Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

This is an ambitious, vivid debut novel. The retelling of the story of Buddha’s son was clever and fresh, and meaningful even if you are not acquainted with the mythology. The prose was elegant and evocative and flowing. The world felt packed with mysteries, swirling with people and politics. The fantasy version of Sri Lanka felt so fun to explore, and the author deftly wove in the scars of colonialism, and its relationship to fascist popular uprisings and religious fundamentalism, and the way political violence is given cover by a liberal tolerance more concerned with bureaucracy and comfortable vacations in the mountains than halting pandemics and pogroms. The pandemic setting also felt eerily familiar: the narrative is very aware of who is masked, which strangers intrude within breathing distance.

But I felt like overall it came together not quite right. Some scenes had awkward transitions and some events were unclear; I had to reread a passage to confirm that a key character had actually died, and it didn’t always feel natural why a chapter started where it did. The mysteries didn’t unravel at the right rate; given the prominence of the Bright Doors, their connection to other worlds felt insufficiently dwelled upon, and was overshadowed by a somewhat out-of-nowhere appearance of a long-lost lover. I expected more coherence between the various mysteries of time shifting, doors, devils and prophecies. Perhaps their seeming disjointedness is given cohesion by familiarity with South Asian folklore. 

The ending also came a little suddenly. From the very first pages of the book, we learn Fetter’s shadow has been torn from him. At the emotional climax of the book, we suddenly learn the narrator has been Fetter’s shadow all along, and we cease seeing the world through Fetter’s eyes as the shadow sets out to complete its own goals. This reveal was well done, and I enjoyed revisiting parts of the story with this knowledge. It was also a clever way to resolve the contradiction between Fetter swearing to never kill again with the prophecy that Fetter would end his father’s life: Fetter’s shadow played the role of assassin (via an ignominious mode of death) while Fetter played the role of non-violent dissenter. Fetter is lighter than air, the shadow operates by causing pain, disgust, indigestion, shame. They form a yin/yang. 

However with this thesis/antithesis established, I felt the lack of synthesis at the end rather unfulfilling: Fetter remains blocked off from his shadow, and more distant and difficult to read than ever. Perhaps it is the author’s intent for Fetter to fully reject forever the use of violence as “the only way to change the world” — his mother’s mantra. A permanent separation of shadow and body achieves that. On the other hand, a synthesis of shadow and brightness would indicate an acceptance of both violence and non-violence. However, in the final page Fetter indicates that he has achieved nearly this latter transformation — he continues to reject violence by his hands while supporting a movement that is willing to use force when necessary to overthrow their government. So then why did his shadow leave him, separate from him?

The crux of the issue is, I think, how the author tried to approach the problem of political revolution in fiction. An author has, broadly, two choices: (1) the main character(s) can play the central role, acting as world-changing heroes (Babel), or (2) the main character can play a small role, some side battle in a bigger war (For Whom The Bell Tolls, Wheel of Time). The Saint of Bright Doors tries to have it both ways: (1) the main character is prophesied to kill his father, and (2) the main character is but a small part of a dynamic, growing movement. While the objective of (1) is completed, the day is not yet saved, and the movement built by Fetter’s friends (2) is poised to contest power. However, Fetter is strangely absent in both aspects: (1) it is his shadow that takes agency in the first arc, and (2) Fetter’s friends who take agency in the second arc. As a result, Fetter’s arc is mainly to drift through the story, and come to terms with his relationships with his parents, while others get the political work done.

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: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

This is a book for those who enjoy overtly political fiction. Those who treasure world-building and the mechanics of magic systems will be profoundly disappointed. The main character, Hank, is bonked on the head and inexplicably sent back to the sixth century. Having just as inexplicably memorized the date of every total eclipse going back over a millennia, Hank uses the knowledge of a conveniently-timed rare astronomical event to make himself King Arthur’s official court wizard, deposing Merlin.

And thus Mark Twain quickly gets all sorts of inconvenient plot necessities out of the way (the kind of power-struggle or magic system exploration that might have kept a Robert Jordan-type occupied for some 4000 pages), allowing us to focus on the real topic at hand: education is absolutely crucial for a mass social revolution.

Armed with the knowledge of the nineteenth century, Hank embarks on a modernization of the kingdom, from a patent office to telephone lines to newspapers. It quickly becomes clear that the barrier to creating a “civilized” society is not (solely) technological, but social. The feudal society is nearly alien to him in their understanding of truth and justice.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.

Hank finds himself repeatedly frustrated trying to reason with people about how they should go about making the world better for themselves only to be met with self-sabotaging superstition.

The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor.

The principal target of Twain’s polemic is the feudal system and the religious institutions that accompanied it. In 2024, it seems like a dead horse that doesn’t need further beating, but I suppose the horrors of nineteenth century capitalism had Twain’s contemporaries romancing the chivalry and bucolic villages of an imagined dark ages, just as 135 years later we romanticize some good, kind capitalism that never was.

Twain’s story shows its age in other facets too; Hank initially repeatedly refers to the sixth century denizens as animals, and once as “white indians”, in need of civilizing. These aspects felt rather uncomfortably colonial (and of course, Twain was writing at a time of American colonialism). On the other hand, Hank wasn’t using economic and military means to force a people to submit: the victims of his authority and his superior ballistics were all aristocrats, the beneficiaries their oppressed and imprisoned serfs. If anything, in his role of transforming society through enlightenment, Hank was more of a missionary. Slowly, Hank learns to relate to the people around him, and his language ceases being quite so derogatory. His friendship with his apprentice, Clarence, was quite cute.

Though the premise and some of the humour is really very silly, the novel bursts with incisive and empathetic observations about oppression, violence, leadership and political education that will linger in my mind for a while.

Review: The Black Jacobins by CLR James

The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this rule.

 It is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership.

