Review: The Knowledge Economy and Socialism by Agustín Lage Dávila

Our current age is remarkable for the rapidity with which knowledge is produced and integrated into products. New technology, like CRISPR or LLMs, explode onto the scene and change the game in such a way that news and technology from 6 months prior is already out of date. A company’s competitiveness hinges on how fast they can produce, respond to, and apply knowledge. Capitalist competition on this battlefield has led to the increasing privatization of knowledge, such as through institutions like patents. For most of human history, science played a liberating role in helping humans meet their needs and overcome the challenges of nature. Under capitalism, scientific output is increasingly commodified. What does an alternative model for the role of science in society look like?

Agustín Lage Dávila is a Cuban immunologist who played a leading role in developing Cuba’s remarkable biotechnology sector. In this series of essays written between 1994 and 2013, Lage Dávila reflects on the role science plays in society, and the way Cuban leaders used their understanding of economics and science to create a successful biotech hub in the unlikely soils of an underdeveloped and heavily embargoed country.

One of Lage Dávila’s insights is that the Cuban high-tech sector benefited from a highly educated populace, in contrast with mainstream approaches to development that prioritize development goals over educational excellence. For Cuba, success in exportable high-tech goods is a matter of survival: it is a small island and so its market is too small to support the production of specialized goods nor is its labour market able to transform into a major manufacturing hub (like China’s approach). It is also poor in natural resources, and so its ability to trade for the things it needs necessarily comes from the export of high value-add products, like its vaccines and cancer drugs. 

Lage Dávila contrasts the path Cuba took with capitalist approaches to the knowledge economy, as well as to approaches taken by other socialist states, particularly the USSR and China. Some of his observations are a little dated: in particular, China’s world leadership in science and technology has only emerged in the last few years. Cuba has also struggled in recent years due to the US’s devastating illegal sanctions. Due to this book's origins as a series of individually published essays, it also becomes somewhat repetitive. Still, his account is clear-sighted and thoughtful, and as a scientist, I found it incredibly applicable to understanding my own role in society.

Review: The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto

Between Canada’s relatively tiny population and the concentration of media in the hands of very few major corporations, there's a paucity of people's histories of our own country. Nora Loreto’s book on the decline of Canada’s social safety net attempts to fill this crucial vacuum. After all, how do we improve the systems we have — from education to housing to healthcare and beyond — if we don’t understand how we got here?

This work is broad in scope, and provides an approachable overview. I’d therefore recommend it to a curious leftist hoping to get caught up to speed on the basic beats of Canada’s history. How were social services organized before the welfare state was created? How did the welfare state come about? What were the major turning points in Canada’s neoliberal journey (particularly the Mulroney government of the 1980s and the 1995 Chrétien-Martin budget)? What sorts of rhetoric and political strategy does neoliberalism harness to push through its unpopular reforms?

Loreto focuses on the welfare state, and I understand the need for a writer to draw boundaries around their work somewhere. However, by not discussing production of resources and focusing only on expenditure of resources, Loreto’s polemics read a little utopian. Every subsidy to a corporation and every tax cut is criticized because the money could have gone to direct transfers to lower income people or other social programs. Questions of money are dismissed as unreal:

The deficit, the result of a fiscal imbalance between state revenues and state expenses, became as important, if not more important, than things that actually mattered and were real, like whether or not someone could afford groceries or access surgery. 

I agree with Loreto that it is deplorable that our government has aided the accumulation of massive amounts of wealth in the hands of the few. However, to meet the needs of everyone in our country, we need to ensure the long-term health of our country’s economy. I would have liked to see more discussion of state-owned enterprises or other investments that would lead to improved productivity so that we can reduce our working hours and care for those who cannot work. We cannot leave “thinking seriously about the economy as a whole” to the neoliberals while we get dismissed as unserious thinkers who just want welfare handouts. That does not garner trust in our ability to govern.

A further boundary is quietly drawn geographically. The US's gravity means it cannot be excluded from this history, however — puzzlingly — most of the rest of the world is. The demoralization of the left and the increased aggressiveness of neoliberalism after 1990 (both noted by Loreto) should both be viewed in the context of the dissolution of the world's first worker state (that is, the USSR), an event Loreto mentions only in passing. Canada is so small, we have to understand our history in a global context and not as a nation that just occupies the shadow of the US because our future certainly lies in international cooperation, not tying ourselves to a sinking empire.

Still, this book fills a void. Although its economic analysis falls somewhat short of what I had hoped for, as a history of Canadian rhetoric around social services it succeeds quite well. I smiled when Loreto turned one of neoliberalism’s favourite values on its head, concluding “Yes, sometimes even radical ideas are common sense.”

Review: Revolutionary Education, edited by Nino Brown

This PSL publication is a collection of essays linked to political education. It's an uneven read.

