Review: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

The Canadian and American states were founded on centuries of genocide. Now what? This is the question Krawec explores in Becoming Kin. Reconciliation requires understanding the harm done and proactive righting of wrongs. Appropriately, this essay collection starts with telling the story of the wrongs of settler colonialism (Chapters 1-5). To do so, Krawec weaves together personal stories, linguistics, history and myth — Anishnaabe and Christian peoples both come to understand themselves and their values through their myths. With these stories imparted, Krawec shifts towards the future, towards becoming kin — a relationship that comes with reciprocal responsibilities to each other. She explores kinship with the land (Chapter 6), the interrelatedness of people (Chapter 7), and practical considerations for rebuilding kinship (Chapter 8).

Krawec’s essays come with homework: each finishes in an aambe, an Anishnaabe term meaning “let’s go!” These sections ask the reader to participate by learning about the treaties that govern the relationships with the Indigenous peoples they share a home with, observing the absence of Indigenous stories in the media they consume, or finding a way to insist on Indigenous representation in your community in whatever form that might be. As the book progresses, her homework problems increasingly involve community building and outreach. 

At the outset, Krawec insists the reader read her book with a friend. Learning and doing are best done in community: “Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbours and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families.” It is from this community that your ability to change the world grows: “Organizing is a scary word. We hear it, and we think about large-scale events and mass mobilizations, but it begins with finding one person you can disrupt with.”

It is this emphasis on practical steps via community and education that makes this book special. Indigenous history is told more completely elsewhere (see, for example, works by Dunbar-Ortiz or Nick Estes). Indigenous philosophy is told more compellingly for a popular audience in Braiding Sweetgrass. Krawec’s writing meanders, and sometimes takes on a lecturing tone. Her perspective is more spiritual than what resonates with me. But her book, particularly Chapter 8, is forward-looking and community-oriented. It urges you to act and also makes you realize those first few steps aren’t so hard after all. That’s rarely found in a book.

Review: Our History Is The Future by Nick Estes

In Our History Is The Future, Nick Estes documents the #NoDAPL resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and connects it to the centuries of struggle for indigenous liberation that preceded it. Although Estes is an academic, he is also an activist, and this book reads as if it were written for training up the next generation of activists. This sets this work apart from others that might otherwise be competing in the same niche of US indigenous history. For example, Estes connects the struggle of indigenous nations in the US with the anti-imperialist writings of Lenin and Amilcar Cabral, figures too controversial for more mainstream audiences. Estes also does not seem to feel the need to sternly disapprove of militant protests while uplifting only lawfare. Because the book assumes little prior knowledge, it’s a reasonable entrypoint into indigenous liberation.

However, the book fell a bit flat for me. The historical sections are often dry, and while each chapter is centered on a broad theme, they tend to jump between topics without clear structure or chronology, making it hard to follow the argument or use the book as a reference. I would also have appreciated a more philosophical lens at times. For a book about national sovereignty, I was surprised how little development there was of what self-determination and nationhood mean. At several points, Estes emphasizes the difference between radical Indigenous internationalism and mere striving for status as a nation state, however how these goals differ in practice was more implied than defined. For example, in the passage below, Estes enticingly hints towards the difference between becoming a nation-state and ending imperialism, but it’s unclear how the nationhood sought by the Treaty Council varies from “the freedom associated with nation-states”:

Indigenous nationhood is often misunderstood as an exclusive project—the sole aspiration of just Indigenous peoples—or as confined within narrow definitions of the nation-state. This is similar to the way the “Indian problem” is treated as solely an Indian problem. According to the International Indian Treaty Council that first met at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 1974 and drafted the “Declaration of Continuing Independence,” the problem was not Indigenous peoples; the problem was, and always has been, imperialism. The aspiration for nationhood set the Treaty Council apart from other Red Power movements that sought the freedom associated with nation-states.

There are many indigenous nations, and it's possible Estes avoided precise definitions of nationhood and related terms out of fear of collapsing many diverse ideals into one. Still, the history of a struggle is also the history of a class coming to understand the struggle from a theoretical perspective, and this part of the history was lacking.

These shortcomings aside, the book is valuable in telling the stories of many of the key figures in indigenous liberation movements, and demonstrating both its connection with other movements and its internal diversity of thought. As Estes documents, #NoDAPL found support from #BlackLivesMatter and socialist parties. The indigenous struggles before it were closely connected to the USSR , to countries that overthrew their colonizers, and to Palestine, which still wages its war against its colonizer. The fall of the USSR and the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement slowed indigenous liberation movements, and allowed Western aggression to run rampant. 

One interesting example of internal struggle was the Treaty Council’s decision to file for non-governmental organization (NGO) status within the UN. As Estes describes, “To some, the channeling of energy into an NGO—arguably a non-revolutionary and non-sovereign entity—seemed in contradiction to their larger project.” The Treaty Council’s response remains an important reminder for our current movements too: “Decolonization, or a better term, liberation is a slow, painstaking process. What the colonialists accomplished over the past four centuries cannot be overcome easily.” The Council used their position as an NGO to push forward recognition of indigenous issues through events such as the 1977 Conference of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas (which the US boycotted) and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (which the US voted against).

Our History is the Future focuses on history, but there’s a few glimpses of what Estes believes the future might be. He points to the mutually supportive, non-hierarchical and non-commodified structure of resistance camps, and he ends his book on the note “For the earth to live, capitalism must die.” There’s a very, very long path between protesting pipelines and the abolition of commodity exchange, and I am left with many, many questions about what that road looks like.

Review: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophical beats repeat throughout history. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment traces anti-foundationalism from the Ancient Greeks through the modern era, and acts as a vaccine against such thought. Having read this work, I recognize it easily, and I can send out my metaphorical T cells to fight it.

