octavo, n. A sheet of paper 7 to 10 inches high and 4.5 to 6 inches wide. It is made by folding the original sheet three times to produce eight leaves.
versicle, n. In poetry and songs, one of a series of lines that are shorter than a standard line of verse.
A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."
To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins …
A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."
To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins Wood says, actually no: those histories are using capitalism to explain capitalism, assuming that even before capitalism, people wanted above all to do things like lower the unit cost of production that only make sense according to capitalist logic. International trade and urbanization did not result in capitalism in the golden age of the Dutch Republic, and the end of feudalism did not result in capitalism in France. Specific changes to the relations of production and property in England created, not just market opportunities, but market imperatives in which people were forced to turn to the market for everyday needs. That created capitalism, and England then spread the reach of those imperatives to the rest of the world.
What's not sketched out here, only vaguely hinted at in the conclusion, is how we can use this knowledge to theorize (let alone build) a better system. After all, Wood is under no illusions that the immediate pre-capitalist system of feudalism provided a great life for most people, acknowledging frankly that there, too, there was a privileged class that exploited another. Knowing how the world transitioned from one bad system to another doesn't provide you with a good system, but it does at least show us that market imperatives are not, in fact, the automatic result of inescapable human nature.
@sanae I liked how Eskor David Johnson's Pay As You Go invented its own fictional city that although obviously inspired by New York City allowed the author to kind of go wild without us being all, "nooooo that building is on 27th Street not 34th!"
A “social” history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of …
To date, lacking a complete theory of statistical learning, artificial neural networks and deep learning are still at the epistemic stage of experiments. In other words, they are machines of unknown potentialities and unpredictable failures.
Tanton's individual persistence was at its root made possible by the greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States, coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton's best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician, leader, or organizer but an adroit servant of capitalists' self-interest. This is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in democratic politics but by creating a bulwark against it.
@jacky I was surprised how much this book turned out to be about US foreign policy as opposed to the workings of the media in general. They could easily have used domestic examples for the concept of manufacturing consent as well. For example, the recent manufacturing of consent to push Biden to drop out. (Not knocking it; I learned a lot)
How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis
We are living through a …
A survey of mutual-aid efforts that doesn't stick its landing
No rating
At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.
The book is organized in four chapters:
Long Emergency: An overview of all of the bad things coming our way due to climate change, including lots of conflict and migration. Felt pretty superfluous. This chapter has already been written by many people, notably Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable …
At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.
The book is organized in four chapters:
Long Emergency: An overview of all of the bad things coming our way due to climate change, including lots of conflict and migration. Felt pretty superfluous. This chapter has already been written by many people, notably Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, but I also feel like I've already read versions of it in more than one other Verso book on climate. Peppered with references to events you'll recognize from 2 to 5 year old news stories.
Mutual Care: Studies of mutual aid efforts including Occupy Sandy (the only one the author was personally involved in, which made this by far the most interesting section of the book), Black Panthers survival programs, and Greek solidarity networks in the wake of the 2011 crisis. Well worth reading.
Collective Power: Studies of collective decision-making structures, including Bookchin's ideas, Spanish municipalist movements, and Rojava. The author confidently asserts Rojava's experiments in radical democracy to have been effectively ended by increased aggression in 2019, but cites no source for this, and others don't seem to agree (AK Press is just now putting out a new book, Rojava in Focus, due in February). This section was a pretty good read.
Beyond Hope: Outlines the "lifehouse" concept, but again, it seems like a wishlist of things that would be difficult to achieve, requiring so much free time, energy, and material resources from participants that it almost presupposes a revolution already occurred.
Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and …
Violence is about the only way to influence another that does not require some sort of mediation. This has two effects. For one thing, it means that violence is one of the simplest forms of action to represent. Its representation requires the least psychological skill or subtlety. But more important, perhaps, by concentrating on violence as the ultimate form of politics, the narrators deny the very importance of what they are doing in telling these stories. It could even be taken as a way of disguising the actual mechanisms by which power is reproduced in the very act of its reproduction.
Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and …
apparently, Graeber considered this to be his best book. although it seems like it would only be of interest to researchers on Malagasy history and culture, he explains, "This is a book...about what it means to act politically; to act historically; and about the point at which one begins to slip into the other" and argues "the best way to gain insight into such pan-human questions is to look at people who seem to go about the same things in the most unfamiliar ways." (30-1)
if you read Pirate Enlightenment, which was marketed (dubiously) as the next great hit from the co-author of the bestselling Dawn of Everything, you've read what was really intended as something more like an appendix to this.
An introduction to "disaster capitalism" argues that the global free market has exploited crises, violence, …
In the nineties, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose[...] cell phones and Web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance[...]
An introduction to "disaster capitalism" argues that the global free market has exploited crises, violence, …
When the Cold War was in full swing and the Soviet Union was intact, the people of the world could choose (at least theoretically) which ideology they wanted to consume... capitalism had to win customers... Keynesianism was always an expression of that need for capitalism to compete.
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, …
In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.
Every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
we are awakened from our temporary death.