CLR James wrote The Black Jacobins with a clear goal: providing black people in the Americas with the knowledge and confidence they need to challenge the governments that oppress them. How do you identify a political opportunity, which political alliances should you make and which should you avoid, how do you identify leaders from amongst you? This goal imbues the book with a sense of high stakes and urgency, complemented by the book’s vivid writing. It’s a perspective of the Haitian Revolution from below, and I liked both the angle and how clear the author was about the angle: the way to counteract narrative after narrative of a historical event “from above” is not to craft a “neutral” history.

The strong suit of the book was the portion before the revolution. James lays out a careful analysis of the complex ways race (mulatto versus black versus white), property ownership (dispossessed, small capital, plantation owners) and freedom (enslaved versus free) intersected, and how the relationship between San Domingo (Haiti’s former name) and its colonizer, France, shaped the politics on the island. San Domingo springs alive: a bustling island rich in resources and rife with contradictions. The colonial powers are pushed to the sidelines for a change: France, Spain, England and a nascent United States haunt the island, vying for power and wealth in the area. The framing throws into sharp relief the validity of the brief, heated moments of retaliatory violence conducted by the former slaves against those who brutally exploited them for centuries and then slaughtered them in cold blood during the war. Interestingly, for all the book’s nuanced investigation of race, imperialism and class, it was surprising that gender oppression was nearly absent from the book. 

The middle section of the book was more middling. James details the movements of various military troops, and the correspondence between various political figures, and I found myself getting a little lost in the names and dates. Woven between the military history, we see Toussaint L'Overture moving up through the ranks, leading men, and making shrewd decisions. For example, he kickstarts San Domingo’s recovery after the war by taking advantage of the skill sets of white property owners. James lifts Toussaint up as an inspiring role model, but portrays him as perhaps too heroic, too out of reach: the pages overflow with phrases like “the range and sensitivity of Toussaint’s untaught genius.” 

The final portion of the book landed like a disappointing plot twist. Having built up Toussaint as this kind, thoughtful, brilliant, sensitive man, James narrates his great betrayal of the masses at the hands of their leader: “Once more the masses had received a shattering blow—not from the bullets of the enemy, but from where the masses most often receive it, from their own trembling leaders.” Toussaint’s failing (and the lesson the reader should apply to their own political work) was to leave unexplained his strategy and the need for collaboration with other classes:

But whereas Lenin kept the party and the masses thoroughly aware of every step and explained carefully the exact position of the bourgeois servants of the Worker’s State, Toussaint explained nothing, and allowed the masses to think that their old enemies were being favoured at their expense.

I agree with James, of course, about the importance of communication. My disappointment was with how little James dug into why this brilliant leader—who dined at the hearths of old black women and lived among the people as much as he could—suddenly failed to communicate with his supporters. James insists the solution was obvious and simple: “With Dessalines, Belair, Moise and the hundreds of other officers, ex-slave and formerly free, it would have been easy for Toussaint to get the mass of the population behind him.” Toussaint “destroyed his own Left-wing, and with it sealed his own doom” and yet “the tragedy was that there was no need for it.” The closest we get to understanding this fateful shortcoming of Toussaint is that he was “a naturally silent and reserved man” and that he was educated—Dessalines, who “saw no further” than his own nose was for that reason able to more clearly understand the threat of the French.

Then, perhaps aware that this nearly divinely effective leader built up throughout the book was at odds with the tight-lipped misguided man of the final chapter, James assures us ”It is easy to see to-day… where he had erred. It does not mean that [his generals] or any of us would have done better in his place.” One wonders if one can really learn from Toussaint at all: an untaught genius, doomed to fail, to betray the masses.

The masses play a strange role in James’ retelling. They are, in large part, the protagonists of the story—The Black Jacobins is a popular history, and the event it portrays was a popular revolution. But in this telling, the masses become a sea of people from which emerge a few leaders, and it is through these leaders that we see the twists and turns of the revolution. James’s primary material guides this perspective, to some extent; we have the correspondence of military officers and diplomats, but presumably fewer contemporaneous records written by ex-slaves. But James writes with certainty regarding the convictions and passions of the masses, treating them as monolithic and often instinctive beings:

The masses thought he had taken Spanish San Domingo to stop the slave traffic, and not as a safeguard against the French.

The masses were fighting by instinct. They knew that whatever party the old slave-owners belonged to aimed at the restoration of slavery.

The Russian masses were to prove once more that this innate power will display itself in all populations when deeply stirred and given a clear perspective by a strong and trusted leadership.

How did consensus arise among the masses? How did knowledge disseminate amongst the masses? How was conflict resolved? What messages resonate and how did the “strong and trusted leadership” revise their communication strategies to adapt to the needs of the masses? None of these questions are explored.

The Tragedy of Toussaint is that communication between the leader and the masses failed. What does good communication look like? A holy communion between masses and leaders, for all we know. Why did Toussaint fail to communicate? Similarly unexplored. The Black Jacobins is an instructional history missing crucial lessons we need to learn.

Review: Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Our current society is particularly ill-suited to tackle climate change. Fixing climate change will require two things: (1) knowledge spanning disciplines as diverse as economics, agriculture and physics and (2) massive scale and multi-pronged collaboration between teams and countries. This presents a challenge for fictional stories of humanity solving the climate crisis: our current mode of storytelling is best suited for internal emotional journeys, following a handful of characters setting out to achieve one goal, with little prior background knowledge required. But we need fiction to handle this topic: fiction has long played a role in how humans understand value systems and social expectations, examine complex emotions, and envision large-scale collective achievement. 

In Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson presents a unique way to overcome this writing challenge. Narrative chapters are interspersed with expositions on energy technology, gini coefficients, the Bretton Woods financial system, the carbon cycle and other pertinent topics. The narrative follows two main characters (Mary and Frank) most closely, but we see through the eyes of scores of other characters that are navigating the devastation of climate change (memorably, climate refugees who spend years in camps, a lone survivor of a village wiped out by a heat wave, and a kayaker who rescues Los Angelinos during a record flood) or trying to fix it (memorably, farmers in India and scientists in antarctica). In this way, the book succeeds at conveying information the author feels is necessary to prevent humanity’s pending extinction (addressing point 1 above) and presents a realistic and collective effort at harnessing all the tools available to society towards this end (addressing point 2).