J.S. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man plays a similar role against race science, tracing the bad philosophy and bad science to uphold the imperialist and racist status quo through a few hundred years. Indeed, his first edition (1981) anticipates the 1994 version of mismeasuring man, The Bell Curve. Gould highlights the factors that make this train of thought return to prominence: the need to justify cutbacks in social resources or explain increasing inequality by means of anything but social policy (“they deserve their fate, they’re just not smart enough to compete”). I think we will have many more years of such worsening social outcomes, so it’s a good vaccine to take.

Gould’s examination of some of the key figures and concepts of scientific racism (Broca, Goddard, Spearman's g, etc.) reveals a number of patterns. For example, data confirming a hypothesis is easily accepted and poorly scrutinized (Gould re-analyzes the raw data for several flawed but influential studies). In contrast, data showing the role of environment over genetics are tortured or waved away with absurd explanations like “intelligent Blacks move to where living conditions are better.” Politically or socially convenient findings are accepted and applied, despite pushback from contemporary critical scientists. Experimental protocols are poorly designed and often not followed.

Gould writes like a scientist (he was a professor at Harvard), for better or for worse. He is precise, cautious, meticulous, thorough. But he writes like a scientist with political convictions, who knows his work matters, who recognizes a personal stake in communicating the message. His presence throughout the book emphasizes this, such as his experience with a son with learning disabilities and how testing in education played a positive role in this case. Anticipating criticisms of bias, he cautions the reader not to conflate neutrality and objectivity: 

It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and argument can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one’s own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. 

It’s a work that bridges science, philosophy, history and politics in a way I found very satisfying, and still very important to the questions of today.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This history of the United States is familiar history, in the way that Wicked is familiar to The Wizard of Oz fans: the formation and development of the United States told from the perspective of those indigenous to the continent. Rather than extolling the inventions of liberties and freedoms, this history is a tragic devastation of a rich network of communities, and their struggle for survival, recognition and restitution.

One of the key themes of this work is how genocidal ideology doesn’t spring out of nowhere. The dehumanization of peoples in Europe preceded the dehumanization of peoples of the Americas, if to a less radical degree. England used bounties to capture priests (who they would then kill) as part of its conquest of Ireland; to conquer the vast distances of the Americas, this practice turned into scalping (Chapter 2). A religion whose God called upon them to wander the wilderness, defeat the heathens, and to occupy a promised land, went on to do just that in the New World (and then later, in Palestine), calling it Manifest Destiny (Chapter 3). The dispossession of peasants across England during the birth of capitalism reverberated in the dispossession of indigenous people of the Americas, using many of the technologies of capitalism — debts, cheap commodities (Chapter 3) — and benefitting from a self-interested volunteer army of settlers (or squatters) instead of the compelled labour of feudalism (Chapter 7). 

Another key theme is that this ideology is not a thing of the past. As the conclusion argues beautifully, the same techniques of quelling insurgencies, the same dehumanization of the barbarous enemy are present in United States imperialist wars of the 20th and 21st century (Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines, Kora, and others). Manifest Destiny developed into a belief that is the United States’ right to have military bases across the world, to bend the world to its will through legal tools and economic tools and, of course, violence. 

I think everyone should read this book.

Review: Women, the State and Revolution by Wendy Goldman

This book serves well as a reference, but for a full picture of women’s issues in the USSR, there is a considerable amount of context missing. 

Goldman’s introductory chapter provides a brief but excellent history of feminist and socialist thought up through 1917. Though initial conceptions of the role of the family in a socialist state were radical, with this intellectual history, the Bolshevik 1918 family code and the discourse around it are shown to be well-reasoned and strongly grounded in the progressive philosophy of the time. What would have made this chapter indispensable would be a comparison with family code legislation in other countries (recall that French women only got the right to vote in 1944, French illegitimate children only became equal to legitimate children in 2002, and at-will abortions are still illegal in England and massively restricted in many countries in the West). The innovation in the 1918 Soviet family code was not really brought home in the way it should have been. How did feminist achievements in the first socialist state impact the movement elsewhere? 

Alas, answering these questions would have been a very different book, and Goldman keeps the readers eyes focused tightly on the interior of the country, with little comparison to the legal treatment of women and children in other countries. (How did other countries handle the surplus of orphans following a war? How did other industrializing nations handle unemployment of women and lack of birth control technology?). We also see little in terms of foreign relations (largely hostile) or economic challenges that provide context towards the country’s challenges in feeding and clothing its people; to what other ends did the country direct its resources, and were its investments successful?

Most of the subsequent chapters provide detailed statistics and touching first person accounts about the difficulties experienced by orphans and women during the aftermath of the first world war and the civil war. The author editorializes somewhat, with each instance of suffering being terrible, but every attempt to fix it being somehow worse. Was there anything the author believes should and could have been done differently, with the wisdom of hindsight? These chapters were informative, but not particularly insightful.

Chapters 5 and 6, however, were more illuminating. In these chapters, Goldman skillfully maps out the fiery and varied debate about the 1926 code. The challenge of finding a robust set of rules that would serve both the urban proletariat and the peasantry — a way of life already diminishing by 1917 — and protect women and children and advance feminist conceptions of love and gender was an unsolvable puzzle. 

Perhaps particularly because of how brilliantly Goldman untangles this discourse, the subsequent rollbacks in family law in the 1930s appear to come a little out of nowhere. Was it truly so difficult to find writing regarding the thought process over the criminalization of abortion and the increased emphasis on the family as an institution for promoting economic security? The last two chapters felt a bit lazy; the conclusion was presupposed that these regressions in social policy were all “political” ploys by the Stalinist regime, and it was not necessary to dive deep into archives to understand why. Wendy writes, "The ideological reversal of the 1930s was essentially political, not economic or material in nature, bearing all the marks of Stalinist policy in other areas." A “political” decision to what “political” end? Unclear.

