You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

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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Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?

Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.

The Internet Con starts with the insight that tech companies, like all companies, are not simply commercial entities providing goods and services, but systems for extracting wealth and funneling this to the ultra-rich. Congruent with Stafford Beer’s dictum that the purpose of the system is what it does, rather than what it claims to do, Doctorow’s analysis understands that tech company behaviour isn’t governed by something unique about the nature of computers, but by the same demand to maximise shareholder value and maintain power as any other large corporation. The Internet Con convincingly shows how tech’s real power does not derive from something intrinsic in network technology, but from a political economy that fails to prevent the emergence of monopolies across society at large.

One thing The Internet Con excels at is demystifying the discourse around tech, which, analogous to Marx’s observation about vulgar bourgeois economics, serves to obscure its actual relations and operations. We may use networked technology every day, but our understanding of how it works is often about as deep as a touchscreen. This lack of knowledge gives tech companies tremendous power to set the boundaries of the digital Overton Window and, parallel to bourgeois economists’ invocation of ‘the market’, allows them to claim that ‘the cloud’ or ‘privacy’ or ‘pseudoscientific technobabble’ mean that we cannot have nice things, such as interoperability, control or even just an internet that works for us. (For a discussion of how Big Tech’s worldview became hegemonic, see Hegemony Now!)

What is, however, unique about computers is their potential for interoperability: the ability of one system or component to interact with another. Interoperability is core to Doctorow’s argument, and its denial the source of his fury. Because while tech companies are not exceptional, computer technology itself is. Unlike other systems (cars, bookstores, sheep), computers are intrinsically interoperable because any computer can, theoretically, execute any program. That means that anyone with sufficient skill could, for example, write a program that gives you ad-free access to Facebook or allows you to send messages from Signal to Telegram.

The absence of such programs has nothing to do with tech, and everything with tech companies weaponising copyright law to dampen the natural tendency towards interoperability of computers and networked systems, lest it interfere with their ability to extract enormous rents. Walled gardens do not emerge spontaneously due to some natural ‘network effects’. They are built, and scrupulously policed. In this Big Tech is aided and abetted by a US government that forced these copyright enclosures on the rest of us by threatening tariffs, adverse trade terms or withdrawal of aid. This tremendous power extended through digital copyright is so appealing that other sectors of the economy have followed suit. Cars, fridges, printers, watches, TVs, any and all ‘smart’ devices are now infested with bits of hard-, firm- and software that prevent their owners from exercising full control over them. It is not an argument that The Internet Con explores in detail, but its evident that the internet increasingly doesn’t function to let us reach out into the world, but for companies to remotely project their control into our daily lives.

What, then, is to be done? The Internet Con offers several remedies, most of which centre on removing the legal barricades erected against interoperability. As the state giveth, so the state can taketh away. This part of The Internet Con is weaker than Doctorow’s searing and insightful analysis, because it is not clear why a state would try to upend Big Tech’s protections. It may be abundantly clear that the status quo doesn’t work for consumers and even smaller companies, but states have either decided that it works for some of their tech companies, or they don’t want to risk retaliation from the United States. In a way I am persuaded by Doctorow’s argument that winning the fight against Big Tech is a necessary if not sufficient condition to win the other great battles of our time, but it does seem that to win this battle, we first have to exorcise decades of neoliberal capture of the state and replace it with popular democratic control. It is not fair to lay this critique solely at Doctorow’s door, but it does worry me when considering the feasibility of his remedies. Though it is clear from his more recent writing that he perceives an opportunity in the present conjuncture, where Trump is rapidly eroding any reason for other states to collaborate with the United States.

The state-oriented nature of Doctorow’s proposals is also understandable when considering his view that individual action is insufficient to curtail the dominance of Big Tech. The structural advantages they have accumulated are too great for that. Which is not to say that individual choices do not matter, and we would be remiss to waste what power we do have. There is a reason why I am writing this blog on an obscure platform that avoids social media integration and trackers, and promote it only on Mastodon. Every user who leaves Facebook for Mastodon, Google for Kagi, or Microsoft for Linux or LibreOffice diverts a tiny amount of power from Big Tech to organisations that do support an open, democratic and people-centric internet.

If the choice for the 20th century was socialism or barbarism, the choice for the 21st is solarpunk or cyberpunk. In Doctorow, the dream of an internet that fosters community, creativity, solidarity and democracy has one of its staunchest paladins. The Internet Con is a call to arms that everyone who desires a harmonious ecology of technology, humanity and nature should heed. So get your grandmother off Facebook, Occupy the Internet, and subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s newsletter.

