What are you reading?

[blindpig]

Jathan Sadowski , The Mechanic and The Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism (University of California Press 2025), 293pp.

“The Mechanic and The Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism” – book review
Originally published: Counterfire on February 13, 2025 by Kevin Crane (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Feb 17, 2025)

The big turnaround of the socialist left’s ability actually to confront and criticise the tech sector came frustratingly late to the game. It was basically not until the Covid-19 pandemic was firmly upon us that there was really much out there. Huge developments like the rise of social media were already old-hat and international capitalism had seen even the fossil-fuel giants largely replaced by electronics and software companies as the biggest in the world, yet there was a real dearth of serious left-wing political writing or journalism about it all.

For well over a decade, commentary around new technologies was absolutely dominated by sycophantic nonsense from rabidly pro-business ‘thought leaders’, who frantically talked up every dubious claim and press release that was coming from tech companies, eager to both believe the dream and get invited to lavish big-money junkets. For many people, the only counter to these narratives they got to hear was simply a different type of bullshit: confused conspiracy-theory driven nonsense that simply spread superstitious paranoia about technology.

An infamous expression of this was the idea that 5G mobile phone masts are a super weapon … or a mind-control device … or something even more vague and menacing. This stuff was all gibberish, but it gained traction because people had a sense that technology was simply in a constant state of change and transforming society around it, with no real discussion taking place about what was happening and whether it was right or wrong.

So, in the summer of 2020, when lockdowns had imposed even greater dependence on internet-based platforms in to so many aspects of our lives, the podcast This Machine Kills launched as part of a new wave of left tech analysis, and it was thoroughly refreshing. Jointly hosted by the Marxist academic Jathan Sadowski and the anarchist journalist Edward Ongweso, the series has tackled a wide range of topics on and around the tech sector, the business interests that run it, the workers that produce it and the consumers (willing or not) who have to live with it. Certainly, I can recommend the podcast to readers of this website who have an even passing interest in technology, but another option is to check out this book.

The Mechanic and The Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism is Sadowski’s distillation of many of the key ideas he has been developing over the years on the podcast. Although he would doubtless be able to write much longer deep dives into many of these concepts, he has instead opted to keep things short, accessible and easy to dip in and out of. Each of the chapters is written to function as a separate essay about a particular talking point: like the role of data, how big tech specifically exploits labour and how the sector’s domination has been controlling our very ability to discuss the future itself.

Disentanglement and demystification
One of the things the author excels at is taking things that have been deliberately obfuscated and making them understandable, which is really useful when we’re talking about the digital economy. Alienation, in the Marxist sense of treating human-made products and processes as if they are supernatural phenomena beyond our control or understanding, has abounded in the internet era. The extremes of this are expressed in the way that many Big Tech leaders, notably OpenAI’s Sam Altman, often refer to their products as literally god-like in their potential power.

A more prosaic but important example of this is the concept of data, which is discussed in an almost entirely inane way in the mainstream of our society. At some point in the past couple of decades, the idea that data was metaphorically a resource entered the popular imagination, only for the point that this is a metaphor to get conspicuously lost somewhere. A cliché is sometimes defined as a turn of phrase that terminates thoughts, and ‘data is the new oil’ has certainly filled that function. This leads to endless discussion about accumulating, trading and using data that takes no account of the fact that it is a human-made product, consisting of discrete and uninterchangeable base units. In turn, the value of data is constantly calculated incorrectly.

On one hand inaccurate, biased, spurious, out-of-date or otherwise invalid data is often packaged up into massive structures without being identified as such, becoming overvalued data. On the other hand, big companies ‘forget’ to check that they aren’t stealing protected personal data or even copyrighted information belonging to other businesses, essentially undervaluing it. Ultimately, all this stuff is getting force-fed into bloated ‘artificial intelligence’ and machine-learning models, with the current consensus among tech-company bosses being that if they just keep going bigger and bigger that they will somehow cheat-code their way past the iron ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ law of information systems. So data we are told to believe is ‘precious’ ends up being treated as absolute junk. Increasingly, the data being thrown into AI models is itself produced by those models, creating what Sadowski calls ‘Hapsburg AI’, which is an effective metaphor I prefer not to think about for too long.

When it comes to both workers and consumers, data plays an absolutely key role for capitalists that is both economic and ideological: ‘datafying’ things reduces them to objects that are merely collections of signifiers, and this is a fantastic way of depicting systems as containing no actual subject that is actively doing things or making choices. They do in fact have subjects, of course, and the objective for people like us should be to point this reality out. Sadowski’s arguments really help with this.

On the most basic level, he breaks down a lot of the nonsense that’s been building up over the years around algorithm-driven work and the ‘gig economy’, which he describes more accurately as ‘servant apps’: a technological veneer to disguise the fact that you are simply buying people’s labour from a gang-master. There is then a slightly more advanced concealment of labour that he calls ‘Potemkin AI’, which is where the technological veneer intentionally creates ambiguity about where it ends, and the human worker begins. Working within one of these systems is both absurd and draining, such as the now-widespread practice of employing a team of people to train a chatbot. The robot should be mimicking the staff, but it goes awry and forces them to mimic it: doing an impression of themselves. This is objectively stupid, but it reflects the contradictions involved in so many of these systems as commercial operations.

Pointless struggles that never end
The above leads us to a recurring theme throughout The Mechanic and The Luddite: the way that capitalists try to use technology in erratic ways because they are so often struggling for objectives that are either unachievable, or that would be catastrophic if they achieved them, or both. In the specific case of Potemkin AI, the bosses are straining towards the fantasy of producing capital without labour. This can’t be done for material reasons, as even the most expensive and highly-advanced models and platforms need some human input because you can’t rely on them otherwise. This means they are in the end just vessels for labour—highly advanced tools, in other words—but also this is fundamental to how the whole process generates wealth at all. Capital is ultimately only accumulated surplus labour: if labour were rendered worthless, so would it be!

Fantasies are a powerful motivating force for today’s capitalists, however ridiculous they might be. In the chapter on risk and insurance—which Sadowski powerfully argues is the most unwisely overlooked aspect of modern capitalism—he points to the dynamics of a business sector that seems to hate the purpose of its own existence. An insurance scheme is, ultimately, resources that have been pooled to help members recover from a shock situation. A perverse incentive of sorts has arguably always existed for insurance providers to exclude (or simply penalise) people and groups with increased risk of negative outcomes, but this has become a mania in the era of datafication.

Hyper-estimating who and what is a risk is surface-level feasible with today’s computational power, but it isn’t strictly speaking insurance, and even senior figures within the industry have publicly speculated that they are in danger of creating a situation in which you can only afford insurance if you don’t need it and cannot afford it if you do. This is all on top of very serious concerns that we could and should raise about the use of data as a source of discrimination with potentially catastrophic impacts on affected people.

Probably the most emotionally irksome example of tech capitalists wanting to have it all ways, however, is the question of investment. Just as insurance companies want to live in a crazy world where they never pay out, but still exist for some reason, venture capitalists (VCs) in the sector believe they are entitled to live in a world where every horse that they back turns out to be a magical unicorn. Listeners to This Machine Kills will be familiar with their demolition of the mythos around VCs, but either way it’s both entertaining and instructive to pick apart who this section of the bourgeoisie actually are.