I picked up this book in part to answer the question of why the first nation to legalize abortion rolled it back not two decades later. I have my answer: initial legalization of abortion was viewed as a remedy to the problem of vast child poverty that the state was unable to support, and somewhat secondarily as a way to alleviate health issues arising from illegal abortions. It was not primarily an issue of the right of a woman to bodily autonomy. Conversely, when abortion law became once again more restrictive, it was viewed as a remedy to declining birth rates (discussion of the impacts of illegal abortion appears to have been minimal), and sold as something no longer necessary due to increasing economic resources for women. In the West, we view abortion so firmly within the language of bodily autonomy and right to choose that to take away this right is seen as a despicable encroachment on human rights. The USSR’s changing attitudes towards abortion do make more sense when viewed as a method of addressing social issues. Though, of course, I think they were wrong to take away this right.

This is a tragic story. The Bolsheviks correctly saw marriage as a tool of patriarchal oppression of women, and wished to bring about its withering away. Now, a century later, it has, in many ways, withered. Better birth control methods give women the confidence to enjoy sexual relationships outside of marriage, better educational and work opportunities give more women the independence to support themselves without a partner, and the laws of many countries have caught up to this material reality by providing legal protections to “de facto” marriages, much like the Bolshevik feminists fought for.

Review: They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Women have always been smart, able to make decisions for ourselves, creative and enterprising, and both interested in and capable of shaping the world around us to our own benefit — to the same extent as our male counterparts. Some social configurations limited the sorts of actions available to us, and we may not have received the same education and resources as our brothers did, but we were never simply passive members of society. Many of these decisions and actions we took, the ways we shaped the world, are not obvious from a more superficial reading of historical sources. This is true for the important roles women played in science and art and politics, and also for the less savory parts of human history, like the ownership and exploitation of enslaved people.

In this work, Jones-Rogers exhaustively documents white women’s autonomy and shrewdness in their roles as slave owners in the United States. She draws from sources as diverse as advertisements, women’s magazine advice columns, sales records and lawsuits to show over and over again how involved white women were in the institution of slavery. They made decisions to purchase or sell their human property, determined how to discipline them, how to get the most value out of their property, and other aspects of ownership. Jones-Rogers shows how important slave ownership was to the culture of this class: enslaved people were often parts of dowries, wills, coming-of-age-gifts and other markers of life. She discusses several instances of “power couple” slave owners, with husband and wife taking wildly different tactics to the care and discipline of their slaves. 

All this at a time when a woman’s property was considered to be her husband’s! In practice, women had say over their own property, and their property rights were enforced in court orders. Women would often sue their husbands for mismanagement of their (human) property, or sign premarital agreements governing the ownership and management of their (human) property. Other historical sources often overlook the role women played in slave ownership, and Jones-Rogers documents a number of factors that led to this under-count. For example, female slave owners were more likely to own female slaves, and female slaves were not recruited for Civil War efforts as male slaves were. When these slave-owners lined up for compensation for slaves taken from them during the war, women slave owners were therefore underrepresented. Women slave owners also used slave traders to a relatively greater extent than slave markets, compared to their male counterparts. They also often used (male) go-betweens to execute their wishes. Buyers and sellers may also be listed only with a first initial, complicating assessment of the individual’s gender. A superficial examination of limited sources might conclude that this practice was mostly a male affair.

The most interesting and unique chapter of the book was the chapter on wet nursing. This practice involves biology and culture, and exploits inequalities and prejudices about race and gender and class. It was a life-giving practice for many people, disgusting in its particular form of oppression, yet rarely features in history books. In my opinion, it works well as a stand-alone chapter, highlighting many of the other themes Roberts pulls at throughout her work.

The rest of the book is very detailed, and though it really brings to life the period and all its ugliness, it’s not a casual read but a scholarly work. I recommend it for those with an interest in the topic, but for the reader casually interested in race and gender in American history, I suggest Angela Davis' Race, Women, Class.

Review: Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt

I think of invention as a long, arduous process of trial and error, where, if you know where to look, it’s easy to see the bolts connecting previous pieces of technology and the design choices made due to historical conditions or material limitations. This book does not operate under the same definition of invention, and its handling of the invention of human rights is much the worse for it.

The picture that Hunt paints of human rights is one where humanity somewhat suddenly (over the 1750s-1790s) realized human rights were a crucial concept, and then somewhat bumpily implemented them, compelled by this contagious consciousness. Briefly, the narrative goes something like this: over the 17th century, the rise of the novel (particularly in France and England) led people to empathize across class and gender boundaries and recognize others to also be humans with their own inner worlds. Society then needed to change to reflect this new understanding of the individuality and equality of humans. Once these rights were declared (particularly in France and the USA), and one group got the individuality and equality they asked for, it was extended from on high to other groups:

The logic of the process determined that as soon as a highly conceivable group came up for discussion (propertied males, Protestants), those in the same kind of category but located lower on the conceivability scale (propertyless males, Jews) would inevitably appear on the agenda. (p150) 

It’s a very western-centric view of the “invention” of human rights. I think Hunt is correct to trace (at least some of) the emotional impetus for European bourgeois propertied male demands for individual rights and equality through the novel, but we should then see mirroring phenomena for other classes (or, to use her language, groups or categories of people). It seems unlikely to me that the slaves in Saint Domingue were inspired to demand their freedom because they were reading Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela or were enthused about the positive example of the Parisian’s right to freedom of religion. That the decree emancipating the slaves quotes the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is not sufficient to convince me it was a demand cascading from the French Declaration rather than a more spontaneous understanding that slavery really sucks, the negation of which was justified to the world with the hypocritical words used by its French oppressors. 

