What are you reading now - and then

[Stavros]

Hey stavros , I see that your reading list parallels mine with regard to concern about the the future of our economic /political systems since we both read Joseph Stieglitz's " The Cost of Inequality".
My thoughts revolve around issues such as : Is the Trump election a symptom of the deep dissatisfaction with a political and economic system where real wages for the average citizen have not increased since the 1970's , while 1% of the populace controls 99% of the wealth and in America , any third ( or more )political party is doomed to failure in our" winner takes all" political system instead of true proportional representation as in European democracys . The failure of Capitalism and the failure of nations is made of such stuff...

The point of interest is the way in which trends come and go. You may be old enough to recall the books on modern life and resource management, such as Future Shock, Small is Beautiful, and the books by Ivan Illich such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality (which these days have been succeeded by books by Steve Pinker and Michio Kaku). Set beside these were the 'personal development' works that ranged from the religious/spiritual works of Alan Watts and Krishnamurti through the 'anti-psychology' of RD Laing and Thomas Szasz, the revival of Nietzsche, the fetish for that most peculiar nonsense of Carlos Castaneda, and the vogue for Marxism and 'protest' literature from Gramsci via Marcuse to Alinsky, Fanon and the Black Power movement. If these were eclipsed in the 1980s by the vogue for structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, it may be a reflection of the decline of industry in the west (though most of Derrida's important works were published in the 1960s and early 1970s) and the growth of post-modernism as an expression of post-industrialism though few then or now read much of the late Andre Gorz and probably too many read Foucault's 'horizontal' critiques of power. But what these trends show is how the literature of change became a literature of adaptation. There was to be no revolution, only survival.

What I thus see in the books you have cited is a delayed reaction to the way capitalism has evolved since the 1980s, but I wonder if Robert Reich in particular is willing to take responsibility for being an architect of the widening gap between rich and poor and the erosion of the Democrat Party's affiliation with a declining working class.

It seems to me that there are other trends at work here. The short term trend can be stated simply: the Democrats were desperate for power and the Presidency, and won the White House when Clinton in effect accepted the legacy of Ronald Reagan but pledged to manage capitalism better than he did. To the extent that the Clinton Presidency inherited Reagan's colossal debt, but left the US with a budget surplus, Clinton succeeded, but accepting the Reagan legacy meant a lenient attitude to the off-shoring of production at the expense of America jobs and a 'regulation-lite' approach to banking and the financial sector which meant that even after the Savings & Loans failures of the Bush Presidency, the sector carried on without the regulation it maybe should have had. There was a similar trend in Europe with the Labour Party under Blair desperate to win elections and trading in their working class inheritance for a middle class vote and a relaxed attitude to wealth, whereas in Germany after Kohl, the CDU has re-established itself as the party of power by moving to the left to such an extent that the latest Grand Coalition with the SPD must make many Germans wonder what the point is of voting. But that also raises questions as to why the Green Party surged throughout the 1980s but failed to grow after unification, notably in the East where the SPD is also weak.

But there is a longer term way of approaching this, which is to argue that the industrial revolution that began in the 18th century ended in the 1970s as there were no new developments in industrial production, but a new revolution in computing and communications technology that has transformed 'the means of production' and the 'social relations of production' as Marx would put it, except that there has been a dislocation between the two, not only trashing a key component of Marx's critique of capitalism, but helping to widen the gap between those who benefit from the 'knowledge economy' and those left out of it, doomed, it seems, to a life on welfare or the magical realism of a Dickensian, overnight win on the lottery. This is not covered in the interesting set of essays in the two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism, that was published in 2014.

But, and this I think is important, had China not industrialized in the old fashioned way after 1984, would we have had globalization and the phenomenal growth of wealth that we have had since then? Not at the level we have experienced. In fact, I would go as far as to say that China's industrial growth rescued capitalism from its moribund decade, and that it is simply coincidental that it took place as the USSR collapsed and in turn created for capitalism in the 1990s an expansion of markets -and consumers- that had not been seen since the last quarter of the 19th century in North America and central Europe, with the added benefit of huge -and hugely profitable- mineral resources in Russia and Central Asia that had previously been closed to international business.

It is hypocritical for your President to attack China without which he would not have either the capital or the goods he sells that are made Anywhere but America. Without China there would be no affordable smart phones, tablets and computers; no affordable shirts, shoes and trousers; no affordable long-haul holidays in Thailand or South Africa, and so on. Far from attacking China, we should maybe thank it and its workers for accepting levels of pay that were unacceptable indeed impossible in Pennsylvania in 1989 and China is still more competitive than the US can match for the simple reason that capitalism survives on cheap costs and high returns.

