About the author

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

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How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative

Non-fiction categories #history #politics

First published in 2014, ‘Utopia for Realists’ is an intervention by ‘rock star historian’ Rutger Bregman to rescue the Left (who are terminally boring) by injecting fresh and radical thinking into stale policy debates. And his ideas certainly are radical. Utopia for Realists unapologetically advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the abolition on migration controls, and a 15 hour work week. With these three ideas, Bregman sets out to do two things. First, to expand our horizons and teach the Left how to think big again. And second, to demonstrate that all three policies are actually less utopian, and more plausible and beneficial, than most of us think. To do this, Bregman takes us through a lightning, though well-referenced, argument for all three proposals, and he certainly manages to persuade of their plausibility.

The whirlwind pace, though, as well as the book’s tendency to rely on sweeping generalisations, do at times make it feel somewhat like a TED Talk or Buzzfeed listicle in book form: “Three Easy Steps to Revolutionise Your Society”. On closer inspection, the eloquence and academic rigour with which Bregman puts forward his proposals don’t fully manage to obscure some glaring gaps in his analysis. Of these, the one that will confront the reader most prominently is the question why, if these proposals are both just and efficient, we are nowhere near adopting them. If, as Bregman contends, his ideas make for better societies for everyone, then what is holding us back?

Bregman’s explanation for this is rooted in an idealist analysis of how society works, which is rather ironic given the title of the book. According to Bregman, these policies have not been adopted because they haven’t won the argument in ‘the marketplace of ideas’. This argument shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Bregman ends the book with a full chapter dedicated to the power of ideas as a motive force for change. The purpose of the book, then, is to advance the argument for these policies as a way of getting them adopted.

This belief in the power of ideas is mirrored by a near aversion to contemplate other forms of power, in particular political or class power. Utopia for Realists bases its arguments on what is best for the common good of society, but in doing so fails to consider what interests would be negatively impacted by its ideas, and would hence oppose them. This analytical limitation leads the book into bizarre and naïve conclusions, which become increasingly frustrating as it progresses. Despite Bregman frequently concluding that it is capitalist structures (e.g. the determination of wages by the market) that result in undesirable social outcomes, he is evidently unwilling to diagnose capitalism itself as the force opposing his ideas for the good society. This leaves him with the common conceit that what we have is a form of ‘bad capitalism’, and that if we could only replace it with ‘capitalism with a human face’ through some palatable policies, the outcome would be better for everyone. Capitalists themselves included.

This disinclination to see the inherent dynamics of capitalism itself as a driving force for situation we find ourselves in can clearly be seen from, among many examples, the way Bregman explains US President Nixon’s failure to implement UBI. As Utopia for Realists would have it, Nixon was misinformed by an incorrect understanding of the Speenhamland system (an early British welfare programme). Bregman responds with an argument for why the story about Speenhamland was wrong, and why UBI actually does work. What he doesn’t do is interrogate why one of Nixon’s advisors would go through the trouble of digging out a study of an esoteric British welfare programme to torpedo UBI, and what interest they might serve in doing so.

This is a blindspot that Utopia for Realists finds itself in time and again. The book references David Graeber’s critique of ‘bullshit jobs’ to argue that waste collectors have greater social value than bankers, but doesn’t question why bankers get paid more regardless. It rails against means-tested welfare, without analysing how it functions as a means of social discipline. When discussing the education system, the book simply declares that ‘we’ rather than ‘the market’ can dictate what worthwhile education is, without considering whether ‘the market’ isn’t the reward system that ‘we’ use to do just that. It is almost as if Bregman has taken Graeber’s injunction that it is us humans who ultimately shape reality to mean that we can simply negate structural forces like markets through sheer force of will, rather than through collective work to create something better.

That neither force of will nor good ideas are sufficient has been amply demonstrated by the 10 years since the book was first published. In that time we have seen the rise and fall of left wing movements both the UK and the US that share a programmatic similarity with the prescriptions in Utopia for Realists. Yet while the ambitions of the Sanders and Corbyn programmes were if anything much less radical (because moderated by the need to be ‘electable’), the response was not a spirited debate about policy, but a ‘nuke it from orbit’ approach that was shared by everyone from the Right to the liberal centre-left, with the nadir in the UK probably being a BBC Presenter asking whether Corbynistas would nationalise sausages. It is telling that this one period when the Left wasn’t ‘dull as a doorknob’ and managed to generate popular excitement, Bregman couldn’t bring himself to endorsing it. One wonders what he thinks now that normality has been restored with Biden and Starmer.