I think the root of my disagreement with Hunt about what human rights are is evident from this passage:

Human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings); equal (the same for everyone); and universal (applicable everywhere). For rights to be human rights, all humans everywhere in the world must possess them equally and only because of their status as human beings. It turned out to be easier to accept the natural quality of rights than their equality of universality. (p20)

While the equality and universality of human rights form the backbone of the remainder of Hunt's narrative, the issue of the naturalness of human rights is discussed only once, when summarizing the critique by Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism: 

Bentham objected to the idea that natural law was innate in the person and discoverable by reason. He therefore basically rejected the entire natural law tradition and with it natural rights. (p125)

This critique is not engaged with — his dismissal of human rights seems to be enough to stamp him as someone to ignore — and I’m left puzzled as to why it is so obvious that human rights are natural. After all, (paraphrasing Bentham) there is no gene that encodes the right to freedom of religion. If human rights are natural, then why is the book called Inventing Human Rights, rather than Discovering Human Rights? 

The title of the book is, ironically, an excellent way to frame this part of human history: human rights are indeed constructed. They are the product of the society that formulates them and enforces them, and they bear the marks of this process. This is a more useful lens: instead of a static, fully identified set of rules that society embarrassingly fails at applying sufficiently universally and equally, rights are the product of the battles and the concerns of the era.

Why was the era of capitalism the one that gave rise to demands for individual freedoms (the right to political representation, the right to freedom of religion), granted equally to all from birth? Those suddenly in power were no longer only men of noble birth. Their wealth came from the markets, and not from the pleasure of the King. Unlike the king, this new middle class had no need for the legitimation granted by the church, and so its authority too was weakened. Why were economic rights (the right to food and shelter, the right to work and to rest) added to the UN Declaration of Human Rights by the first ever Worker’s State? Those in power were concerned not only with political freedoms, which better enable the accumulation and enjoyment of wealth, but also with the economic freedoms, which enable the enjoyment of a fulfilling life without such wealth.

Because Hunt’s breezy overview of rights (excluding appendices, it is just 214 pages) emphasizes the slow stumbling process of recognizing the universality and equality of rights (rights in the abstract), the content of these rights and the specific relationships between these rights and the concerns and challenges of the people that demanded them is lost. It makes the invention of rights seem finished — in 1948 we declared there were 30 of them, and now we have only to implement them properly for a change. Why aren’t we adding to them to reflect our new understanding of what every member of society deserves, say, the right to a planet with an inhabitable environment?

Review: Love & Capital by Mary Gabriel

By her own accounts, Mary Gabriel set out to tell the story of Marx and Engels, not with the goal of examining their philosophical developments – which had already been dissected from all political angles – but with a focus on understanding their family. Gabriel discovers – chiefly through combing through decades of correspondence between the Marx and Engels households and their friends – a tightly knit, loving family of “brilliant, combative, exasperating, funny, passionate, and ultimately tragic figures.” But there are many brilliant, exasperating, passionate people in the world, and not all of them have biographies that could be pitched as “a story of one of the most influential thinkers in history, but this time, with a feminist angle.” What does Gabriel’s angle tell us about Marx?

Gabriel reflects, “as rich as the Marx family story is, I found it also shed light on the development of Marx’s ideas.” I don’t fully disagree: the grueling poverty Marx and his family lived through, the tumultuousness of the politics of the mid-19th century, these are all things I was broadly aware of but reading it in minute detail through their letters, all laid out carefully in chronological order, certainly helped me better understand the emotion and hope behind Marx and Engels’ writing. But it feels, nevertheless, like a partial portrait. The story of their intellectual development is told briefly, perfunctorily, and I was left with many questions. Who were they reading? How did it shape them? Did they exchange silly quotes from Adam Smith and Malthus or were Marx’s searing critiques of these philosophers put on paper only in Capital? Hegel is barely mentioned. I would have gladly read several pages on their reaction to Darwin. Instead, we get pages of salaciously delivered, poorly sourced gossip about mistresses and other soap opera dramas. Perhaps it is unfair of me to judge this biography on this account: Gabriel explicitly set out not to examine philosophical developments and wound up only including more of Marx’s theory because it seemed timely in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, I cast judgment based on its goal: these are figures we know because of their philosophy, to attempt to tell their stories without really engaging with their contributions feels empty.

But to be charitable, what if I look at this biography of Marx based on the goal Gabriel sets for herself: an emphasis on the women in Marx’s life? These women played a more important role than I previously appreciated: his wife and daughters handled some of his correspondence, translated his works, and acted as his research assistants. This isn’t unusual for writers of the time: Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy, played similar roles for their husbands (although Gabriel does not provide this context). Marx’s daughter, Eleanor (unnecessarily called “Tussy” throughout Gabriel’s oeuvre while family nicknames are inconsistently applied to the other figures) played an active role in the labour movement in the 1870s-1890s, and to a lesser extent, her sisters did too.