Because of this unusual structure, I hesitate to call it a novel; Tolstoy rejected the label for War and Peace, which intersperses philosophy and history with narrative, if less disjointedly than Robinson’s work. I was a fan of this technique for War and Peace, and I found it to be compelling and enjoyable in Robinson’s less deft hands too. However, from discussions with others and from perusing book reviews for both literary efforts, I might be the only reader with this opinion. Climate change sci-fi authors are therefore recommended to further innovate on this approach to achieve broader appeal.

Robinson has clearly thought through possible paths towards maintaining a livable planet, and therefore I think his political and technological solution deserves some commentary: it sucks.

Briefly, his solution rests on blockchain financial instruments funded by modern monetary theory, although he engages with none of the critiques of MMT (and there are many). Through a convoluted system of privacy-focused social media networks (really!) and carbon coins, technological solutions arise magically due to competition. Sure, a weird techno-utopian neoliberal solution, I could have anticipated that much based on my reading of Red Mars. But what surprised me was its full-throated defense of terrorism (and the lack of mainstream critique he has received for this!).

The story begins when Frank kidnaps Mary at gunpoint, and this event causes her to radically shift her view on her role as a high-ranking official in the branch of the UN charged with addressing climate change (the Ministry for the Future). It is quite clear that without this act of terrorism, the reforms she ultimately implements would never have come to pass. Several chapters center around the actions of the Children of Kali, a terrorist group who, by attacking cattle and airplanes, very effectively terrorize the planet into no longer eating carbon-intensive foods or flying in carbon-emitting planes. This terrorist organization is even secretly supported by the UN itself! These terrorists are portrayed with bottomless empathy, and are largely rewarded for their actions, which are presented as critical for humanity addressing climate change. It is hard to imagine what a more pro-terrorist science fiction work would look like, and that others don’t seem to view this political work in the same way leaves me feeling a little rattled.

Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

This novel surprised me! The opening scene features the protagonist, Robert Jordan, laying out his plans to blow up a bridge to enable to Spanish Republicans to take a city over from the fascists, and I assumed this would be the inciting event to kick off the wave of action that the rest of the book would ride. Instead, the novel spans the two days leading up to the attack, every moment of the day catalogued in detail, from the typical thrilling events of an action movie (like scoping out enemy watch shifts) to the very mundane (sitting around campfires over dinner and talking). The slow unfolding of events gives space for an intensely realistic portrayal of life behind enemy lines (based on Hemingway's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the book was a favourite among Cuban revolutionaries for its realism), and philosophical meditations on leadership.

Of the aspects of leadership explored, my favourite was the argument for strategic decision-making guided by science and engineering over impulsive action guided by blood-lust and vengeance. Repeatedly, Robert Jordan reins in his allies, who, in their desire to kill some fascists, might jeopardize the bridge objective. Repeatedly, he is proven correct, ultimately tragically correct. This kind of theme feels rare in war stories, which often feature story arcs in which the best laid plans of mice and men give way to heroic actions driven by gut feelings. It seems rare outside of action movies too: evidence-based long-term planning does not scream "gripping plot" and even the stories we tell about real world events are usually re-framed to emphasize in-the-moment decision-making and big personalities over careful team coordination and discipline in sticking to long-term goals despite temptations.

The philosophy was, however, a mixed bag: Robert Jordan's school of ethics was proudly eclectic. For him, philosophy is a matter of faith: you pick what you choose to believe and discard the rest. I would have preferred a protagonist who is as systematic in his philosophical thinking as he is in his assessment of how to place explosives or identification of men not up to the task of leading a rebel party.

The portrayal of women was abysmal. Although matriarch Pilar was quite fun, I gritted my teeth through the scenes with Maria (of which there were many). Maria, we are repeatedly told, would have been ever so beautiful if it weren't for the fact that her hair was short. Despite the disfiguring length of her hair, she has every man in the camp slobbering over how sexy she is, although she falls in love at first sight with Robert Jordan. She quickly dives into bed with him because she is told that sex with this complete stranger will cure her of her trauma from being violently sexually assaulted. She is very young, and naive to the ways of the world, and wants nothing more than to sexually please Robert Jordan and wash his socks. They agree to marry, and mother figure Pilar gives her helpful advice like "don't eat potatoes so you can maintain your figure", and Robert Jordan agrees with her on the importance of not getting fat and not eating potatoes. Insoportable.

The language of the story deserves commentary. I've seen elsewhere it has been criticized for its unnatural phrasing, but I loved it. The story is set in Spain but although it was originally written in English, it reads like an awkward translation from Spanish. The characters use "thou" and "you" for the informal and formal "tu" and "usted" as befitting their social relationships, and their speech is peppered with false-friend translations ("I could not support it" instead of "I couldn't stand it", taken from "no puedo soportarlo"). The main character, a Spanish teacher, muses at times on the fidelity of translation and the way etymology shifts across the european continent. Lots of fun easter eggs for fans of languages and people learning Spanish (i.e., me).

Review: Lenin Rediscovered by Lars Lih

Lih takes as his target western marxists that wish to exonerate Marx from his association with Lenin. This so-called “textbook interpretation” of Lenin’s 1901 What Is to Be Done?, favoured by academics and Trotskyist, takes a couple passages out of context and uses these passages to argue Lenin was dismissive of the intelligence and abilities of workers and that this pamphlet is a founding document of a party of a new type, one distinct from the socialism that sprung from Marx’s milieu and one that is more authoritarian. Although this interpretation requires dismissing thousands of pages of Lenin’s other writings, including passages from within the same text, it nevertheless predominated at the time of Lih’s writing of this book (2005).