Notes & Suggestions

• Numerous organisations and individuals are engaged in what Doctorow calls ‘the war on general purpose computing’. You can check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation or a similar organisation specific to your country, as well as other creators such as Paris Marx with their podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.
• The question over who controls technology, and what we get to use it for, is also central to Pantheon and its exploration of a future where minds can be uploaded to the cloud.
• The discussion on the use of standards to consolidate certain system configurations and prevent others from emerging reminded me of the concept of the ‘Technical Code’ as proposed by Andrew Feenberg in his book Transforming Technology. The General Intellect Unit podcast has an in-depth three part discussion on the Technical Code as a means of understanding how societal use of technology is structured and codified.
• Even though The Internet Con uses the feudal system as a metaphor for Big Tech’s walled gardens, my sense is that Doctorow doesn’t subscribe to a recent current of Left analysis that contends we have moved beyond capitalism and into a new epoch of ‘technofeudalism’. This is because technofeudalism seems predicated on the premise that the tendency to hyperconcentrated platforms is essential to networked technology, whereas Doctorow clearly holds the opposite view, and sees walled gardens as a consequence of copyright restrictions. For an argument in favour of the technofeudalist analysis, there is Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism. For an argument against, the Culture, Power, Politics podcast by Jeremy Gilbert has a two-part discussion.

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If unions had a collective mythos, then the union-buster would be its demon. Called in by employers to thwart unionisation drives, the union-buster sows fear and discord wherever they tread, skirting and sometimes crossing the bounds of legality. All is fair in love and class war, after all.

In accordance with Sun Tzu’s dictum in The Art of War that warfare is the Tao of deception, union-busters operate, if not in secret, then at least under the cloak of deception and misdirection. Their art consists of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another. Countless organisers have seen their campaigns end in defeat without being fully aware of the forces arrayed against them. However, some of these covert tactics have been illuminated by repentent deserters. One such convert is Martin J. Levitt, a former union-buster from the United States who had his Damascene Moment and revealed the union-buster’s arsenal of deceit and discord in his Confessions of a Union Buster.

I first came across a reference to Levitt’s book in the union organising manuals of veteran activist Jane McAlevey. McAlevey devoted much space in her own writing on preparing union organisers for the inevitable counteroffensives employers unleash on their workers if the latter seek to build a union, with Levitt’s Confessions being a key source. Levitt’s memoirs are indeed insightful, but what I had not expected was the extent to which they are also, and possibly primarily, indeed a confessional.

Central to Confessions of a Union Buster is an equivalence between the immorality of union-busting and the moral collapse of the union-buster’s themselves. The pain inflicted on hundreds of workers deprived of higher wages, better working conditions, and dignity, is mirrored in the pain Levitt inflicts on himself and his marriage through alcoholism and familial neglect. Levitt portrays himself as a Faustian figure, having made a bargain for fame and fortune, he is unable to extricate himself from the union-busting business even as he senses that it is slowly destroying him, until his path culminates in rehab, the dissolution of his marriage, and personal bankruptcy.

There is something quite American about this narrative, and while I have no reason to doubt Levitt’s sincerity – though there are evidently some who do – it fails to convince on multiple counts. For one, it is clearly not the case that undertaking morally objectionable work unfailingly rebounds on people personally. For all Levitt’s faults, there are plenty of people out there inflicting substantially more harm on their fellow human beings without experiencing a similar psychological implosion to Levitt. Reading his memoir, it is not the union-busting that drove him to alcoholism and destroyed his marriage, but rather a combination of unacknowledged trauma, failures to communicate and a lack of emotional regulation. In short, the dysfunctional gender roles prevailing in the US of the 1970s. Regardless of whatever else it may or may not be, Confessions is an excellent portrayal of the havoc caused by toxic masculinity.

Even if unethical actions did have personal consequences, the equivalence that Levitt seeks to draw smacks of the unreconstructed arrogance that derailed his life in the first place. Merely considering sheer numbers it is clear that the cumulative harm inflicted by Levitt on others far exceeds what he brought upon himself. Moreover, Levitt’s bankruptcy was at least preceded by a time of largesse and luxury. The same cannot be said for the workers whom he denied a $1 per hour pay rise.

