on
a complicated phenomenon, she too believes that the solution is some
complicated mixture we haven't quite found the recipe for at the center of everything. To do so, she reimagines
the tumultuous history of the industrial revolution as a sort of parallel for
today:
"It took another half century or so for the labor movement**, in partnership with government and private industry, to form things like a standard ten-hour day, state laws regulating child labor, and requirements for worker safety".
This view suggests the exploitation of the time
were almost accidental; just an inevitable hiccup when developing complex
manufacturing systems rather than inherent and intentionally developed features
of the systems themselves. This also suggests these problems were overcome
through out of the box, administrative problem solving as opposed to the
violent struggle the government, labor, and private industry engaged in. Here
is historian Howard Zinn talking about one such....uh...partnership... in
Ludlow:
"This was the Colorado coal strike that began in
September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven
thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron
Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder
of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions,
and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the
mining companies. …
When the strike began, the miners were
immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United
Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the
strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies.
The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller
interests—the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—using Gatling guns and rifles,
raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung on,
drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers.
With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate,
the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as ‘our little
cowboy governor’) called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers
supplying the Guard’s wages.
The miners at first thought the Guard was sent
to protect them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon found
out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strikebreakers
in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat
miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of
women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still the
miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of
1913-1914, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break
the strike."
Storytelling is important, but if we're going
to use it to make a broader point about the unacceptability of things like
entrenched poverty or rampant inequality, we need to be as Michael Brooks once
said; "kind to people and ruthless to systems". A great example
of storytelling paired with a radical vision is Tim Faust's Health Justice Now.
Faust uses first-hand stories about people caught up in the egregious American
healthcare system. Many of these stories are heartbreaking, but Faust uses them
to portray the unacceptability of the world we live in. He then brilliantly
articulates a world in which we remove the profit motive driving a lot of
the issues explored in the book. Faust discusses single-payer healthcare and an eventual move to not-for-profit pharma companies and he has a clear call to
action on how to get there; activism, class struggle etc.
Gigged does have an important story to tell.
Kessler has been writing about this for a long time and the ascendancy of the
gig economy will have ramifications for a long time. It's an important read,
but it's equally important to be critical of anything that seems so comfortable
with preserving the status quo.
The American left maintains the constant goal of articulating a better world. This means reshaping the American perspective of what is politically possible, think of the way Bernie Sanders popularized Medicare for All. Given that I've been able to win various people in my life over to the left (or at least to a position sympathetic to left values) with this method I've internalized the goal; I'm constantly on the lookout for policies and projects that can help reimagine the world we live in.
Enter the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. Kelton's CV is, at its face, conventionally establishment; professor of economics, Chief Economist for the US Senate....Bloomberg contributor. Don't let this fool you, Kelton is here to buck convention and destroy public misconception. Using the lens of Modern Monetary Theory (or MMT), she sets out to dispel what is known as the deficit myth.
The deficit myth is a pervasive view that the government deficit means that the government is so indebted that it is effectively out of money and couldn't possibly spend any more. You don't have to be a political scientist to understand the effects the deficit has on our political discourse. It's used to hand-wring about big, life-altering universal programs, it's used to scare voters into thinking society is on the brink of economic collapse if we don't get some fiscal sensibility, it's used to stage massive political battles on the Hill, some of which are so petty they shut the government down for weeks. Which is all to say the deficit myth is a useful idea to total assholes.
Kelton's telling features 5 core misconceptions the deficit myth is generally used for, each has a chapter devoted to it;
The US government budget operates like a finite household budget
We're putting young people on the hook for our national debt
government debt crowds out private investment
The trade deficit means we owe countries like China
Entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security) are going broke
The main reason the deficit myth, all of the myths mentioned above, are bullshit is, that America prints its own money. It could essentially pay off any number of debts and pay for any number of programs. If it sounds impossible, you're likely thinking about the negative impacts of inflation, but as Kelton adeptly shows, that's a different argument entirely. We should be assessing our economy's ability to take an influx of cash in certain areas rather than if the money is there (because it always will be).
The penultimate chapter "the Deficits that Matter" serves as Kelton's estimation that our economy can absolutely handle large sums of money as long as it's directed to where it counts with programs designed to help reduce the existing deficits that matter (like in education, healthcare, the environment). Whether the programs are "paid for" with tax revenue or whether they're produced via deficit spending doesn't matter so much as getting the money funneled into infrastructure, projects reducing the impacts of climate change, expanded healthcare etc
The Deficit Myth helps us develop policy proposals that will improve our communities, it helps us imagine a better world where we don't handcuff ourselves with arbitrary fiscal constraints. In this regard, it is a very useful book.
Butttttt.........I remain unconvinced by certain aspects of MMT.
The role of taxes - Exploring the politically possible without worry about where the money comes from must be what it's like to oversee the Pentagon budget. Imagine if infrastructure or green energy or education funding bills soared through both houses of congress with the ease that our bloated war budgets do! What would you include in them? These are valuable exercises, but I can't help but feel without the conversation on taxation (MMT suggests that taxes do not in fact fund government spending), you're missing out on, frankly, some of the fun.