Lih’s approach is to demonstrate the continuity between German Social Democracy and Russian Social Democracy in the last half of the 19th century, elevating particularly the role Karl Kaustky played in shaping social democracy. Lih supports his argument by quoting extensively from Kautsky and contemporaries to explain the “merger theory”, a concept that would have been very familiar to socialists across Europe during this era. Briefly, the scientific analysis of capitalism and proposals for a better socioeconomic order become apparent to socialists, who study the system carefully. However, they are few in numbers and cannot effect change on their own. Workers also become aware also of the flaws of the capitalist system through their experience as labourers, but without the ability to study the system in its entirety (due to the oppression of capitalism clawing away as many hours of their life as it can) are capable only of militant fights for economic and labour rights, but not for universal political change — i.e., they are limited to trade unionist politics. The merger theory describes the meeting of these two parties that need each other: the socialists with the workers, each mutually instructing each other on what is to be done. Far from dismissing the intelligence and abilities of the workers, the merger theory (and Lenin’s dogged defense of it in What Is to be Done?) hinges on the workers being rational, curious, coordinated, powerful. After reading Lih’s background, I realized how foundational this concept was to writing of the late 19th and early 20th century — much like how a modern television show wouldn’t bother explaining how the internet works, the existence of the merger theory is assumed knowledge rather than explained.

In bringing Lenin closer to Kautsky (I remain unconvinced that Lenin is uniquely passionate about Kautsky, rather than taking him as just one of many valuable instructors), Lih tries to distance Lenin from the Russian revolutionary tradition: Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Pisarev. This is a factual error: Lenin refers to these authors extensively in his writing — indeed also in this very book — and (according to his wife, Krupskaya, Chernyshevsky and Lenin) elevated them as inspiration to the level of Marx and Engels. It is also an error for those wishing to understand the course of history: 1917 was an anti-imperialist revolution, which necessitates a strong, shared vision of national identity.

Though I gnashed my teeth through large swathes of this book, I also found it to be very useful. Reading What Is To Be Done? without the intellectual history and historical context Lih provides would likely have been a far less productive experience. This book is too eurocentric and too overly long to recommend broadly. I wish there was a modern accompaniment to What Is To Be Done? that spent a little less time on Kautsky and a little more time looking forward to the ripples of this book and the debates featured within it. Still, for the reader eager to learn about movement building and hoping to turn to theoretical works from 120 years ago to do so, it’s an excellent read.

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: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

There is not an overwhelming amount of science fiction writers tackling the climate crises and other challenges of social organization from a leftist perspective. Kim Stanley Robinson, or KSR, is probably the most decorated of this crew, and the Mars trilogy is the most well-known of his work. For these reasons alone, I thought it would be interesting to check out this series. 

Fiction provides a good way to explore topics like social organization at a level of distance or abstraction, can provoke discussion and debate, and at its very best it can inspire a desire for change. Its ability to explore these topics and spark discussion rely on how well it portrays the interconnectedness of issues, the relationships between peoples and the problems they face. This doesn’t exclude fantastical elements: R.F. Kuang’s Babel wonderfully explores the internal contradictions of imperialism and capitalism in a world powered by magic. But within the world the author builds, the issues and their solutions have to seem realistic, each challenge and its solutions arising naturally from the world, and they need to feel relevant to our example. For the work to inspire, it has to show an appealing path forward for us: good characters who resonate with us, and who are tied into the challenges in the world and the solutions.

Red Mars, the first installment of the trilogy, does not achieve these tasks. Its characters do not demonstrate a way we can change society, and its analysis of sociopolitical relationships is superficial.

The premise of the book is the formation of a new society on Mars: in an international collaboration, 100 scientists are sent to Mars to begin colonizing efforts, followed by waves of additional immigrants. The narrative follows a handful of these “First Hundred” scientists, while off-scene, Earth increasingly struggles with inequality, overpopulation, and powerful international corporations. This choice of setting sets KSR up for a challenge in making the issue he’s discussing relevant to our world. For the next century at least, our social projects must build on the foundations of existing societies — how would this change the characters’ solutions? The novel does not explore this. Additionally, there’s something off-putting about a story about the colonization of a new frontier without people — this is also how the first settlers in the Americas viewed their task and we haven’t really reckoned with this past yet. (There is a brief discussion about the danger of terraforming Mars without first ensuring it had no original traces of life, but the scientist in favour of a “red” Mars is quickly over-ridden and her concerns are made to look silly.) 

In their nine-month voyage to Mars, the scientists discuss declaring independence from Earth and forming a new society. A scientist named Arkady sparks this debate with some of my favourite lines of the book:

“To be twenty-first-century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it's — it’s —” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific!”

The conflicts between them rapidly dissipate when they arrive and diffuse across the planet. I liked this analysis: this reflects the dissipation of social tensions in Europe as the “surplus population” spread to the (“unpopulated”) colonies. The pacing gets a bit weird after this. There are endless passages about dust and ice as the scientists terraform Mars, pumping as much heat into the environment as possible (also off-putting to read about, given present challenges). In the background, Arkady agitates among the new immigrants while the transnational companies tighten their grip on earth. These off-scene maneuverings come to a head in what ends up being a failed revolution.

This is where the novel fails in its tasks as political fiction. First, our main characters have surprisingly little to do with the "main" events of the book. They drive around Mars in their Jeeps and ponder the implications of their pharmaceutically-induced immortality, bemoaning that there are really too many immigrants coming to Mars. Some are a little sympathetic to Arkady’s movement, but their support seems lukewarm, disinterested. Second, the political actions and reaction don’t feel relevant to our world, and are thrown into the plot with little connection to each other. In one of the few scenes in which we witness a point-of-view character impacting events, Frank convinces the President of the United States of America to stand up to the multinationals because it would be embarrassing for him not to. And Washington is swayed! What was the rebel’s plan, how did they develop it, and why did it fail? These questions aren’t really answered.

From my brief summary of the story here, it might sound like a complete failure of a novel — but I actually don’t think so. It does actually have a cohesive emotional arc. The underlying issue with Red Mars is that the backbone of the story has very little to do with its premise. At its heart, Red Mars is about the dynamics of a group of a hundred people required to work together out of necessity and proximity — like colleagues or homeowner association members, but in Space. The structure of the story reflects this: the book opens with a critical scene where one of the First Hundred arranges and executes the assassination of another of the First Hundred, the climax of a power struggle built over decades. Next, we flash backwards, learning how the First Hundred came to get to know each other, how they formed their first friendships, romances and allegiances. Next, we see how cracks form, developing into the feud that leads to the assassination. Much of the (slow, dust- and ice-filled) middle of the book is driven by the tension of some of the First Hundred looking for a faction that has gone no-contact, and how they deal with the feelings of regret and rejection. The climax of the novel is not the revolution, but of the First Hundred uniting again, surviving together in the chaos caused by Arkady’s rebellion.

