Warning: Some spoilers

Death comes for us all. But if you happen to be an extra in a movie or an NPC (non-player character) in a videogame, death can come rather gratuitously. Your role, after all, is to serve the plot and potentially make a hero(ine) look good. You are expendable by definition. You are such a trope that you have your own term: red shirt, in homage to the frequently fatally phasered security personnel in Star Trek. Red Shirts are those characters where you just know, as soon as they walk into view, that they will not last until the credits roll.

What ought a group of workers to do when they are systematically maltreated? Organise, of course! That is the starting point for John Scalzi’s Redshirts. Set on the Universal Union (UU) Intrepid, a thinly veiled analogue of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, it regales us with the story of four wary ensigns who must uncover why so many people on the UU Intrepid die on away missions under mysterious, avoidable and often gruesome circumstances, and how they might escape the same fate.

Redshirts was my first return to John Scalzi after The Interdependency trilogy, which I found intriguing in setup but underwhelming in execution. Redshirts worked much better for me. It is more tightly written. Scalzi’s style and pace work better at the scale of a small company of friends on a single spaceship than for the grand space opera of a collapsing civilisation. And Scalzi exploits the creative premise much more adroitly than in The Interdependency, tying everything together in a satisfying and touching ending.

What made the conclusion the more pleasing is that about midway through the novel, I started to worry that Scalzi wasn’t going to be able to stick the landing. The first half of Redshirts has our four ensigns figuring out what is going on on the UU Intrepid and, more importantly, how they avoid getting killed by whatever ‘it’ is. The challenge of Redshirt’s conceit is that the reader knows what is going on from the prologue and is thus well ahead of its heroes. Finding out how they unravel the mystery is entertaining, but it is not clear how they might get themselves out of this predicament in a satisfying way.

This is where Redshirt’s first major twist comes in, and I’m not going to spoil that here. Suffice to say that our putative disposable heroes manage to use the power of tropes in their favour to get themselves out of harms’ way. More or less.

And the ‘more or less’ is important here. Not being a redshirt does not guarantee a long and happy ever after. In the long run we’re all dead, and many have perished in circumstances that were more tragic, calamitous or avoidable than those of the sacrificial redshirt. This is where Scalzi pulls a second, more philosophical twist. The complaint of the redshirt is not death itself, but a death that is pointless, stupid, and above all bereft of agency. The demand of the redshirt is not immortality, but a life worth living and a death worth dying. In a way not dissimilar to Castlevania, the latter half of Redshirts is in part a meditation on what it means to act in the world, to have agency, to make choices, and to grow, and the consequences of us either not using that potential or it being taken away from us.

In some ways, redshirts are the necessary corollary of Ada Palmer’s heroic protagonist: for the single hero(ine) to hold all the agency in the universe, they must deny it to everyone else. Redistributing agency across a larger group of characters requires a different mode of writing. At a minimum, something like the ensemble cast we see in Redshirts itself, where solving the mystery is the effort of a group of reasonably ordinary people, rather than the predestined fate of the Chosen One. Beyond that are more composite approaches such as The Ten Percent Thief, that abandon the traditional form of the novel altogether.

Redshirts does for single-episode disposable companions what Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! did for the nameless battalions of disposable guards and goons. It does so with similar panache, if not the same level of genius or wit. There are also acknowledged nods to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series about the lives of fictional characters after they’ve exited stage/screen/page left. Like these inspirations, it is a rewarding combination of witty writing, entertaining plot and cultural commentary, with some philosophical reflection thrown in to boot. It won’t change your life, but it will make you stop, smile and remember for a moment that we don’t all have to be heroes to make a change in the world.

Notes & Suggestions

• The ‘dead wife’ trope also makes an appearance in Redshirts, and on a sympathetic reading also finds itself subverted. Explicitly positioned as a plot demand, the dead wife in Redshirts is not the motive force for a hero, but instead a reason for withdrawal and fear, with Scalzi compassionately incorporating it in the book’s conclusion. I wrote a bit more about the dead wife trope in my review of Castlevania.
• Ada Palmer’s essay on the damage caused by a monoculture of heroic tales is well worth reading and can still be read in Uncanny Magazine. I engaged with it in my review of the Mass Effect series, particularly Mass Effect 3, as well as The Ten Percent Thief.
• How to exert our agency is of course the question of our times, or of life really. It is a question we must each answer for ourselves, but if you are looking for some inspiration on what is to be done, Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century is not a bad starting point.

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The Left excels at diagnosis. There is no shortage of books, articles, papers, podcasts, documentaries, reports and more decrying the ills of late-stage capitalism. From deepening inequality to the breakdown of the biosphere, we can argue convincingly how capitalism fails us. What, however, is to be done about it?

Here we are on substantially weaker ground. Marx famously declared that he was not in the business of writing the cookbooks for the post-revolutionary workers’ state, and this injunction against utopianism has hung like a shadow over socialist writers ever since. The nature of actually existing socialism limited the imagination even further, equating post-capitalist society with dreary authoritarianism. Yet even where alternative futures are being imagined, such as in visions of degrowth or solarpunk, the question of how we get from here to there often remains unanswered. Attaining the future we want is not merely a matter of having the right ideas, it is also about building the power to get there.

Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st century directly grapples with this question. Wright’ final book, it builds on decades of Marxist sociological research and activist practice, distilling these into a delightfully short primer on how to change the world. It is not an instruction manual for building a community group or trade union along the lines of Jane McAlevey’s Organising for Power and similar works, but a guide to what anti-capitalist organisations can do to move us closer to a better future. Although the book contains some policy ideas, it is not a catalogue of nice but unachievable policy prescriptions either, but instead presents a strategic framework that organisers can use to assess whether their efforts are likely to erode capitalist dominance.

Ecosystem socialism

While it might be assumed that readers picking up a book titled How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century would already be persuaded of the evils of capitalism, Wright nonetheless starts off with a succinct overview of the arguments against it. As an Analytical Marxist, Wright has disavowed Marxism’s original foundation on the teleological movement of history and the exploitation of workers through the extraction of surplus value. Wright’s case against capitalism is instead purely moral, grounded on capitalism’s inherent tendency to undermine equality, freedom and community. It is an elegant first chapter, and while traditional Marxists may well find it too milquetoast for their liking, it will appeal to a much wider left-wing readership. The availability of multiple arguments against capitalism in any event strengthens rather than weakens the case.

Wright’s Analytical Marxism similarly excuses him from the search for a revolutionary subject charged to be the sole agent of historical progress, something much left-wing writing has been agonising over after the failure of the traditional proletariat to usher in the socialist new dawn. Hopes have been pinned on revolutionaries in the global periphery, other oppressed groups such as women or ethnic minorities, students, or a new generation of ‘networked workers’. Not that hope in the working class has been fully abandoned either: there are still those yearning for a return to the centrality of the working class led by a reinvigorated communist party to act as the revolutionary vanguard. Wright avoids this fruitless search for a single historical subject, and instead roots his analysis in a recognition that capitalism harms people in many different ways, leading them to organise against it for different reasons and with different goals. It is diversity instead of uniformity, and to Wright this is a strength rather than a weakness, although he does not downplay the difficulties of organising across an ecosystem of groups, communities and movements. In this, he his much closer to writers like Rodrigo Nunes who in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal also advocates for ecosystemic approach, than to Jodi Dean’s argument in Comrade for a return to the traditional communist party. Or, as revolutionary poet Diane di Prima explained:

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here

Once you recognise that it will take a multitude of us shoving at the thing from all sides, the logical next conclusion is that it will also take a multitude of methods. Wright thus takes the holistic view that an ecosystem of actors will deploy a range of strategies to bring about the demise of capitalism, depending on their situation, capacities and preferences. How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century identifies five types of strategy: smashing capitalism through revolution, dismantling it by political means, taming it to limit its worst effects, resisting it locally, or attempting to escape it altogether. Discarding revolutionary rupture on the grounds that it is neither likely nor desirable in advanced democracies, Wright concludes that a combination of the other four strategies must be used to erode capitalism.