Far from being extremely smart, or even lucky, investors, VCs are a caste of businessmen that the United States government intentionally fostered in the wake of World War Two to take the technology sector—born as it was out of state-investment during the war—into private ownership and direction. The VCs’ constant pumping of vast quantities of dollars into this and that project is enabled by a faith that the American state, via legislation and tax breaks, will only let them fall so far if things go wrong. So, we have investment without risk: it’s all reward, for nothing.

Since the pandemic, the VCs have ploughed money into a series of failed projects—the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, now AI—in a desperate bid for a thermodynamically impossible perpetual value machine. This has allowed them to maintain the persistent and huge overvaluation of tech-sector businesses, but of course that is looking very unsustainable right now.

Landlords and propagandists
One of the most novel topics of discussion in the book by far is the chapter on rent and landlordism in the tech sector, which is actually two parallel topics: using tech for rent extraction and extracting rent from tech itself.

On the latter, it feels counterintuitive, but ‘the cloud’ is actually a physical thing owned by landlords, an arrangement intentionally created by the same set of conscious policies that gave us VCs. On the former, we get the gradual slide towards the ever-expanding pervasiveness of everything-as-a-service.

Turning things that were at one time products into services enables capitalists to establish themselves as rentiers, and it is very much the way everything is going as cheap credit and overvalued advertising sharply reduce incomes for Big Tech. It’s at this point that the author introduces one of the biggest points of difference between his thinking and a significant number of other writers on the left: Sadowski does not endorse the concept of ‘tech feudalism’ that has been suggested by people like the socialist economist Yannis Varoufakis. His reasoning is simple: rentiers are not actually foreign to capitalism; this is just something that is ideologically argued to make capitalism sound better than it is.

The Ur-example of a tech rentier, Bill Gates, is a case in point: he is not some overhang or remnant of a past order that glommed onto the emergent personal computer industry from the outside or the past. He successfully sold a disk-operating system to another business (the now mostly forgotten IBM), which he had bought rather than written, and managed to get them to pay him royalties because they just didn’t realise how much it was going to be worth. These are normal property deals and relations in capitalism; the fact that Gates got unusually rich doesn’t change that.

Sadowski argues that saying ‘tech is feudal’ is actually getting trapped in a position where you are simply responding to the right-wing libertarian argument that ‘tech is freedom’ with a counter that has reversed rather than beaten your opponent’s logic. The big danger for anti-capitalists accepting the existence of tech feudalism is that you actually end up reproducing libertarian arguments about ‘the real capitalism’ being good, because unlike the ‘feudal’ rentiers, it is dynamic, enabling and promotes efficiency. We can just look at the creaking overblown mess of AI and see that that’s got to be wrong.

Generally, the author feels that where the left needs to raise its game on these issues is to avoid ‘criti-hype’, which is what he says is an unfortunate tendency to accept the claims and promises made by tech-sector boosters and simply add the caveat ‘but it’s bad’. What he proposes as the alternative and antidote to such mistakes leads us back to the book’s title.

An alternative to all the failed utopias
Sadowski calls on readers to be both a mechanic, and a Luddite, in what he regards as the more proper original meanings of both words. A mechanic was not, until recent times, someone with a fairly specific job relating to maintaining motor vehicles. It was rather a person with a much broader understanding of machines, systems we might say, in a wider sense. The Luddite, meanwhile, is a figure that is much more commonly slandered than honestly talked about: capitalists pretend Luddites were mad barbarians who simply hated the march of progress. In reality, they were skilled and astute workers who became an armed resistance movement because they knew very well that the technologies being imposed upon them were not delivering progress that they would enjoy.

The title of the book is essentially a call for both good theory and good practice: understand how technology works, but also how it relates to capitalism and when to oppose it. The contents set out an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to do this, even if all you want to get out of it is solid arguments about relatively straightforward points of debate. A good example would be why AI, in the form it’s being imposed on us, is bad and we shouldn’t be afraid to say it’s bad.

The book is subtitled as ‘a criticism’ and not a manifesto, which is probably to do with the fact that the author did not wish to weigh his conclusion down with more concrete, but also, maybe, overly-specific, calls to action. There’s also been a bit of a debate on the left recently about teleology—the study of things via their ultimate ends—and how useful this really is. Sadowski is very critical of the way that the tech capitalists have been selling us all their own failed, and often idiotic, utopias to justify their actions. That’s given him pause for thought before potentially putting forward a utopia of his own, so the book ends in quite an open way. Nevertheless, this is emphatically a book about looking forward so we can present our alternatives to what capitalism has to offer. I am sure it will give the reader enough of their own ideas to do so.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/17/the-mec ... ok-review/

[blindpig]

Most American Literature Is the Literature of Empire
April 15, 2025


By Viet Thanh Nguyen – Apr 11, 2025

“An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire.”

One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The United States is a different kind of empire, exerting global hegemonic power through hundreds of military bases and a network of alliances, trade agreements, and financial and legal institutions, which add up to a US-led “international rules based order,” as Joe Biden called it.

For decades, American literature has played its role in this order as an arm of US soft power, showing the domestic life of empire while mostly ignoring the rest of the world. Remember that the aptly named Central Intelligence Agency understood quite well the importance of soft power and the role of art. During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded or encouraged everything from the promotion of modernism in Europe to the importation of international writers to the United States, where they could be exposed to an American literary aesthetics.

The problem for imperial literature under Trump is that he sees no need for soft power, only hard power. The Trump innovation during Trump II, the Sequel—and Americans love sequels—is to dispense of any sense of imperfection, which is what imperial literature explores, as well as the notion of rules, domestic or international. While Trump did not understand the nature of the rules confronting his first administration, he had always been interested in breaking the rules, like a Hollywood villain straining against the chains placed on him by Captain America. Captain America, in the form of Joe Biden, defeated Trump, but as with every good Hollywood villain, Trump returned stronger than ever. Comic book creators understand very well that every story needs a hero and a villain, and that the distinction between hero and villain is thin. Likewise, the United States has always been hero and villain, both to other nations but also within itself.

This ambiguity of character defines American presidents of all ideologies and also makes for great drama, which is something that American writers from Herman Melville to William Faulkner to Toni Morrison powerfully exploit. Unfortunately, this ambiguity is also tragic, involving the deaths of tens of millions of people, from Indigenous nations reduced by genocide to Africans kidnapped into enslavement. When Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he is speaking about a return to a 19th-century style marked by the unapologetic use of violence or the threat of violence, exercised at the level of an expanding, conquering nation and an individual swaggering masculinity.

An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire.

The Trump administration, caring little for democracy and focused on hardness, is immune to the idea that literature, a supposedly feminizing kind of art, could ever be useful, unless perhaps it was done by aspiring presidential possibilities like JD Vance, whose best-selling memoir of escaping the constraints of rural life helped propel him into national visibility. Hence the paradoxical situation of literature in the conservative parts of the United States, where it is dismissed as having no utility and yet is also seen as enormously dangerous. Thus, the rise of book banning and other forms of censorship and the efforts of Trump to control narrative, ranging from his takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where American presidents except Trump have given out high honors to American artists, to his latest attempts to dictate to American museums that they must glorify America. American writers are opposed to these efforts, for American writers, especially the most lauded ones, mostly tend to be liberal, and hence as a whole are vigorously anti-Trump.