None of this detracts from the value of the book in illuminating vividly the ugly business of union-busting. The procedure itself is straightforward enough, and is contained in a small appendix at the end of the book. The power of Confessions is Levitt’s detailed evocative descriptions of the psychological terror he unleashes on the unsuspecting workers who had the temerity to try and improve their lot. ‘Show, don’t tell’ fully applies here. It is one thing to understand theoretically that turning supervisors against their workers is an effective strategy. It is another thing altogether to read the harrowing real-life accounts of humans being pummeled into emotional submission before being used as tools against their fellow workers in a psychological war of attrition that can last for months. If nothing else, the insight Levitt gives into the ugly reality of class war should act as a powerful corrective to a naive idealism that believes that all we need to do is win in the marketplace of ideas.

To spare readers the need to read Levitt’s book, the method boils down to these core elements:

1. Recruit all supervisory and middle-management staff as shock troops to be deployed against the workforce, either willingly or unwillingly.

2. Use your shock troops to create a hostile environment in the entire workplace.

3. Remind workers that their pain only started when the union arrived on the scene, and that the easiest way to make it stop is to get rid of the union.

4. Exploit any legal avenue or loophole to your full advantage and refuse to engage in good faith at all times.

5. Gerrymander your bargaining unit, and get rid of any pro-union workers where possible.

6. If you lose and the union wins recognition, drag out the contract negotiations until you can start again at step 1.

Simple, brutal, and clearly effective. Levitt’s heyday may have been fifty years ago, but we see his tactics at work to this day, with employers firing union organisers, indoctrinating workers through constant captive audience propaganda sessions, and inflating the bargaining unit by importing unorganised or agency workers. In that sense, Confessions has lost none of its relevance.

Does that make Confessions the essential activist resource the cover suggests? Probably not. The specificity of the time and place for which it was written, the absolutely atrocious editing, and its primary purpose as a plea for forgiveness, negate Confessions potential as a universal organising manual. Its lessons have been well absorbed and expounded more effectively elsewhere, including in McAlevey’s works. However, as an insight into the practical psychology of a union-busting campaign Confessions still has value, and it works brilliantly as an educational tool to help workers understand their enemy.

We don’t know whether any contemporary union-busters wrestle with the same demons as Levitt. In Confessions he suggests some do. Our lived reality suggests many probably don’t. In a way, it is immaterial. Contrary to Levitt’s implied premise, there is no divine justice we can rely on to rid us of our adversaries. There is only the justice we fight for ourselves. Together. One workplace after another.

Notes & Suggestions

• If you are a worker and you are not yet in a union, you should be. If you are in the UK, the TUC website can help you find an appropriate TUC-affiliated union for your sector. Unaffiliated unions, such as the IWGB, might also be good fits for you. For readers in the United States the AFL-CIO offers resources on how to get started.
• Jane McAlevey sadly passed away recently at too young an age, and with much still left to give. I have no doubt that like Joe Hill, she would exhort us not to mourn, but to organise. All her books remain excellent resources for union organisers, but I would recommend No Shortcuts as a starting point.

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Where have all the comrades gone? Once a common term of address for those engaged in joint struggle for a better world, decades of defeat, betrayal and marginalisation leave it barely used except ironically. In Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging, Jodi Dean seeks to recover the term by arguing it defines a unique and necessary relationship for common struggle. As a union organiser, I was very sympathetic to this endeavour. Effective collective organising undeniably demands a strong level of commitment and discipline that cannot be attained through allyship or arise spontaneously. As Rodrigo Nunes and Vincent Bevins convincingly argued in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal and If We Burn respectively, neither disorganised horizontalism nor the post-capitalist networked citizen can amass the power we need for the struggles we face. Unfortunately Dean’s argument doesn’t succeed in revitalising the comrade for the 21st century, attempting to resurrect the ideal comrade from the 19th century instead. The effort is commendable, but unconvincing. The old order has gone, and we cannot simply will it back into existence.

Comrade begins with a useful and necessary distinction between allies and comrades. Allies, as Dean points out in the first chapter, are not engaged in our fight, but only asked to offer assistance. They may share our goals, but they cannot share the struggle, because its contours are delimited by one’s identity. Comrades, on the other hand, contribute to a common struggle regardless of their identity. Comrade is a reciprocal relationship based on a recognition of a common aim and common enemy.

