READ ANY GOOD BOOKS LATELY?

[Davy King]

Titles, reviews, links. Any thing worth reading about Money & political alternatives to this sorry status quo.

[Davy King]

From Marxism to Post Marxism?
by Göran Therborn, published by Verso
Reviwed by Steven Poole in the Guardian

Is Marxism still relevant? Therborn's call to think "of a world beyond capitalism and its global joint ventures of luxuriant wealth and misery" is probably more topical than the author expected, in view of the current financial meltdown. His book begins by proposing a very interesting schema for looking at politics across two axes: irreverence/deference, and collectivism/individualism. (Thus, socialism was irreverent collectivism; and neoliberalism is deferential individualism.) Taking a refreshingly planetary view, he notes some facts about global economics, takes stock of "left" successes in the 20th century, and laments what he calls "the Bush war against the world".

After a brief history of 20th-century Marxism, the third and perhaps most impressive essay surveys the spectrum of left intellectuals at the turn of the 21st century, taking in Habermas, Derrida, Hardt and Negri et al, with a finely tuned style of analysis and judgment, in which he is benignly ironic about Žižek, defers rather movingly to Zygmunt Bauman's "unusual life wisdom", and conducts an enjoyably terse demolition of Anthony "Third Way" Giddens. The book's most provocative statement comes when Therborn says that the left needs to rediscover a sense of fun. "Only rightwing perverts," he thunders, "have fun at the expense of others." Intrigued, I looked in vain for the footnote.

[Davy King]

I haven't read it but it sounds relevant.

Please add other titles that may be of interest.

[michael dickinson]

Mike Gilliland is updating his novel 'The Free' first published in the early 1980's. The background of the adventures is a Social Revolution leading to a Money-Free economy seen through the eyes of a Irish teenage girl. It's great!

You can read the book and comment on it at the Authonomy website (you have to register) -

http://www.authonomy.com/ReadBook.aspx?bookid=4458#chapter

The book has already received excellent notices from readers but Mike would appreciate any feedback.

[michael dickinson]

"THE COMING INSURRECTION"

NY Times, June 16, 2009
Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

They arrived at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in small groups on Sunday afternoon, proceeding two and three at a time to the fourth floor, where they browsed among shelves holding books by authors like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger.

By 5 o’clock a crowd of more than 100 had gathered. Their purpose: to celebrate the publication of an English translation of a book called “The Coming Insurrection,” which was written two years ago by an anonymous group of French authors who call themselves the Invisible Committee. More recently, the volume has been at the center of an unusual criminal investigation in France that has become something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians.

The book, which predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture, was inspired by disruptive demonstrations that took place over the last few years in France and Greece. It was influenced stylistically by Guy Debord, a French writer and filmmaker who was a leader of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who encouraged the Paris protests of 1968.

In keeping with the anarchistic spirit of the text, the bookstore event was organized without the knowledge or permission of Barnes & Noble. The gathering was intended partly as a show of solidarity with nine young people — including one suspected of writing “The Coming Insurrection” — whom in November the French police accused of forming a dangerous
“ultraleftist” group and sabotaging train lines.

As a bookstore employee announced to the milling crowd that there was no reading scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s recent introduction: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”

A security guard tried to halt the unsanctioned reading, but the man continued for about five minutes, until the police arrived. The crowd, mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including some graduate students, then adjourned, clapping and yelling, to East 17th Street. There they formed a rebellious spectacle, crowding into shops and loudly shouting bits of political theory, to the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.

When the French publisher La Fabrique first issued “The ComingInsurrection” in 2007, it received comparatively little attention. But among those who did take notice were the French police, who began monitoring a group of people, mostly graduate students, living in the tiny mountain village of Tarnac in central France.

Last November nine of those men and women, ages 22 to 34, were arrested and accused of “associating with a terrorist enterprise” and disabling power lines that left 40,000 passengers stranded for several hours on high-speed trains. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutors’ office said that one of the nine, Julien Coupat, was believed to have written “The
Coming Insurrection.” He has denied being the author but told interviewers in France that he admired the book.