But who gets the rewards? As Stiglitz has argued, the politics of re-distribution that distinguished Labour from Conservative was dumped for market opportunities masquerading as personal choice at a time when the household income that was supposed to make this feasible was not growing as fast as the cost of living. The result is not just the dislocation of production from society, but of society from politics with a generation that was born into guaranteed work now facing no work, or re-training for jobs that were once done by school-kids at weekends for pocket money. In the US this is complicated by the legacy of race, in the UK as we have seen by the EU and immigration. Above all, I think that this cluster of factors that Stiglitz in particular is good on, has bred the resentment that fed into the anger and aggression of the 2016 US campaign and the EU Referendum in the UK, both characterised as Cambridge Analytica would put it, by the replacement of truth with lies and emotion.

The bleak view is that resentment being a negative emotion cannot solve the problem of millions of Americans in search of gainful employment and security; the more positive view is that people adapt. Millions of women used to work as telephone operators and typists. Those jobs disappeared yet there are now more women in work than ever before, so something happened to fill the gap when one set of jobs disappeared and so there is no reason to despair. BUT- I think that there is the geographical problem that new jobs may not appear in all places at the same time; the 'racial' problem that in the US means some people may benefit more than others; and the wider resource problem that water deficit areas may not be sustainable forcing people to move -from south to north in the case of the south-west of the US.

Crucially, and I think your selection of books makes the point, the ruthless profile of capitalism may have to be modified and the concept and practice of 'fair shares' and a more equitable re-distribution of wealth return to the agenda to end the alienation and resentment of citizens, and revive their sense of belonging in the state. But this was at the heart of John Rawls A Theory of Justice and that was published in 1971. At the moment, Republicans would dismiss it as 'socialism' yet the irony may be that for all the failures of Marx, the future may have to be more socialist in a broad sense, or be lost to a dystopian nightmare of greed, desperation and violence -and that is a whole other set of books to read!

[sukumvit boy]

Thanks for those interesting comments and speculations which move me to agreement and further exploration of some of the books and issues you mentioned. I certainly want to read Rawls's ,"A Theory of Justice " and see if I can find a reasonably priced set of ,"The Cambridge History of Capitalism" . And yes, I remember the various trends that you mentioned and read those books , some of which ,like the Casteneda , were complete nonsense.
I was wondering what you think of Richard Wolff ,as I find myself particularly enamored by the 'worker's cooperative ' experiments such as Mondragon for which he expresses such a fondness. And , as you say a modification of the current "ruthless profile" of capitalism certainly seems to be what is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
With regard to politics , America needs a more diversified system of representation , more proportional representation as in your Parliament. We have reached a point where the 'Tweedledee and Tweedledum ' of the Democrats and Republicans , and the 'winner takes all' mindset just is not working anymore.

[Stavros]

In retrospect I may not have been very clear - I see those earlier books as dealing with the anxieties of living in a modern capitalist state than being about capitalism itself so the personal development books offered alternative ways of living to the 'rat race', whereas at the time most of the books on capitalism as such were partisan, being written by libertarians like Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard and in the UK Patrick Minford and a stable of writers at the Institute of Economic Affairs; or they were Marxian critiques. If there is a time lag involved, it may be that it is only after policy makers have moved on that they can reflect on their time in government, but also the 2008 crisis that appeared to bring an end to the so-called 'Neo-liberal' regime established by Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl forced some reflection that emerged in the 'what went wrong' books.

The dilemma for the left, particularly in the UK is that on the one hand there is evidence that the post-war consensus that was built on Attlee's reforming government of 1945 and was maintained by Churchill, Eden and MacMillan presided over economic growth and a more equitable distribution of wealth. As often happens, either politics is more ambitious that economics will allow, or economic changes advance ahead of political change, and with capitalism it appears that the growth of computing and automation took policy makers unawares, but energy price crises in the 1970s obscured the deeper changes that were taking place to production. The State then became, in the UK the guarantor of jobs in failing companies, in particular motor car manufacture entered a crisis in the 1970s and with inflation it became absurd for the State to use taxes to prop up firms with no commercial value. So on the one hand people want some form of state guarantee or backup, but don't want their taxes raised for white elephants. Labour under Corbyn promising to spend billions on domestic industry and jobs sounds too good to be true, but there has also to be something that restores faith in the economy and the ability to live reasonably well and while jobs are key to that, the trend in recent years for low-wage jobs, short-term or zero-hours contracts makes structural change harder than I think Labour understand.