When I thought the novel would be about forming a new society on Mars, I wondered at the choice of point-of-view characters. Why do we not see the perspective of someone on Earth, perhaps someone in the Global South, particularly at the mercy of the transnationals, and able to access neither Mars nor the pharmaceutically-induced immortality? Why do we not see through the eyes of a new immigrant to Mars, struggling with the lack of infrastructure and the oppressive laws of the transnationals, eager to join Arkady's movement? Why are our only point-of-view characters these older, white, privileged First Hundred scientists that care more about science and each other than forming a new society on Mars? Because it’s not a story about forming a new society on Mars, it’s a novel about the friendships and competitiveness of adult professional societies.

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.

Review: Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Well-mannered and bright woman from an impoverished aristocratic family undergoes character development and is rewarded for it by a prosperous marriage. Sound familiar? It’s the plot for novels ranging from Jane Austen to Jane Eyre, and it is, in my reading at least, completely, amusingly, subverted in Charlotte Brontë's 1853 novel Villette. Maybe other girls have marriage as their reward; Villette is about the aristocracy learning to become bourgeois, about a young woman learning how to run a business.

Our impoverished aristocratic heroine is one Lucy Snowe, a highborn girl who we first meet spending a few months with her rich godmother, Mrs Bretton. In her early adulthood, Lucy loses her family and her fortune. The circumstances of this sudden loss of wealth are never clearly explained. Lucy is an unreliable narrator; she keeps the identity of a character secret for several chapters, until it is most dramatic to reveal she had known all along (information asymmetry is after all highly exploitable for profit) and she often mocks the reader for making assumptions or wanting to know particular details or her innermost longings. All we know of Lucy’s impoverishment is that it somehow involves a shipwreck. Perhaps she could turn to her wealthy godmother for support? No: it is the early 1800s, the aristocracy faces financial precarity in a world upset by capitalism, subject to the whims of unpredictable market bubbles. Mrs Bretton's property, “which had been chiefly invested in some joint-stock undertaking, had melted, it was said, to a fraction of its original amount.”

With no family relations to support her, Lucy becomes a caregiver for a wealthy elderly woman. The woman soon dies, and Lucy falls into despair as she tries to identify how she will be able to support herself. Like many propertyless individuals of the nineteenth century who struggled to find employment, Lucy sets out to a foreign land: a fictional continental European country called Labassecour. Though in the same dire straits as the working class, Lucy retains the tastes and obliviousness as to the financial values of things of the aristocracy. A wiser Lucy, later in the novel, will remark upon awareness of the material worth of objects as a bourgeois characteristic: “Ginevra ever stuck to the substantial; I always thought there was a good trading element in her composition, much as she scorned the ‘bourgeoise.’” But for now, our hapless heroine spends far too much money — “three times that afternoon I had given crowns where I should have given shillings” — and loses every one of her paltry possessions on the journey, finding herself purely by Providence in the drawing room of a Madame Beck, a well-off mistress of a private school for girls.

In this tense scene, Lucy is faced with the “perils of darkness and the street” if she is not able to secure employment with Madame Beck. In desperation, she pleads, successfully:

Be assured, madame, that by instantly securing my services, your interests will be served and not injured: you will find me one who will wish to give, in her labour, a full equivalent for her wages.

Thrust into this new life, Lucy is very aware of class differences, nationality differences, and wealth differences. Madame Beck, dressed in impeccable French tailoring, “looked well, though a little bourgeoise; as bourgeoise, indeed, she was." The educational institution features girls from both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and Lucy finds that it is the lower class that possesses more admirable virtues:

At the desks of Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise sat side by side. Nor could you always by outward indications decide which was noble and which plebeian; except that, indeed, the latter had often franker and more courteous manners, while the former bore away the bell for a delicately-balanced combination of insolence and deceit. In the former there was often quick French blood mixed with the marsh-phlegm: I regret to say that the effect of this vivacious fluid chiefly appeared in the oilier glibness with which flattery and fiction ran from the tongue, and in a manner lighter and livelier, but quite heartless and insincere.

Lucy adjusts to her new life as a waged worker and as an immigrant — but not easily. She struggles with loneliness and depression. Eventually, she becomes so distraught that she swoons in a church yard, and is nursed to health by her godmother and her son, Dr. John Graham Brretton, after a surprise reunion. Lucy falls in love with Dr. John, however her affections are not returned. Dr. John is instead besotted with Lucy’s companion and student, Ginevra.

Let’s pause for a moment here and examine the trope of marriage as a reward for well-behaved young women. There are three single, aristocratic women in this novel (all British, incidentally): Ginevra, Paulina, and our heroine, Lucy. Ginevra, poor but gently born, is beautiful, unstudious, unreligious, materialistic and toys with men's affections. Paulina, a countess, is highly accomplished, sweet, chaste, witty, and thoughtful towards her loving if overly controlling father. Lucy falls somewhere in between the two: pious, gracious, restrained, poor at mathematics and lowbrow in her artistic tastes.

Following the conventional marriage tropes of the era, we would expect some embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in abject poverty or misery for Ginevra. Instead — having burned bridges with Dr. John for taking too much advantage of his heart and purse — we get an embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in Ginevra becoming a countess, living relatively comfortably, and (through a little of her own cunning) “suffering as little as any human being I have ever known.” For Paulina we would expect a happy, fruitful, and prosperous marriage. And it certainly is happy and fruitful — but her prize husband is Dr. John, who has little wealth and works for his living, and who is scorned repeatedly as “bourgeois”. Moreover, although Lucy expresses happiness that her friend marries the man they both love, there is also a sense of loss. Paulina drops suddenly out of the narrative, rarely to be seen again, and in her happy marriage, she seems to become fully subsumed within her husband:

Graham Bretton and Paulina de Bassompierre were married, and such an agent did Dr. Bretton prove. He did not with time degenerate; his faults decayed, his virtues ripened; he rose in intellectual refinement, he won in moral profit: all dregs filtered away, the clear wine settled bright and tranquil. Bright, too, was the destiny of his sweet wife. She kept her husband’s love, she aided in his progress—of his happiness she was the corner stone. 