To MMT, taxation is used to control inflation or to siphon money out of unuseful places (carbon emissions or offshore accounts). These are useful endeavors, but some of the value in the taxes as a payfor logic is that there is an inhent justice in making corporations and businesses (and even citizens) pay their fair share. I also don't feel like we can abandon taxation as a payfor because - as Kelton herself points out - state and local governments use tax revenues. The continuance of using payfor verbiage isn't to continue to suggest money is finite but rather that it is a public good used to pay for services that we all benefit in.
Doug Henwood has a large piece criticizing MMT, I don't agree with much of it (I think MMT is helping), but I do agree with his position on taxation:
"We have homeless people living on the streets of San Francisco blocks from Twitter and Uber’s headquarters, bridges collapsing, trains derailing, schools falling to bits — the entire structure of private opulence and public squalor, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it long ago, because the public sector is starved for resources. Taxing takes those resources out of private hands and puts them into public ones, with at least the potential for them to be spent on more humane pursuits. Fewer Lamborghinis, more bullet trains. Fewer Hamptons houses, more public housing."
Messaging - Along those same lines taxation is still an important part of the puzzle for how we create a people's economy (the subtitle of the Deficit Myth). Kelton acknowledges that the government needs to tax to control inflation, redistribute wealth, and discourage bad behavior. Except only the first of those seems entirely necessary. No one is suggesting we can just print money consequence free. Yet the idea that we're printing money, doling it out, and then taxing some of it back to incinerate it doesn't have the same messaging power as "the money is used to pay for services" (which again, is still true, since it does in fact pay for local government services).
It's way easier to talk to people about social security and medicare, two successful government programs who have so far mostly withstood efforts to abolish and privatize, when you suggest that they are in fact paying into it. They are! Whether you believe the money is going to partially fund the program or - as MMT suggests - is being removed from the economy, the truth is you're paying for it. The accounting trick of payfor is just easier to explain to people. Matt Bruenig (who is actually quoted positively in the book) gets at the heart of MMT's messaging problems:
"This is a good way to jam up the discourse and confuse people, which can arguably be useful politically, but as a policy matter, it does not add any new insight. It tells you that the correct question is not “how will you pay for this” but rather “how will you offset the inflation that is caused by paying for this with created money since all government spending is created money.” Nonetheless the rephrased question has the same answer as the first one: some combination of taxes and borrowing that will eventually have to be worked out."
Jobs program - I despise the idea of a jobs program and think it is one of the most undertheorized projects to come out of the left. The MMT Job Garuntee (JG) answers one of the striking questions of modern poverty; what do we do with the under/unemployed? MMT: "give them a job". Oh your oil rig laid you off because we're not extracting oil anymore? Here's a job. You're a truck driver and your profession was automated? Here's a job. You get a job, you get a job, you get a job!
The idea is that, somehow, the government can be flexible enough to provide jobs to areas suffering joblessness. There are tons of problems with this idea; no one can articulate what jobs would be ephemeral and useful enough, how long could the jobs theoretically be kept up, some areas have lots of jobs and just not enough qualified people to work them, jobs are hard and require training, etc etc. Which isn't to say I don't agree with a jobs program, similar to, say, the New Deal, that offers jobs to people who can do them especially in times of high private sector unemployment, but a constant jobs guarantee seems impossible and undesirable.
All in all, MMT is useful in its efforts to destroy the traditional deficit myths that plague our ability to use our policy imaginations. If worked out, I think it could provide some pretty compelling answers to the incalcuably stupid, misguided, and bad faith question "hOw ArE yOu GonnA PaY fOr ThAt". But it still has some limits of its own and might complicate certain aspects of the debate that are better left simplified. I'm glad I can keep it in my back pocket, but will avoid keeping it in my front pocket for now.
"Don't be against yourself. There is enough cruelty in the world as it is."
Set in 1944 Newark, New Jersey in the height of the polio epidemic, Nemesis by Philip Roth could not be more of a timely read. All the paranoia, frustration, and pain currently shrouding our COVID pandemic is present at its heart, but so is the sense of injustice.
The story focuses on the tragic hero Bucky Cantor; a fresh college graduate who - being too clinically blind to be drafted into WWII - takes a position as a teacher and summer playground superintendent in the city. Impossible to overstate how likable Roth writes his protagonist Bucky. From the onset, you love Bucky almost as much as his students do. His sense of duty lacks all the annoyingness the trait usually relays, Roth is a master at painting the picture of a young man who genuinely cares about the people around him.
This of course makes it all the more devastating as the worst things imaginable begin to descend on those people. Polio strikes the playground hard, killing children Bucky feels personally responsible for. We watch the strong, dutiful, and likable Bucky begin to rage against the virus, the war, a God who would let it all happen, and ultimately himself.