The government eventually released the group — who have come to be known as the Tarnac Nine — pending further investigation, with some opponents of the official action accusing the police of carrying out arrests without sufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, the book Mr. Coupat was accused of writing has developed a small but devoted following. Dozens of anonymous translators have posted the text on Web sites. And Semiotext(e), a Los Angeles publisher that
specializes in works by French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, published an English-language edition of the book at the end of last month with a print run of 3,000.

Hedi El Kholti, an editor at Semiotext(e), said that the book’s windingup as a key part of a controversial case added to the historical value of its message.

“Everyone is dancing around this notion that publishing a book can take you to jail,” he said recently by telephone. “That a book is an element that can involve you in a trial.”

The slender text is part antimaterialist manifesto and part manual for revolution. The writers expound at length on what they see as a diseased and dehumanizing civilization that cannot be reformed but must, they contend, be torn apart and replaced. To that end the authors direct their readers to sabotage authority, form self-sufficient communes and
learn how to “support a conspiracy against commodity society.”

Like the authors of “The Coming Insurrection,” most of those observing its publication on Sunday night refused to identify themselves by name.

“The book is important because it speaks to the total bankruptcy of pretty much everything,” one man said after the group left the bookstore. “We’re living in a high-end aesthetic with zero content.”

Inside the Sephora cosmetics shop on East 17th Street, the crowd chanted, “All power to the communes,” as security guards wearing black T-shirts ordered them back outside. A few minutes later the cry was taken up again as the group marched into Starbucks on Union Square West.

Emile Olea, 28, a customer at the coffee shop who was visiting from San Diego, closed his laptop computer and gazed at the crowd.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “But I like the excitement.”

[Davy King]

http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

[michael dickinson]

April 23, 2009

Reading Orwell: George Packer

To judge “Down and Out in Paris and London” and the motives of its author, consider the context of how it came to be written. Orwell began “tramping” and staying in shelters in 1928, when he was twenty-four years old and had just returned from five years as a colonial policeman in Burma. This period (which the critic V. S. Pritchett described as “going native in his own country”) continued—including the year and a half Orwell spent as a dishwasher and English tutor in Paris—for the better part of four years.

That’s a long time to be poor and living as hard as Orwell did. It suggests more seriousness of purpose and staying power than some comments would grant him. It’s true that he came from some rung of the English middle class (“lower upper middle” he once called it, subcategory military), but it wasn’t a social world that leant itself to sponging off your parents. His decision to become poor was just that, but it wasn’t a joyride that he could easily have gotten off once under way, and it carried psychological as well as financial dangers. So why did he do it?

Orwell’s explanation, given a few years later in “The Road to Wigan Pier” (which is a far more sociological and political book, about the unemployed poor in northern England), connects the experience to his years as an imperial cop in Burma:

I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same…I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to “succeed” in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.So Orwell’s own account of his motives is political—but it’s politics at a very primitive stage, where it’s pretty much the sum of his psychological impulses. He had not been living in the kind of circles in which he would have gotten a sophisticated political education of any kind. He was fumbling his way in solitude toward an identification with the downtrodden, but without any theories or proposals—which, to my mind, is one of the strengths of “Down and Out,” not a weakness. A book by an apprentice writer about why the poor are poor and what should be done about it would probably not be a book you’d want to read today. This is a book that shows no fear of what you’re supposed to think.

As a result, it includes a fair amount of unreflective bigotry—no denying the anti-Semitism and other taints of an early-twentieth-century Englishman’s world view. But I don’t think the book is snobbish, which would mean a belief that the poor are inferior. There is disgust, prejudice, amusement, even horror, but what “Down and Out” shows is the start of Orwell’s harsh and prolonged regimen of self-mortification, with the goal of stripping himself of his class prejudices and privileges. That’s a long way from slumming.

