Reposted from Fantastic Metropolis, author China Mieville lays out a list of 50 science fiction and fantasy works he feels every socialist ought to read.
When I became a socialist I was also studying Sociology and Philosophy academically. I experienced something that seems to be a trend among many (though assuredly not all) folks who delve into these worlds: a sudden loss of interest in fiction.
Over time I only read non-fiction work and discovered something missing. Reading fiction again had a major impact on me, stimulating parts of my brain that had laid mostly dormant (or only experienced anything through film and TV shows). I feel invigorated from diving back in and also feel better equipped to deal with issues as a socialist (and as a sociologist and a philosopher).
I recommend Mieville’s recommendations because he is himself a fantastic science fiction author. There is a fantastic interview with him at the website of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of such fantastic works as The City & the City, Kraken and his new book that I’m holding in my hand in eager anticipation, Embassytown. Enjoy!
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50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read (by China Mieville)
America does not really want a black middle class. Some of the most bracing portions of Wilkerson’s book involve the vicious attacks on black ambition. When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots. The father had saved for years for a piano for his kids. The people of Cicero tossed the piano out the window, looted his home, torched his apartment and then torched his building. In the South, when black people attempted to leave to earn better wages, they were often forcibly detained, and thus kept in slavery as late as the 1950s.
On a policy level, there is a persistent strain wherein efforts to aid The People are engineered in such a way wherein they help black people a lot less. It is utterly painful to read about the New Deal being left in the hands of Southern governments which were hostile to black people, and then to today see a significant chunk of health care, again, left in the hands of Southern governments which are hostile to black people. At this point, such efforts no longer require open bigotry. They are simply built into the system.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The American Case Against a Black Middle Class,” on his reactions to reading Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns. It really never gets taught in school that one of the ways that FDR got the New Deal to pass to allow significant chunks of it to not apply to black people. The Dixiecrats were a substantial portion of the Democrats’ congressional majorities, and their needs were catered to. Generally pretty quietly.
And it wasn’t just confined to the South. When blacks started moving north in greater numbers, plenty of people who were against the South’s Jim Crow laws weren’t willing to deal with a black family in their nice suburban neighborhood. Cicero was, I believe, a particularly bad example. But there was a general expectation that the creation of the vast American middle class in the decades after WWII was supposed to be the creation of a vast, white, middle class.
Books I picked up in 2012. Not included is Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton, which I lent to a coworker months ago and haven’t gotten back yet. They’re all good books. Anyway, what’s pictured is (from top to bottom):
- Sherry Wolf – Sexuality and Socialism
- Henri Lefebvre – The Urban Revolution
- Francis Spufford – Red Plenty
- Corey Robin – The Reactionary Mind
- Erick Lyle – One the Lower Frequencies
- James C. Scott – The Art of Not Being Governed
- Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? (Mattilda Dernstein Sycamore, editor)
- Rick Perlstein – Nixonland
- Eduardo Galeano Upside Down
- David Harvey – Rebel Cities
- Greg Grandin – Fordlandia
- A couple issues of The Baffler (there’s a third somewhere around here that I can’t find at the moment)
- A couple issues of Radical History Review
I unfortunately didn’t do terribly well on my goal of including more books by people other than white males. Hopefully I can make some progress on that in my 2013 reading.
Let me know if you’ve got any questions about any of these books, or recommendations for the upcoming year.
Just came in the mail today. I’d been hoping to read this for a while, but only recently was able to find a copy at a reasonable price. I just can’t justify spending $30 or more for a used book, however good it may be. And what’s with Verso having let both this and Doug Henwood’s Wall Street go out of print? They both seem more relevant than ever.
10 Years Ago: Ravi’s “Eight Day Plan” and Moving into My Old Apartment (Part 1)
I’ve been meaning to write up more anecdotes about my life for this blog, just to have them written down somewhere, and to keep my writing skills in practice. This story happens to fall ten years ago, the end of October and beginning of November of 2002. But I was inspired to write about it for completely different reasons. One of my big interests is studying how cities work. And more recently I’ve been working on reading up the matter from a radical leftist perspective. The weekend before last I swung by the local radical bookstore and discovered a couple books along those lines.
