Preamble: --An antidote to Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?… --Let me re-trace the steps that led me to consider a speculative fiction as my most-enjoyable read of the year: i) For context, fiction is buried in my list of reading priorities, relegated to when my brain is in a stupor. I’ve just found little success in fiction for the questions that haunt me. ii) The last fiction to captivate me is Varoufakis’ 2020 Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present; however, this was assisted by the (geo)political economy that was at the center of the book (i.e. structurally, how could capitalist markets for labour/finance/land, global trade imbalances, etc. be abolished). iii) This year, I’ve been systematically (re)reading Graeber (RIP), in particular his under-read magnum opus Direct Action: An Ethnography (written in 2009, before Graeber’s 2011 breakthrough Debt: The First 5,000 Years). One highlight is analysis/demonstration of the uses of speculative/science fiction and ethnography… iv) …And, lo and behold, I encounter this book which combines speculative/science fiction and ethnography (oral histories)! What a perfect playground to experiment with Graeber’s analyses (wish Graeber had found the time to write a sci-fi)!
Highlights: --Each one of these 12 short-story oral histories deserves a full-length book, which I would read (12-for-12 is a stunning success rate for me!). Overall reflections:
1) Capitalist Realism or Capitalist Crises? --Before we imagine alternatives, we need to be clear on the present situation. In the next section, we’ll explore why fiction seems to avoid carefully unpacking “capitalism” (i.e. political economy). In this book’s (fictional) introduction:
Unfortunately, explaining the global market before liberation is beyond the scope of this project. We highly recommend Understanding the Capitalist Market, Understanding the Geopolitics of Imperialist Nation States, and Understanding Wage Dependency as supplemental reading to this section [these are fictional works].
--My one-line summary of “capitalism”: the commodification of society, in particular the peculiar markets of labour/land/money featuring the “fictitious commodities” of humans/nature/purchasing power, which are not “produced” just for selling/buying on markets. Yes, Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time is an exhausting read for this, but luckily we have eloquent nonfiction like Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails to introduce this. I’ve also summarized Fraser’s synthesis of Marx + Polanyi here. --I find this political economy builds a strong foundation to appreciating the underlying contradictions of capitalism, whereas most historical accounts only reveal the brief surfacing of crises (consider: Thinking in Systems: A Primer). --“Capitalist Realism” cannot be a totality; this cancer/virus could not have survived without its host. Capitalism is dependent on: i) outsourcing its contradictions (slavery/colonialism/imperialism, settler colonialism), and ii) watered-down socialist policies (so social reproduction is not extinguished). …Vivid examples include the Enclosures/Industrial Revolution’s commodification (and degradation) of humans/nature to create the labour/land markets in brutal workhouses and “dark Satanic Mills”, culminating in a social crisis in Europe only relieved by: i) settler migration (relief to Europe’s labour market), and ii) public sanitation/health policies (relief to social reproduction): Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World --Thus, this books recognizes: i) looming capitalist crises, ii) the opportunities they present as the status quo crumbles iii) to expand socialist causes, some already somewhat in practice out of necessity; see Debt: The First 5,000 Years for Graeber’s “actually-existing communism” (in contrast to myths of “primitive communism”/“mythic communism”/“epic communism”):
But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.
Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.
--Crises: national states become increasing vulnerable to social protest. States are unable to maintain social reproduction/outsource its contradictions under the mounting burden of the parasitic/volatile finance (speculative gambling/debts for rent-seeking) and accelerating ecological collapse, bringing down the “middle class” (who have been an essential buffer for “Capitalist Realism”). When things we take for granted collapse (ex. car transportation), seemingly insurmountable social norms follow (ex. car culture); paraphrasing Assange, humans are extremely adaptive to both change (heroic efforts to survive) and status quo (tragic efforts to tolerate oppression). A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster …One of the states to collapse is China, which opens up a can of worms on really-existing socialism. I’ll bypass this (still working to synthesize with Graeber’s analysis of “bureaucracy”) by saying that Western imperialist states also collapse, so the siege is over… these other crises include: i) collapse of the US dollar (“dedollarization” has recently become a trendy topic, so we need to dig deeper: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) ii) even the US military, with its overreach attacking Iran leading to mutinies. While many Leftists are allergic to studying the US military given its endless layers of imperialism/conservatism, we should not all abandon careful study of its contradictions, including its dissenters from War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier to Veterans for Peace, to comparisons between wartime mobilization and the Green New Deal (which must be analyzed with extreme caution! For a critical take that re-centers the Global South: A People’s Green New Deal). Similarly, Graeber points to the academic bias where academics attribute importance to what is intellectually interesting (thus, neglecting the importance of sheer violence with all its vulgar stupidity). iii) further pandemics (Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19); collapse of capitalist healthcare [emphases added]:
Of course, it wasn’t the doctor who had really turned grannie away [for not having health insurance]! It was the hospital! And who was the hospital? It was whoever was making money off it, and those faces were invisible. It was the whole fucking system. I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” This system had taken everything from me, from us. It had taken my mom, my grannie—even myself. It had even taken me away from me.
iv) collapse of academia (capital tied to volatile finance):
Like, the universities are gone, of course, or the idea these specialized fields of knowledge are separated out from the rest of life or not subject to the same logic of profit and exchange. But, in this other way, the zeal for knowledge was saved. Way, way more people read and debate philosophy and theory than ever when I was growing up.
v) We should add Varoufakis’ hacktivism targeting the fragility of financial risk in Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and supply chain vulnerabilities in Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain.
…See the comments below for the rest of the review: “2) Synthesizing the Left’s conflicts” and “3) Resilience in Diversity”…...more
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