Despite the extra screen time these women received compared to a more ‘traditional’ biography of Marx, I felt like there was a complete absence of effort to understand who these women were. This tendency was most egregious for Marx’s wife Jenny von Westphalen, who is presented as gentle woman who loves simple luxuries, and who is deprived of her birthright to a comfortable living because of a lousy husband who won’t get a real job but thoughtlessly involves himself in political movements that go nowhere. This portrait is painted without specific evidence penned by Jenny herself, and Gabriel does not seriously engage with the counterfactual: that Jenny loved Marx, believed in the socialist cause, and that her trust in Marx’s contributions to socialism arose from her capacity for rational thought bestowed unto her by her aristocratic and bookish upbringing. All this despite Gabriel highlighting over and over again the tireless work Jenny did to support Marx, such as sending messages to their acquaintances requesting financial support and running a household that overflowed with visiting socialist organizers. Instead of respecting Jenny’s choices and intellect, Gabriel accuses Jenny of "parroting" Marx’s ideas. It reads profoundly unfeminist despite its emphasis on the women of the story.

I found myself instead wondering about the emotional pain the author brought from herself to the story. Who is this woman who had so many tears to shed about an 18th century woman pawning her jewelry and clothes, but so few tears for the poor living in London slums (who Gabriel likened to rats)? My google searches turned up sparse details about her life, but her outsized indignation at Marx's life choices had me trying to fill in the blanks. When she suggests Marx's economic work and organizing efforts were selfish choices with "so devastating an impact" on his children, is she thinking about an absent parent, too busy with committee meetings and conferences to provide her with the attention she deserved? Does she see in her own career a certain virtuousness in having done her dues for two decades as an editor at Reuters before taking time off to write books — if only Marx had put off writing Capital a little longer, Jenny might have been able to keep her von Westphalen family silverware! When she fails to consider the relationship between Jenny and Marx as one of partnership of two well-studied individuals both intent on bringing about socialism, is it because of a shallowness in her own romantic relationships? Has she never loved someone and the cause they believed in?

Still, the work Gabriel clearly did in reading the correspondence assembled in the Marx and Engels Collected Works and other archives shines through the gossipy muck. The book is peppered with fun anecdotes that make the characters and the period feel very alive. Combined with the historical and political context woven throughout the narrative, this book is an informative if infuriating read.

Conspectus: Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns by Domenico Losurdo

Twentieth century history unfolded from battles in nineteenth century philosophy, which itself was a reaction to the French Revolution. One path of nineteenth century philosophy and twentieth century history objected to the French Revolution’s upsetting of the natural order of things (are all men really equal?). In this path, we find the liberals Burke and Toqueville, neoliberals like Hayek, and the philosophers of fascism. The other path developed a philosophical expression (and eventually, political implementation) of the values that sparked the French Revolution: all men are equal, and political rights are meaningless without economic rights. This path follows Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and from there continues to Marx and Engels, to Lenin and leaders of socialist movements world-wide. Given the crucial role Hegel played in this second path, it’s worth understanding his philosophy in some depth, and Losurdo’s book delivers beautifully.

Losurdo starts by asking, “is Hegel a liberal or a conservative?” (I suppose I am a little jealous that these are the arguments in which Losurdo feels he must intervene; the misunderstandings I see of Hegel revolve around a sort of “that guy loves kings…. and Spirit??”) The answer is that neither binary fits Hegel well, and in fact presupposes the rather peachy view of liberalism that liberalism views to be self-evident about itself. A better axis on which to situate Hegel would be “Patrician or plebeian?” On this axis, liberals and conservatives alike end up in the former camp, while Hegel is clearly situated in the latter (for all his approval of kings!). Hegel’s political positions are complex, and, Losurdo argues, must be understood in the context of the historical events and debates of the time. Losurdo leads us through these battlefields, examining Hegel’s perspectives on revolution, the sovereign, education and the rights of the child, and the role of the state in addressing poverty.

The one gap I felt was missing from this book was an examination of Hegel's racist statements about other civilizations. These statements also have roots in his philosophy (nothing in history is eternal, the actual is rational, and so why did Europeans become the dominant force in the 19th century?), and I think they could have fit within the argument of the book.

I feel so much more confident in the philosophical and historical issues of the nineteenth century having read this work. It's surprising (even disappointing?) how current discussions tread the same ground as discussions from two hundred years ago. Or perhaps it is instead Losurdo's skill at picking out the most relevant conflicts to our times, and presenting these clashes in ways that feel fresh but familiar. Regardless, it's a valuable book to read for understanding both the past and the present, and I strongly recommend it. However, it was a little dense, so as both a guide for myself and for other apprehensive would-be readers, I summarized the main arguments of each chapter. 

 Chapter I: A Liberal, Secret Hegel?

Review: To Kill A Nation by Michael Parenti

I loved Slovenia when I visited. It's a beautiful country, with an interesting geography and a resulting interesting history. Spanning an opening in the alps, it forms a passage between western Europe and eastern Europe. As a result, it has historically been a strategic territory to hold, and was part of empires ranging from Rome’s to Byzantine’s to Napoleon’s to Austro-Hungary’s to the Nazi’s. The territory was liberated from this latter empire by socialist Partisans, and became part of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. 

Slovenia's relationship with its past was fascinating. In the half dozen museums I visited while I was there, the country spoke positively of its socialist era, but similarly it was proud of being part of the European Union and of NATO. I wanted to learn a little more about its fascinating 20th century history, so I was happy to see Parenti wrote a book on the final years of Yugoslavia. As Parenti lays out, Yugoslavia was a particularly multi-cultural country that showed strong economic success:

Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates, along with free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to an income, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, and a life expectancy of seventy-two years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, in a mostly publicly owned, market-socialist economy.

In the late 1960s-1970s, Yugoslavia took out loans from the West to invest in its industrial capacity, however when a recession hit western economies, Yugoslavia found their export market dried up, and had challenges servicing their debt. In response, the IMF demanded an economic restructuring: wage freezes, elimination of worker-owned enterprises, cuts to social spending. These cuts led to an economic depression that “helped fuel the ensuing ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements.” 