The first, Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution, is decidedly theoretical in orientation. Haven’t gotten to it yet, but Lefebvre seems to have been the first to study urban geography from a Marxist perspective, so I’ve seen plenty of references to his work. The other, more relevant to this story, is Erick Lyle’s On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, which is all about anti-gentrification praxis. Collected from various zines and other underground publications that Lyle put out, it’s a bunch of tales of years of making San Francisco a more livable place for various sorts of outcasts, and less comfortable for the bourgeoisie. Totally my sort of thing.
On page 23, I ran across a typical sort of passage, describing the history of his late 1990s independent newspaper (distributed free out of stolen newspaper boxes) The Turd-Filled Donut:
But I think our most well known story, besides the Brown interview, was one with morally or politically upgrading benefits, “The 6th Street Treasure Hunt for Beer.” Greta and I hid a 6-pack of beer and the centerfold of Issue #5 featured a big map and clues to find it. It was actually pretty hard, but if you solved it—and all the clues were right on 6th Street—then you would’ve found the beer in a suitcase, floating in the bay, at the end of a rope tied to a ladder on Pier 7! That’s how the beer was guaranteed to be cold; it was in the icy bay! It turned out my bike messenger friends, Ravi and Sean, found the beer within a week, so we put more out there. One day, I went to check on the second 6-pack and I found the rope up on the dock next to a bunch of crushed Tecate cans. Someone had found that one too!
The T.F.D. broke a major story in an election year, and publicized resistance against gentrification ad redevelopment on 6th Street and in the Mission. It was read widely—at both the welfare office and in City Hall. Yet, mostly, when people stop me on the streets to talk about it, they just ask me when I’m going to hide some more beer.
Which is all totally great. But then I realized that, wait a second, I know who the Ravi and Sean he mentions are. That brings back memories. Ravi moved to Boston and worked with me for a year way back when I was a rookie bike messenger. Just to be sure, they’re mentioned in another story trying to extort more beer off the author, with the added description of being from “the laundromat in Oakland.” Ravi used to tell me stories about how they had six punks running a laundromat on MLK Boulevard in Oakland in exchange for living in the unused part of the building. Somewhere, I still have a copy of the zine they put out. Incidentally, the mentions in this book aren’t Ravi’s only claim to fame. He’s also mentioned in the thank you’s of some Shai Hulud albums.
As I said, Ravi was in Boston working as a bike messenger back in 2001 when my company hired him in October. I had started just before September 11th, which had then caused a huge drop in business. I was living at my parents house, having finally given up on college after five years, and this was the first job I had managed to find. And then, week later, there’s no money to be made. Having no expenses, I made it through the worst, and by late October we were actually hiring new people again. Ravi and some crazy older lady who didn’t last terribly long.
Somehow, those of us who were there managed to convince the boss not to hire additional people as things got busier again, simply working harder to cover the increased workload, and, as it’s a commission business, getting paid more. I’m still inordinately proud of how we managed to take a rookie company and turn it into something better. It wouldn’t last forever; bosses have a way of ruining anything the workers do for themselves, but that came later on. And Ravi was a key part of that amazing 2002 tight-knit crew we had. Don’t know how he did it, but we’d look at our numbers at the end of the day, and he was usually the top dog.
And the drinking. We would hit the bars all the damn time. Wednesday night darts at the Silhouette, Foley’s after work any day of the week, the Plough & Stars on Sundays when Matt’s band played. One of my favorite Ravi stories was him leaving a message on the office’s answering machine late one of those Sunday nights, slurring that “I can’t come to work Monday because… rock ‘n roll.” At some point, March of 2002, I think, we also added another amazing individual from San Francisco, Nate. He was friends with Ravi, and we assumed they knew each other from there, but had actually only met in Boston a month or two earlier. But Nate was also amazing, one of the only people (I’m just guessing here) with both a law degree and a full sleeve of self-applied stick and poke tattoos.
So, that was more or less the situation when October of 2002 rolled around, and I can get to the story I said I was going to tell way back up top there. That’s when Ravi’s friend Sean, the one mentioned in the One the Lower Frequencies quote, came to visit Boston for a bit. So, Ravi had hi friend from San Francisco staying with him, and I think he had recently broken up with (OK, got dumped after cheating on) his girlfriend. I don’t recall how Sean had gotten to Boston, but he didn’t have any firm plans for needing to go back home at any particular time.
But then, on a Friday afternoon in late October, I found out that Ravi had decided to move back to San Francisco. The following Saturday. Basically, he had no idea how he was going to pull it off, but eight days later he was goddam well going to be heading to the other side of the country. Hence the need for an “eight-day plan.” One order of business was easily dispatched with while we were all hanging out at the office for the usual after-work drinking. I think the conversation we had was almost verbatim the following:
“So when I move, do you want to take my apartment?”