In the same chapter Dean also contrasts comrades with systems, despite these being different categories. Dean considers a systemic view to be disempowering due to its scale, but that is because she only picks systems at vast spatial or temporal scales. It is not clear if she is ignorant or disingenuous, given a system can refer to any set of related entities that together produce some effect on the world. Yes ‘climate change’ is a system and it is very big, but smaller systems are available: ‘the economy, ‘the party’ or even an amoeba. It felt odd to me that Dean would dismiss an effective analytical tool for understanding the world and finding ways to change it, but the disinterest in understanding the world persists as an unfortunate theme for the remainder of the essay.

Chapter Two draws on examples from the early days of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Soviet Union to preempt the criticism that comrades can only be white, male and stale, but it is questionable if this is the right target. The more obvious attack to anticipate is that the cloak of comradeship has historically been used to cover enduring prejudice against female or black comrades. In particular because, as Jo Freeman argues in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, putative equality can make actual inequality much harder to challenge. The female comrade isn’t absent from our cultural imagination, but she was still expected to cook dinner, clean the house and raise the kids after the agitating was done. Invoking Alexandra Kollontai doesn’t prove women were equal comrades any more than Barack Obama’s presidency proves the US is no longer racist. A more effective argument could have mirrored Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism, which demonstrates that while communist regimes were unable to fully eradicate patriarchal oppression they nonetheless advanced women’s liberation much further than their capitalist counterparts, but that is not the road that Comrade takes.

Chapters Three and Four define the boundaries of comradeship by including those who are faithful to a common truth and have the discipline to fight for it. Immediately this raises the question of who defines this Truth, and Dean does not have a satisfactory answer but implicitly falls back on the traditional communist position that it is the Party. This leads us back to the dangerously tautologous logic that the party gets to define truth because it represents the workers, and we know the party represents the workers because it articulates their truth. Dean herself includes various examples where parties schismed, dwindled or descended into internecine warfare, but does not use these as a prompt to explore how a party could be organised so that it can attain a shared truth without its uniformity risking disintegration, irrelevance or internal violence. If the objective of the essay is to revive a viable organisational form, then this is a fatal omission.

The same tautological flaw also affects Dean’s comrades directly. Comrades are comrades because they execute the party’s directives with enthusiasm, courage and joy, and they have enthusiasm, courage and joy because they are comrades. Comrades are not only expected to do the work, but in a rather unpleasant similarity with your average Pret-a-Manger worker, they must enjoy it. I don’t dispute that working together for a common goal can enable people to do great things, but that is not the same as assuming that all obstacles can be overcome simply by sheer force of Stakhanovite will. Again, Dean is not interested in questions of organisation. Maybe that is expecting too much from the essay, but without attending to it, the argument comes down to assuming that if people will something hard enough, they can achieve it.

If moving mountains by force of will wasn’t enough, Dean also asks her comrades to subsume their identity into the generic nature of the comrade. Comrades are not only functionally, but also personally interchangeable. Again, I don’t dispute that surrendering a degree of individuality to be part of a common effort cannot be rewarding and joyous. But if comradeship requires a total renunciation of who we are, then why would anyone want to be a comrade? In Taoist terms, Dean’s comrade is all yang and no yin: all force and will, no patience or introspection. There is no balance.

We have seen where this leads. Dean’s comrades populate the pages of Hannah Proctor’s Burnout. Comrades who fell out and apart because they couldn’t will the world they wanted into being, or themselves into the transformed people they desired. The road to the Workers Paradise is paved with the remains of comrades who willed themselves to destruction, and what exactly has it given us?

I expect that Dean would counter that my position is the result of cowardice, of an unwillingness to do what is necessary to be a comrade, a bourgeois inability to surrender my individuality. And she may well be right, but I would argue that doesn’t actually matter. Our present moment demands a comradeship that can accommodate both collectivity and individuality, discipline and diversity, yang and yin. Time has moved on. New Soviet (Wo)Man left on the dustheap of history. A historical materialist cannot ignore the hard lessons of the 20th century or fail to acknowledge our world differs from that of our ancestors, only to fall back on an idealist faith in the power of voluntarism. Comrade is a missed opportunity to reinvigorate an essential relationship for the 21st century. The past can help us chart our course, but we cannot return there. We must move forward, as comrades, together.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rodrigo Nunes’ Nether Vertical nor Horizontal is a much more nuanced and constructive exploration of organisational forms, and a genuine attempt to salvage what we can from our past failed efforts to help us move forward.
• Hannah Proctor’s Burnout carefully and compassionately assays what happens to communities who strain themselves beyond endurance in an attempt to bring a new world into being, and suggests what we may do to care for ourselves and each other while we still live and struggle in our broken world.

