Three Books

 

Lately I've been reading George Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. As he has done in previous books (such as Heat or The Age of Consent), Monbiot shows he's not the sort of leftist author who spends 80% of his book describing problems with the remaining 20% dedicated to vague, generalized prescriptions for alternatives. 

Starting off, I was struck by how similar Monbiot's centring of the importance of narrative for human affairs was to Caitlin Johnstone's writings on the subject. The Left has avoided "metanarratives" (such as Marxism) in response to the ways that the white, male dominated Old Left excluded feminists, racialized minorities, environmentalists and the eco-system, etc., from power and constructed institutions reflecting this exclusion and narrow-mindedness.  (In so doing, the Left seems to have succumbed to the intellectual morass of post-structuralist confusion. Don't get me wrong. Reality IS chaos. But reality is also REAL. Whether you earn enough to not have to worry about homelessness is a condition that can be created by a focused, class-based politics. A Leftism that deliberately alienates ordinary people through the confused elevation of "identity politics" and conniptions about "micro-aggressions" is a Leftism that is quite compatible with gargantuan levels of social inequality and state violence.)

Monbiot's great narrative in Out of the Wreckage is that most human beings are altruistic and that we value things like community and cooperation. But a minority of people are motivated by selfishness. And these are the people who are driven to rise to the top of any social pecking order. Capitalism doesn't just reward hard workers and innovators. (Oftentimes it doesn't even reward these!) Capitalism (especially late-capitalism) rewards the ruthless, the cheaters, the already-powerful, anyone willing to betray colleagues, poison the environment, exploit the sick, kiss ass, steal ideas, etc., etc., ... assholes basically.

And it is neo-liberalism, propagated by economists like Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, that provides the grand narrative for these selfish attitudes to be rewarded. Instead of fellow human beings to be worked with, neo-liberalism instructs us to think of other people as individual rivals to compete against. This system inevitably creates atomization, precarity, alienation and loneliness and despair. (As well as a threatened eco-system.)

Monbiot does a great job describing how adherence to neo-liberal hegemony has been devastating to left-wing parties and to representative democracy generally. He talks about utilizing participatory budgeting and the Donut Economics of Kate Raworth.

I've got two other books to mention so I'll stop there ....

Next up is Eric Toussaint's The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation. I've read other books before about "Third World" debt, but Toussaint's book is the first one that so clearly emphasizes the massive fraud involved in 19th-Century international financing. So far I've read about the loans from (mainly) London bankers to South America and Mexico; London and Paris bankers to Greece; Paris bankers to Tunisia. The peoples of these countries would find themselves on the hook for bond payments that were sold at a discount (but which needed to be repaid at 100% of their value) by bankers who took commissions and fees that routinely amounted to 10% of the total loan. Oftentimes, domestic oligarchs got in on the action too, directing money raised by these loans to their own bank accounts or to the purchasing of substandard goods produced in their own factories. It's a story that really exposes the seflishness, inhumanity and hypocrisy of European capitalism and European imperialists.

Finally, I'm reading Edward Ashpole's Signatures of Life: Science Searches the Universe. I'm writing a Sci-Fi comedy (mostly for my own amusement) and I wanted some backgrounding in the realities (or, make that, "science-backed speculation") of alien evolution and the evolution of alien technology. Ashpole is a science writer, not (I do not think) a PhD-possessing, practicising scientist. Still, he does write about hard-science topics about the physical dangers of space travel; the enormous challenges of the distances in space-time involved; and the likely total incompatibility of space-travelling lifeforms with the alien eco-systems they're likely to encounter. Sometimes the book feels padded by repetition. But it says enough interesting things to keep me reading.