Selecting ‘all of the above’ may look like a trite way out of an analytical quandary, but Wright’s assertion is deeply considered and its value lies precisely in its ability to pragmatically transcend both the sterile argument about an ideologically ‘correct’ course of action and the fatalistic sense that because revolution is not on the horizon everything is futile. It cannot be denied though that Wright’s assertion here rests in large part on faith. In essence, Wright’s gambit is to replace the belief in an inevitable historical telos with a hope that the strategic combination of the four strategies remaining to us will be sufficient to carve out a path beyond capitalism through gradual change. This is of course not a novel position. Reformist or gradualist approaches have been advocated for as long as there have been socialists, with the most famous proponents of this approach probably the British Fabian Society. What How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century adds is a recognition that parliamentarianism alone is also not enough, but that it will require the combination of political advances, grassroots campaigning, and the nurturing of anti-capitalist modes of living in the interstices of the capitalist system to secure victory. By pointing at the interdependency of these strategies, Wright prompts us to identify opportunities to deploy them in mutually reinforcing ways: changing laws or institutions to make cooperatives more viable, or using grassroots action strategically to extract political demands. Although not explicitly referenced, How to Be an Anti-capitalist In the 21st Century bears the influence of André Gorz’ non-reformist reforms: changes that don’t just deliver immediate material gains, but change the terrain on which class struggle plays out to our advantage.

The ecumenical perspective may not appeal to all, and traditional Marxist or communist readers will likely take issue with absence of dialectical materialism or the endorsement of market socialism. For socialists wedded to revolutionary rupture, I imagine that Wright’s alternative will feel either too soft, too utopian, or both. Wright does not dispute that eroding capitalism is not going to be easy. He is well aware that conditions are far from optimal, the road long and arduous, and success far from certain. Yet for anyone who accepts that revolution is either unlikely or undesirable, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century gives a lot of useful food for thought. This is true even if the reader does not wholly agree with Wright’s premises or conclusions, and that is precisely because Wright’s proposal is expansive and accommodating of different approaches and perspective. In essence, Wright’s strategic programme is a contemporary rearticulation of Laozi’s ancient wisdom that water is stronger than stone:

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.

At ~150 pages, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century can only give a cursory introduction to many of the concepts and strategies discussed, though it is a testament to Wright’s mastery as an academic and writer that he does everything he covers a great degree of justice in the limited space available. It is a great tragedy that Wright was never able to write the intended, more extensive companion book for How to Be an Anti-Capitalist In the 21st Century due to his death to acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. Instead, How to Be an Anti-capitalist will have to be a starting point or roadmap for those who want to engage more with socialist thought, rather than a detailed compendium in itself. But its real value lies in what it was always intended to do: offer activists not only a framework and a theory of change to take into the world and act, but also the hope to do so. The purpose of philosophy is not, after all, to merely understand the world, but to change it.

Notes & Suggestions

• None of this is to say that anti-capitalism is easy, and the capitalist system has both direct and indirect ways of facing off challenges. Some of the very direct tactics were exposed in Confessions of a Union Buster, whereas Hegemony Now! analyses the more subtle methods by which consent and compliance are maintained.
• One attraction of Wright’s approach is that it doesn’t lock you into one specific form of activism on the ground that this is the One True Path. You don’t have to stand outside your local library flogging badly stencilled pamphlets. On the other hand, this does mean that you have to work out for yourself what you can do. Wright’s strategic outlook accommodates a multitude of approaches, so if you are unsure, see if there are campaign groups active in your local area, or based on issues that are important to you. If you are in work, always join a union, or set one up if there isn’t one yet. If you want to influence national politics where you live, join or donate to a political party to support them. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century tells you that you don’t have to do everything yourself. All it asks is that you find ways for your actions to clear the way for others.

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During World War I, a British archeologist singlehandedly forged a multitude of Arabian tribes into a unified army, leading them to victory over a decaying Ottoman Empire, in so doing bringing Arabia into the modern world, i.e. that of Western-style national statehood. This hero would become the legend known as Lawrence of Arabia, the white man who donned desert garb and with his Arabian comrades conquered Damascus. At least, that’s the story of the movie, as I understand. The story told by T.E. Lawrence himself in his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather more complex and ambiguous.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s own account of his role in the Arab Revolt, written some years after events from his notes and diaries (though most were lost) and going through several iterations before its final version. From the outset, Lawrence recognises that the Arab Revolt played only a minor part in the Allied victory in World War I, and that if it was critical to this victory, it was so in the sense that British authors tend to ascribe a sense of crucial importance to any single operation because it was part of the totality of the war effort (see also dambusters etc.). Nor does Lawrence suggest he tells his story because he was uniquely instrumental to the events of the Arab Revolt. By his own words, he tells his story because he was there. As such, he is as much, or perhaps even more, of an unreliable narrator as you might expect. Nevertheless, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is assuredly not a heroic tale or adventure novel about how good old British pluck saved the day. Instead, we accompany a profoundly emotionally conflicted man into a struggle where he is forever doomed to be an outsider to both his own and his adopted peoples. On top of which Lawrence is emblematic of so many of the pathologies of 1920s English repressedness that his memoir could double as a psychoanalytical field manual. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now the sort of historical artefact that requires a 100 page introduction (which my copy duly has), and on the whole, the surface level war story of a few brave fighters facing overwhelming odds is the least interesting part of it.

Events, dear boy, events

Its nature as a memoir rather than a novel means that Seven Pillars of Wisdom lacks an overall plot, at least in the traditional narrative sense. There is a trajectory, starting in the deserts of the Hejaz in 1916 and terminating with the fall of Damascus in 1918. Damascus is Lawrence’s lodestar from the very beginning, but with the book written after events unfolded, it is hard not to suspect some of this is a backward projection. The narrating Lawrence at any point in the book is always a superposition of the contemporaneous Lawrence in situ and the future Lawrence telling his story with the benefit of hindsight. Combined with his literary writing style and tendency to embark on long introspective digressions, all this makes Seven Pillars of Wisdom oscillate unsteadily between being a memoir, a historical account, and a war story.

Real life is much messier than a story, with less structure, and hence Lawrence’s retelling often feels like a series of disconnected events following one after the other without much in the way of connecting tissue. Seven Pillars of Wisdom presents the reader with a constant procession of people, places and communities, many of whom are introduced with an assumed familiarity, only to never be seen again. Keeping track of the manifold characters and places isn’t made easier by Lawrence’s refusal to adhere to a single rule for transliteration from Arabic to English. With Lawrence rushing between villages, riverbeds, oases and most importantly, railway lines, always in the company of an rotating cast of comrades, there is simply too much going on, a significant part of which would be considered irrelevant digression from a narrative perspective. There is a sense in which Seven Pillars of Wisdom truly is ‘one battle after another’, with its endless sequence of skirmishes, reconnoitres, and a truly astonishing level of destruction levelled at railway lines.

War of manoeuvre

Lawrence’s account of the campaign in Arabia contrasts markedly with the common understanding of World War I as fought on the Western Front. Where the the latter is remembered as a war of stasis, the Arab Revolt is a mobile guerrilla war predicated precisely on refusing a pitched battle with the enemy. The Arabian forces use stealth and mobility, tying down the Ottomans in a futile defence of their extended supply lines. In the first chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence muses on contemporary military theory and its applicability, or lack thereof, to the situation in Arabia, foreshadowing the contrast between wars of position and wars of manoeuvre that we see developed a decade later by Antonio Gramsci. Compared to the masses of forces involved elsewhere in the war, the Arab forces are pitifully limited in number, ill-equipped and riven with internal tribal rivalries. Even within the Middle Eastern theatre of war, the Arab Revolt is a side-show to the main event, which is the British and French advance against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself is fully aware of this, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom never pretends the fight to be anything else.