Chapters 1-3 are the high notes of the collection. They lean on works by Vygotsky and Freire to present key considerations in education: build onto the base of what people already know, act as a guide as they venture into the unknowns; education is constantly happening, it's not limited to the classroom; education is a dialogue between people with different types or levels of knowledge, not a power hierarchy between those who know and those who do not know; link the topics you are learning to their broader context.

The remaining chapters suffered from being weakly related to the theme (the role journalism plays in education was not the subject of the chapter on journalism; there is an even more unrelated overview of Amilcar Cabral's life in Chapter 5), or a little low in content for a more advanced audience. Chapters 6 and 7, which deal more specifically with what organizing looks like and what mistakes organizers sometimes make, might be useful for getting other PSL members all on the same page, but don't present anything new, and don't present it particularly compellingly.

It's an easy read, however. Little knowledge is assumed. Each chapter is short and divided into short subsections. The language and arguments are straightforward. This book has a place on some reading lists, but not all.

Review: Not Enough by Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough identifies a very interesting phenomenon: that discourse around human rights kicked off only as the USSR disintegrated and neoliberalism kicked off. Such an interesting coincidence deserves an explanation.

Over the last few decades, human rights have fit quite comfortably within neoliberalism. But should they? Neoliberalism takes little issue with the first twenty-one articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): these have to do with political freedoms and property rights, and have close kin in the UDHR’s predecessors, the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). 

The next seven articles are harder to square within neoliberalism since they demand, among other social and economic rights, the right to shelter and food, to education, and even to paid holidays. These were sharply censured by one of neoliberalism’s leading thinkers, Hayek:

The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1979)

Moyn argues that human rights set merely a floor for basic needs, allowing limitless wealth accumulation for the few provided some allowances are made for bare subsistence living for the many. To address inequality — both between nations and within a nation — a new framework is needed. In this conception, indeed, human rights are exactly the fig leaf necessary for a return to the horrors of 19th century capitalism after the cannibalization of the welfare state. I agree with him that human rights organizations have largely prioritized political rights, and that the neoliberal era has made embarrassingly poor progress in the provision of shelter and food, education and paid holidays, globally. 

I am less convinced that it is so much an inherent failing of the tool of human rights than simply the doing of those wielding it. Article 27 demands “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Article 28 declares “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” Together, I think these rights demand that the technological progress of the Global North (high speed rail, internet, the most cutting edge cancer drugs, for example) be made available to all the people of the world regardless of their place of residence. The human rights movement under neoliberalism has not chosen to work towards these ends (and indeed this human right is also violated for many people residing in the wealthiest countries). 

Moyn argues throughout his book for the need of a distributive concept of equality versus ideals that aim only for a subsistence existence. However, he never dares to venture a positive vision of what that could look like — a privilege of the ivory tower, and not one a burgeoning state attempting to bring equality to its people can afford. Presumably, his conception of the rights due to all people would have to encompass a “share” of all wealth? It is interesting, therefore, that Article 27 (quote above) indeed provisions to all humans a share of science and technology. Simply declaring a right to a share evidently hasn’t been enough. So what sort of government permits that?

One of the neoliberal critiques of human rights is whether it is possible to satisfy them within a worldview founded on individual responsibility. Here’s Hayek again:

It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

Moyn, likewise, is terrified of the “totalitarian” systems that chose an alternative to the welfare state in their efforts to eliminate inequality (i.e., socialism). It is not clear what system he calls for, nor how this system would avoid such “totalitarian” tendencies.

Moyn’s argument largely traces the intellectual history of the concepts of distributive equality versus subsistence allowances — particularly from an American perspective. He does not investigate the source of wealth inequality (although he nods briefly towards the devastation wrought by colonialism), nor does he ground his analysis in what sorts of interventions effectively reduced inequality (though there is a brief foray in how investment in education both satisfies a human right and reduces inequality). This is a blind spot: it is very difficult to tackle a problem without knowing what causes it and what has fixed it in the past. 

His treatment of intra-nation versus inter-nation inequality is simplistic. Political projects are largely judged by their intent to lift the very neediest in the globe out of poverty. In this way, the USSR’s accomplishments in dramatically raising literacy and life expectancy within its borders are dismissed because they aimed for “socialism in one country” (rather than addressing global inequality). (Nor is there curiosity regarding why the Soviets pivoted from their original goal of socialism across the world to just socialism in one country.) Similarly, heightened intra-nation inequality during the marketization of China is lambasted, although the wealth gap between China and the wealthier countries narrowed during this time for both its poorest and its better off citizens. Is it possible to reduce intra-nation inequality without, at least for some period, heightening inter-nation inequality? Because Moyn examines neither the source of inequality nor practical examples of addressing it (beyond the former colonial empires’ welfare states), he cannot answer this question.