We don't have proportional representation in Parliamentary election in the UK, though it exist for local elections in Northern Ireland. There was a referendum on the electoral system in 2011 when PR was rejected. It sounds democratic but in fact it tends to produce parliaments with no overall control and deals with parties that can often see the largest party form a government with parties that have less than 10 or 15% of the vote. The thought of PR in the UK with someone like Nigel Farage making a deal with the Tories that makes him Home Secretary is chilling, and I would not recommend it.

I am away for the Easter weekend into April and will respond to any more posts when I return.

[Stavros]

Tom Wolfe has died in New York. He has many admirers, and was an accomplished writer, of that there is no doubt, be it the 'new journalism' essays on American culture be it The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Right Stuff (an outstanding film too) or novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities. My own favourite is The Painted Word, a short book which packs a punch, aimed at the means whereby influential New York art critics created a market worth millions of dollars that Wolfe argued was worth nothing.

The problem is that while Wolfe was an eloquent conservative critic of 'counter-culture' and its derivatives- in fact there is a superior critique of the counter-culture in The Radical Soap Opera: Roots of Failure in the American Left (1974) by David Zane Mairowitz- it is not so clear what his alternative was, what it is that he was for. Moreover, the more recent interview with him suggests he was more comfortable as a critic than an advocate, and thus the opposite of William F. Buckley who made a point of offering a conservative alternative to New Deal economics. He is thus not very intelligent when comparing the Republican and Democrat candidates in the 2016 Election -"I have no idea who to vote for", while one of his last books - The Kingdom of Speech- is devoted to ridiculing the concept of the Big Bang, Darwin and what to him is the failure of Chomsky and others to tell us where language comes from -a critique that offers no alternative theories of his own.

An enjoyable read, but his flamboyant style lacks the elegance of Dorothy Parker, and there is in some of his work a whiff of anti-semitism which comes across as the self-invented snobbery of a 'Southern Gentleman' who thinks selling stock on Wall St may suit the grandson of the Shtetl but is far beneath his aspirations as an American.

[slave2u]

just to lower the tone: harry harrison's invasion earth. a lovely slice of pulp sf.

[BlüeKarma]

I'm reading two. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Sabriel by Garth Nix.

[sukumvit boy]

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/20...human-history/

[josehip]

Just finished this sci-fi short story by [trans] writer Jamie Berrout called THE WAITING ROOM about a story in the future about a trans woman and an android woman who are both waiting for their consultation at a surgical clinic.
You can download the PDF here

[Stavros]

Fear, by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, 201.

I paid £20 for this book earlier today and have so far read the first 10 chapters. I would not call the book rubbish - I have not read all of Woodward's books so I don't know if this is his worst, but as it appears to be an assembly of notes and personal comment I am not really sure it merits the attention it has received.

If you think the current occupant of the White House is an idiot, a moron, a narcissistic arrogant and lying 'son of a bitch' and a danger to world peace, you don't need to read this book to have your prejudice confirmed. There are some vignettes, as reported in the Press though the first that had me laughing (in a coffee shop where I took the book after purchase) concerns Paul Manafort who did not realize when he opened a Twitter account that it was public, and revealed his membership of a New York City bondage and swingers club called 'Decadence'.

In the rush to both assemble the text and print it, I don't believe it was properly proof read. For example, in Chapter 5 when discussing the career of James Mattis in the Obama administration before he was sacked, reference is made to Leon Panetta when he was Defence Secretary, but this is not even noted in the text. The sentence in which he appears reads: Panetta told Mattis his stance on Iran put him in real trouble with the Obama White House. We already know that Obama was President, but just lobbing in 'Panetta' without a qualifying ID, eg, Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defence at the time, told Mattis... is unprofessional.

Other examples read like memos or notes, thus in Chapter 8 in a discussion of Russia's involvement in the 2016 election (a topic dealt with in several chapters) a paragraph begins: What has not been previously reported: and on the next page This has also not been previously reported: This is sloppy wrtiting from a man who has made his living using words.

That Woodward believes it was wrong of James Comey to add a rider to a memo on Russian involvement that also included the allegation the President paid prostitutes to piss on the same bed the Obama's slept in seems odd, just as the claim the Russians had full audio and video surveillance of the Presidential suit in the Moscow hotel suggests they must also have tapes of what the Obamas did when they were there.

As for the President, this is a man who loves money, yet in discussions on the economy doesn't understand why the US cannot just print as much money as it likes, which seems far-fetched to me.

I was expecting from Woodward a thoughtful book that would give me a detailed account of the origins of Presidential campaign and how and why it broke the mould of previous elections -none of this so far. I wanted deeper background on the Man himself and what motivates him -nothing so far. I am looking for portraits of key figures from Ivanka to Kushner and particularly Stephen Miller: so far nothing. I want a narrative structured chronologically to build a momentum from 2010 to where we are today: no such narrative structure exists, just chapters that seem to appear at random -this one on the campaign, then Russia, then NATO, then Russia, and so on.