Given Lawrence’s knowledge that the Revolt will only play a minor part on a secondary front within the Great War, his determination to claim victory is not based on the strategic value of his efforts, but a professed desire to help the Hashemite dynasty, in particular Crown Prince Faisal I, secure a truly independent Arab State. This is to be achieved through a combination of direct conquest of the lands to be incorporated into the putative Arab Kingdom, consolidating the variegated tribes into a single national body politic, and lending sufficient assistance to the British to gain standing as a reliable ally. It is this latter consideration that causes Lawrence no end of anguish, given his fears that Britain will in the end do what serves the Empire, even if it means reneging on its promises to its Arab allies. Time and again Lawrence returns to the feeling he is a traitor, engaged in a deception against the Arabian tribes whose fealty he is working to enlist for Faisal, and it is no surprise that on entering Damascus, victory tastes bitter to him.

Complex white saviour

Lawrence’s constant unease about the trustworthiness of his British superiors towards the Arab forces is only one part of the profound emotional turmoil that afflicts him, which means Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not the straightforward Orientalist white saviour narrative that I had come to expect. At a surface level, the Orientalism is definitely there, with a white man leading a motley collection of noble savages towards their destiny, i.e. a modern, European-style nation state. Below the surface however, Lawrence is aware that his leadership is less to do with the innate superiority of the white race, and more with his role as a conduit for British rifles, money and supplies for the Arab cause, as well as his status as a neutral outsider with no stake in the many inter-tribal rivalries flaring across a still divided Arabian peninsula. Significant parts of the book are devoted to Lawrence describing debilitating illnesses, fatigue and lack of endurance compared to his fellow guerrillas, even as his experience with desert warfare increases. Conversely, once he has adopted the indigenous ways of living with the desert, Lawrence can only gaze in bemusement on his compatriots who refuse to exchange their patently unsuitable khaki uniforms for the much more appropriate indigenous dress. Although he does not articulate this explicitly, one gets the sense that Lawrence is well aware that British supremacy is not due to the innate superiority of the white master race, but the result of being the ones holding the Vickers machine guns.

Not that this means the racism and Orientalism isn’t there. In keeping with Western sensibilities of the era, Lawrence cannot help but essentialise his Arab comrades, as well as every other people, including the English. It makes for a pervasive but also uncommitted and inconstant racism, with Lawrence readily pronouncing on the innate characteristics of the Arab race on one page, only to completely deviate from all of this in his detailed psychological profiles of the most prominent members of the Revolt or his most intimate companions. There is something intriguing about seeing the racist logic operate so openly on the page, with Lawrence unable to grasp how the immense diversity of personas and communities he describes directly contradicts the generalising tenets of his racist ideology. Time and again Lawrence will make sweeping pronouncements about Arabs, Turks, Indians or the French, only for these to immediately break down in his recounting of the actual people he meets. Even the Turks, who come in for most of Lawrence’s spite, are humanised when encountered as individuals, in particular the conscripts, prisoners of war, and the many casualties. His role in the Revolt makes Lawrence acutely aware of the great variety across the Arabian tribes he encounters, and while he is unable to divest himself of a belief in some inherent ‘desert culture’, the racism on display in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is of a completely different nature than our prevailing ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse, which lets Western leaders launder their realpolitik via some putative grand theory of history. The idea of unified ‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultural blocs will have seemed patently absurd to Lawrence, engaged as he was in enlisting the aid of Arab muslims against their Turkish overlords as part of a protracted European ‘civil war’.

Nor is it only his deep ambivalence over his role in the Revolt that causes Lawrence anguish. From his writing emerges a profile of a conflicted man profoundly repulsed by all things physical, most of all his own body, and hence with a deep-seated envy of people who inhabit their bodies with ease. Time and again Lawrence seems to seek bodily transcendence in the harshness of the desert, but this remains always beyond his reach. Neither is he intellectually confident, for while he is an educated man, he is not a trained soldier and therefore feels inferior to the military command in which he is embedded. If it were not for his duty to king, country and the Revolt, Lawrence might plausibly have taken the road of Frank Herbert’s [Dune Messiah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuneMessiah “Dune Messiah – Wikipedia”)_ and walked into the desert to disappear forever.

Imperial mandates

I cannot help but wonder to what degree the recurring episodes of self-loathing were retroactively amplified by the developments that followed the end of World War I. As Lawrence was writing his memoirs on return to England in the 1920s, the Arab state that he helped bring into being was destroyed in its infancy by French colonial forces, exercising their ‘mandate’ to Lebanon and Syria as agreed with Britain in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, of which Lawrence was probably already aware when fighting with his Arab irregulars. Only a few years later, Arabia is indeed unified, but not under the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal I, but under the rival house of Saud, again with connivance and support of the British. Within a decade of the conquest of Damascus, everything that Lawrence told his Arab comrades they were fighting for has been crushed, one way or another, by the European Powers, endorsed in this by the nascent League of Nations. It is the beginning of a long series of betrayals that endures to this day, which includes Mandate for Palestine, the Nakba, the Suez Crisis, the assassination of Iran’s Mossadegh and the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Iran, as well as the unwavering support for Israel’s military adventurism and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Seen in the light of the abject failure of the League of Nations to defend Arabian right to statehood in the 1920s, is it any wonder that the newly established Arab nations of the 1940s were disinclined to abide by a United Nations decree that the better half of Palestine was to be awarded to its recently arrived minority Jewish population?

Over a hundred years after its first publication, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is mainly interesting as a historical artefact that shows both the continuities and discontinuities of Western involvement in the Middle East. The British Empire has been eclipsed by the United States and its Israeli vassal as the primary imperial force, but the subordination of people’s right to self-determination to Western national interests remains. Direct colonial subjugation has disappeared, replaced by indirect economic control. And the racism is still there, but now grounded in Islamophobia rather than Orientalist essentialism. From the perspective of a family in Syria, Iran, or Palestine today, it must seem that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. The question is how many more white saviours they must suffer before they can take charge of their own destinies.

Notes & Suggestions

• An unavoidable comparison on reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom is with Frank Herbert’s Dune, for which it was a direct inspiration. In between the fighting and travelling, Lawrence gives a great deal of attention to the desert itself: the different compositions of sand and stone, the shape and topography, the sensation of various environments. Echoes of the desert, the Bedouin, and the outsider become leader can all be found in Dune. This essay offers an interesting discussion of the similarities, differences, and varying degrees of Orientalism in both books.
• Lawrence’s account of the exercise of imperial power is by its nature personal and small in scale. For an impersonal and macro-level account of how colonial policies readily sacrificed the lives of millions on the altar of imperial ambition, Late Victorian Holocausts gives a gruesome account of the catastrophic famines inflicted on European colonies in the 19th century as a consequence of their forcible integration into the global market.
• The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is the main British organisation campaigning to secure Palestinian rights and defend them against the ongoing occupation and genocide.

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A common theme in fantasy worldbuilding is that once there was a Golden Age, but now the magic has vanished or is draining away. The Elves have departed. The Gods have been slain. The Mysteries have been forgotten. So prevalent is this trope that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy has a specific term for it: thinning”). It describes that feeling evoked by worlds that used to be fuller or richer, brimming with magic, mystery and wonder. But by some mysterious force or process, they have become emptier, flatter, greyer. In a word: thinner.