Artistic politics is something of an oxymoron in the United States, an anticommunist country that tends to see calls for the explicit mixing of art and politics as a communist practice. While writers might march in protests or sign letters, they are not usually expected to think of their writing as political, and the ones who do are more exceptional or respond to specific crises, as some writers did to the Vietnam War, including poet Robert Lowell, essayist Susan Sontag, and novelists Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Writers like Melville and Faulkner, who diagnosed deep problems in the American body politic in novels like Moby Dick and Absalom, Absalom!, are seen as canonical writers. They are not usually seen as pure political writers, perhaps because their greatness is seen as residing in their art rather than their politics, as if the two can be separated.

Writing as a continually political practice has usually been delegated by readers and critics to so-called minority writers like Morrison. Minority writers are expected by dominant audiences, and sometimes their own communities, to write about the traumas like enslavement, colonization, racism, migration, or war that have defined their communities, a set of experiences that happened because they have been subjected to abusive power. As as result, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, the space of the minority is always political.

They used Franz Kafka as their primary example, and Kafkaesque is an apt description of the minority experience. It is surreal, after all, to live in a self-proclaimed democracy that sees itself as the Greatest Country on Earth, and yet one that deploys enslavement, genocide, incarceration, disappearance, and deportation as standard tactics against minorities. Thus, the sense among American liberals that they now live in a surreal time under Trump II must be put in the context of how minority existence has always been surreal: hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican American citizens deported to Mexico in the 1930s, 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to concentration camps during World War II, and African Americans routinely disappeared, castrated, raped, lynched, massacred, and even subject to bombings and air attacks by white people and the state, from Tulsa in 1921 to Birmingham in 1963 to Philadelphia in 1985.

While many writers are sympathetic to Palestinians, many of their literary institutions have been flummoxed.

Writers of color have always written about this surreal contradiction between lofty ideals and brutal realities, which prevents the possibility of a universal humanism. This contradiction is vividly illustrated by the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, using bombs and political cover provided by Biden and continued by Trump in a bipartisan display of American imperial power. In the name of protecting the Jewish people, the Palestinians are reduced to what multiple Israeli government officials have called “human animals,” an obscene term that simply repeats how Western colonizers have always seen the non-white, colonized peoples whom they slaughtered in the name of civilizing them. The Palestinians and those who support them are the exception to Western Civilization and American Exceptionalism, but to even point this out is punished with increasing ferocity, from censoring, firing, doxxing, and arresting to expulsion and deportation.

The contemporary American literary world is in disarray as a result. While many writers are sympathetic to Palestinians, many of their literary institutions have been flummoxed, unable to support Palestinians, name genocide, or use the active voice to identify Israeli agency, even as many writers demand that they do. These literary institutions are a part of empire, supported by the state or by powerful donors who benefit from the imperial machinery.



The genocide in Gaza is therefore not an incidental event that can be ignored but a fundamental event like the Vietnam War, where what is being burned with American weapons are not just nonwhite people but American ideals and the possibilities of euphemism. In the light of that fire, American imperialism is revealed, as well as the complicity of Americans who do nothing, including writers who say nothing.

The contemporary writers who have said something through their artistic practice are relatively rare, like Bob Shacochis and his novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (2013). While this exploration of America’s permanent state of war as a global military power won awards, it did not propel Shacochis into the realm of literary celebrity. Those books which have been celebrated have been authored by [so-called] minority writers who are in some ways expected to speak, from Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. These are anti-imperial works because they connect the domestic operations of racism to the US strategy of targeting nonwhite peoples, from drone strikes to invasion, from supporting authoritarian governments to genocide.

American literature as imperial literature does not make that connection, which reveals that the lining of the American Dream is a surreal nightmare for many people inside and outside the empire. An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire. This act of showing constitutes a low-level dissent that can be promoted by President Obama in his annual list of recommended books, which flatters writers and provides a literary sheen that obscures Obama’s extensive use of drone assassinations and deportation of undocumented migrants. But even that minimal dissent cannot to be tolerated under Trump II, where ideas like diversity, anti-racism, and other core themes of Obama-sanctioned literature are outlawed.

Defending against certain Trump attacks is important, of course. Social security, national parks, voting rights, immigrant rights and more should be protected. But reflexively defending everything that Trump attacks also reveals that there can be a liberal investment in sustaining American global power. Deploring the end of USAID, for example, with the human damage done to those who lost jobs and those who lost aid is understandable. But USAID is also a form of American soft power that has helped to cloak American hard power. A more substantive dissent would be to call for more soft power and less hard power, a radical downsizing of the military-industrial complex that Democratic presidents, as much as Republican ones, have not been willing to do.

If Obama extended an invitation of inclusion into the American empire to citizens, minorities, and allies, then Trump seeks to turn American empire into an exclusive, members-only club where one can enter only through tribute and submission. Thus the dilemma of contemporary American literature: dissenting against Trump and what he represents but not recognizing that Trump’s imperialism is a more naked version of liberal imperialism is a limited kind of dissent. Instead, such minor dissent will be American literature fulfilling its imperial function, which is to fine-tune imperial power through showing the literary and liberal values of empathy and compassion, and in so doing to be empire’s diplomat.

https://orinocotribune.com/most-america ... of-empire/

[blindpig]

Book Review: ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ by Anne Applebaum
Posted on April 30, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

It was a challenge to get past the dedication page.

“For the optimists,” it reads. If you’re at all familiar with the warmongering author heading in, you just might lose your breakfast. It’s a preview of what’s to come for the next 224 pages in what is a marked achievement in the sheer amount of BS from a book’s start to finish.

‘Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World’ is such tired and ridiculously transparent imperial garbage, it could be used as Exhibit A for why US plutocrats need an imperial rebrand. Indeed, Applebaum struggles to keep all her false arguments straight and ends up lost, shell shocked to find that countries like Belarus, Venezuela, Russia, etc. aren’t entirely isolated despite the US’ best efforts. It’s like the person in the following tweet then decided to write a book about their epiphany:

One day you're just living life, existing in tranquility, and next thing you know, you find out that other countries have their own laws and institutions. A hard pill to swallow.
1:21 PM · Aug 31, 2024

And Applebaum is upset about this state of affairs. She reserves most of her venom in ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ for Russia, writing that it “plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo.”

That is unsurprising given Applebaum’s background and the fact that for more than a decade she has been one of the most vocal supporters of Project Ukraine, which has led to the deaths and suffering of millions and might eventually wipe Ukraine off the map. Applebaum apparently has no regrets about all that blood on her hands; not only was it worth the sacrifice in the struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy,” but the fight must go on.

Born into wealth in Washington DC, Applebaum says her great-grandparents immigrated to North America (possibly to avoid conscription) during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus. At Yale she studied under Professor Wolfgang Leonhard, a German communist-turned-hardcore-capitalist.

Leonhard was either mesmerizing or his pupils were easily convinced. Another of his students was Bush the Younger who wrote that Leonhard’s “History of the Soviet Union” was his “introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom, a battle that has held my attention for the rest of my life.”

Leonhard held a similar sway over Applebaum judging by her Cold War warrior path.

Applebaum went on to report for The Economist and The Independent, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has since written several books and been a member of The Washington Post editorial board, an adjunct fellow at the free market, interventionist American Enterprise Institute. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Renew Democracy Initiative. She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian “disinformation” in Central and Eastern Europe.

In every spot she has pushed anti-Russian positions. Along the way she married Polish politician Radosław Tomasz Sikorski who is currently the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland. He is probably best known for this tweet following the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines:



And despite the liberal democratic order collapsing all around her, Applebaum remains fully committed to the bit. The lazy propaganda in ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ can be boiled down to America and its allies are good and whoever opposes Washington is bad.