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After discussing Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in my last post, it felt appropriate to follow it up with a seminal text by one of the other key representatives of the early 21st Left: David Graeber. Graeber was strongly involved with the Occupy Movement and is credited with coining its famous “we are the 99%” slogan. An anthropologist by training, Graeber, like Fisher, applied his critical eye to a whole range of social phenomena, including debt, bureaucracy and social resistance. Sadly, also like Fisher, Graeber died too young, succumbing to acute necrotic pancreatitis in 2020.

Where Fisher gave us the insight that it remains easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, one of Graeber’s enduring concepts is that of ‘bullshit jobs’. Bullshit jobs made their debut in a short essay in STRIKE! Magazine in 2013, which remarkably is still online. The essay generated a flurry of interest, including several surveys commissioned by pollsters like YouGov, which led Graeber to expand it into a full sized book. Unfortunately, what makes for a strong provocative essay does not necessarily translate into convincing social analysis. I had a vague recollection of Graeber’s argument from having read the essay years ago, and as with Fisher’s Capitalist Realism remember the sense of it expressing a truth that we all feel but can find hard to express. I was intrigued how Graeber had developed the original argument of the essay into a full length book, so decided to give the audiobook a listen. This was, sadly, a disappointment. The book is a padded out version of the essay, with the padding reinforcing its weaknesses and diminishing its strengths.

Bullshit Jobs starts by recalling the original essay and sets out how the events that followed led to the publication of the book. Graeber informs us that the polls conducted after his essay suggested up to 40% of workers in some Western countries considered themselves to be in a bullshit job. To interrogate these findings, Graeber invited correspondence with these workers, creating a body of case studies for anthropological analysis. The findings are undeniably interesting and provocative, but a couple of unscientific polls and self-selected case studies are not a very solid foundation to base a totalising social theory on.

The case studies themselves are of variable persuasiveness. Bullshit Jobs offers them up as anecdotes supporting the particular argument it is making at a given point, but this obviously cannot avoid the suspicion that the examples are cherry picked. And while some of the case studies clearly describe jobs without any redeeming qualities, others contain complaints that rather indicate a lack of experience or insight. For example, there is the worker who objects to participating in a prioritisation workshop using the rather common MoSCoW method. Another worker objects to having to actually write reports of their employees’ performance, and a third complains about an excess of pointless planning surveys on environmental impacts involved with infrastructure projects. Any of these activities can be pointless of course, but that does not mean they are intrinsically so. The key here is context, which we don’t get, and so the reader can be forgiven for thinking that Graeber objects to prioritisation, record keeping and not killing bats. Many examples seem to come from people who have recently entered the workforce, and it is reasonable to ask whether their assessment is born of a full grasp of their function in their organisation, or of a lack of familiarity with their workplace. Graeber counters this with the argument that since no objective measure of the utility of a job exists, it is justified to take a worker’s self-assessment as measure. Maybe, and I can see how this fits with his anthropological background. But some insights require knowledge, experience or both, which can only be gained over time. I say this as someone who has, with time, begrudgingly come to respect a risk register.

The sparseness of the evidence is compounded by a lack of methodological precision that borders on intellectual dishonesty.  In Chapter 2, Graeber introduces a schema of five different types of bullshit jobs (flunkies, goons, box tickers, duct tapers and task managers) based on what ostensible function they perform. But this typology obscures a more fundamental difference, which is whether a job is a bullshit job because the worker is not doing work at all, is doing work that is objectively pointless, or is doing work that is socially harmful. While Bullshit Jobs acknowledges that these are different, its argument repeatedly treats them as equivalent, or relies on a shift between the particular and the universal. Specific examples are brought to bear to make a point or rebuttal, but Bullshit Jobs then proceeds as if either all bullshit jobs, or large subsets of them, share the features of the particular examples cited. For example, Bullshit Jobs at different points provides examples both of workers with nothing to do and workers who are very busy being socially harmful, but in both cases refers back to the same 40% statistic to generalise these observations, even though they cannot both apply to the same sets of workers. This assumed equivalence is hence merely assumed, never proven and often implausible.

This analytical imprecision forces Graeber towards an almost conspiratorial theory to explain why bullshit jobs exist, because his framework cannot allow ‘because it makes sense for organisation X to create said job’ as an answer. Instead, Graeber suggests bullshit jobs were invented to prevent the masses from having too much spare time on their hands, which they might use to come up with ‘unhelpful’ political demands (the Trilateral Commission is namechecked in the book). Yet clearly, it makes sense for organisations to employ tax lawyers to reduce their tax bill, or for governments who want to reduce the welfare bill to employ people to hamper access to social security. The fact that Graeber is politically opposed to these practices does not mean that they are not rational at a more systemic level of analysis.