These conflicts, or rather, the aggressions of the Serbs against the Albanians specifically, formed the basis of NATO’s justification to violently intervene in Yugoslavia. Parenti investigates the claims of NATO and the West, looking for evidence that (a) mass murder and mass rape was committed on a “genocidal” scale and that (b) these acts formed part of a government-sanctioned policy. Citing sources like The New York Times, Amnesty International and the UN, he finds that the oft-repeated allegations that 100,000-500,000 people were unaccounted for and presumed dead are based on poor evidence, that detailed investigation of grave sites by French, British and other Western sources found evidence of about 2,000 dead — just a fraction. Nor could the UN War Crimes Commission nor Amnesty International find evidence of mass-rape campaigns, nor survivors of rape in any substantial numbers.

No doubt there also were despicable grudge killings and executions of prisoners and innocent civilians as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide or justify the death, destruction and misery inflicted upon Yugoslavia by bombings and sanctions.

These allegations of violence are put into context of the devastation wrecked by NATO. The US itself estimated NATO killed 500 (Belgrade puts the number at 2,500 dead), and displaced 100,000 civilians hoping to flee the destruction. (This refugee crisis was then pointed to by NATO as post hoc justification for NATO’s intervention.) NATO’s bombing surgically eliminated waterworks, power plants, bridges, hospitals, schools, churches — marvelously sparing all foreign-owned firms while destroying 164 state-owned factories. These strikes constituted illegal war crimes, and were committed by an institution without elections: “the first major war declared by a body that has no constituency or geography as would be found in a nation-state.” 

So if the alleged humanitarian crisis shows no strong basis in reality, why did NATO invade? Parenti lays out a more compelling explanation: (1) the Balkans form a strategic territory from which to exert power towards the east, (2) prior to IMF interference, Yugoslavia was an admirable socialist success story (despite Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that There Is No Alternative [to capitalism]), (3) the financial and US hegemonic benefit of “Third Worldizing” a non-allied country, that is, converting Yugoslavia to a smattering of small, right-wing nations that are (a) incapable of charting an independent course, (b) open to transnational corporations to extract labour and natural resources, (c) populated with literate but impoverished workers who labour at subsistence wages, depressing wages in Europe and elsewhere, and (d) no longer possess competitive mining, automotive, pharmaceutical, etc industries of their own. 

While this text is two decades old, and Yugoslavia has generally faded from pop culture memory, and even from current criticism of NATO, this book felt highly relevant. In it, we see the same media patterns used to allege genocide of minority groups by socialist nations and the humanitarian justification of Western atrocities. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine reaches its first anniversary, I also see hints of how negotiation talks might unwind. Yugoslavia proposed peace conditions that included “guaranteed human rights for all citizens and promotion of the cultural and linguistic identity of each national community” as well as granting legislative assemblies with representation specifically designated for national communities. NATO instead put forth the Rambouillet Peace Agreement, which “demanded complete autonomy for Kosovo, the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from the province, and occupation by NATO forces”, with Yugoslavia barred from legislation over Kosovo’s affairs while Kosovo would be able to exercise influence within Yugoslavia’s parliament and receive funds from Yugoslavia’s budget. The Serbian delegation was told they had two choices: sign the agreement as written or face NATO bombing. Russia is in a little better of a negotiating position than Yugoslavia was, with its tiny population and GDP. However, I think we can expect to see very one-sided reporting, little good-faith effort on NATO’s behalf, and we are unlikely to arrive at a solution involving an unaligned, thriving, multi-ethnic state. 

This book, out of all of Parenti’s, is particularly controversial, with his critics charging him of minimizing or denying the genocide of Albanians. However, I haven’t seen a critique that lays out what evidence Parenti leaves out or misconstrues, and the sources Parenti cites (such as UN tribunals or New York Times retractions) are likely trustworthy on this line of messaging. (Parenti notes, “Generally, mainstream information that goes against the mainstream’s own dominant paradigm is likely to be reliable. It certainly cannot be dismissed as self-serving.”) These criticisms of Parenti often come from avowed fans of Parenti — those who like him but insist that while his other books are great, in this one he takes an uncharacteristic mistep. To those critics, I ask what part of Parenti’s philosophy or research methods could lead him to come to the correct conclusion in his much-beloved Blackshirts and Reds, but to the wrong conclusion when aimed at Yugoslavia.

Review: War and Peace by Tolstoy

My most controversial book opinion might be that I actually liked the second part of the epilogue of this book.

In War & Peace, Tolstoy lays out his criticism of historians, particularly those who subscribe to great man theory, or those who take halfhearted measures and try to play both sides. Tolstoy's philosophy here has clear roots in mid-19th century thinking, in which clashes between idealism and materialism were fierce, and discoveries like evolution signalled the death of intelligent creation (of man by god, of wars by genius generals).

In many passages, Tolstoy seems on the cusp of discovering or otherwise exploring historical materialism (first laid out a couple decades earlier by Engels and Marx, but not arriving in Russia until rather after War and Peace was written). However, he fails to see (or perhaps underestimates) the material conditions that differentiate the peasants and the nobility. He also, in his efforts at countering great man theory, downplays the importance of strategic thinking and seizing opportune moments. As a result, his view of history is one where the actions are a tidy mathematical sum of interchangeable men acting as they wish, the total of their personalities clattering like dice thrown on a gambling table. This then devolves into a rather uninteresting musing on the existence or illusion of free will.

Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first real novel, and having now read War and Peace, I understand this assertion. This first work of fiction is perhaps a quarter philosophy and history, and feels not quite evenly stitched together. The blueprints of ideas that become well-developed in Anna Karenina are visible in War and Peace. Between the two, I liked the former better, but this philosophical treatise woven with angsty young people trying to find their way in the world was still a fascinating read, particularly for understanding the development of thought in the nineteenth century, and in this period of time in Russia.