We saw thinning at work in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot centred on an attempt to restore a lost magic to England. But the example most fantasy readers will be familiar with is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Middle Earth walked by Frodo and Sam is a world where the most titanic struggles have already been fought, the mightiest empires have risen and fallen, the gods have walked the earth and retreated. Everything in The Lord of the Rings, from Lothlórien and Gondor all the way to Sauron himself, is a shadow of a grander age. The Lord of the Rings is at least in part a novel about how to move on in a world literally set in the ruins of the past.

The world of Martha Well’s Witch King has similarly thinned, but here there is no mystery about why the world is emptier than it once was. It is thinner because invaders from across the sea landed on its shores and massacred everyone and everything. Witch King is not a story of melancholic longing for some imagined but lost Englishness, but a direct reckoning with the effects of genocide, trauma, and loss, and what happens to those left alive to move on from it.

Witch King starts with demon Kaiisteron (Kai) and witch Ziede finding themselves imprisoned, but quickly liberated by the misguided attempts by an ‘expositor’ (i.e., a sorcerer) to enthral Kai. Thus inadvertently freed, Kai and Ziede must discover who betrayed them, and to what end, and what fate has befallen their friends and allies.

This situation creates a great amount of anxiety for both Kai and Ziede, and as the story progresses, we gradually find out why. Both were there when their world first burned, when their friends were slaughtered and their ways of life destroyed. Witch King is structured like braid, with alternating chapters set in the present and the past. It is from the past chapters that we learn that when Kai was young and had only recently crossed into the human world, a people called the Hierarchs came from across the sea and exterminated almost all the societies they encountered, saving only a few to be either subjugated or enslaved. In their war, the Hierarchs have two advantages over their enemies. First, their united forces, arrayed against a fragmented patchwork of city states, tribes and principalities that comprises Kai and Ziede’s world. Second a form of blood magic powered by death and suffering. It is the latter that allows the Hierarchs to wage the magical equivalent of nuclear warfare, making their merciless advance unstoppable.

The Hierarchs’ genocidal invasion has echoes of the Roman conquests of Gaul and Carthage or the arrival of conquistadors in the Americas, and it is probably no coincidence that the Hierarchs’ soldiers are called legionaries. The level of death and destruction is a clear departure from from Wells’ previous Murderbot Diaries series, which despite being set in a dystopian future did tend to see its heroes prevail over their adversaries. Not so in Witch King, where we watch with Kai as his people are massacred, his fellow demons imprisoned, and his connection to the Underearth severed.

Witch King is not a story about heroic resistance, but of loss and how to come to terms with it. The majority of the novel is set after first the invasion and then the defeat of the Hierarchs. The chapters set in the past tell us some of the events of the invasion, but here we are constrained by Kai’s own limited knowledge of what is happening, and that strand of the story terminating before we arrive at the successful counter-offensive against the Hierarchs.

The purpose of the ‘past’ chapters is therefore not to describe heroic battles, but to explain why ‘present’ Kai, Ziede and their allies are the way they are. Our heroes suffer from trauma and survivors guilt that expresses itself in panic, mistrust, and a reflexive tendency to deploy force or violence in defence of self or loved ones. Each of the characters who lived through the war is struggling to recover who they were, restrain the negative impulses they’ve developed due to what they’ve suffered, and to integrate their experiences into a new self that can move forward. There has been a profound break in the world of Witch King, and the novel put me in mind of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which ends on this reflection:

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

The inhabitants of Witch King were not as innocent or pacifist as the Althesians in Le Guin’s novella, but it is nonetheless implied that before the arrival of the Hierarchs, their communities coexisted mostly peacefully. It is therefore not only our heroes, but their entire society that has to come to terms with trauma and having been fundamentally altered. To defeat the Hierarchs, the fragmented city-states and other political entities that existed before the invasion were forced to unify into the an alliance called the Rising Worlds Coalition. But just as Le Guin’s Althesians could not put murder back into the dream-world, neither can Wells’ societies unlearn domination, autocracy and imperialism.

The search of Well’s characters for a new identity not governed by their traumatic experience is thus mirrored in the search of their communities for a future beyond mass death, war and domination. In both cases it involves internal conflict and work to unlearn reflexes forged in pain and despair. One of Kai’s key motivations is to prevent the Rising Worlds Coalition, which began as an alliance of independent states formed to fight the Hierarchs, from itself turning into a for mof empire. I was reminded of Hannah Proctor’s meditations on collective grief in Burnout, and how communities can be sundered by a trauma that, while shared, is nonetheless experienced uniquely individually. What is clear, is that Wells does not believe that simply putting the King back on the throne of Gondor is going to be a solution to anything.

The absence of the actual war of the Rising Worlds Coalition against the Hierarchs does leave an odd gap in Witch King’s worldbuilding, which is compounded by Kai’s ignorance throughout much of the ‘past’ chapters. We hence only gradually and incompletely discover the world’s lore, with Wells offering little in the form of exposition. The absence of characters launching into lengthy but implausible explanations makes for refreshingly natural reading, but combined with Wells’ creative approach to existing fantasy concepts and her invention of new ones, makes the story and the finer points of the lore hard to follow. Character abilities occasionally emerge just when they are convenient to progress the plot, lending a mild feel of deus ex machina to parts of the story, though unlike in for example Mal Goes to War, this did not impair the overall plausibility for me.

Witch King is an intriguing new direction for Wells, although it shares with the Murderbot Diaries the centrality of found family, the importance of trust, and the almost casual inclusion of diverse representations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability. A crucial difference however is that where Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery starts almost from a blank slate at the point they gain autonomy, Kai’s journey is instead one of recovery after a cataclysmic rupture. It is a courageous decision to write a fantasy that focuses not on the ultimate battle, but the aftermath, with its painful work of reconstruction, reconnection and healing. In a world of ecological breakdown, warfare and genocide, these themes are more valuable than yet another simplistic triumph of good over evil. At the conclusion of Witch King there is therefore clearly more to do, and I am interested to see where Wells takes this story next.

Notes & Suggestions

• Anxiety, grief, loss, anger, and trauma are emotions that will, in varying degrees, be familiar to people organising in activist spaces, from marginalised communities, or who have simply been hurt by the world. Hannah Proctor taught us that none of us can be whole in a broken world, but that collective healing is a process that can sustain us. If you are struggling, seek assistance if it is available to you, but more importantly, reach out to friends, family or comrades that you trust. Readers in England and Wales can access Mind for support. Readers in Scotland can turn to SAMH.
• Readers who enjoyed Wells’ Murderbot Diaries may also enjoy Citizen Sleeper, a relatively short videogame exploring the same themes of community, the autonomy of constructed sentiences, and corporate dystopia.
• Perhaps surprisingly, Marvel’s Loki shares Witch King’s argument that the real work only starts after we defeat our enemies, while similarly engaging with themes of grief, despair, and recovery.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Fantasy has a subgenre that asks itself “what if history, but with magic?”, and within that subgenre there is a peculiar penchant for novels set during the British Regency era with its High Society romances and the thrill of the Napoleonic Wars. Bridgerton with Dragons, if you will. Because after all, what is more dashing than a well-bred aristocrat wizard wearing the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Navy?

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell falls within this genre, but takes a deeper approach than adding magical creatures to a romance or adventure story. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it tells the story of the two titular magicians and their efforts to restore magic, specifically English magic, to the world. The novel’s 900+ pages of high society salons, the Peninsular War and expeditions to elven lands are quite possibly less about magic, and more about what does or does not define Englishness. Clarke’s novel almost feels like an incantation itself, a magical tome containing an intricate spell to conjure up a lost England for the reader.