And that, ultimately, is the fundamental double flaw of the whole book. ‘Bullshit jobs’ makes a great provocation, but as an analytical concept it containers too many different types of work together and remains stuck at the individual job as the level of analysis. This makes it blind to more systemic explanations, and Graeber is not able to ascend from bullshit jobs to higher levels of abstraction in the way that for example Marx manages dialectically with the commodity form in Capital. Instead, the book often reads as a screed against all the things Graeber dislikes (university administrators, lawyers, the rich, etc.) with the argument reverse-engineered to support the desired outcome.

All of this is a shame, because something of that kernel of truth of the original essay remains. It is a good question why so many people are engaged in jobs they don’t like and that don’t seem to have any socially useful output. And Bullshit Jobs still serves as an entry point to other concepts and theories that have much greater systemic explanatory power, such as alienation, hegemony, social value, etc. The provocation remains productive in making us think, but ironically, would have worked better if less work had been spent on it.

Notes & Suggestions

• The original Bullshit Jobs essay remains a very worthwhile read, and can be found here.
• A much more robust study of the data on bullshit jobs finds that while many of the harms Graeber identifies are real, the incidence of bullshit jobs is likely overstated. It also suggests that alienation is maybe a better lens to understand this phenomenon. It is available here.
• Similar to Bullshit Jobs, Hegemony Now! explores how ‘common sense’ ideas about for example the value of work become established, although to my mind Hegemony Now! does this more persuasively than Bullshit Jobs. I wrote about Hegemony Now! in a previous blog.
• If you are in any kind of job, bullshit or no, you should join a union (if you are not in a union already). Readers in the UK can look up unions relevant to their sector via the Trades Union Congress union finder, though it only returns unions affiliated to the TUC, and other worthwhile UK unions also exist. And if you do find yourself with lots of spare time because your job is mostly bullshit, consider using that time to organise your workplace.

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Every now and then a text is published that explosively captures its zeitgeist. For early 21st century Britain (and the West beyond), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative is such a text. The title of its first chapter (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”) has become and remains a truism on the Left. The first part of the book’s title has become the descriptive term for the pervasive sense that there is, indeed, no alternative. That we are forever stuck in an Eternal Present of a crumbling public realm, increasing precarity and environmental disintegration, all the while being told by our capitalist overlords that this really is the best of all possible worlds.

Capitalist Realism came out in 2009, resonating with the politics that emerged from the Great Financial Crash: Occupy, student protests in the UK and elsewhere, the abortive resistance to austerity, the failed revolutions of the Arab Spring. If anything, events since then reinforce the observation that resistance is indeed futile. Reading Capitalist Realism for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how much it is of its time yet remains relevant today.

At only 81 pages, Capitalist Realism does not pretend to be an all-encompassing analysis or programmatic manifesto. It is an attempt at sense-making, at articulating something that many of us experience but are unable to express. It is this ability to give voice to the psychological impact of existing within late-stage capitalism, weaving together observations on culture, academia, precarity and bureaucracy, that give Capitalist Realism its enduring significance. There is something undeniably true in Fisher’s examples, and while nobody will identify with all of them, Fisher convincingly demonstrates how they all trace back to the way our lives are structured under Actually Existing Capitalism.

Fisher’s examples are very much inflected by his own experience as a precariously employed academic and cultural critic, but are broadly recognisable nonetheless. There is the increasing bureaucratisation of targets and form-filling, familiar to anyone who has been to hospital, only to receive a text message afterwards asking if they would recommend the experience to friends and family. There is the absence of cultural innovation and counter-culture, which feels even truer now we have been forced to watch the same three superhero movies for over a decade. There is the growing sense of despair, expressing itself as a mental health crisis in particular among the young. And above all, there is the crushing sense of powerlessness that comes from being unable to hold anyone accountable for what is happening to us. From being entangled in a web of overlapping public and private institutions that are all somehow ‘involved’ but never actually responsible. In 2009, it was the aftermath of the financial crisis that generated the feeling of collective impotence. In 2025, it is the long shadow of Grenfell, the toeslagenaffaire or the literal enshittification of the UK’s waterways.

In a way, nothing that Capitalist Realism tells us is new, and that is sort of the point. The enduring value of the book lies in three ways in which it helps us change our relationship to the cultural and political stasis in which we appear to be inextricably trapped.