The other point about the circumstances of “Down and Out” is that it’s a first book, and Orwell pursued the experiences it describes in order to learn to write. So the second motive was literary. Another comment he made several years later:

I gave in my resignation [as an imperial policeman] in the hopes of being able to earn my living by writing. I did just about as well as do most young people who take up a literary career—that is to say, none at all.
His literary beginnings were full of failures and wrong turns. He was far from a natural at the kind of work he really wanted to do, which was fiction-writing. But recording experience without flinching or sentimentalizing or self-aggrandizement or self-laceration—this is what Orwell seems to have known how to do from the start, and it’s what makes “Down and Out” a classic early work. It shows all the strengths of the nonfiction writing to come, in books like “Wigan Pier” and “Homage to Catalonia,” and also in his essays. (Compare “Down and Out” to an essay he wrote fifteen years later, but about the same period of his life, “How the Poor Die,” or to “Such, Such Were the Joys,” one of his final essays, about his school days. The power of portraiture and description, the casual directness of the voice, the assertions and overstatements, the zeroing in on difficult truths: the whole arsenal of the Orwell style is already apparent from the very start.)

Orwell did not write naturally from the imagination (which isn’t to say that every word of “Down and Out” is factual), but his observations from life and his prose were in sync. In later work he formed his own political beliefs (“against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism”), and readers who want more hardheaded analysis might look at “Wigan Pier,” “Homage,” and his Second World War book “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” which James Wood wrote about at length in his excellent essay in the magazine a couple of weeks ago, and which includes the closest thing to an Orwell policy agenda.

But “Down and Out in Paris and London” is not policy, and it’s not politics. It’s a vivid record of life at society’s lower depths by a writer who’s learning the art of narrative and descriptive prose. The closest thing to an idea in it is something like this:

You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar /lowness/ of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
Those sentences will be wonderfully readable no matter what the current view about the causes of poverty. “Down and Out” doesn’t completely hold together as a narrative—it was cobbled from two separate manuscripts, and it lacks a single guiding storyline—which might explain why one commenter grew bored. But every page has tremendous vitality, and this is directly related to the frank brutality of Orwell’s account of poverty.

The undeniable ugliness of his portraits of the poor is bound to put off some contemporary readers. To me, this probably reveals how soft we’ve become, how euphemistic we expect such writing to be, how many silent taboos and directives we carry around in our heads. The harshness of this book is an expression of its basic sympathy. If Orwell had made the poor nobler and more touching (or, worse, turned them into the heroes of nineteen-thirties socialist realism), he would have made their lives less true and therefore less damning of those of us who live in comfort.

You can read the whole of 'Down and Out in Paris and London' here -

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/downandout.htm

[Davy King]

Saw this review:

Why Not Socialism?, by GA Cohen (Princeton University Press, £10.95)

On a camping trip, property is held in common and each person contributes according to his or her ability. It would be silly to impose a market system, with people paying for the use of one another's tools and earning money by cooking or washing up. It's obvious that the right way to organise a camping trip is on socialist principles. So why can't society as a whole be ordered the same way?

So begins this beautifully written last book (a repackaged essay) from the late political philosopher Cohen. Now, there are ways in which society differs from a camping trip, but are such differences really germane? In sublimely lucid fashion, Cohen draws up taxonomies of equality, offers ethical objection to capitalism ("The market . . . is a casino from which it is difficult to escape"; it is a "system of predation"), and distinguishes between two questions: is socialism desirable?; and, if desirable, is it feasible? The question of just social organisation, he concludes, is a "design problem": that it has not been solved so far does not prove it's insoluble. Tiny books are all the rage in publishing nowadays; this is one of the few that punches well above its weight."

(Steve Poole; The Guardian)

[michael dickinson]

Jack London: The Iron Heel

Ben Granger on Jack London's neglected dystopian novel that rivals 1984 and Brave New World in its prophetic vision of the future


When it comes to accolades for the most lauded prophetic dystopian satirical novels of the early twentieth century, there's no doubting which are the big two. The hyper-Stalinist all-surveillance paranoid nightmare of Orwell's 1984, and the distorted DNA-as-play-doh playground of Huxley's Brave New World. Occasionally Yevgeny Zamyatin's We gets a look-in as a curio, a minor precursor to both, appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley (1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which always gets passed over, despite being written before both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked, despite being written by one of the most widely revered American authors of all time. That novel is Jack London's The Iron Heel. In and out of print for decades, The Iron Heel has finally been republished in the last couple of months by Penguin UK.