And what of Lucy? Bottling up her emotions, she manages to get over Dr. John, and grows fond of Monsieur Paul, a teacher at Madame Beck’s school. M. Paul encourages Lucy in reading, arithmetic and various other self-improvement projects (going so far as to lock her in an attic so she would study her lines — is it a Charlotte Brontë novel without a woman locked in an attic?). When Lucy expresses an interest in running her own school — she wishes to be independent, not working for wages — M. Paul uses his wealth to make this dream come true. 

And here we discover the true reward: emancipation from poverty and familial control comes not through a fortunate marriage (which leaves one subsumed within one’s husband) but through financial independence via capital investment. M. Paul is immediately whisked away on business travel for three years. Lucy reacts thusly:

Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life. Do you scout the paradox? Listen. I commenced my school; I worked—I worked hard. I deemed myself the steward of his property, and determined, God willing, to render a good account. Pupils came—burghers at first—a higher class ere long.

Lucy finds happiness not through marriage, but from growing her business. After some time, yet another windfall of capital comes her way. A distant relative dies, and on his deathbed, bequeaths her a large sum, out of guilt for not having supported her more earlier:

How far his conscience had been sinned against, I never inquired. I asked no questions, but took the cash and made it useful.

Our heroine, who once spent crowns where she should have spent shillings on useless consumption like carriage rides, has learned the bourgeois art of making money with money.

The ending of the novel is ambiguous, but, mirrors the mysterious circumstances surrounding the loss of Lucy’s hereditary wealth: it is implied M. Paul dies in a shipwreck. While Lucy is presumably emotionally devastated by this loss, there is the suggestion that she otherwise continues to be successful in her enterprise. Although Lucy refuses to inform the reader as to her own welfare, the final line in the novel notes that the other independent school proprietress, Madame Beck, “prospered all the days of her life.”

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: 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: Midwives of the Revolution by Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar

I picked up Midwives of the Revolution thinking that a feminist avenue into learning more about the February Revolution and the October Revolution might be up my alley; I’ve read a lot about contemporary feminist movements, but felt like my Russian history was a little shaky. This book unfortunately serves the exact opposite goal: it could be a reasonable introduction into common goals and struggles for 19th/20th century feminist movements for someone very familiar with Russian history between 1860-1917. It spends pages and pages reiterating fairly common issues affecting women in most contemporary industrializing societies (e.g., wage discrimination, exclusion from educational institutions, difficulties combining motherhood and work, the rising importance of women workers as men were called to fight wars). In contrast, key historical developments, like the grain shortages in 1917 that played a massive role in inciting the February Revolution, are discussed assuming the reader already understands their impetus and general timelines.

I learned a lot while reading this book, but I can’t really credit the book itself. I regularly found myself seeking additional sources to fill in some of the blanks. Some of the more interesting parts of this work were the Who’s Who of female Bolsheviks and the unique factors impacting women workers and peasants in Russia in the early twentieth century. For a better and briefer discussion of both of these topics, I refer the reader to “Women Fighters in the Days of the Great October Revolution” and “The Woman Worker and Peasant in Soviet Russia”, both by Alexandra Kollontai. (I'd love to point the reader to works by her peers too, but their translations appear to be few and far between. MotR's bibliography is unfortunately not very helpful in this regard; many citations lead to works that are seemingly available only in Russian and, as far as I could tell, aren't available online.)

There were a few other good tidbits here and there. Chapter Three had some interesting discussion of how Western late-twentieth century examination of Russian history was clouded by sexism. I also was surprised to learn the February Revolution happened on International Women’s Day – somehow this never makes it into modern celebrations of the day! I also learned just how influential Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? was on revolutionaries across parties and genders. Lenin read the novel five times in a single summer and named his famous polemic after it, and it was read in political education reading groups for decades!

Puzzlingly, the book repeatedly describes the Bolsheviks as dismissive of the importance of women in the revolutionary movement, but support for this claim is largely limited to the memoirs of a handful of Bolshevik men (e.g., Shliapnikov, Kaiurov). Where the Bolsheviks did reach out to women workers to bring them into their movement, the authors minimize these actions (“To an extent, the Bolsheviks recognized that there was some potential for agitation and organization [among women workers].”), or portray them as individual actions of various Bolshevik women (Agadzhanova, Armand, Vydrina, etc). I would have liked to see support of this position sourced from party debates, or more extensively sourced from a wider array of party leaders (the few mentions of Lenin’s position on the role of women in the revolution describe him as very supportive of Kollontai’s advocacy for involving women). I wonder if this emphasis is a sign of the times. Perhaps with the dissolution of the USSR further in the rear-view mirror and with the rising interest in socialism, there’s room for a new book on the role of women in the 1917 revolutions.

In conclusion, you can probably skip this book, but read the two essays by Kollontai.

Caste and Climate Change in N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy

The Broken Earth Trilogy tells a story about caste and dehumanization using anthropogenic climate change as a metaphor. The two topics are perfect fodder for exploration through fantasy, but they are different enough that, at least in this story, the mixing of environmental destruction and racism muddies both themes.

The story opens at a breaking of the world. A man channels massive amounts of power into the heart of the city of Yumenes, blasting the seat of the Empire off the face of the Earth.

And then he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection. His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. He cannot free them, not in the practical sense. He’s tried before and failed. He can, however, make their suffering serve a cause greater than one city’s hubris, and one empire’s fear.