First, it is just good to know that we are not alone in how we feel. Fisher accurately diagnoses how pathological individualism and social atomisation leave us feeling isolated, frustrated and impotent. Capitalist Realism functions as virtual consciousness raising or group therapy, showing us that we are not alone in how we feel. This directly leads to its second merit, which is to juxtapose our individual powerlessness with the power of collective action. Not that Capitalist Realism is an organising manual, but it does posit a revitalised left-wing project centred on both collective action and an active/creative collective culture as a possible way out of the trap of capitalist realist inertia, which at least suggests a course of action to the reader.

Capitalist Realism’s real power however is in how it gives name to the source of our existential dread and cultural miasma. It is a core principle of any magic that only when we know the true name of something can we hope to exert power over or vanquish it. Fisher’s enduring legacy is that he enabled us to express what afflicts us, as a first step towards overcoming it. It is why Capitalist Realism is as relevant today as when it was written, possibly even more so.

Similar to Burnout – How to be well in a sick world, or Bullshit Jobs – A Theory, Capitalist Realism doesn’t give us all the answers. But it does help us ask some of the right questions, and its dizzying array of cultural references, relatable personal insights and political theories give ample leads for an engaged reader to pursue further. For while Fisher is careful not to suggest that we can simply will our circumstances away, he is equally clear that with commitment to a collective, active, creative effort, we have a chance to reclaim our future from capitalist realism’s Eternal Present.

Notes & Suggestions

• Mark Fisher’s enduring influence can be seen in Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William’s Hegemony Now!, as well as the #ACFM podcast hosted by Novara Media, of which Jeremy Gilbert is also a part.
• The inability of some science fiction to move beyond the present and imagine a different future forms a core part of my critique of Mass Effect and Oryx & Crake.
• Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void contains a stronger critque of how neoliberalism has hollowed out our politics, so that Bad Things keep happening, yet nobody can ever be held accountable for them.
• An essential step towards liberating us from the Curse of the Eternal Present is to join a union (if you are not in a union already). Readers in the UK can look up unions relevant to their sector via the Trades Union Congress union finder, though it only returns unions affiliated to the TUC, and other worthwhile UK unions also exist.

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“Where is the revolution?” With rising inequality, impending ecological breakdown, ongoing genocide – many of us feel that ‘something should be done’,. Then we look around and see everyone else turning up at work, doing the dishes or just trying to get through the day. And so we, too, put the day’s misery out of mind and get on with it. The rent must, after all, be paid.

Hegemony Now! – How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams interrogates why this happens. Why, if so many of us so acutely feel the injustices of our present moment, does nothing ever seem to change? Gilbert and Williams seek the answer in an update of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci introduced the term during the days of Mussolini’s fascism to describe the ability of one group in society to exercise control over everyone else. Control here doesn’t need to mean men with guns, nor does it mean total control of the North Korean variety. Instead, hegemony describes a state where a dominant group, or bloc of groups, manages to get just enough of the rest of us to do as they wish to keep themselves in power, using a variety of means, most of them not directly violent.

Mussolini’s Italy lies almost a hundred years behind us, and a lot has changed since then (though depressingly, a lot has also stayed the same). Hegemony Now! benefits from integrating hegemony 1.0 with extensive developments in critical and philosophical thinking. This is necessary not only to account for social, economic, political and technological changes, but also to deal with the displacement of the Working Class as the teleological Subject of History, endowed with its necessary world historic mission to overthrow capitalism.

Instead, Hegemony Now! needs to start over with a working class that is complex and multifaceted, and to varying degrees complicit in the maintenance of the capitalist system that exploits it. This in itself is an improvement, because it forces us to approach the working class as it actually is, rather than how we would like it to be, and avoids us projecting a uniform ‘class interest’ onto it which it is the duty of some intellectual vanguard to explain. A complex and multifaceted subject requires a complex and multifaceted theory. Hegemony Now! identifies a range of factors that incentivise alignment of the working class with the currently dominant social bloc – which Gilbert and Williams identify as an unholy alliance between finance capital and Big Tech.

First, Hegemony Now! introduces a distinction between passive and active consent, noting that it isn’t necessary for workers to believe in all the dogmas of the dominant bloc, provided that their disagreement is impotent. Most people may disagree with the increased use of private sector providers in the NHS, for example, but there is no obvious way to express that disagreement in a way that could plausibly make a difference.