I shall labour it out and read it to the end, but so far this is a big disappointment.

There is a negative review here-
https://mashable.com/article/fear-wo...p/?europe=true

[Stavros]

I have now finished reading Fear, by Bob Woodward, and as I suggested above, it tells the reader little about the President they do not already know. The question, what is this book for? seems to me to have an answer, to save the Presidency as a respectable institution in American political life.

One concludes from the book that what upsets Woodward so much are not the policies, but the style and lack of substance in a man so clearly unfit for the job, whose crude rhetoric, lack of interest or curiosity in the world around him, and the ease with which he insults and abuses his staff when insisting he is always right, undermines the purpose of the Presidency which is to lead the country by example. On key issues the solution is simple: Afghanistan: cant win, costs too much: get out. Or, stay in but take the minerals and get rich doing so. South Korea: costs too much, South Korea should pay for ther own defence: get out. Tariffs makes sense: impose as many as you can. Immigration is bad: so stop it. Bashar al-Asad is a bastard: so kill him. And so on.

As for the sources, it seems clear to me by their ubiquity in the book that the sources are Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Senator Lindsay Graham, John Kelly and the lawyer John Dowd who surely is the source for the all but verbatim account of his meeting with Robert Mueller that forms the last chapter in the book.

Woodward has spent decades cultivating key sources in Washington DC: the military, the intelligence community, and Congress. For this reason there is a lack of alternative sources. Rupert Murdoch for example, who has been a 'confidant' of every Republican President since Reagan, is a key figure owing to his ownership of Fox News, but is only mentioned once in the book when Kushner and Ivanka are on his yacht. Thus there is also no mention of the Fox team that work so hard to maintain a postive profile for the President and his policies, and thus no additional material from the supposedly influentiual Evangelical Preachers, and nothing on supporters who are Governors.

If there is a lack of background from anyone outside the Beltway, there are three deep problems with Woodward's book.

The first is that Woodward has no deep understanding of some of the issues in the book. Like a Washington trained parrot, he illustrates his pathetic ignorance of Lebanon by calling Hezbollah a 'terrorist organization', a 'state within a state' funded by Iran and a strategic threat to Israel, as is Iran. At no time does Woodward show the slightest understanding of how Hezbollah came to be the largest party in Parliament in Lebanon, let alone a single thought on what rights Lebanon and Iran have to defend themselves from nuclear Israel. Similarly, Saudi Arabia comes and goes as a US ally without even the hint that it is a brutal, undemocratic, threatening regime that provided most of the 9/11 Hi-jackers, has funded the terrorist Taliban for decades, and has the long-term aim to replace the Ottoman Empire as the sole Caliphate in the MIddle East with all that implies for the existence of Israel.

But this is because of the second major absence in the book identified by the advice Deep Throat gave him: Follow the Money. There are a couple of references to the President going berserk when told the Mueller enquiry is looking into his finances, but where are Woodward's 'deep background' sources to give him the information on how much many the President has, in how many onshore and offshore bank accounts does it rest, tax free, and how much of it, before, during and after the 2016 campaign came from Russian and Arab sources? Felix Sater is mentioned once, as if Woodward was barely interested in a business partner of the President who is also a convicted felon and intermediary for the Russian mafia.

Because the third omission is the most startling of all: Woodward does not see any traction in the 'Russian collusion' claims. If it is astonishing, consider that while Woodward notes the appeal the candidate made to Russia to help him attack Hillary Clinton -twice in one day-, he does not take it further. But here is the problem: if it is the case that the Russian interference in the US election was in legal terms an 'attack' on the US, then the Republican Candidate, by seeking support from a state that was attacking the USA for his own attack on a US citizen is literally committing Treason. That this argument has not been pursued is surely a dereliction of duty. But Woodward is soft on this issue, referring briefly to Wikileaks, not at all to Cambridge Analytica.

As for the powerful women the President hates- Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon-, not one of them gets a mention in this book. Melania occasionally flits in and out, often in the middle of these hastily written chapters, and for all their affection there is no suggestion they have a sexual relationship, which could raise the question, does the President?

In the end this was a rushed job, and it shows. It is written by a liberal Republican who wants to remove the current President from office because he is so crazy and dangerous, but is committed to the very kind of compromising, collegiate Presidency that is lacking. Spare a final thought for the American people, who only exist in this book as a 'crowd', having little or no character, a set of vague rights and demands, and no access at all to the circes of power that revolve around Woodward's ferocious and ever deepening swamp.