While this type of propaganda has been around for ages, there is something so shameless about Applebaum’s desperate sales pitch at a time the West is no longer even trying to hide its oligarchic police states. Applebaum’s reality is one in which the West is mostly freedom, democracy, and unicorns even though she was writing this book at the same time that the West was declining into open tyranny and illiberalism. At various points in the book, when Applebaum is on another tear denouncing the unjust system of an “undemocratic” country, one could be forgiven for thinking she’s writing about America. Let’s take a few examples.

Is the US an Autocracy?

It certainly seems so, according to Applebaum. Consider a few passages describing the evil countries out there:

…autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services — military, paramilitary, police — and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.

Here’s another:

…this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their wealth and power.

And another:

…[they] share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.

How about one more?

Once upon a time the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally…Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy.

And these are just from the introduction! Applebaum proceeds with such a severe case of projection for the entire slog of a book. Does she ever mention plutocratic control over US “democracy”? Nope. Does she mention how the Global War on Terror conformed to the “aspirational system of norms”? Nope. Does she mention the West’s descent into oligarchic police states? Of course not.

Instead we get treasures like this:

These kinds of regimes can be hard for the inhabitants of democracies to understand, because their primary goal is not to create prosperity or enhance the well-being of citizens. Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.

“These kind of regimes” are actually quite easy to understand, Anne, even for us inhabitants of “the greatest democracy the world has ever known.” That’s because it’s all around us — from wage slave jobs falling ever further behind to pandemics that whack millions of Americans, disable millions more and fall disproportionately on the working class.

When Applebaum does give a rare mention to a few wee cracks in the facade of the great American democracy, they are in astonishing fashion traced to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “historical fever dreams.”

Applebaum cites the case of a steel plant in Warren, Ohio, “a Rust Belt town that would later cast its votes twice for Donald Trump.” In the 2010s the plant suffered a series of accidents caused by cost-cutting and safety violations. It closed in 2016.

Applebaum is getting to Putin but there’s one other hurdle she must clear first. That’s because the plant was owned by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. To most rational observers this is a story of US corruption and lax American laws around shell companies and real-estate purchases that allow money-launderers and illicit financiers to hide their money while simultaneously helping land blows on the working class.

But to Applebaum it is evidence of Putin’s evil genius and the long shadow of the USSR. She blames the Warren steel plant’s demise on the assertion that Ukraine — and Kolomoisky — were at that time “following the Russian path toward dictatorship and kleptocracy.”

One can only conclude that Applebaum’s brain is irreparably broken. She soldiers on nonetheless sending us missives from autocratic lands populated by hearts of darkness, unaware that she is the Colonel Kurtz she warns of.

She criticizes China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others for resisting American unilateralism, and she ridicules their agreements to recognize one another’s “sovereignty” — a word she places in scare quotes— as signs of their autocratic nature.

Applebaum thinks she can pull the old “they hate us for our freedoms” trick, but how well does that work when in nearly every nation across the liberal, democratic West there has been one or more of the following in recent years?

Crackdowns on fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, the delegitimization of democracy and elections. And most of all, the question I kept coming back to: how could someone be so far disconnected to write this as the free, human rights-loving, rules-based order backs a genocide in Palestine?

Applebaum, as a representative of “the center” occupied by polite thieves and war mongers, takes up the task with glee. Her book, coming now as the US slides into unchartered fusion between government, tech oligarchy, and the police state, represents a dying gasp to still maintain the lie of a free democratic West. Most in the halls of power have already moved on from this silly pretense deciding that maintaining this charade is really no longer worth the effort.

So who is this book for? My best guess would be that it’s for Applebaum and her ilk, absolving them of guilt of what’s currently going down and what’s sure to come. It’s a virtue signal until the bitter end with their liberal values schtick. They fein shock at Trump’s crassness while the billionaire Silicon Valley eugenicists lead us deeper into a dystopian abyss, ignoring the fact the liberal center helped bring us to this moment. Applebaum and company differ little from Trump on policy aside from prioritization of the empire’s many wars, and in the end, the center will do as their plutocrat paymasters say as that’s all they stand for. What Applebaum’s selective lay of the land makes clear is that she’d be fine with a Fourth Reich headquartered in Washington as long as the US wins the great global struggle, and she gets to remain among the nobility penning her screeds about the evil of whoever would dare oppose such a magnificent “democracy.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04 ... ebaum.html

[blindpig]

]Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman. University of Chicago Press, 2025. 600 pages.

Marx: The Fourth Boom
Originally published: Los Angeles Review of Books on May 27, 2025 by Devin Thomas O’Shea (more by Los Angeles Review of Books) | (Posted Jun 25, 2025)

IN HOWARD ZINN’S 1999 play Marx in Soho, the bearded Rheinländer addresses the audience:

I’ve been reading your newspapers […] They are all proclaiming that my ideas are dead! It’s nothing new. These clowns have been saying this for more than a hundred years. Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?

As Andrew Hartman points out at the end of his new book, Karl Marx in America, while the German philosopher had played a pivotal role in American politics since the Civil War, by the 1990s very few Americans were reading him. Flash forward to 2024, when Hartman was writing the book: “[S]ix years removed from the philosopher’s two hundredth birthday, we are living through the fourth Marx boom,” Hartman writes.

Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s.

Hartman’s nine chapters periodize how Marx has been thought of in American history, from “Bolshevik” and “Prophet” to “False Prophet” and then “Red Menace.” If you’ve never read about Marx’s life, Hartman’s book doubles as a short biography; if you’ve never read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Hartman’s book is a primer on a variety of Marx’s most cited and important philosophy. If you’ve never read Marx’s interpreters—who are many, from Kenneth Burke to Frantz Fanon and David Harvey—Karl Marx in America is a road map. But the most interesting insight in the book comes from the laundry list of Marx’s haters, and their complete inability to land a good punch on our boy.

Slavery in the United States had a clarifying effect on Marx’s thought concerning where value comes from. Marx famously declared that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded,” because they are the same. Labor is labor, and this remains one of the most important philosophical observations of the last couple centuries.

The bloody work of emancipation greatly affected Marx’s examination of the squalid (yet waged) conditions in England’s sectors of industrial capital. “Marx was antislavery from early on,” Hartman writes:

He disagreed with all impositions on free labor, especially literal shackles. Marx’s abolitionist zeal was a moral position, consistent with his hatred of most forms of hierarchy. It was also strategic. He believed workers everywhere were limited in their freedom so long as workers anywhere were in bondage.

Most of Marx’s work was unpublished in his lifetime, but in conjunction with Hamburg publisher Otto Meissner, American printers were the ones who first set Capital, Volume I to binding (in German). An important fact about the early history of Marx in America is that he was known as a popular rabble-rouser among immigrants—the first wave of Marxism in the United States consisted of German “forty-eighter” revolutionaries, who wanted to tear down the European monarchies and dethrone the medieval archbishops but ended up exiled to the New World after the 1848 revolutions, arriving just in time to help decapitate the Slave Power.

Marx’s journalism and political writing was suppressed by a wide variety of European censors. The right-wing Prussian government banned the socialist newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (“Rhineland News”), which Marx wrote for, and in France, Prussia again got Vorwärts! (“Forward!”) closed down after one of his colleagues wrote an article praising an assassination attempt on King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

It took decades for the full body of Marx’s magnum opus to find publication. Capital, Volume I didn’t make it into English until 1887, four years after his death. Marx’s family lived in severe impoverishment in the UK, and he never had the means to visit the United States in his lifetime—though his daughter did. American readers would have primarily encountered the living Marx in his correspondent work for the New-York Daily Tribune, which helped keep the family afloat for years.