The reader spends quite a bit of time in this space with Mr. Cantor, existing inside his head as he tortures himself. Roth casts a striking duality; we're treated to scenes of sickening grief as Bucky witnesses the families of Polio's child victims contend with such a lost, then, while Bucky remains externally composed and rational, we're given torturous internal monologues castigating any universal authority for the irrational unfairness of it all.
All of which makes Nemesis a concise and beautiful piece of work. Reading it in the wake of our own brutal pandemic isn't comforting - that wouldn't be the right word - but it does offer a sense of interconnectedness with an America from another time; plagued by a deadly virus, prejudice, war, and senseless, irrational death. Nemesis is a tough reminder that we might actually suffer alone, but also that we can take solace in the fact that we always have.
I was at Powell's Books in Portland, specifically in their politics section, when it hit me: looking for new books to read always makes me have to shit. This happens without fail. I didn't have time to go and resume my search after so the last book I grabbed was one with the most alluring cover: Marxism A Graphic Guide.
I'm not a huge theory guy. I feel like I actually spent a lot of time organizing with the DSA getting dunked on by people who can quote Das Kapital like the bible. I thought a graphic guide would be a good way for a time-pressed idiot like myself to learn some of the basics and defend myself from the rabid mobs of anarchists insisting that Medicare for All is fascism.
And maybe it is, but certainly not this graphic guide. It became clear by page 74 that Woodfin is actually not a fan of Marx. The first 70 or so pages are an introduction to Marx's life and theory of value. Woodfin then pivots, saying "Marxist Theory seemed rigorous....but more or less all economists today believe Marx's theory seriously flawed, or, to put it bluntly, wrong". He then spends the next 100 pages giving massive amounts of air time to Marx's anarchist and capitalist detractors - Bakunin and Francis Fukuyama play big roles - and post Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Significant time is spent talking about the authoritarianism of Russia, because of course.
The last page of the guide has a 10-point criticism of Marxism that includes such gems as "in an interdependent, globalized world, anti-imperialism has had its day. The world is too complex", "the state as such is always dangerous and cannot deliver effective social welfare", "any form of central planning is inefficient and tends toward corruption". It's unclear if Woodfin, who taught Marxism to undergrads (his bio doesn't list where) actually believes these criticisms, but it's strange that they're included and seem to refute a theory he spends almost no time defending.
It strikes me that Woodfin holds with neo-classical and modern economists he cites who, as the brilliant Martin Hagglund puts it, "seek to explain the value of commodities not in terms of labor time but in terms of supply and demand". Even though supply and demand seem like immutable orthodoxy, the concept doesn't reject Marx like some would think, Hagglund goes on: "the model of supply and demand confirms [Marx] argument that socially necessary labor time is the measure of value for commodities. [These concepts] cannot be understood merely in spatial terms but must be understood in temporal terms". The example I found very compelling was if water was even a fraction as difficult to obtain as diamonds, the value of water would be insane regardless of supply.
So to be clear, Marxism a Graphic Guide is a critical guide, paying tribute to Marxism only in its influence as a critical theory of the past. The stance of the author is that we have moved beyond the need for such a theory. And also that the government is inherently evil? Anyway, the cover is still pretty damn cool and I have to give it to illustrator Oscar Zarate, the art is fun:
Written in devastatingly beautiful prose, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things starts with an immense tragedy - the drowning of a young English girl - and unravels everything before and after, traversing time and generations to do so.
It is an intensely visual novel. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say the ultimate god of small things is Roy herself. Her descriptive form follows the narrative of the novel. If she wants to describe a room or an event, she starts by focusing in on the poetry of the smallest adjacent objects and expands out. While much of the praise The God of Small Things received, including that printed on the book, compare her to Faulkner, but I tend to think this style more original.
The words "white supremacy" or "Eurocentrism" never appear in The God of Small Things, but they play a central role in the destruction. Roy rather than baking the love of everything white and European into her characterization directly, she takes the more subtle and difficult route of integrating these concepts into the objects that make up the novel's setting, the character's clothes, the way other people interact with them, etc.
There are tons of examples as to how fun and original this prose style can be. Anyone with Fox News loving, paranoid grandparents can relate to this passage:
"She was frightened by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel surfed. Her old fears of the revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them. She used her windows for specific purposes. For a Breath of Fresh Air. To Pay for the Milk. To Let Out a Trapped Wasp"
Everything from the sentence casing on the uses for windows to the "direct threat to furniture" makes an enjoyable read.
I think one of my favorite things about Roy, on in full display writing this book, is how well she writes children. All the nuanced adorableness in their dialogue, things like "feeling vomity" or "afternoonmare", and in their view of the world. The novel focuses mostly on Rahel and Eshta; young precocious twins whose inner thoughts, expressed exactly how you would expect a child's thoughts to be, pepper the story and whose simplicity adds anything from humor to debilitating grief to any given moment.
Of course the beauty of the style is on full display too. Without spoilers, my favorite line in the book pertains to the way the caste system destroyed the possibility of working-class solidarity in the Indian Communist movement (as demonstrated by the event central to the novel): "And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature".