Review: To Kill A Nation by Michael Parenti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Utopias and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The point of dystopian science fiction is usually to take some aspect of our present society and exaggerate it to produce a terrifying but recognizable world. What if the government put extreme limits on free speech? What if we forced fertile women to give birth? What if advertising and consumerism got really out of control? It’s a tool for critiquing society, but tends to produce criticism in the form of warnings of slippery slopes. There’s an implicit acceptance of the status quo, except for this one part of it that society needs to be concerned about. Because of this, dystopian fiction stories often lack a solution to the problems in society they have identified, other than simply “don’t do the bad thing.”

Utopias start from the exact opposite premise, critiquing our current world by leaving it unchanged, foiling it against a better world. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, we follow a physicist, Shevek, as he grows disillusioned with his isolated anarchist society. Over the seven generations since its founding, shadowy bureaucratic hurdles and fears of trespassing ingrained social norms have produced a static, sick society that no longer upholds the radical individualistic and free-choice ideals on which it was founded. To pursue his scientific work, he turns traitor to his society, and visits the liberal, capitalist planet. Through his eyes, we explore a world virtually indistinguishable from our own. Elegant and highly educated people enjoy sumptuous cocktail parties, wear fur coats that cost two years of minimum wage salary, eat chocolate that comes wrapped in far too many layers of paper, and rarely have to encounter the miserable working poor. Escaping from the clutches of his well-spoken, well-shod captors, Shevek finds working class revolutionaries and becomes a figurehead for a mass strike — one brutally repressed by the liberal government's military. The violence the government exacts on its own people, the gender and class inequality he sees, and the way money and property distort all relationships lead him to view his own society in a more positive light. He broadcasts his research findings to all civilizations in the universe so as to prevent the capitalist society using it for profit or for colonization. He then returns to his home planet as a proud anarchist, fortified with the knowledge that revolution is hard, and has no end, but is ultimately worth it.

Because utopian fiction critiques our current world undistorted and through comparison with a hopeful alternative, it lends itself well to revolutionary fiction. In What Is To Be Done?, an 1863 utopian novel that inspired many within the Russian Revolution, Chernychevsky writes:

A person who’s never seen anything except hovels would look at a picture of an ordinary house and mistake it for a luxurious palace. How can one ensure that such a person should perceive the house as a house and not a palace? In the same picture one must depict at least one corner of a palace. From this corner it will be clear that a palace is really a structure of a completely different sort than the one in the picture, and the observer will realize that the building is really nothing more than a simple, ordinary house in which all people should live (if not in better ones).

The reader of The Dispossessed is presented with a palace of a sorts, if a flawed one, in which resources are shared equally with everyone within a community, where people view each other as a brotherhood, where there is complete gender equality and no shame in sex. Shevek, in a sense, goes through the reverse journey, discovering the hovels so that he can see the promise of the palace. Le Guin’s world-building is thoughtful and deep, exploring how everything from language to education to “who does the dirty work” might be different, better, in an anarchist society. 

While dystopian movies and novels have been staples of the box office and bestseller lists, utopian fiction is rarer. Dystopian stories are lauded as smart political commentary, while utopias are impractical, unserious. Indeed, Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian “what if we forced fertile women to give birth?” story, prides herself on not imagining anything new or better at all: “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in (...) history” (Foreword to The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017). The Dispossessed at the very least demonstrates that utopian stories can be Serious Literature. Utopian fiction being rare and dismissed isn’t unique to our current era. Chernychevsky accused those dismissing utopian fiction as suffering from sour grapes:

And as for the fact that [the idyll] is no longer fashionable, and therefore people spurn it, that’s no real objection at all. They shun the idyll as the fox in the fable spurned the grapes. They think it inaccessible; consequently they conclude, ‘Let it no longer be fashionable.’ But it’s pure nonsense that the idyll is inaccessible. 

— What is to be Done? (1863)

Chernychevky’s writing was crafted to get through Tsarist censorship, so some of his more ambitious designs for a better world are cloaked in metaphors and codewords difficult to follow a century and a half later without an annotated edition (the Michael Katz translation is good). The difficulty in producing utopian fiction today is perhaps no less fraught. Those with decision power over producing big-budget movies might find more appeal in stories like “our world, but what if the government put draconian limits on free speech” than “our world, but without money or property.” Regardless of issues on the "supply" side, is there demand for utopian fiction, or is it too unfashionable?

Chernychevsky was writing shortly after the abolishment of the serf system in Russia. The era in which Le Guin was writing was shaped by the Cold War, protests against the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Our present era, marked by pandemics and wars and increasingly evident climate change, seems similarly unstable, perilous. How can we work towards a better society if we don’t first imagine what that could be?  I wonder if we might therefore be ready for a change in fashion, a rediscovery of utopian fiction. I am, at least.