Hartman’s approach blends reader-friendly explanations of Marx’s work, and why he thought the way he did, with descriptions of the legion of skanks who have sought to disprove, ban, and expunge Marx’s philosophy. But, as Hartman notes, were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

There has long been a denial that the United States has a class system, which is often followed by “and if it does, it’s actually good, and is totally distinct from other stodgy, illogical class systems.” This exceptionalism has served to protect U.S. political science from criticism with, for example, the Geneva School of the 1920s asserting that capitalism had to be privileged, and politically protected, because the free market was “the only economic system that did not spawn tyranny,” as Hartman paraphrases their view. This was in opposition to decrepit European monarchism, the Bolshevik revolution underway in Russia, and the various brands of fascism brewing in Europe.

Hartman’s takedown of this exceptionalism argument is particularly satisfying, and he is in a good position to deliver it, having written his first book on the history of the U.S. education system in the Cold War, and another on the intellectual history of the United States.

What is stark in the study of Marxism in America is how well-resourced the haters are. In 1958, Walt Whitman Rostow, “by then a professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won a Carnegie Corporation grant to spend a year at Cambridge University developing what would become The Stages of Economic Growth”—a book meant to reorient Marx’s work away from a progression of history whose end goal was a classless society and toward a “teleology of five historical stages that began with a traditional society, the equivalent of feudalism, and ended with American-style liberal capitalism, or what he termed ‘the age of high mass-consumption.’”

Rostow represents only the beginning of a long succession of Cold War liberals and libertarians who echoed some version of what Daniel Bell said: “Americanism, with its creed of egalitarianism, was a surrogate for socialism.” As Hartman notes, this is a pretty confused idea. U.S. capitalism—especially in a crisis like the Great Depression—has always been propped up by controlled dosages of socialism: “Progressivism wasn’t going to bring down capitalism,” Hartman notes of FDR’s New Deal; “it injected small doses of socialism to render it slightly more humane, and significantly more effective. By borrowing from socialism, progressivism galvanized a new, mightier form of capitalism.” The Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Communist Party USA are representative of the second boom.

A key defense of the U.S. class system dates back to John C. Calhoun, a man championing state’s rights as a way to protect slavery and the Slave Power. Funny that Calhoun’s thought ended up resonating strongly with various Cold War figures such as Walt Rostow and the economic theorist James M. Buchanan—especially with the latter’s concept of “public choice theory,” which “turned the Marxist theory of the state on its head,” Hartman writes. “As opposed to wishing to free the masses from a state controlled by the capitalist elite, Buchanan wished to free the capitalist elite from a state controlled by the unruly masses.” This paved the way to all sorts of contemporary thinking, like school voucher programs, which present as “the freedom to choose,” but in actuality, they empower the rich and the racist to hoard resources and segregate.

Well-funded libertarians of the Chicago school of economics and beyond have been pumping out extreme caricatures of Marx for a century, and they define their pro-capitalist philosophies in explicit contrast to the foundations of Capital, which actually causes Marx’s ideas to persevere as “if through a dark mirror,” as Hartman explains it.

But there’s still no shaking the philosopher. “Until the freedom of some no longer required the unfreedom of others,” Hartman writes,

Marx would carry on, no matter how intently his enemies tried to erase him.

Karl Marx in America, published by the University of Chicago Press, is not a book that gets too deep in the weeds. It moves breezily through familiar names like Eugene V. Debs and Leon Trotsky, while also exploring lesser known (yet very important) figures between. As Hartman notes, Raya Dunayevskaya was “one [of] the most important if overlooked twentieth-century American Marxists” due to her work delivering to the U.S. audience a humanist Marx who was distinct and dissociated from the Stalinist Soviet Union. Dunayevskaya’s work would then be picked up by the counterculture of the 1960s, marking the third boom of Marxist thought in the U.S.

No matter how much the right wing hallucinates the presence of acidic cultural Marxism, politics in the United States is generally an unbroken tradition of rejecting the labor theory of value—the idea that when you go to work, you create value by committing time, energy, and attention to a task. That value is then siphoned off by the boss and added to the overall value of the company, with a fraction of it returning to the laborer in the form of wages.

As opposed to centering working people as the engine of American excellence, or recognizing that the workplace is where free citizens should exercise control over their lives, almost none of our politics in the United States revolves around that. Hartman cites C. L. R. James’s argument that the American workplace is a totalitarian institution: “The modern worker is a cog in a machine […] All progress in industry consists of making him more and more of a cog and less and less of a human being.” The hyper-surveilled Amazon warehouse comes to mind as Hartman notes:

James wrote about American society through the lens of Marx, who conceptualized human happiness as deeply bound up with autonomy. People who lack control over their own labor remain unfree.

In the United States, we officially credit people who own stuff, and spend most of their lives playing golf, or dining at the country club, as the purveyors of excellence—and look where that has gotten us. The U.S. now has wealth disparity on par with the Gilded Age and the monarchies of yore, because our politics is the end result of a systematically sabotaged landscape: in the 1920s, members of the Industrial Workers of the World were jailed and membership fell into permanent decline; the Palmer Raids of 1919—20 bagged thousands of communists, including Emma Goldman, and deported them to Russia; the First Red Scare ruined the lives of a generation seeking to reorient American politics around people who go to work for a living, who have to clock in and labor under a boss. Hartman’s chapter detailing the advent of the entrepreneur in midcentury America hits hard—having crushed the “un-American” Left, the Cold War—era U.S. government sponsored the idea that lone-genius businessmen are where innovation comes from, and that has proved to be a nice costume for a battalion of con men, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump just the newest iteration.

And yet, there is hope in the fourth boom. Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University, is one of the rare Gen X Marxists, pilled by the revolutionary politics of rock band Rage Against the Machine:

A thousand years they had the tools, we should be takin’ ’em / Fuck the G-ride, I want the machines that are makin’ ’em.

“Rage appreciated Marx’s theory that power derived from command over the means of production,” Hartman writes, pointing to the advent of Jacobin magazine, the podcast Chapo Trap House, and the Democratic Socialists of America as the new communicators of fourth boom Marxism, with 9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2008 financial crisis signaling the return of Marx’s predicted cycles of economic bust and imperial conquest.

Still, the fourth boom has been shut out of power, and wildly underfunded compared to the money one can make studying Friedrich Hayek at the Mises Institute. Contemporary American socialism is treated as unserious by centrist figureheads, and on the right, the fights for universal healthcare and free college are accused of being secret nihilist movements toward enforced unfreedom. This socialist contingent is explicitly ignored (and resented) by Democrats, but as Hartman notes, “reducing millennial socialism to a generational tantrum ignores the fact that many young Americans have been pushed leftward by deeply entrenched historical pressures.” According to him,

Marx has remained relevant in the United States across more than 150 years because he suggested an alternative perspective on freedom. In a nation long obsessed with the concept, why were so many Americans relatively unfree?

Young Americans are only being pushed harder by these entrenched historical pressures. Accelerationists argue that worsening material conditions will force people to confront these questions no matter what, and the Right has a clear and bloody answer: it’s also a hapless and stupid one that just so happens to protect power and wealth. The left has a better response, with a liberatory future to win, and it’s rooted in the work of a guy named Karl.

https://mronline.org/2025/06/25/marx-the-fourth-boom/

[blindpig]

Book Published
Roger Boyd
Jun 30, 2025
Over the past year I co-edited a collection of the academic works of Simon Dalby, Simon Dalby: A Pioneer in International Relations: Key Contributions on Critical Geopolitics, Environmental Security and the Anthropocene, with Mr. Dalby. This was published in May. As an academic book, of course at an incredibly high price of US$149; meant for institutional libraries rather than individual purchase.