Powerful spells require excellent concentration and superb command of one’s ingredients however, and this is where Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not always have the wizardry required. It is a daunting undertaking to sustain pace and dramatic tension across hundreds of pages, and at times Clarke does not succeed at this. But it is the ending where for me the story unravelled and the spell broke. There is much to enjoy in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in particular for fans of the English classics, but the finale did not deliver the magical fireworks that its premise promised.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is built on an almost dialectical series of interconnected juxtapositions that start with the contrast between the two mages and spirals out from there. We are introduced first to Mr Norrell, a deeply insecure, narrow-minded and vindictive member of the minor gentry set outwith Society by virtue of both his status and personality. His deep-seated anxieties drive his contradictory impulses of wanting to restore English magic, while simultaneously sequestering any magical books he can find away in his private library lest anyone else might read them. Norrell is a man who craves intellectual companionship with the same strength with which he fears potential competition. It is a rare moment indeed when he overcomes his caution and takes on Jonathan Strange as his apprentice, who is psychologically the complete opposite of Norrell, the yang to Norrell’s yin. Equally riven by contradictory impulses, Strange oscillates between the insouciant and carefree nonchalance that only comes from being securely born as an aristocrat into high society, and obsessive fixation on whatever interest or task he has set himself. Strange takes up magic on a whim, but his unthinking self-confidence means ends up drawn far deeper into the mysteries of the art than Norrell.

Unbeknownst to themselves, both magicians find themselves in conflict with The Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. A faery with no regard for morality, honour or good manners, he represents the dark and wild side of English magic that Norrell seeks desperately to excise from his modern approach to magic, and to which Strange becomes fixedly attracted. Yet it is Norrell who first sets the Gentleman on a course against the magicians, by compelling him to assist in the resurrection of Lady Pole, a young woman, to secure Norrell’s access to the highest levels of government.

Together with various other characters orbiting the three magicians, Lady Pole represents a third juxtaposition within the novel, between the three mages and their collateral damage. For what unites Norrell, Strange and the Gentleman is a callous disregard for the consequence of their actions. Even though the three mages are constantly at odds with one another, they share a deep carelessness about other people: Norrell because he cares only for himself, Strange because he does not care for others, and the Gentleman because he cares not at all.

The characters hurt by the three mages represent various oppressed groups in Regency England: women, black slaves, the poor and working classes. Norrell’s bargain with the Gentleman to restore life to Lady Pole sees the latter lead a double life in the Faerie, leaving her exhausted and seemingly mad, to eventually be secluded away for the sake of propriety. Strange’s neglected and ignored wife Arabella is similarly enchanted, as is Stephen Black, black butler to the Pole household who is neither slave nor free man. And poor, working and even middle class magicians are excluded from the revival of English magic as it established as a gentlemanly pursuit.

And therein lies the final contradiction, for while Norrell, Strange and their Government Ministers dream of a thoroughly English magic for the modern age, the magic itself stubbornly refuses to conform to their aristocratic sensibilities. Magic was brought to England a thousand years earlier by the Raven King, a human foundling raised by faeries who conquered Northern England to establish his own kingdom. The Raven King’s magic is indeed English, but it is the magic of gnarled oaks in dark winter forests as much as of the green rolling hills in the imaginations of Norrell, Strange, and the past and present English upper classes, ensconced in their stately homes in the Home Counties. There is an obvious implied argument here that it is not just the magic, but Englishness itself that is much darker, older and wyrder than the national myth of the green and pleasant land and the people that own it. That England’s blasted moorlands, mountain crags and snow-covered forests, and the people that dwell there, have an equal claim to Englishness.

Breaking open the dominant notion of Englishness to make it more inclusive has merit, but the risk of an argument about the cultural self-conception of a specific part of a small island nation on the periphery of the Eurasian continent is that it becomes, well, insular. The outsized cultural influence of the Anglosphere notwithstanding, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not escape this inherent provincialism, and instead rather leans into it. In part this is because the debate at the heart of the book implies that magic is something uniquely English, there being no evidence or engagement with foreign magical practices past or present throughout the novel. On top of that, the style and format of the novel further reinforce its profoundly inward-looking nature. To pay homage to English Romance novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is written like a contemporaneous account of the novel’s events (footnotes included!), but the price of this is that despite Clarke’s possible misgivings about the English upper class, they still dominate the pages and provide our lens on the story’s events. Unable to escape their inbred sense of superiority, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unfortunately suffused of the infamous “Heavy Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off” mentality.

The centrality of upper class characters is also one of the reasons why Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell did not fully work for me as a narrative that attempts to bring marginalised groups back into the story, though I don’t dispute this is a possible reading. It is undoubtedly the case that the female and working class characters have more common sense and see things more clearly than either of the two titular magicians or the upper class characters who are frequently depicted as either incompetent, venal, or both. But with the exception of Mr Norrell’s manservant Childermass and the vagrant prophet-magician Vinculus, most of the marginalised characters have their agency curtailed either directly (as in the case of Lady Pole who is enchanted by the Gentleman) or indirectly (as in the case of Stephen Black who has no standing on account of his race). While they act as a foil for the arrogance of the wizards and their class, they do not exert their own power on events until the final part of the book, and even then their role is instrumental, but not directive.

This is is because as we approach the novel’s finale in the third act, we discover that Clarke chose to play with that most dangerous magic of all: prophecy. Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell may believe they are directing the return of magic to England, but gradually it is revealed that they are mere ingredients in someone else’s spell. A spell by none other than John Uskglass, the Raven King himself, to restore his magic to England.

It is an intriguing development, falling somewhat short of a twist by virtue of serious foreshadowing, but it has the effect of collapsing the dramatic tension just as we approach the conclusion, For as soon as we know that events are preordained, the actions, agonising and arguments of the protagonists cease to be compelling. The outcome of the story may well be interesting, but it is so in the way of a game of chess: we might be invested in the outcome and the play, but nobody will enquire after the moods or motivations of the pieces.

For this reason I was ultimately also not persuaded by the thesis that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell emancipates its marginalised characters by moving them from periphery into the centre of the story. Because the centre of this story is empty, a void spun around the absent figure of the Raven King who turns out to have been pulling everyone’s strings all along. In a way, Clarke does manage to equalise the standing of her upper class magicians and her other characters, but it is done by reducing the former rather than elevating the latter.

As an argument about who magic belongs to, the denouncement of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may work very well, but as a story it fizzled out for me. By this point, the reader has spent hundreds of pages of sometimes laboured prose in the company of two unpleasant magicians, whose idiosyncrasies, inability to communicate and failure to notice crucial events perform precisely as the plot demands. It may have worked if Clarke had also intended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a pastiche of a comedy of errors, but I doubt that is the case. In a way the ending retroactively justifies these odd lapses of judgement and the fact that the cause of English magic ever came to rest on the shoulders of two men so ill-equipped to bear it, but satisfying it is not.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an ambitious, at times audacious work. It mixes evident affection for fantasy and the English classics with a critique of both genres, taking its story from what feels like a familiar beginning into an unexpected direction. But at over 900 pages it also feels drawn out, with great lapses where nothing seems to happen and the reader is left waiting for events to unfold. Since it was published in 2004, fantasy has seen much innovation and a proliferation of protagonists from diverse backgrounds, and by comparison Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can feel dated. It should certainly still appeal to readers with a love of the ‘historic Britain with magic’ subgenre, in particular those who are intimately familiar with the English classics. But beyond that it is somewhat too much like its wizards: learned but long-winded, adroit but unfocused, and ultimately just not in control of its magic.

Notes & Suggestions

• There were times when Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reminded me of Gormenghast, probably because of the similarities in length, the drifting plot and the constant sense of something ominous in the background. Where Peake uses Gormenghast Castle as the structure that contains his protagonists, Clarke could be said to use the whole of the English landscape. But England is much larger than Gormenghast, and we never spend enough time outside of London to give it the same dominating presence as Peake’s Castle.
• ‘Men failing to communicate’ is also central to the plot of Akira, and I suppose it is generally a common trope. Akira’s sheer energy and much shorter runtime mean it gets away with it in a way that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not.
• I enjoyed putting this review in dialogue with a 2008 review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Elizabeth Hoiem, published in Strange Horizons magazine. Although I eventually tracked down the original, I initially accessed it using the Wayback Machine, which seeks to preserve web content even after the original pages expire. A laudable aim that always values support.