The Earth of this world is periodically ravaged by environmental catastrophes, however the fallout of this man’s actions promises to be thousands of years of the most devastating environmental destruction the planet has ever seen. We see a little of how society adapts in response, shifting from a mercantile and hierarchical social structure to emergency-ordered communism [1]. But the environmental aspects fade into the background, serving more than anything as narrative impulse to characters to travel or argue over resource scarcity.

Instead, what unfolds in The Fifth Season is a satisfying, layered exploration of the pervasive way institutions and social norms oppress the lower caste: the orogenes, people with a genetically inherited supernatural ability to sense and control rock and metal. Our main protagonist, Essun, finds her son murdered by his own father for being an orogene. Her secret orogene status, synonymous with being subhuman, is also discovered and she is reviled by her neighbors and exiled from her home, just as the apocalypse begins.

Through flashbacks to her childhood and her youth, we learn about the Fulcrum [2], an institution run by orogenes and accepted by the Empire only because the orogenic leaders of the Fulcrum keep their fellow orogenes in check: cowed but ready to calm earthquakes and volcanoes when needed. Its members have little choice; society doesn’t permit them to live anywhere else. It’s an interesting examination of how simply giving power to a few members of an oppressed group isn’t sufficient to emancipate the rest.

The Fulcrum carries out a breeding program to ensure its ranks are populated with sufficiently strong wielders of orogenic power. And, most horrifyingly, they cull their ranks of the unruly or incompetent by lobotomizing them into a vegetative state, retaining just enough brain activity to use their instinctive earthquake-cancelling powers, and installing them at "node stations".

“Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny. (...) The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

Essun, under the name Syenite, learns much of this through Alabaster, a powerful orogene who has begun questioning the social order, spurred in part through his discovery that the Empire has rewritten history to make orogenes appear responsible for the Earth’s unstable tectonics.

“Tell me what other way there is, then.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. She turns to look at him finally, and he’s looking uneasy. “Well…” He edges into the statement. “We could try letting orogenes run things.”

They find their way to a remote island community, Meov, the only example we see in the entire trilogy of orogenes living in harmony with non-orogenes. Syenite and Alabaster find a sort of peace here, parenting their child together, broken only when Syenite uses her orogenic abilities offensively in a pirate raid. Her location thus revealed, the Fulcrum destroys the community and both Syenite and Alabaster barely escape alive. Syenite kills her son to prevent his being captured (“Better to die than live a slave.”).

So ends The Fifth Season. A fascinating world, if rather grim. The second book, The Obelisk Gate becomes narrower in scope. Essun is sheltered from the environmental catastrophe by an unusual community of both orogenes and non-orogenes led by Ykka, an out-of-the-closet orogene. Unlike on the island of Meov, tensions and suspicions between the two groups rise. However, we are prevented from seeing a true resolution or reconciliation of the two factions by the invasion of an enemy force. Essun saves the day, tapping extra power from the mysterious satellite-like “obelisks” and weaving together both orogeny and magic [3] to defeat the enemy [4].

In the final installment, The Stone Sky, our scope widens dramatically again, now spreading across millenia. Hoa, a member of a strange android-like race of people called “stone eaters”, recounts flashbacks of his early life. His world was one of advanced technology: rapid transit, space travel, beds that cure your wounds. This luxurious world was powered through the literal draining of the lifeforce (“magic”) of orogenes, incapacitated and hooked up to pipes much like the humans in The Matrix. Society, unable to keep up with its own energy demands purely through oppression of its orogenes, carry out a centuries-long plan to tap the Earth’s core for magic instead. This plan involves genetically engineering a new race of particularly powerful orogenes: Hoa and a small handful of others, trained to see themselves not as human but as tools.

Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury. 

Better the earth, Syl Anagist reasons. Better to enslave a great inanimate object that cannot feel pain and will not object. Better Geoarcanity. But this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth's core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies.

Discovering the truth of the oppression at the heart of this society, at the crucial final moment in which the obelisks would be switched on, Hoa tries to destroy civilization, only to discover that the Earth itself is also human and very angry. 

We were not the only ones who chose to fight back that day. (...) The Earth sees no difference between any of us. (...) We were all guilty. All complicit in the crime of attempting to enslave the world itself.

Locked in a power struggle with the Earth, Hoa realized that to destroy all of humanity would also be to destroy the woman he loves and her child. Hoa dissipates the massive amounts of stored orogeny and magic by blasting a hole in the moon and knocking it off its orbit and initiating thousands of years of unstable climate.
 

This power struggle is mirrored in the present day. Essun seeks to restore balance to the Earth by catching the moon and returning it to its orbit. Her daughter seeks to turn all of humanity into immortal stone eaters in a last ditch effort to save a dying friend she has adopted as a father figure. The two of them fight over the power accessible only through the obelisks, and Essun dies in the conflict. Nassun is moved by her mother’s sacrifice of her own life for the benefit of humanity and for the sake of saving her own daughter, and chooses to complete her mother’s task instead.

Because the world took and took and took from you, too, after all. She knows this, and yet, for some reason that she does not think she’ll ever understand… even as you died, you were reaching for the moon.

This is the way the trilogy ends. So where are we on our themes? The environmental destruction caused by mankind has been solved, but only by returning society to an economy of farmers and artisans [5]. There’s no solar-powered rapid transit, or wind-powered restorative beds, no way to have advanced technology without exploitation of slaves or the Earth. Before learning of the Earth’s sentience, Hoa feels that to maintain this level of technology but without exploitation of orogenes would be tantamount to accepting that enslavement was acceptable.

What we are doing is pointless and Geoarcanity is a lie. And if we help Syl Anagist further down this path, we will have said, What was done to us was right and natural and unavoidable.

If this were the conclusions we should draw about climate change in 2022, it would be a depressing, cynical outlook. But, the story isn’t really about climate change, it’s about the oppression and dehumanization of lower castes.
 

So in what state do we leave relations between the castes? The first encounters between orogenes and non-orogenes resulted in the enslavement of the orogenes at the hands of the Empire [6]. After millennia of deeply ingrained racism, most communities we see show exile of orogenes (Tirimo), uneasy truces between neighbouring communities (Maxixe’s orogenes and their rival non-orogenic raiders), or mixed communities brimming with tension and animosity (Ykka’s community). We see a single example of a people who have truly integrated orogenes and non-orogenes (the island of Meov), but no indication of how to move from say, a Tirimo-like society to a Meov-like society.

“Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society. (...) Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.”

There is such sorrow in her, your little girl. I hope Nassun learns someday that she is not alone in the world. I hope she learns how to hope again.

She lowers her gaze. “They’re not going to choose anything different.”

“They will if you make them.”

She’s wiser than you, and does not balk at the notion of forcing people to be decent to each other. Only the methodology is a problem. “I don’t have any orogeny anymore.”

“Orogeny,” I say, sharply so she will pay attention, “was never the only way to change the world.”

She stares. I feel that I have said all I can, so I leave her there to contemplate my words.

The plot climax is a magical reversal of climate change. The climax of the theme of caste oppression comes half a book earlier: Hoa’s discovery that electricity is harvested from orogenes, and that the Earth (and even one of the obelisks) are sentient and exploited too. This climax is never resolved with a solution, it is simply a revelation, and thematically, it is the same revelation encountered in The Fifth Season, when we discover the lobotomized children hooked up at the node stations. Prejudice, colonialism and slavery are horrifying. Be very careful of excluding people from your definition of "human." I agree, as do, I assume, most readers. Okay, now what? The Stone Sky leaves us without answers, just a plucky girl, void of hope, versus a society still rotten with racism.

* * *

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: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Who could resist the premise "genius lesbian uses intrigue and math to save her polyamourous homeland from an evil colonial empire"?

Given such a unique pitch, I was surprised how strikingly similar the first 140 pages of The Traitor Baru Cormorant were to Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire: smart gay woman from a close-knit far-flung community is appointed to a powerful government position in the empire after the mysterious murder of her predecessor, alone but for a clever aide to help her figure out both the foreign culture and the ongoing political machinations.

Unfortunately for Traitor Baru, the contrast with A Memory Called Empire serves only to highlight its flaws. The empire of Baru's world conquers the world, exterminating gay people, enforcing an extensive eugenics breeding program, and improving record-keeping as it gobbles up cultures. It is very clearly capital E Evil, and nearly every citizen of the empire that we meet is either a political puppetmaster or a puppet. A Memory Called Empire's Mahit finds herself trying to protect her people from the Teixcalaan empire while also loving parts of the empire: its people, its culture, its literature. This contrast adds tension, but also presents a more relatable empire. The biggest empire of the 21st century is an oppressive colonial power with some wonderful people and a great canon, including notable works like Casa Blanca and Bojack Horseman.

The flat world-building extends also to Aurdwynn, the province brimming with rebellion to which Baru is assigned as Imperial Accountant. There are hints at interesting designs—the druidic Ilykari, or the Unsullied-like Clarified, for example—but it felt like all the scenes characterizing the minor characters (excepting, perhaps, Muire Lo, Tain Hu, and Xate Olake) and describing the Aurdwynni culture and history were cropped to keep the novel to a tidy 399 pages. Aurdwynn could be any fantasy country. The dukes could be fully summarized with a tagline and never developed personality beyond that: "the philosophical one", "the sailor one", "the one that collects handsome baby daddies." The result is a story packed with political intrigue and twists where I don't care about any of the players, nor do I really care about the fate of the country. The exception to this is the slow burn relationship between Baru and Duchess Tain Hu; the two have great chemistry and their scenes together are adorable. But because such long swathes of the book were low emotional impact, the book was somehow too long for it to be a tight story of a savant accountant trying to out-maneuver seasoned politicians to save her home, and too short for a compelling narrative about how economics and the personalities of political leaders shape the course of a revolution.

Baru was an enjoyable protagonist. Her weapons of war are unconventional and its fun to watch her wield them: controlling inflation to stop a rebellion, using annual tax forms to discern loyalties, identifying political ambitions through sales of commodity goods. She's very aware of the importance of keeping up her metaphorical (and sometimes literal) mask: she must project power and the right sort of ambitions, and she must hide her sexual orientation and her loyalty to Taranoke. The first person point of view gives us an intimate perspective from which to watch her calculations about which facial expressions to make, or what information to reveal when, and see her react to realizing when she's made mistakes and let her mask slip, or developed more attachment to people and places than she had intended. Still, this intimate perspective is inconsistently applied—we know she has made a deal with the shadow cabinet behind the imperial throne, but not what it is. This separation between Baru and the reader seems (to me, at least) intended to allow for a plot twist, rather than say anything about the nature of the mask between Baru and the reader. I think this would have been more effective if Baru was aware of the reader, taunting us a little with her unreliable narrator perspective.

The end of this book, the first of a planned trilogy, is dark and bleak. The Falcrest empire asks Baru to foment a rebellion then betray it. The Empire crushes the hope of the Aurdwynni people for generations to come, and Baru gets the approval of the Empire and the power that comes with it. This is the way the Empire operates: convince people there is no point in rebelling:

In Falcrest, in the Metademe, they condition prisoners just so: permit escape. Offer a rescuer, a collaborator. Slip a key in with the food. Let them come close to freedom, let them feel real triumph—they would not let me this far! This is the crux: give them the taste of victory, the certainty that this cannot be part of the game. And then snatch it away. The collaborator betrays them. The key will not open the outermost door. With enough repetition, most prisoners learn to ignore a key, an open door, a whisper to run. Led out onto the street, they will wait to be returned to their cells. After a time, they begin to teach new prisoners the same.

Her rebellion, the one to save her home country of Taranoke, will be different, Baru tells herself. The costs to the Aurdwynn people are worth it—and actually this brief, squashed Aurdwynni rebellion saves Aurdwynni lives in the long run.

Still, I am interested in where the author will take this theme over the course of the next books. Perhaps the mathematical and rational to a fault Baru will need to inspire hope in her people, inspire belief that there is a better solution and that it is possible to get there. How does one go about this? What is the answer to "well, there's no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, so I just live my life and don't think too hard about it"?

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.