This work involved going through articles, book chapters and books that Mr. Dalby had written since the start of his academic career in the late 1980s to select which ones best represented his career’s work. The first one selected, the 1988 “Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other” which was based upon his PhD thesis, could have been written today simply by changing “The Soviet Union” to “Russia”. The first paragraph:

The vociferous criticisms of superpower detente heard repeatedly in Washington and to a lesser extent in other NATO capitals, in the 1970s, were supported by arguments concerning a massive political and military “Soviet threat” to Western security. Among the highest profile proponents of the “Soviet threat” was the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), many of whose members subsequently attained important policy-making positions in the Reagan Administration. Their arguments in favor of a reversion to the foreign policy of containment militarism, have had a significant influence. To date, while the CPD’s political campaign has been examined in some detail, and its links to the “Team B” intelligence estimates review process [to overcome an intelligence community that refused to fabricate scary assessments of the Soviet Union] have been traced, no comprehensive examination has been made of the structuring of their arguments. This paper shows how they drew on a series of “security discourses,” namely sovietology, the realist literature in international relations nuclear strategy, and geopolitics to ideologically construct the Soviet Union as a dangerous ‘Other’. It traces how each of these discourses operate ideologically to hinder progressive political change and to perpetuate militarization.

And here we sit in 2025, with Russia and Iran “Othered” in very much the same way and China well on its way to being “Othered”. In the same way that the regimes of Iraq (“babies thrown out of incubators” and “WMD”), Libya (“crimes against humanity”), and Syria were to facilitate their defeat and subjugation. In the same way that the national liberation movements of Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Alllah have been through the “Muslim terrorist” trope and those fighting for freedom in Haiti are seen through the pejorative of “criminal gangs”. The first threatening Other of the Amerindian population of North America, which needed to be ethnically cleansed and genocided to make way for “Western civilization”, is constantly recreated. “The only good [sic] Indian is a dead [sic] Indian” has been transformed by the Zionist regime into “the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian”, calling upon the tropes of the Terror Dream (The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, by Susan Faludi 2007) of the first 150 years of British colonization in North America. A dream that the capitalist oligarchy do not want us to awake from; there must always be an Other that is somehow threatening “our way of life”. As Dalby stated later in the article:

The ideological moves of geopolitics are powerful because of how they act to exclude alternative formulations of politics. They are powerful because they draw on a number of “common sense” themes in Western metaphysics. Specifically, this paper suggests that rethinking geopolitics requires a refusal of the dichotomous formulation of the identity-difference theme in security matters. Geopolitics is about the formulation of security in spatial terms of identity and difference, difference being inherently inferior to identity. Universalizing a particular identity does not lead to security but to a replication of security problems at a larger scale, or to a blatantly imperialistic situation. Security requires a reformulation in terms that refuse the dichotomous structures of them and us, Same and Other.

The next papers that we selected, Environmental Insecurity of 1996 that covered the attempts to securitize environmental degradation, Globalizing Environment: Culture, Ontology and Critique of 2000 covered the intersection of globalization and environmental degradation; Geopolitical Identities: Arctic Ecology and Global Consumption of 2003 touches on the same subjects. With Geopolitics, the Bush Doctrine, and War on Iraq of 2003, Dalby returned to the subject of geopolitics and the propagandist constructions required to support wars of conquest and regime change, and policies of preeminence and preemption. As he notes:

The policies of preeminence and pre-emption are the key to understanding what is going on in Iraq, they may be the key to the next few years also. But this is a foreign policy agenda that is driven by a small but influential group of intellectuals and political operators who have used the events of September 11th to change American foreign policy and have triumphed in Washington in recent months. They have done so primarily because they have seized an opportunity presented in the war on terrorism to militarize other aspects of American policy. These are mostly civilians drive by an ideological agenda to remake the world according to their own view of American prosperity. In the aftermath of September 11th, the complete unwillingness of the Democratic Party to challenge the interpretation of the world as a dangerous place in need of pacifying, gave Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz their chance.

Perhaps a little naivete with respect to a Democratic Party that is just as much a tool of the US capitalist oligarchy as the Republican Party, with Democrats such as Biden enthusiastically pushing for the invasion of Iraq. Currently with respect to Iran we are faced with the policies of preeminence and pre-emption (once more a fake “WMD”). That reminds me to rewatch the 2018 movie Vice which was about the rise of the “Darth Vader” Dick Cheney. The militaristic and propagandistic tropes utilized by an aggressive US Empire and its mainstream media were detailed in Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and the Kingdom of Heaven of 2008 that covered three specific movies.

Of late, combat movies have been an integral part of the production of geopolitical spaces which construct identities of heroes and villains on the one hand but also provide both fictional and mimetic discourses of the terrain of danger.

With Ecology, Security and Change in the Anthropocene of 2007, Dalby had started to address the role of humanity in the large scale terraforming of the Earth and the implications of notions such as security and geopolitics. With the need to connect social science with the rapid changes in the Earth System. Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene of 2014 proposed a rethinking of geopolitics. Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene of 2018 noted the use of fire as “both as an ecological transformation device and a weapon of warfare” with opposition to climate change initiatives based in both political economy and “conservative” cultural themes:

The intense political opposition to climate change initiatives in the United States in particular, but also in other places of the Anglosphere, notably in Canada and Australia, is partly driven by the short-term economic interests of coal and petroleum sectors. But, as will be elucidated further later in the paper, climate change ‘deniers’ also frequently articulate ‘conservative’ cultural themes that emphasize competition, struggles for dominance and status tied to technological artefacts, notably ‘firearms’ and petroleum powered vehicles. These often encompass colonizing tropes, of wilderness and danger in need of conquest, pacification and where that fails, violent policing to deter threats. In the Canadian case during the years when Stephen Harper was prime minister these themes were explicitly articulated in terms of Canada as an energy superpower, coupled with the suppression of government scientific discussion of environmental topics and rhetoric of support for military solutions to external political problems in the Middle East in particular. Australian politics has mirrored many of these themes in the last decade too, and in particular themes of the hostility refugees and migrants fleeing violence in Asian and Africa and antipathy to serious climate change action.

As Dalby notes, the combustion of fossil fuels must be contained in contrast to the alternative of a Trump administration “that is to go on burning things with abandon and then attempt to ride out the increasingly severe environmental consequences.” How so little has changed in seven years, even with the Canadian Liberal prime minister that echoes Harper in his calls for a Canadian energy superpower. With the increasing possibility of the usage of solar radiation management being raised by the state, Dalby’s statement that “Obviously the technological temptations toward controlling global change by using solar radiation management, or in the current jargon albedo modification, by the rich and powerful will grow in coming decades” may prove prescient.

Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate Disrupted World of 2021, To Build a Better World: Securing Global Life After Fossil Fuels of 2021, and Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate Disrupted World of 2022 consider the realities that will face a world where climate change has not been adequately mitigated and what they will mean for notions of territoriality, security, equality, geopolitics and even survival. The last paragraph of that second paper could so easily sum up our present predicament:

The nightmare scenario is of warfare resulting from efforts by the elites to maintain economic and political control if climate change accelerates towards a hothouse earth. If that transpires, alas, an old-fashioned geopolitical focus on interstate conflict - potentially in the form of a major confrontation between China and the USA, reminiscent of the superpower rivalries that were a backdrop to the Stockholm Conference - will once again tragically be germane for security scholars. The alternative geopolitical framing that is even more urgently needed now than in the 1970s is one that replaces competition with a recognition of common vulnerabilities to climate change and global species extinction. Anthropocene security requires a flourishing global biosphere, rather than the attempted imposition of modern modes of combustive consumption on a world that cannot accommodate them, if the conditions for civilized life are to be provided for future generations.

As the global average surface temperature of the earth has passed irrevocably beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade above the late nineteenth century benchmark, the Trump administration has heightened the tensions between the USA and China, the US supports its proxy Israel in its drive for dominance in the Middle East (including the possible use of the combustion of nuclear weapons), and the Ukraine proxy war drags on into a fourth year; the old-fashioned geopolitics of interstate conflict is fully in focus. Even mirrored in my own institution’s major turn to the “dark side” of support for foreign aggression and proxy wars, and the construction of threatening external and internal Others, reflecting the shift in the Canadian academy. While Western governments, including Canada, ramp up military spending and ramp down the focus on climate change initiatives.

From the 1970s when I was just a teenager, to the present, we have come full circle from one arrangement of global power politics to another, but in a present where global power politics blocks the societal paths that are required for the long term survival of modern human civilization. Trump, Merz, Macron, Starmer, Meloni, Carney, Albanese and von der Leyen represent the societal dead end presented to us by the capitalist oligarchy. Putin is utterly dependent upon the financial flows that stem from Russia’s massive fossil fuel exports. It is only China that seems to both genuinely strive for peace and non-intervention, and a transformation of its energy and transport systems away from combustion.

For my own non-fiction book on this subject, now titled Great Power Politics, Elites & Energy, I am engaged at an early stage with a publisher. We will see how that goes. As the days go by my unpublished novel The End of the Beginning, serialized here, becomes more and more prescient. The only change that may be required is a change of the timeline to four years later than it currently is; or perhaps not given the recent acceleration in climate change.

Mr. Dalby is now retired from academia, but his “in retirement” academic output would rival that of many full time academics. His book Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World was published in late 2023 at the much more reasonable price of US$27 for the kindle version and US$29 for the paperback. The kindle version of his 2020 book Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability is available for the princely sum of only US$7.86. His 2022 Rethinking Environmental Security is priced at US$42.95 for the paperback version. Such are the wide variations in the prices of such work depending on the publisher and envisioned audience.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/book-published

[blindpig]

Capitalist Realism: Another Work of Wasted Opportunity

And My Own Very Personal Exasperation With The Western Self Defeating Left
Roger Boyd
Sep 26, 2025

In 2009, Capitalist Realism: Is There An Alternative? written by precarious academic Mark Fisher, was published by Zero Books (which he co-founded) and has since sold over 100,000 copies; quite a feat for such a book. I recently purchased it and while reading it was hit with all the exasperation that I experienced in this time period; while watching such organizations as Occupy Wall Street, taking a mainstream politics course as part of my online MA, and then studying for another MA in an intentional community in the UK. Also with sadness at all of the intellectual and organizing effort wasted by individuals and groups that were trapped inside a bourgeois-progressive “critical” ideology that actively rejects the successes of real existing socialism, the centrality of political economy and and role of the state in societal transformation.

Mark, like so many “alternative left” thinkers came from a background of culture and philosophy rather than political economy, having a BA in English & Philosophy and a PhD with the dissertation title of Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, and was also a founding member of the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. He started a blog on cultural theory, i.e. theory stripped of historical materialist insights, called K-punk. He later became a lecturer on Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College.

He coined the phrase “capitalist realism” which in effect meant exactly the same as the bourgeois cultural hegemony that Gramsci proposed, and then quoted Frederic Jameson / Slavoj Zizek with “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”. An utterly Western-centric defeatist attitude that excludes the actually existing socialisms of nations such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba. The classic “Western Marxist” internal navel gazing academic ideology that is either blind to actually existing socialism or denigrates it as “authoritarian”. He utilizes the film Children of Men as a representation of a disaster capitalism where the state had been “stripped back to its core military and police functions” (p. 1) when he could have simply visited parts of Africa, South America or even the United States to see such a thing in the flesh. But pontificating about a theoretical future far away from material reality equivalents in the present is so much less discomfiting.

He then writes about the work of Deleuze and Guattari, two Continental post-structuralist and post-modernist philosophers whose work was utterly disconnected from material realities and used the usual colossally over-complex and obscurantist language of such writers. That Fisher thought that their account of capitalism was “the most impressive since Marx” is quite astounding to me, and shows the utter lack of linkage to the historical materialism of giants like Gramsci. Deleuze and Guattari are the classic “clever children”, just like Derrida, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, that play “clever” but career-safe philosophical word games utterly disconnected from material reality. As part of my own politics course, I was forced to grind through Hardt’s Empire, a “masterpiece” that I considered was one of the most over complex, self-indulgent, and utterly uninformed and naive works that I have ever read. Of course, it was a sensation in the Western academy. Only with such a limited perspective can Fisher state with a straight face that “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration” (p. 4). No mate, its when a small elite own the means of production and exploit the rest.

The spendthrift utilization of many rich words in “clever” sentences pervades the work, for example when the author states that “The most Gothic description of Capital is also the accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us”. No mate, its when a small elite own the means of production and exploit the rest, which is most definitely not in the abstract. Philosophy without a grounding in historical materialism can be oh so clever and oh so far off the mark. One can be “critical” without threatening the societal power structures that are embedded in materialism. Then he delves into the misuse of psycho-analytic metaphors for societal issues so “cleverly” used by the likes of Lacan and Zizek which have been so corrosive to the understanding of the natural sciences and empirical validation.

The author then opines on the “reflexive impotence” (p. 21) of the youth which is much more about the destruction of the social institutions through which they can be politically educated and active. An “impotence” that was not much on display when the youth of Britain so enthusiastically responded to the socialist optimism of Corbyn. The role of the “critical theorists” is not just to redirect energies for real change into ideological and activist dead ends but also to sow the very feelings of impotence in the face of capitalism that the author complains about. His designation of the capitalist oligarchs George Soros and Bill Gates as “liberal communists” (p. 26) shows an utter confusion about the two opposites of liberalism and communism. Again, perhaps “clever” but deeply flawed.

Then the next “cleverness”, the invented term “Market Stalinism” which values the symbols of achievement over actual achievement; showing an utter lack of basic historical knowledge. Stalinism turned a backward nation into the industrial powerhouse that defeated the Nazi armies of invasion in only a decade, and then bounced back from the utter destruction of WW2 to build a nuclear bomb while rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of the nation. Stalinism was the very opposite of meaningless bureaucracy. It was Khrushchev who removed the pay incentives for performance and it was Khrushchev and his successors that embedded the bureaucracy within the nation. And even then, the Soviet Union outgrew the West into the 1970s. Here, Fisher is repeating the classic Trotskyist garbage so redolent among both Western capitalist propagandists and such “critical” scholars. The same ones that mention the “bread lines” which only appeared after the corruption and profiteering hoarding in the late 1980s after Gorbachev’s “reforms”.