Review: Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence by Yves Winter

One should reproach a man who is violent in order to ruin things, not one who is so in order to set them aright.

— Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

I, and I think this is common to most of us in the West, feel a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the concept of violence. “Violence is bad! I won’t condone it!” I feel I need to yell in my own defense, when spotted reading this book. “Instead, we must fix the unequal socioeconomic conditions of our society by…..” And here, I falter.

While elite actors can frequently mobilize significant forces to pursue their objectives, popular actors must rely on numbers and on tactics that specifically target elite properties: their privileges, wealth, reputation, and social standing.

How do you target the privileges, wealth, reputation and social standing of the elite? It’s either shame or violence, isn’t it?

Machiavelli’s writings on violence are portrayed, in Winter’s reading, as a necessary antidote to liberal perspectives on violence. Necessary, because the threat of violence is one of the few tools popular (plebeian, proletariat) forces have at their disposal to achieve their objectives against the elite. In the liberal world, violence has been depoliticized primarily through four methods:

1. Marginalization: Violence is either a fundamentally human weakness, a remnant of our bestial, pre-civilization roots; or, an inhuman or pathological urge. In either case, violence is not a political tool because it is not something wielded by thoughtful, strategic, justified humans.
2. Technicization: a favorite of the political realists, violence is a mechanical tool, that can be precisely dialed in impact and scope to achieve the desired ends, so obviously necessary for enforcement of law that it is trivial to discuss in its particulars. As it is obviously required, fully controllable and transparently applied, it is not a political tool.
3. Moralization: Violence is evil — but when is it justified? Philosophers invent a slew of thought experiments for when it is morally justified. Because in these hypotheticals, violence is abstracted away from the power structures and historical context in which violence is actually deployed, this violence is no longer a political tool. (Often accompanied with portrayals of violence as an apolitical acid that eats away at the foundations of functioning political systems).
4. Ontologization: Violence is transcendental, mystical. According to Derrida, even naming something can be violence. Violence can be anything, which makes it not a political tool.
   

Winter’s Machiavelli instead views violence as a political tool, and as inherent to a social structure with class inequality (the populi and the grandi):

Those serious, though natural enmities, which occur between the popular classes and the nobility, arising from the desire of the latter to command, and the disinclination of the former to obey, are the [origin of] all the other evils which disturb republics (Machiavelli, 1532)

Unlike in Weber’s construction of violence, in which violence is a coercive force between an object/subject pair, Machiavelli views violence as tryadic: object, subject, and audience. From this key insight emerges most of the rest; how violence is perceived becomes the key question (violence as cruelty, violence as spectacle, violence as catharsis, violence as justified).

Machiavelli considers there to be four political emotions: hate, love, hope, fear. Hope is relegated to foreign policy and conquest, for reasons that Winter didn’t really make clear to me. The relationship between hate and fear, and the way violence mediates this switch was of particular interest to Machiavelli, because it is crucial to strategy both for Princes and for the masses.

Politically, the power of fear lies in its capacity to isolate individuals. We hate collectively but we fear individually. (...) Unlike fear, which tends to individualize, hatred produces the possibility of unifying a multitude. (..) From the point of view of the prince, this yields the problem of how to deploy violence without generating hatred. (...) From the point of view of the rebellion, it yields the opposite problem: how to nurture collective hatred and avoid fear, especially in the face of repression.

This switch between hate and fear poses one limit on violence. The other limit is long-term stability and succession. For this, laws are necessary. Political systems are continuous – even in times of turmoil – and the violence of founding a state sets the stage for the laws that develop over time.

I learned far more about civil unrest in Florence in the late 14th and early 15th century than I thought I would. It was a fascinating time, with the beginnings of a proletariat class, and Marx’ and Engel’s axiom, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, was brought to the foreground of Winter’s presentation of Machiavelli’s analysis of the times. 

Applying Machiavelli’s perspectives on violence beyond the 15th century is left as an exercise for the reader.

Review: Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington

 I think this one is a must-read for anyone conducting biomedical research.

Some parts — particularly the first third, dealing with the slavery and reconstruction era of US history — I'd read before in books like Angela Davis' Race, Women and Class. A few parts felt like rather long deviations that I didn't feel added all that much to the central thesis — for example, the chapter on display of Black people at zoos and freak shows, the part on apartheid South Africa's bioterrorism against its own citizens (the US, as Washington clearly demonstrated, has done plenty such terrorism and testing against its own citizens).

Some parts I thought I knew well — the Tuskegee syphilis trials, for example — but I was surprised there were still shady details to learn (for example, the time pressure on the ad hoc Tuskegee investigative committee, the shameful political maneuvering by its chair to soften the language of the report).

The book was written in 2006, and in the intervening 15 years, I think the big new issue we need to grapple with is the role Big Data plays in healthcare. Non-interventional anonymized healthcare data is sold and re-sold so companies can better target their marketing efforts or assess the potential ROI of a pharmaceutical intervention. These companies have data on some 300 million Americans (of 330 million people). This type of use of medical records has minimal benefit to the people whose records are being sold and analyzed, and I think few people know their information is used this way. I don't think it should be tolerated.

Review: The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

I read The Jakarta Method over just a few days, but it took me nearly twice that to pinpoint what about this book left me feeling unsatisfied. 