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Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.

Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions.

These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict.

That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks.

None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding.

Notes & Suggestions

• I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it.
• There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect.
• The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended.

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With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

Neorealism emerged in the United States after World War Two as a fusion of the old idea of the ‘balance of power’ and game theory. The school took its name as a claim to a hard-nosed tradition of statecraft that says that while peace may be nice, the nature of the international system means conflict and war are inevitable, always have been, and always will be. In very short summary, neorealism posits that because there is no central authority in the world to govern inter-state behaviour, there is a perpetual anarchy giving rise to a Hobbesian conflict of all against all. It doesn’t matter what states want, or who is in charge, or what their domestic politics are. Any state must be constantly vigilant lest their security or power is surpassed by others.

This is the sort of abstraction reminiscent of Newtonian physics where for convenience one might momentarily assume that all objects are frictionless spherical penguins in the vacuum of space. And such simplifications have their uses, but they must justify themselves. Empire contends that neorealism does not provide such justification, and offers a competing theory rooted in the specific mode of production of states, arguing that conflict between them emerges predominantly as a result of how they must reproduce domestically, rather than as the inevitable function of a transhistorical states system.

Rosenberg mounts a dual challenge to neorealism’s dominant position. First, Empire undermines neorealism’s claim to transhistoricity by demonstrating that its favourite examples (Greek and Italian city states) were both quite unlike modern sovereign states and were driven to conflict for historically specific reasons that derived from their political, social and economic structure. Empire than expands on this by investigating the early modern Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese empires to show that even at the supposed dawn of the states system era, international actions were shaped predominantly by domestic considerations and constraints and impulses resulting from the level and configuration of the political economy at that time, rather than as blind reaction to an international balance of power. It is a persuasive argument – insofar as I am qualified to judge – and beyond the realm of IR it also reads as a detailed and interesting history of the time when Europe’s development began to diverge from the rest of the world. As with any history of this period, it is perhaps unintentionally a salutary reminder that for most of history Europe was marginal to global political economy, and that its ascendence was in no small part the result of the violent destruction of pre-existing manufacturing and mercantile capacity in Asia, culminating in the devastating famines in the 19th century that were described in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Having surveyed this history, Rosenberg then proceeds to contrast it with the modern states system, arguing that rather than something eternal it is actually historically contingent. Unsurprising for a Marxist, Rosenberg finds the motive force of history in the specific mode of production of capitalist economies, which at the state level expresses itself in the near complete separation of the economic and political realm. The assumed anarchic system of ‘free and independent’ states is mirrored in the anarchic market of ‘free and equal’ individuals, who can contract with one another at will, unencumbered by the reciprocal bonds of obligation that pertained in, for example, European feudal societies. But this formal, political equality both obscures and is necessary for the profound economic inequality that exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Empire thus seeks the roots of state behaviour in the historically contingent form of capitalism, but avoids the crude socialist simplification that states are merely imperial extensions for their capitalist class.

Does this perspective offer anything of value to our present moment? At first glance, the drive to rearmament appears to argue in the neorealists’ favour, with Europe in particular anxious to increase its security and/or power in a more geopolitically unstable and multipolar world where it can no longer rely on the United States as an ally. In the UK, (armchair) generals have quickly emerged to bemoan how the nation’s spending on ‘welfare’ enfeebles its ability to pursue its national interest. Yet on closer inspection, the notion that recent conflicts were not driven by the domestic politics of the instigating states is not tenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American adventurism in Venezuela and Iran are evidently motivated by domestic considerations. The war in Iran in particular makes more sense when read as an effort to forcibly integrate Iran into the capitalist world system than as an inevitable result of some American ‘balance of power’ calculation. Israel, meanwhile, is waging a genocidal war on a people it explicitly refuses to recognise as a state. Perhaps the only ‘realist’ conflict is the one currently perpetrated in Sudan which, while technically a civil war, is being sustained by other nations using it as a proxy to increase their power, influence, or access to resources.

On the face of it therefore, reality seems rather at odds with the claims of the neorealists. Whether it supports Empire’s alternative proposition is hard to tell, as Rosenberg only gives the contours of a possible Marxist IR theory. The second edition ends with a rather self-deprecating afterword where Rosenberg admits that his intention to develop his theory further was diverted by his discovery of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ as proposed by Trotsky, which locates some of sources of geopolitical dynamism in the variety of states constituting the international system. Its logic suggests an intriguing possibility for an ‘end of history’ as the result of the complete subsumption of all states in the capitalist world order, ultimately equalising their development and depriving history of a motive force for want of diversity. An IR equivalent of the heat death of the universe. Though whether Rosenberg would have reached that conclusion cannot be inferred from where Empire finishes.

For a contribution to a specific debate within a specialised academic discipline, The Empire of Civil Society is surprisingly readable, in particular its historical chapters. While it remains a niche endeavour, its spirited argument for an IR theory rooted in human agency rather than impersonal and abstract systems is a necessary reminder that we must choose to make our own history, and that statesmen asking us to dissolve our political and class differences for the sake of some putative ‘national interest’ are seldom to be trusted.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rosenberg’s proposition that modern states are built precisely on the separation of political and economic realms struck a chord with me, as it explains my slight scepticism regarding the corpocracy depicted in the otherwise excellent The Ten Percent Thief. Would an entity that fully encompasses the state and the market within itself still act like a corporation? The resultant contradictions are of course part of The Ten Percent Thief’s narrative, and as it is an excellent book, I recommend people read it and draw their own conclusion.
• The enduring debate between the different IR schools put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis that scientific paradigm shifts don’t happen because people are convinced, but because adherents of obsolete theories are replaced over time by advocates of new, presumably better theories. In the realm of IR and history where we don’t have a control Earth to play with and one can convincingly enough make an argument for any position, one wonders where progress may come from. Plus, I’m unsure if Kuhn allowed for political forces with a vested interest keeping particular sides of a scholarly debate alive.
• I stole the notion that it is Iran’s refusal to be integrated into the US-dominated economic system from the recent Macrodose Extra episode Order as Fiction, which also covers the creation of the The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations intending to uphold international law where the West is patently failing. While I prefer not to include paywalled references, in this case honesty demanded that I include my sources.
• There numerous organisations, with a range of political affiliations, that seek to promote peace, which can always do with support in one way or another. In the UK, options include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, and the Peace & Justice Project.
• Empire relies on the traditional Marxist distinction between feudalist and post-feudalist modes of production, but apparently ‘feudalism’ is no longer a preferred category among historians, and ‘manorialism’ is considered more precise. This distinction between feudalism and manorialism, and its application to the emerging concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ is covered on this episode of Culture, Power, Politics.

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Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

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Ronald Reagan infamously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, but Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington would counter that what should really frighten you is: “I’m a consultant and I’m here to advise.” Mazzucato and Collington are the joint authors of The Big Con: How the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies, which as the title suggests is a full-on critique of the consulting industry and its malignant effects on society.

The Big Con builds on previously published research by Collington and Mazzucato, as well as Mazzucato’s earlier book The Entrepreneurial State. The central argument is as clear as it is intuitive: if you consistently rely on someone else to do something for you, you will not get any better at it yourself. Or as the wise sage Bruce Lee had it: “Growth requires involvement.” The increased use of consultancies creates, to borrow a favourite right-wing phrase, a ‘dependency culture’ among public sector organisations and businesses. And as with any dependency, your dealer usually has little interest in weaning you off what they sell.