There are many good insights in Fisher’s work, but like so much of the output of the “left” it is marred by a not required philosophical and rhetorical cleverness, which is divorced from the real materialist world and rejects the very socialist successes that point the way forward while also wasting so much energy that could be spent on actual change. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ortega etc., were successful because they understood that although there was of course a need for an alternative ideology, that ideology needed to be in terms that the average person would understand and be based in political activism and when required pragmatism. Gramsci understood that in the 1920s, the vast majority of people who quote his work do so very selectively as they spin post-modernist and post-structuralist word games and disconnected from reality “critical” theories.

Fisher had struggled with depression and unfortunatley took his own life in 2017 at the age of 48. The “left” Trotskyist journals such as Tribune celebrated his work, work that had so much promise if only Fisher could have properly come to terms with Gramsci and eschewed the capitalism-serving dead ends of post-modernist cultural theory and the likes of the capitalist court jester Zizek.



In my politics course I was provided with a CD of “great thinkers” called Examined Life which included so many of the capitalist-serving court jesters such as Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Micheal Hardt, Avita Ronell and bourgeois progressives such as Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah; all directed by the bourgeois progressive Astra Taylor. So many people being “clever” in a very obscurantist way rather than being insightful. I agree with Rockhill that the clarity of one’s writing reflects the clarity of one’s theorizing.

At the intentional community that I studied at there was much love for the failed but “perfect” doomed rebellions, with the “media-savvy” doomed-to-fail Zapatistas very much celebrated. A general hatred of the state as “bad” was evident together with a general commitment to the kind of non-violent resistance which the capitalist oligarchy will happily tolerate until it becomes a little too obstructive; then the non-violent protestors will find out what state coercion and violence is. The Cuban revolution was certainly not seen as a good example!

Overall, a completely self-defeating set of attitudes. But there was no real revolutionary fervour anyway, as so much of the focus was on “the change within”. Many great and beneficial societal changes have been brought about by people who were not so “great within”, just look at the philandering of MLK. This focus on “the change within first” is really just bourgeois progressive “new-agey” stuff dressed up in different clothes. Yet more comfortable performativity. There are just so many avenues through which real energies for change can be dissipated within modern capitalist societies.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/capita ... er-work-of

[blindpig]

Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Translated in India
Posted by MLT Editors | Sep 28, 2025 | Featured Stories | 0



September 22, 2025

Over the years, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny has been translated into many languages. The latest language into which it has been translated is Tamil. The co-authors were recently asked to contribute a preface to the 2025 Tamil edition. That preface is below.

The Tamil language, spoken by an estimated 86 million people is a Dravidian language (non-Indo-European) natively spoken by the Tamil people of the far south of India. It is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world, attested since about 300 BC.

What accounts for the sustained interest in this book? The loss of the Soviet Union defines our own time, the early 21st century. The renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th century a “short century, 1914-1991,” claiming that the USSR, emerging out of the bloodbath of World War I (1914-1918), was what gave the 20th century its essential characteristics. It is no coincidence that after the counterrevolution of 1991, in much of the world, workers rights have deteriorated, the welfare state is being dismantled, the far right is on the march, unions are on the defensive, democratic rights are being rolled back, and progressive forces so far have been unable to halt imperialism’s ugliest deeds — witness the Gaza genocide and the Ukraine War.

Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union first appeared in 2004 when it was published by International Publishers of New York. A second edition in English was published in 2012 by i-Universe of Bloomington, Indiana.

The co-authors had no budget for publicity or promotion. The translations have been undertaken by Communists and other left-wingers who read the English language original and resolved to make it available in their own language. For example, one of the first translations, into Farsi, was done by Amoui, a political prisoner in Iran. The Russian and Bulgarian editions were translated by Irina Malenko, Blagovesta Doncheva, and Ivan Ivanov. The French translation was done by Jean Salem, a Marxist professor of the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne. It was published by Editions Delga in Paris and went on sale in the book pavilion of Fete de l’Humanite.

Nikos Seretakis of the KKE, the Communist Party of Greece, called the book to the attention of his party, which invited the co-authors to speak at a December 2007 KKE international theoretical conference in Athens, Greece on the causes of the Soviet downfall, which alerted Francisco Melo of the Portuguese CP to the book. The Portuguese CP subsequently invited the co-authors to speak at the Festa do Avante in Portugal and published several editions of the book, with many sales in Brazil.

The genesis of the Cuban edition was perhaps the most interesting and consequential. Ramon Labanino was one of the Cuban Five, unjustly imprisoned in the US for antiterrorist activity among the Miami Cuban-American community. He read the book in English, thanks to a visit from Walter Tillow, an editor of MLT, to Ramon’s federal prison cell in Ashland, Kentucky, who gave it to him as a gift. Ramon subsequently pushed the publishing authorities in Havana to translate it into Spanish and publish it. The Cuban edition, with a Prologue from Ramon, was launched at the Havana Book Fair. That led in time to two other Spanish language editions (Spain, Ecuador).

The Communist movement and the left generally are strong in India. Just recently, a general strike in India brought an estimated 250 million workers into the streets, possibly the largest strike in world history. Tamilmarx Foundation is a Marxist study group in India which offers Marxist commentary on contemporary local, national and international politics. The study group also focuses on publishing books ad articles that offer Marxist perspective to topics related to political economy, socialism, workers movements, labor rights, scientific and technological advancements. With roots in Tamil Nadu and a vision that reaches beyond, Tamilmarx Foundation is being by the spirit of service and the ideals of equity, dignity and democratic participation.

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Preface to the Tamil Marx Foundation publication of Socialism Betrayed in 2025

We are honored that the Tamil Marx Foundation is publishing a new translation of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been 34 years since the Soviet Union disappeared and 21 years since our book first appeared in English. The questions of why the Soviet Union collapsed and what lessons are to be drawn from the collapse remain as relevant and pressing for revolutionary socialists today as they were three decades ago. Evidence of this exists in the translation history. Before the Tamil edition, the book was translated into at least ten languages, including Bulgarian, Persian, French, Russian, Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Spanish (editions in Cuba, Spain, and Ecuador), Italian, and most recently Chinese.

Though much has changed in the world since the Soviet collapse, including the appearance of many studies of Soviet history leading up to the collapse, the main argument of the book remains valid: The Soviet Union had many problems in 1985, the year Gorbachev became Soviet leader, but none of these problems brought down the system that remained fundamentally sound, that represented the essence of socialism, and that benefitted the working class of the Soviet Union and the world. The main cause of the collapse was the social democratic policies and ideology of Mikhail Gorbachev and his clique. Though these ideas had long existed in the Soviet Communist Party, where they enjoyed a material basis in the growing second economy of private (legal and illegal) private enterprise, they never held full sway until Gorbachev.

Of course, the Soviet collapse represented a tremendous setback for the struggle for socialism. This, however, was not the first such setback nor the last. In his preface to the 1890 German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Frederick Engels reminded his readers that immediately after the first publication of the Manifesto, the working class suffered the terrible defeat of the French working class in June 1848, and that defeat pushed the Manifesto “into the background.” Then barely sixteen years later the First International was born. The First International lived only nine years and was defeated in the Paris Commune, but then forty-four years later came the Russian Revolution. Engels suggested the working class can learn more from its defeats than its successes and thus can advance further in its next struggles against capital. It is up to our generation to carry forth this mandate in our own time. We must start by drawing the lessons of the Soviet collapse.

–Roger Keeran and Joseph Jamison (Thomas Kenny)

https://mltoday.com/socialism-betrayed- ... -in-india/