Even before these defeats, the contention that society is shaped through a fair battle of ideas was naïve at best, and disingenuous at worst. The use of disinformation (Big Tobacco, climate denialism, ‘think tanks’) has been understood for decades, and where that fails there is always simple repression (e.g. the gagging and anti-union laws in the UK). Power to turn ideas into reality doesn’t only come from the barrel of a gun, but it has to come from somewhere.

Where Utopia for Realists succeeds is in expanding the discursive space around matters of working hours, free movement and a fundamental right to dignity. And even there, the book is hardly as original as it presents itself to be, it’s claim to novelty being more indicative of a lack of engagement with anyone to the left of Ed Miliband. Bregman may be a ‘phenomenon’ (according to the dust jacket), but his failure to acknowledge, let alone contend with, the structural forces arrayed against his proposals might make this book salonfähig in the liberal talking circuit, but those who want to understand how to realise utopia are better off looking elsewhere.

#books #nonfiction #politics

#books #nonfiction #history

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.

Late Victorian Holocausts centres on a series of famines across the globe that occurred between roughly 1876 and 1902, with many different parts of the world affected simultaneously. One strand of Davis’s book is to identify the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as the climatological driver of crop failures in areas as far apart as Brazil and China. Yet the main strength of Late Victorian Holocausts is Davis’s investigation of how these naturally occurring phenomena were catastrophically exacerbated by the forcible integration of countries into the world capitalist system, either directly as colonies like India, or otherwise through dependency on credit or as the result of war, as was the case with Brazil and China.

After all, Davis points out, the ENSO has been a natural phenomenon for centuries, yet the famines of the late 19th century were of a scale hitherto unimaginable. Davis persuasively argues that, rather than bringing benefits to these countries, integration into the capitalist system fatally weakened their resilience to droughts and other natural disasters. Subsistence farming gave way to cash cropping, with peasant farmers left destitute and without locally grown produce when global prices collapsed. Mechanisms of resilience, such as China’s ‘eternal granaries’ or arrangements of mutual aid in India, were broken down because the market deemed them ‘inefficient’. And even where food was produced locally, integration into the world market meant starving communities saw their produce exported overseas where it could gain a higher price. Nor was this just the unfortunate effect of impersonal environmental and economic factors. Late Victorian Holocausts shows that at every turn, rigid pro-market ideology defeated even the most lacklustre compassion. Especially in India, British colonial administrators deployed openly Malthusian policies, forced marching thousands of starving peasants into work camps, where they had to ‘earn’ rations that were smaller than those provided in Nazi extermination camps.

The descriptions of the impact of famine and imperial policies are where Davis’s brilliance comes through with cold fury, but they are also the ones I most struggled to read. I often found myself having to put the book down for a while simply to process the staggering scale of human suffering inflicted on the world’s poor and marginalised. Late Victorian Holocaust relentlessly documents the death tolls resulting from the famines: regions where 95% of the population starve, canyons filled with skeletons, casualty numbers going up to the tens of millions. It is statistics returned as tragedy with a vengeance.

Yet Late Victorian Holocausts is not simply a polemic. If anything, it is rather academic for a work of ‘popular’ non-fiction. Descriptions of emaciated children sometimes sit incongruently next to tabulations of rice production in northern Chinese provinces. Overleaf from the ideological insanity of 19th century economic liberalism we find a detailed history of ENSO events. The sheer amount of detail can make the book somewhat inaccessible at times, and I was rather surprised there wasn’t more of a conclusion to tie it all together at the end. Instead the book finishes in the way it makes most of its argument: with three in-depth chapters on the long term impacts on India, China and Brazil. Yet while the argument comes through well in the detail, I did think this rather left it to the reader to fully connect the four distinct parts of the book.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend Late Victorian Holocausts to anyone interested in world history, or who wants to understand why the world now looks the way it does. I cannot pretend it was a pleasant read. The book has no patience for vague notions that ‘colonialism was bad’, and mercilessly confronts you with the actual brutality of it. It most certainly obliterates any notion that peripheral nations somehow benefitted from benevolent integration into the world capitalist system: the railroads were never there to bring civilisation, but to carry away the grain. Hence it makes for essential reading in our times of culture war where the Right vocally claims that ‘Empire was good, actually’. The millions upon millions of starved Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others would surely argue otherwise, had they actually lived to tell the tale.