Mazzucato and Collington present their argument in three parts across a concise 250 pages. The opening section sets the scene with a history of the consultancy sector and its evolution from roughly 1920 to the present day. With the context in place, The Big Con presents its core argument on how persistent and prevalent use of consultancies harms businesses and governments alike. The book closes on four recommendations for how both the public and private sector can wean themselves off their addiction to consultancy services and rebuild their own capacity and expertise.

In the first part, which corresponds roughly to the first half of the book, Mazzucato and Collington take us from the origins of consulting in optimising manufacturing processes via the birth of IT and computing to the current universal advisory and outsourcing services. It is a lot of history and variety to unpack, and hence this part occasionally feels like a string of disconnected facts and namechecks. While it gives a good sense of the gradual infiltration of consultancies into every facet of society and every layer of government, the detail is either excessive or could have been organised more coherently to enhance the overall effect. Even something as simple as a graph with global consultancy spend over time in inflation-corrected terms, pulling the evidence from different subsections together, would have made a big difference.

Once the history is established, The Big Con sets out the ways by which consultancies impair rather than strengthen the capabilities of their clients. Issues range from failure to actually impart knowledge on a sustained basis, consultancy value being difficult to measure, inability of clients to properly evaluate or control services they have outsourced, and systemic conflicts of interests. At the root of all these issues is a severe principal-agent problem, where consultancies have both strongly divergent interests from their clients and hold a significant information advantage over them. As Collington and Mazzucato show, consultancies are essentially parasites on the productive economy, and like all parasites must weaken their host organism, but not kill it.

Elaborating on the disease metaphor a bit, the question The Big Con implicitly elicits is whether consultancies are the cause of our predicament, or merely a symptom of it. The Big Con connects the rise of consultancies particularly with the neoliberal revolution, although it points out they do predate the 1970s. What is less clear is whether Collington and Mazzucato see consultancies as enabling factors, or merely opportunists. This is in part because both the history and analytical section lack strong aggregate data to ground the argument. There are facts and illustrative anecdotes in the narrative, and to a sympathetic reader these are not unconvincing, but they do not establish a coherent and compelling causality.

This matters, because whether consultancies mostly exploit weaknesses in an impaired system, or are in fact a key cause of those weaknesses, determines what a viable strategy to counter them would be. If consultancies are a symptom but not a cause, then our treatment plan should not focus primarily on them. This ambiguity surfaces in the solutions proposed by The Big Con, which include increasing the capability and learning potential of public institutions, leading to both reduced dependency on consultancies and increased control where they are used. Mazzucato and Collington also propose greater transparency about conflicts of interest and mandatory transfer of learning at the end of contracts.

The common theme connecting all this is, as Collington and Mazzucato set out themselves, “A new vision, remit and narrative for the civil service”. In other words, a reconfiguration of the role of the state in society. But as they themselves have noted throughout the book, the role of the state as a proactive force for good in society has been under sustained assault at least since Reagan’s one-liner about government, and overturning this would require an effort that feels disproportionate to the problem posed by consultancies, harmful though they may be.

All this put me in mind of Donella Meadows’ hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. Viewed through Meadows’ framework, consultancies act as positive feedback loops for the neoliberal project: they are both enabled by neoliberal reforms, and in turn further neoliberal policies. Unchecked, positive feedback loops can drive a system to radically new configurations or even destructive instability. Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is therefore a way for the system to remain more stable, and for other forces to exercise more control.

Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is the 7th most powerful intervention in Meadows’ hierarchy, but ‘changing the paradigm’ comes in at number 2. It is both more powerful, but also far more difficult to do. Altering the consensus on the role of the state in society is evidently a paradigm shift, and would undoubtedly change our use of consultancies. But undoing decades of neoliberal hegemony will also be extremely difficult to achieve.

In a way, The Big Con is thinking both too big and too small. Too big, because of the enormity of the political and ideological struggle required to make Mazzucato and Collington’s solutions possible. Too small, because if we did manage to radically reinvent the purpose of the state, we could do so much more than merely diminish our use of consultancies. Compared to ‘solving housing insecurity’ and ‘providing healthcare for all’, reducing our use of McKinsey feels like rather small fry. The more technical solutions that The Big Con suggests, such as moderately increasing state capacity or enforcing greater transparency, are more commensurate to the scale of the problem they are meant to address, though will be more difficult to attain while they go against the neoliberal grain. Nonetheless, they are a more realistic place to start, and the last chapter would have been stronger if it had considered how to implement them under the adversarial conditions imposed by neoliberal hegemony.

In fairness to The Big Con, it does not at any point suggest that consultancies somehow caused the neoliberal revolution, only that they were complicit in it and greatly benefited from it. But neither does it explicitly argue why, of all possible battles to pick to overturn neoliberal hegemony, consultancies should be a primary target. Referring back to Meadow’s leverage points, my own contention would be that reducing the impact of consultancies and their reinforcement of neoliberal dogma is a worthwhile battleground precisely because progress might be made without overturning the existing order of things first, rather than the the other way around as Mazzucato and Collington propose. The Big Con does after all provide ample evidence that consultancies fail to deliver even on their own terms, so reducing our dependency based on the merits of cutting costs and increasing state resilience in an increasingly uncertain world seems, if not straightforward, at least plausible.

To paraphrase Laotzu, being ignorant of your ignorance is a disease, and recognising your ignorance is the first step to being cured. The great service of The Big Con is to expose the harmful effects of the consultancy industry and the way it weakens state capacity. Although its tremendous reach in terms of the history and typology of consultancies comes with a resultant sacrifice of further depth, it convincingly conveys the pervasiveness of consultancies across governments and industries, as well as the unavoidable conflicts of interest that arise from their multifarious entanglements. The book should be required reading for public sector workers and business leaders alike. Having prepared the ground, Mazzucato and Collington could do worse than come out with a sequel: The Big Counter: How to kick out consultancies and learn to become self-reliant again. Such advice would be worth paying for.

Notes & Suggestions

• Readers looking to go into the nefarious world of consultancy in more detail may be interested in When McKinsey Comes to Town, an investigation specifically of how McKinsey shapes business and policy around the world, including for some more unsavoury clients.
• It occurred to me that there is an interesting analogy between consultancies and LLMs. Both are used by people and organisations as a way of compensating for a lack of skill or knowledge, but it is precisely that lack of skill or knowledge that makes it impossible to verify the utility and veracity of any outputs. The logical endpoint is, I suppose, when consultancies in turn outsource the work to an LLM.
• Two books specifically analysing neoliberal hegemony, through with quite different methods, are Hegemony Now! and Capitalist Realism.
• Mazzucato and Collington’s programme of increasing state capability and decreasing reliance on consultants is gaining traction with left-wing parties across the world. In New York, new major Zohran Mamdani is reducing dependence on consultancies to both save money and increase the city government’s capacity to act. In the UK, new Green Party-aligned think-tank Verdant is similarly recommending reducing consultancy spending as a way of reclaiming the theme of government efficiency from the Right.
• The Laotzu paraphrase is loosely based on chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching, drawing from both the more standard Waley translation and Ursula K. le Guin’s more poetic version.

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“There is no magic money tree” is the stern injunction invoked by politicians, central bankers and economists to explain to a fiscally imprudent public why it cannot have nice things. Fiscal rectitude is now the primary virtue of government, perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Treasury has shackled itself to the need for approval from an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. Running deficits or printing money, we are told, is only one tiny step away from Weimar Republic levels of financial calamity.

But what if it wasn’t thus? That is the alluring promise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which first gained prominence in the wake of the Great Recession and argues that not only can governments print money to cover expenses, but they should do so to fully realise a nation’s productive capacity. It is a provocative and controversial theory that repudiates the need for permanent austerity in the name of balanced budgets, and finds one of its most ardent advocates in Stephanie Kelton, erstwhile chief economist to US senator Bernie Sanders. In her book The Deficit Myth, she takes her argument for a ‘people’s economy’ built on the insights of MMT to a wider audience.