“Sure.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I.”
And so, I was finally moving out of my parents’ house. It was about time. I had left college almost a year and a half before, and was pretty sick of it. I don’t know how I was born into a family of morning people. Some cruel joke that the world played on me. In any case, I had once been to Ravi’s place, to pass out on his couch after a night of drinking nowhere near my home, so it wasn’t like I was being entirely reckless in agreeing to move there in five seconds.
Big changes being afoot, let’s end part one of this story here for maximum cliffhanger value.
City Under Siege – Jacob Silverman
Writing in The New Inquiry, Jacob Silverman reviews Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, by Stephen Graham. The book is an examination of the massive security apparatus that has sprung up all throughout urban areas, aimed at the intimidation of the urban masses themselves. The book advances its arguments in two directions. The first deals with tracing the origins of the methods being used:
From Michel Foucault, Graham has drawn the book’s galvanizing concept: the boomerang effect. Graham quotes from Society Must Be Defended, a series of lectures Foucault gave in 1975 and 1976 in which he argued that Western imperialism didn’t merely force Western practices and institutions on imperial subjects. Rather, “a whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practise something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.” This boomerang effect has been resurgent over the past decade, when one can observe practices from the neocolonial frontiers of Baghdad, Kabul, and Hebron now being instituted in New York, Washington, D.C., and London. So-called green zones, security buffers, checkpoints, novel nonlethal weapons, drones, and CCTV—all have become indelible features of the West’s urban centers of political and financial power. Though they originate in the military campaigns prosecuted by Western forces and security contractors, these elements are largely facilitated by the police.
The second argument deals with the political and social reordering that these techniques make possible:
This brings us to the second key feature of Graham’s thesis: a shift in the perception of cities in the eyes of policymakers, security officials, and financial elites. Graham seizes on Richard J. Norton’s term “feral cities,” defining them as “highly disorderly urban areas in the global South which are controlled by violent nonstate militias of various sorts.” Increasingly, the global North’s cities are also seen as feral, “intrinsically problematic spaces” that must be managed, regulated, and heavily securitized. And with “war [serving] as the dominant metaphor in describing the perpetual and boundless condition of urban societies”—a war on drugs, on poverty, on terror—we have a domestic culture that matches the perpetual, amorphous, and secretive wars we are prosecuting on colonial frontiers from Somalia to Pakistan to Yemen. Graham demonstrates that the police conduct counterinsurgency wars at home, too.
Lastly, not to give away the ending, the book hazards some ideas about how to resist this transformation. It doesn’t exactly sound hopeful in the face of the opposition that it’s detailed leading up to that point, but certainly figuring out the nature of the oppression is a necessity to fighting back.
Your Brain on Pseudoscience: the Rise of Popular Neurobollocks
The “neuroscience” shelves in bookshops are groaning. But are the works of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer just self-help books dressed up in a lab coat?
An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.
In my book-strewn lodgings, one literally trips over volumes promising that “the deepest mysteries of what makes us who we are are gradually being unravelled” by neuroscience and cognitive psychology. (Even practising scientists sometimes make such grandiose claims for a general audience, perhaps urged on by their editors: that quotation is from the psychologist Elaine Fox’s interesting book on “the new science of optimism”, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, published this summer.) In general, the “neural” explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena. Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality disavows “reductionism” yet encourages readers to treat people with whom they disagree more as pathological specimens of brain biology than as rational interlocutors.
The New Atheist polemicist Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, interprets brain and other research as showing that there are objective moral truths, enthusiastically inferring – almost as though this were the point all along – that science proves “conservative Islam” is bad.
Happily, a new branch of the neuroscience explains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” (according to Sleights of Mind, an amusing book about how conjurors exploit perceptual bias) and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.
Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books. (Some cram the hard sell right into the title – such as John B Arden’s Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life.) Quite consistently, heir recommendations boil down to a kind of neo- Stoicism, drizzled with brain-juice. In a selfcongratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms.
The idea that a neurological explanation could exhaust the meaning of experience was already being mocked as “medical materialism” by the psychologist William James a century ago. And today’s ubiquitous rhetorical confidence about how the brain works papers over a still-enormous scientific uncertainty. Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets “exasperated” by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do.” Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes.”