It's very well researched, gathering information from interviews, contemporary reporting in both Western and Third World news outlets, and CIA documentation. These sources are woven together into a gripping narrative. The subject matter — the brutal, relentless, anti-communist international interventions carried out by the United States in the twentieth (and twenty-first...) century — is vital to know, and Americans are grossly, depressingly ignorant of it. The victims of this aggression are humanized, their stories of shattered dreams for a better world are poignant, yet these violent, gory moments are never played for titillation. The events are contextualized well, drawing a line between colonialism/imperialism, communities depleted of their natural resources and finding solutions in communism. It's good investigative journalism.

But it feels like just that. An unusually long investigative article.

With a title like "The Jakarta Method", I was expecting to learn some sort of framework, something like Manufacturing Consent's Propaganda Model. A 12-step plan for a military coup of a socialist government? Seven signs to look for to identify an upcoming CIA-backed extermination of communists? Some other Buzzfeed listicle-ready structure? I had lingering questions: were all anti-communist interventions after the events in Indonesia in 1965 using the Jakarta Method? were there exceptions: "successful" interventions that used some other method? were there unsuccessful attempts at employing the Jakarta Method, and if so, why did they fail? Bevins doesn't have answers for these questions, but then again, he never promised anything more rigourous than an exhaustively-researched, accurately-told story (and he uses that word to describe his work here repeatedly). So maybe that's on me.

Setting aside this disappointment and accepting the book for what it was rather than what it could have been, I did learn a lot. I had a bare bones understanding of events in South East Asia and South America, and this story fleshed out many missing spots. 

That said, I recommend that readers read it with a critical eye. For all that Bevins has been able to dig through the muck of Western reporting to uncover some really ugly truths about American foreign policy, I think he rather fundamentally misunderstands why this aspect of US foreign policy is unknown domestically:

I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.

Ah yes, your typical American learns the facts of these events and simply chooses to ignore it out of national pride. 

This naïveté extends from analysis of propaganda and politics in the First World to discussion of the Second World. The same sorts of narratives Bevins questions when applied to Indonesia are not questioned when their subject is the USSR.

In this book, I spent less time discussing the real atrocities carried out by certain communist regimes in the twentieth century. That’s partly because they’re so well known already; it’s mostly because these crimes truly didn’t have much to do with the stories of the men and women whose lives we traced throughout the past one hundred years. But it’s also because we do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin’s purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. Even Mao’s Great Leap Forward was quickly abandoned and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party, though the party is still very much around. We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence.

I would, with the above reservations, recommend this book to those interested in learning more about recent history in Indonesia, Chile and Brazil. It's a good story.

These countries were trying to do something very, very difficult. It doesn’t help when the most powerful government in history is trying to stop you. It’s hard to say how they might have reshaped the world if they were truly free to experiment and build something different.

Review: Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin

Black Against Empire is well researched and approachable as an introduction to the Black Panthers. As implied by the full title (Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party), it is very much a detailed history of the organization - there is little examination of the philosophy of the organization. The prose is a little functional - unlike, for example, Race, Women and Class, there are no particularly memorable or inspiring or emotionally wrenching passages. The authors aim to inform, not to incite. I think for these reasons, it serves as a good introduction or supplement. But as far as a call to action, or even really understanding what the Panthers were fighting for, it works best in the context of other readings — particularly those that form the philosophical basis of the Panther party, like those by Malcolm X or Mao or Marx.

Still, the authors make a compelling case that the unprecedented political power of the Panthers relied on both their revolutionary tactics of armed self-defense against state oppression and the receptive political context of anti-war activism. They also clearly present how social movements gain power and build community, how the State targets social movements, and how social movements splinter.

The authors conclude:

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.

At times during the summer of 2020, in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter protests after the police killing of George Floyd it seemed like perhaps the frustrated, pandemic-stricken public's imagination was seized to create this broad alliance. But now, nearly a year out, change seems incremental — particularly relative to the change effected during the ~2 year period described in Black Against Empire. I feel like perhaps the recipe for success is therefore even more complicated than that presented by the authors, a daunting prospect.

Review: Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

Rating: 5/5 stars

There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me - that Parenti has spent so much time thinking of this topic that this work just flowed straight out of his pen.

This fluidity made it a joy to read. However, it was also not quite what I expected. I picked this book up in part because I enjoyed The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome so much, and I was expecting a similarly focused and well-cited exegesis. Instead it was a broad overview of the many facets of anti-communist and pro-capitalist propaganda and foreign policy in the 20th century. In some ways, it functions perhaps more so as an "introduction" chapter to the rest of Parenti's work - which I will probably read.

It took me a while to read; although flowing, it is dense with fantastic ways of framing or phrasing an issue that I think deserve a moment of contemplation.

I thought back a little to my review of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, where I complained that the illustrative examples of manufactured consent were all quite dated and unfamiliar to me, and were not fully explained, instead presuming the reader was already quite familiar with at least the mainstream media narrative of Pol Pot or Duarte or whoever (which I wasn't). Although the examples Parenti uses in this book are similarly old, more of the necessary background to understand them was presented.

Review: Michael Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome

 Rating: 5/5

This book is the overview of the Late Roman Republic that politically conscious social justice advocates didn't know they needed to read. It was at times frustrating to learn how old the ways the wealthy wield and accumulate power and fight for their class interests are.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification proffered by the assassins themselves. In this book I present an altnerative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.

Despite the cliché that "history is written by the victors", our popular view of history remains largely unquestioned. I really appreciated the emphasis in this book to point out how our narrative of Caesar has been constructed for us by a lineage of white, upper-class, male historians, and sorts through these biases.

The chapters are well organized, to the point, and not overly long. The language isn't dumbed down but nor is it overly academic (a welcome change of pace after my last read, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny). The author's passion for what he writes about comes through; at times he is drily humorous, sometimes he is a little snide, sometimes he incites compassionate feelings of injustice. It's a very readable book.