Orwell's warning about the grotesque parody of socialism offered by Stalin and his acolytes which plagued the twentieth century, and the grim auger from Huxley on the eugenic, anaesthetic aesthetic threatened by scientific consumerism which stalked both this century and the last have been analysed, critiqued and celebrated to death. There is, however, a third more straightforward great evil of the modern age. The rich crushing the poor, the propensity of the forces of capital - when vicious push comes to deadly shove - to react with the most monstrous and tyrannical violence against the organised labour which seeks to grab more of its fair share from them. The evil that led to the bloody regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their tin-pot descendants. This was prophesised just as uncannily in Jack London's long-neglected novel.

The action of the book begins in the years immediately following when it was written. Labour relations in the USA are plunging as rapidly as the economy, while the thuggery of big-business against the unions increases in turn. Goons break limbs at picket-lines as families go hungry. No fiction there. Poverty spreads apace, and slower but just as surely does the Socialist movement of America (strange fantasy it may seem now, but as London wrote, the US Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs, was growing rapidly, at one point gathering over a million votes even as its leaders were being jailed.)

The book is written as the memoir of Avis Everhard, wife of labour leader Ernest Everhard who comes to lead the workers' insurrection. Avis is the daughter of a prominent US academic, and begins her account as the pampered intellectual circles her family frequents find it a delightful parlour game to invite Ernest for debates, much as panel games will have the token revolutionary on our TV screens today.

Ernest, long-suffering, self-taught and assured union man has steely determination and razor intellect. He rips their arguments to pieces, and the smug smiles subside. In the final confrontation he manages to get one more forthright and honest plutocrat to admit the truth and discard the flannel. In the end their power over the worker has no moral basis and must be set in steel -

"In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched."

"It is the only answer that can be given" replies Ernest.

"Power. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for right, for justice, for humanity can ever touch you. Your hearts are as hard as your heels as they tread upon the faces of the poor."

Avis is entranced not only by the power of Ernest's magnetic charisma, but also by the unpleasant but unassailable truth of the frightful poverty which, as he points out, props up her own classes wealth. She begins to notice the wretched poverty, only streets from where she lives. The scenes of misery are jaggedly drawn, once again, without any need for exaggeration from what London saw daily with his own eyes.

We see both the Everhards and the wider union movement as a whle as they're wrenched to snapping point. As America's oligarchs realise the conflagration to come is a fight to the death, they stealthily cast off the flimsy pretences of democracy. They organise into the great Dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The bloodiest repression seen in humanity's history ensues.

The novel's narrative skilfully shifts focus from the small scale to the large and back again, the snapshots of poverty signifying the minutiae of the bigger vista. We see as the dictatorship takes hold it does so steadily, creepily. The insidious little signs -the silencing and ostracising of academics, the blackening of the names of campaigners, - are shown as Avis's father is hounded from his job, and a reformed priest the family know is hounded into a mental institution. The icy paranoia of the witch hunts is evoked chillingly. With the thug gangs bought from the criminal caste by the ruling-class to pummel dissent - the wonderfully named "Black Hundreds" - the paramilitary paratroops of future Fascism are equally well predicted. He even got the colour right.

The story continues to centre around the Everhards as the years go on and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with the individual intrigues within. The desperate hopes of the revolutionaries are evocatively told in between the details of their struggle. There is indeed no compromise up until an apocalyptic finale.

As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in many ways more prophetic than either 1984 or Brave New World. Orwell merely exaggerated, exemplified and hypertrophied elements of a Stalinist dictatorship which had existed for decades, while the ruminations of Huxley set still further in the future remain something of an allegory. London was describing with exactitude a streamlined mechanised totalitarian dictatorship, backed by big business, specifically designed to crush the labour movement, when no-one dreamt of such a thing, and which would not actually be in place for decades.

Of course his vision was vastly off the mark in many ways. America managed to crush a far weaker socialist presence by far less draconian methods, and real fascism arrived on another continent. But then we're not currently living in a post-nuclear dictatorship with cameras in our living rooms, and no-one's being bred in tanks yet either. He got a lot more right than he got wrong.