![hungryghoast:
Now Reading.
“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization.” on the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
I’ve been slowly making my way through this, in between other books, for a while now. The parts that I’ve read have highlighter all over them. Filled with fascinating information. One of my favorite bits is this passage about potatoes:
In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxmen wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one. Plagued by crop failures and confiscatory procurement prices for the cultivars recommended by the Burmese military government in the 1980s, many peasants secretly planted sweet potatoes, a crop specifically prohibited. They shifted to sweet potatoes because the crop was easier to conceal and nearly impossible to appropriate. The Irish in the early nineteenth century grew potatoes not only because they provided many calories from the small plots to which farmers were confined but also because they could not be confiscated or burned and, because they were grown in small mounds, an [English!] horseman risked breaking his mount’s leg galloping through the field. Alas for the Irish, they had only a minuscule selection of the genetic diversity of New World potatoes and had come to rely almost exclusively on potatoes and milk for subsistence.
So, yeah, I’ll give another plug for this book.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lr60zbN8fv1qz9wf9o1_400.jpg)
“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization.” on the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
I’ve been slowly making my way through this, in between other books, for a while now. The parts that I’ve read have highlighter all over them. Filled with fascinating information. One of my favorite bits is this passage about potatoes:
In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxmen wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one. Plagued by crop failures and confiscatory procurement prices for the cultivars recommended by the Burmese military government in the 1980s, many peasants secretly planted sweet potatoes, a crop specifically prohibited. They shifted to sweet potatoes because the crop was easier to conceal and nearly impossible to appropriate. The Irish in the early nineteenth century grew potatoes not only because they provided many calories from the small plots to which farmers were confined but also because they could not be confiscated or burned and, because they were grown in small mounds, an [English!] horseman risked breaking his mount’s leg galloping through the field. Alas for the Irish, they had only a minuscule selection of the genetic diversity of New World potatoes and had come to rely almost exclusively on potatoes and milk for subsistence.
So, yeah, I’ll give another plug for this book.
I’m not going to say I have too many books, but they do make moving a pain in the ass.
For my birthday yesterday I finally managed to track down David Harvey’s most recent book, Rebel Cities. I’ve been trying to find this since it came out back in April. Much thanks to the Lucy Parsons Center for actually having it in stock and totally justifying the three block walk (they also had Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, also on my list of books that I’ve been meaning to get to, but I put that purchase off for now).
Anyways, to get back to David Harvey, here’s a good summation of what he’s getting at in this book:
One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.
So why would we insist that the past exists apart from our thinking, writing, and teaching about it?
You might answer by saying that even before historians of class, gender, race, and sexuality built out the archive with new documents dredged from abandoned grottoes, subaltern groups were shaping the past from below, always already making history: workers did this, women did that, slaves and freedmen did it too, and eventually homosexuals got in the act. The relevant facts were always there, right in front of us, we just didn’t notice them. In short, the past didn’t change, our interpretations did.
Bullshit. The past changed because the facts changed because the world changed. You can put these nouns in any sequence you like. The past in question here began changing for good in the 1950s, when the whole history of Reconstruction had to be revisited (“revised”) because the NAACP got the attention of the Supreme Court and the Montgomery Improvement Association meanwhile got the attention of everybody else. When black folk became visible historical agents by organizing consumer boycotts, denouncing apartheid, and demanding the right to vote, the political past looked different, and so did the future, or rather the past looked different because the political future did. In fact, the past was, suddenly, different.
James Livingston, in a rather provocative essay over at the blog of the US Society of Intellectual History. “The past changed because the facts changed because the world changed” is a really interesting concept, challenging the way we think about what history is.
This essay is a clarification and broadening of his earlier essay reviewing (excoriating might be a better word) Paul Murphy’s The New Era, which actually looks to be quite a decent history of US political thought in the 1920s. That review thrust Murphy’s book into the unfortunate role of being the catalyst for Livingston’s rant about the way that history gets studied. The follow-up essay makes his criticisms more clearly, and without focusing on one particular book that he sees as an example of the problem.
Thought-provoking stuff, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: from the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (& Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behaviour)
Definitely plan on getting this book ASAP. I just checked out David Harvey’s previous books that cover some of the same sort of ideas, The Urbanization of Capital and Consciousness and the Urban Experience from the library to get a feel for his ideas.
(Source: jrantisexleague)