This links to Hegemony Now!’s second valuable perspective, which is what I would term ‘horizons of viability’ (although the authors don’t use that term). Gilbert and Williams propose that when any class, social bloc or individual expresses demands, these are shaped not only by their interests, but also by what they perceive to be achievable. In other words, there has to be the belief that there is a viable pathway from where we are now, to where we want to go. Hegemony Now!’s contention is that it is that horizon that is constantly subject to political contest, and is always being diminished by the dominant bloc. Workers may well want higher wages, but if they do not believe that this can be achieved through democratic control of their workplaces, they may settle for something less ambitious, such as trade union bargaining, or supporting efforts to make their firm more ‘competitive’, or restricting immigration. Hegemony Now!’s vital contribution here is that it is not the case that workers are deceived by some ‘false consciousness’ about what their interests are, but that the dominant bloc can contain these interests by only allowing demands that do not disrupt the current system.

For many labour organisers, campaigners or activists this sound fairly obvious. Anyone who has spent any time organising workers knows that their identities, hopes, dreams and actions are multifarious and complex, and that their demands are constrained by what they perceive to be possible. Much organising time is not spent on convincing workers of what they want, but of the fact that what they want can be attainable. Nonetheless, Hegemony Now! offers a helpful toolkit to inform and direct organising work, and conceptualise the difficulties it often faces.

In some chapters however, the theoretical arguments do feel quite removed from the praxis of activists. An entire chapter of the book is committed to demonstrating that workers, while not having immanent interests intrinsic to their class, still have interests beyond the demands they express at any given time. Any organiser will likely find themselves bemused by the amount of argument deployed to ‘prove’ something that to them will be a daily empirical reality. The chapter on interests was the starkest instance of this, but as a whole the book feels like it is written in two registers: one for lay activists, and one as part of an ongoing academic debate. Gilbert and Williams do attempt to provide context about this broader debate, but without being read up on its parameters, it remains difficult to follow. It doesn’t help here that while the book has ample footnotes, the references are all to entire works, rather than to locations with them. Certainly this showcases the authors’ erudition, but informing the reader that something can be found ‘somewhere’ in Capital is not exactly helpful.

In the conclusion of the book, Gilbert and Williams return to our opening question, expanding on the (And How We Win it Back) bit in the title. This section is shorter than I would have liked. The authors note the need to form alliances, but even a mere three years after publication, it looks less plausible that there is a strong ‘progressive faction’ within capital that can be peeled off using the Green New Deal as a vehicle to align interests. And even if that was possible, it is not clear if the working class would not simply be the subservient partner in such an alliance. Already, the specific recommendations in the book feel therefore dated.

Where its recommendations are less conjuncture specific Hegemony Now! is on stronger terrain: political education, consciousness raising, and building a counter-hegemonic infrastructure (e,g. in new media) are not shiny and new, but the authors are not wrong that the Left is currently neither good at nor sufficiently invested in them. Naturally, these things are easier said then done. Hegemony Now! provides a lot of theoretical backbone to help people undertake these activities, but falls short of being an effective organising manual for any of them. A whole sequel could, and should, be written to help a generation of activists and organisers disconnected from these traditions and practices to reinvent them for the 21st century. Still, with so many Left books limited to mere diagnosis, the fact that Hegemony Now! contains practical steps is commendable.

In the end, Hegemony Now! is a useful resource for activists who want to better understand how to build a counter-hegemonic force, but it is not for the faint of heart. Some of the theoretical digressions are difficult to navigate without knowing the coordinates of the debate to which they clearly contribute. The same applies to the language, although I appreciate the authors want to be precise and nuanced, and have added a helpful glossary. Throughout, Hegemony Now! speaks to two readerships, and it doesn’t address either as well as it would have done if it had focused on one or the other. But in the absence of ‘Political Education For Dummies’, we should be grateful that the authors chose to address a wider readership, and give us at least the starting point to build a Left counter-hegemonic project.

Further reading

• Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void picks up the thread on why neoliberalism is designed to disempower citizens by removing everything that matters from democratic control.
• Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is a short and very poignant reflection on what it feels like to be stuck in the dominant bloc’s hegemonic common sense.
• Rodrigo Nunes’ Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal is a dedicated and more extensive articulation of Hegemony Now!’s point that seeking the ‘one true organisational form’ is a futile effort.
• The authors go into the theory and concepts of Hegemony Now! in more detail on Jeremy Gilbert’s own podcast. A first episode is available here, and the second one here.

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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.

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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.

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