In The Iron Heel London laid bare the whole machinery of a mechanised dictatorship, of the class-based mass murder to come, and did so during a pastoral, pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalry-charge. The novel was ridiculed at the time in popular reviews because of its bloodthirsty "sensationalism". Even London himself may have intended the grotesque blood-bath he portrays in the novel's later chapters -the full-scale warfare between the haves and the nots - as more hyperbolic warning than prophecy. These scenes do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time. But they're no Somme, and they're no Auschwitz. The grim reality dwarfed even his savage imagination.

In other ways, it is not such a mystery why The Iron Heel has been passed over in favour of its rivals in dystopia. As a novel of ideas, as an imagining of intricacies into the minute grim possibility of the future it does not live up to them. There is no innovation to excite the troubled imagination as much as the telescreens, doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother of Orwell, and the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological caste-system in Huxley. Being more narrowly political than either it does not lend itself to flights of speculative futuristic fancy. No-one is likely to base a reality TV show on one of its observations.

Orwell himself noted that there was a strong streak of the Social Darwinist in London, a sadistic revelling in the cult of violence and the survival of the fittest. Given that London was sadly prone to the most vulgar white supremacist racism too, his failings could well have turned him to Fascism were it not for the strength of his commitment to the working-class cause. Race itself is almost absent from the novel altogether, a good thing given London's proclivities, though an obvious and glaring blind-spot in a novel about an American class-war. A curious fear of "the mob" when pushed to its limits is in evidence too, the auto-snobbery against workers who don't follow your cause:- the perennial flaw of theoretical socialists.

Far more importantly though as a novel, by the test of plot, persona and prose it is not up with London's best either, and in that sense too falls well short of Orwell or Huxley. The cult of personality London indulges in sadly undermines the characterisation of the hero Ernest Everard, who is ever-so-slightly too much of the Nietchzhean superman to convince, even given his occasional endearing awkwardness. He veers too close to an icon in a Soviet mural. There is a slightly stilted characterisation in other main players too. In the grand epic of human destiny being described in book less than 300 pages long, people come can close to being ciphers, including the narrator Avis herself.

There is no doubt that as a convincing and holistic piece of writing, The Call of The Wild, that thrilling adventure story which also laid bare London's Nietzchean sadism, is a better read, more deserving of its ubiquitous place on the world's school curricula, and a better example of London's gift with the written word.

The Iron Heel is a great deal more than an insightful piece of propaganda however. London always writes with a stern poetic vividness. Both stark and lurid, passage after passage in the book grasp so hard it's impossible not to be drawn in. The narrative is charged with honest emotional energy, and it convinces as a blood-curdling thriller too. This is a short novel dealing with an enormous scope of ideas and events, essentially attempting to dramatise a Marxian analysis of US society. Yet there is never a dull moment. London has the gift of investing the forays into theory with the same excitement as exists in the scenes of bloody conflict.

The "footnotes from the future" device tagged at the end of each chapter (in which we discover Avis' memoirs have supposedly been discovered in a future socialist age) give the novel a lighter satirical edge too, off-setting the book's occasional slouch into portentousness.

And while individual characters may stray near caricature, in the bigger picture London possesses a rather more nuanced insight into the psychology of those at both ends of the class conflict. The workers are the heroes of course, but London does not shirk on the corrupting and brutalising effect revolution inevitably has on its agents. And, even more importantly, he recognises that the ruling-class are not just crooks and thugs. They'd be a lot easier to deal with if they were.

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if they weakened, the great beast would engulf them, and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign, and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.......This was the beast to be stamped on, and the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly believed it.

Many is the Fascist and war criminal utterly convinced they have humanity's interest at heart but scarcely has it been so well put.

The Iron Heel then is a flawed but fascinating read, undeniably entertaining, and containing some of the most deadly insights of the last century. By one of America's best known writers too. This book is a landmark, and has been ignored for too long. Here's hoping its republication by Penguin will see it gain the wider readership it deserves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel

Read the book online here - http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/IronHeel/toc.html