The Deficit Myth faces the triple challenge of any non-fiction book that assails an existing orthodoxy. It must set out a compelling argument, be intelligible to a lay audience, and dispel hegemonic common sense. This is a daunting task, and the meagre evidence base, weaknesses in Kelton’s writing style, and a different perspective on political economy meant I was left unpersuaded by the book’s stronger claims. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking read that provides ample critique of economic orthodoxy, and left me receptive to exploring more rigorous defences of MMT in future.

MMT is based on the chartalist premise that any government operating a freely floating fiat currency can create money to fund its expenditure. Governments can do this because they are the monopoly issuer of their own currency, which means they can never ‘run out’ of it. This money then flows into the economy, from which it can be removed through taxation, to avoid an excess supply of money driving up inflation. I had come across this view before in David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5000 years, although Graeber did not explore the economic consequences as thoroughly as Kelton.

MMT pre-empts the obvious counterargument that governments creating money will simply lead to inflation by positing that the additional money will be absorbed by unutilised productive capacity in the economy instead. In essence, MMT argues that it is not the relationship between money and goods and services available to purchase that drives inflation, but the relationship of money to the productive capacity of an economy to produce goods and services. As long as increased government expenditure results in a commensurate increase in things available for purchase, by stimulating economic activity, inflation will be kept at bay. It is only when the economy is running at full capacity that increasing the money supply further will cause inflation.

This argument will sound familiar to readers acquainted with (post-)Keynesian theories advocating countercyclical spending to dampen the negative effects of the business cycle, and my impression is that different views on the nature of money notwithstanding, MMT advocates and Keynesian economists are at least fellow travelers. It is an intriguing and logically coherent hypothesis, but unfortunately The Deficit Myth does not offer much evidence to buttress the initial premise. Kelton references a number of other heterodox economists, but unless the reader is already predisposed to agree with the argument, the appeal to authority does not work if the reader is unfamiliar with the sources cited, yet still aware that they are not universally accepted.

This lack of evidence and a failure to address any of the obvious critiques or counterexamples to MMT leave the central argument in a precariously weak position after the first two chapters, and The Deficit Myth does little to shore it up in the remainder of the book. Instead, it applies the core premise to a range of policy issues, such as the national debt, trade imbalances and social security commitments. The Deficit Myth’s prescriptions follow logically from the core premise, which Kelton repeats somewhat overmuch, but they do not offer further proof for its truthfulness. If one does not accept MMT’s core tenets, the whole argument immediately falls apart.

Avoiding substantive engagement with critiques of MMT also leads Kelton into a dead end when explaining why her theory isn’t universally accepted. Discounting competing views on MMT’s validity, she resorts instead to ascribing the failure of policymakers and mainstream economists to accept MMT to either an almost delusional psychological investment in the myth that government finances work similarly to a household budget, or to bad faith ploys for continued austerity. I certainly don’t dispute that hegemonic dogma constrains how people think, but it is not persuasive as the only reason why so many economists, including from heterodox traditions, remain stubbornly unconvinced of MMT’s validity.

All this leaves Kelton’s account of MMT exposed to numerous lines of attack. There is no account of how MMT would explain or manage crises such as the 1970s stagflation or the hyperinflation seen in Weimar Germany or contemporary Zimbabwe or Iran. The chapter proposing a jobs guarantee, does not work through how a strengthened bargaining position for labour might cascade through the economy. The chapter on international trade explains the dangers of governments restricting their monetary sovereignty by linking their own currency to that of another country (usually the dollar), but does not address the risk of increases in the money supply or trade deficits causing currency devaluation, making imports more expensive. This chapter also suffers most from the US-centric perspective in The Deficit Myth, because while Kelton notes the exceptional position of the United States as the issuer of the world reserve currency, there is little exploration of the advantages this confers on the US, and the disadvantages it poses for everyone else. No other country can rely on a near-infinite demand for its own currency to maintain favourable exchange rates despite running structural trade deficits. The lack of consideration for higher-order effects certainly makes the book more readable, but on the flipside also makes it feel so too simplistic to remain persuasive.

The last couple of chapters are dedicated to policy problems that Kelton argues are far more important ‘deficits’, such as crumbling infrastructure, inequality, the atrocious healthcare provision in the United States, and imminent environmental collapse. It is these chapters where The Deficit Myth cannot cash the cheques it wrote for itself at the start of the book. Kelton reminds us that it is the productive capacity of the real economy, not the supply of money, that is the real constraint on what is achievable. Yet as we near the end of the book, we are no wiser on what this capacity is, how we would know what it is, and how it is constituted. It is plausible that MMT could solve any of the problems identified by Kelton individually, but it is doubtful it can solve them all at the same time. The Deficit Myth offers no evidence that simply increasing the money supply would enable us to pay for better healthcare and environmental restoration and a jobs guarantee and infrastructure repair and any of the other things Kelton cares about. Instead, Kelton has to concede that other policy measures, such as progressive taxation, environmental legislation, universal healthcare and industrial policy will also be required.

And so we find ourselves back at the political in political economy. The allure of MMT is its promise of a technical fix to a political problem, and Kelton repeatedly stresses that MMT is not ideology but monetary reality. But in the end, until we achieve fully automated luxury communism, we cannot escape political struggle over our societies’ limited productive forces. Kelton falls into the same trap as Rutger Bregman in Utopia for Realists by proposing an ostensibly objectively positive policy as a shortcut to avoid class conflict, but with class antagonism itself standing in the way of the policy being implemented. As Cory Doctorow reminds us, if something is good for workers, the bosses will hate it. The reason why we cannot have nice things is not because of a mismatch between the money supply and productive forces, but because it is not in the interest of the capitalist class to let us have them. Universal healthcare and a jobs guarantee may well benefit society in the abstract, but the bosses know that insecure, desperate workers are much easier to discipline and exploit.

Jane McAlevey said it best. There are no shortcuts. MMT may well be a useful tool in the hands of labour, but if so, it will still require a powerful working class to wield it.

In the end, I was not persuaded that MMT is the gamechanger that Kelton propounds it to be. But The Deficit Myth remains a valuable and critical intervention in public debate on how we run the economy, and a powerful argument for removing artificial constraints on our welfare and prosperity. The book could be read as a first step on one’s MMT journey, rather than the final word, and I expect more in-depth MMT works would address the critiques I’ve raised. As we discovered to our collective detriment following the Great Recession, there are dangers in having a monoculture of economic theory. It will however take more robust defences and sharper arguments if Kelton wants to see MMT emerge victorious.

Notes & Suggestions

• In her early chapters, Kelton introduces the concept of the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) which is the putative reference point for central banks to manage inflation. It isn’t central to Kelton’s argument and so I didn’t manage to integrate it into the blog proper, but it was the part of the book that made me most furious. The NAIRU is a rate of ‘acceptable’ unemployment that unelected technocrats decide is necessary to avoid inflation. In other words, it is official government policy in all advanced economies to keep a certain percentage of the workforce out of work as a reserve army of labour. Yet the same politicians and technocrats who deliberately inflict suffering and misery on millions of workers for the benefit of ‘the economy’ will simultaneously blame the unemployed for their situation. If there is one other thing to take away from The Deficit Myth, it is that we should never again take serious any politician talking about ‘skivers vs strivers’ or ‘encouraging’ the unemployed back to work.
• Kelton’s book is a decent entry point, but there is a lot more on MMT out there, on both sides of the debate. Jacobin has featured an extensive critique and rebuttal, as well as an interview with Stephanie Kelton. In the UK, Richard Murphy is one of the more vocal MMT advocates.

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