#nonfiction #politics #socialism

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.

#nonfiction #politics

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.

#nonfiction #politics #boundedimagination

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.

#books #nonfiction #politics

“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.

#books #nonfiction #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?