Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to a book review by Matthew Stevenson of Joan Brady‘s Alger Hiss: Framed – A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous (2017) (previously published in 2015 as America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged):
Bonus link: “Remembering Alger Hiss in the Age of Russia-Gate”
Link to an article by Paul Le Blanc:
Link to an article by Kevin Young:
“The Huddled Masses Were Never Welcome”
Bonus link: “Dirty Blvd.”
Link to an article by Connor Kilpatrick:
Link to an article by Radhika Desai:
“Marx’s ‘Capital’ at 150: History in Capital, Capital in History”
Walter Scheidel – The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press 2017)
Ah, more liberal-conservative historical revisionist drivel. Scheidel’s book follows in the ignoble footsteps of Steven Pinker‘s moronic The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff‘s discredited This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. That is to say it sidesteps and obscures crucial philosophical and ideological (and moral) questions in favor of lots and lots of quantitative data, analyzed with dubious methodologies.
I didn’t actually read this book. What I did do is a litmus test. I looked up anything about the Bolshevik revolution in the index, and read those pages. Scheidel cites Niall Ferguson (!!!!) primarily, and, in much the same way soviet history scholar Moshe Lewin has eloquently described regarding similar writings, engages in the lowest kind of anti-communist propaganda by singling out isolated incidents stripped of context and presenting them as representative.
Fortunately there is a book that already existed to (premptively) rebut Scheidel’s: War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, by Domenico Losurdo, which aimed to offer a “vigorous riposte” to “imperial revivalists”. The aim of Scheidel and his ilk is to assert that “there is no alternative” to inequality, and anything that redresses inequality (i.e., revolution) cannot be contemplated. But why can’t it be contemplated? Scheidel does not engage this question in any serious way. But that is his aim: to bracket that question out of consideration and normalize the “structural violence” of actually-existing inequality, by lamenting it from a distance but taking any pragmatic solutions to it off the table. He is not concerned with the horrors of the status quo, only the alleged horrors that accompany any change of the status quo. To put it more bluntly, The Great Leveler is nothing but an apology for the status quo. As Robespierre put it long ago in response to odious fools much like Scheidel with their cynical “humanitarian” concerns, “A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”
Take the opportunity to make a hard pass on Scheidel’s book and perhaps instead look to something by Losurdo.
Link to an article by Meagan Day:
“Jonathan Chait Is Wrong: Neoliberalism Is Real and Fundamentally Opposed to Left Principles”
Bonus links: Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (this is an older book that concretely refutes Chait’s claim that the Democrats have veered left, or simply haven’t veered right) and Liberalism: A Counter-History (this book shows how liberals in general are more aligned with the right than the left)
Link to an article by Daniel Gaido:
Link to an article by Vijay Prashad:
Link to an article by Staughton Lynd:
“John L. Lewis and His Critics: Some Forgotten Labor History That Still Matters Today”
The point that Lynd makes is much the same as the difference between Lenin and Stalin‘s methods of leadership. Someone even shared a link with me to some garbage business school article that said much the same thing about humble vs. charismatic narcissist CEOs.
One flaw in Lynd’s article is the statement, “There is the subtle but all-important understanding that the experience of solidarity in action, not ideology, comes first.” This is not outside ideology, but rather about putting the ideology of solidarity before some other kind of ideology. Ideology always comes first (to be fair, though, Lynd seems to rely on the old formulation of “ideology” as “false consciousness”). The other issue with the article is perhaps the historical focus. In an age of digital telecommunications and globally integrated transportation networks, and the so-called “post-industrial economy,” the ability of workers to strike by setting down their tools and have an impact on employer behavior is not what it was in the historical period Lynd describes. Strikes succeed primarily because they drive a wedge between capitalists and finance, not merely because the workers slow or stop production as such. In other words, strikes work primarily where factory owners owe debt to banks/financiers that continue to accumulate as those same machines sit idle in a strike. There is nothing wrong with Lynd’s history in this regard, but its practical relevance to the present is maybe in question.