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.

About halfway through One Battle After Another, soldiers wearing combat fatigues and brandishing guns break into a convenience store, looking for Willa Ferguson, the movie’s fugitive protagonist, as well as for evidence of illegal immigrants. This is a scene we are all familiar with: the armed entry of infantry into an enemy building. The military hand gestures and codes. The careful scouting of rooms for hostiles. Except, this isn’t Black Hawk Down or the Hurt Locker. We are not in Iraq or Afghanistan. And these soldiers have ‘police’ stitched to their uniform.

We are in ‘Baktan Cross’, USA. The war has come home.

One Battle After Another is a magnificent movie in many ways, most of which are much better expressed by professional critics. The excellent pacing means that despite coming in at 2:40hrs the movie doesn’t feel long. The story is gripping. The characters flawed but interesting, with Leonardo diCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro and in particular Sean Penn all putting in stellar performances. The cinematography is beautiful, from vertiginous car chases to the carefully curated details in a family home. The minor garnish of magical realism provides for effective symbolism without ever really stretching the bounds of plausibility. The soundtrack is frenetic and of a kind with the movie’s feverish momentum. Watching One Battle After Another is like stepping onto a frantic and relentless rollercoaster. When you finally grind to a halt, you feel exhilarated, confused about what just happened, and wondering if you have to go on the ride again to fully appreciate it.

There is no shortage of excellent scenes in One Battle After Another, but one that stood out most starkly for me is the ‘police’ arriving in the fictional town of Baktan Cross for their womanhunt for Willa Ferguson (Infiniti). In its reminiscence of countless war movies, it shows us a country at war with itself, its military an occupying force on its own soil. This is a movie about the imperial boomerang having fully circled back.

One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) as he desperately tries to save his daughter Willa from being disappeared by Colonel Lockjaw (Penn). For Lockjaw, Willa is a potentially fatal embarrassment that could prevent his inclusion in the ranks of the ‘Christmas Adventurers Club’ – a Ku Klux Klan for posh people – because she may be his mixed-race daughter born of an intense but brief reciprocal sexual obsession with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the de facto leader of the ‘French 75’, an American insurrectionary group along the lines of the Weather Underground or the Baader-Meinhof Group. The activities of the French 75 form the start of the movie, but are cut short after a botched bank robbery leads to Perfidia’s capture and her partner and newborn daughter going into hiding as Willa and Bob Ferguson, until the latter are tracked down by Lockjaw sixteen years later.

Bob is however singularly ineffectual at rescuing his daughter. Even in the heyday of the French 75, he was more of a hanger-on than a disciplined revolutionary, and sixteen years of smoking weed and watching The Battle of Algiers on repeat haven’t exactly improved things. For the protagonist of a putative action movie, Bob is neither very capable nor very central to the unfolding story. Instead, his incidentality to events helps One Battle After Another to foreground what Bob is caught up in: a world of detention centres and disappearances. Of militarized policing, razzias and summary executions. This foregrounding is most effective for the part of the movie where Bob pairs up with Willa’s karatedo teacher sensei Sergio (del Toro), who is a highly capable agent, providing an excellent contrast with the hapless Bob. For me, this was definitely the strongest part of the movie.

There is a lot going on in One Battle After Another, but the one thing it brilliantly demonstrates is the merciless logic of the imperial boomerang: how techniques used by an imperial power against enemies without ultimately rebound on the nation itself, to be used against the enemies within. Originating with anti-colonial writers Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon during the Algerian War of Independence, it was first used to describe how European fascism and Nazism were the logical return home of tools of oppression and extermination that imperial powers had refined in their colonies abroad. It was the Spanish, British, and Americans who invented concentration camps for their colonial ventures after all. These days we see it in police departments being trained in counter-insurgency techniques and stockpiling armoured personnel carriers. A state apparatus that becomes habituated to the regular use of violence against foreign populations it deems less human, will inevitably discover that such violence can be equally useful on its own soil. All it needs to justify this is to define some groups of people as undeserving of rights and protections. One Battle After Another reminds us of this again through the contrast of Bob and sensei Sergio. Bob may have opted into the struggle through moral conviction, or his love for Perfidia (or both). But Sergio and his community never had a choice. The struggle was brought to bear on them, by a state that decided that people like them did not have the right to exist.

Yet as Carl Schmitt realised all the way back in the 1940s, once you set this logic in motion it gains a momentum all of its own. Once you start rounding up immigrants, it is a small step to also round up the protestors against your immigration raids. Then you realise that it is even more effective to restrict the right to protest further and further, while making it easier and easier to exact harsh penalties on those you have detained. Once the aim of the state becomes the preservation of a ‘pure’ people and the unrestrained expression of its will, any opposition to that aim will be illegitimate and any means to remove that opposition will be justified. It doesn’t even require all the participants to be actively racist, though that does help. We see in One Battle After Another that for a lot of the soldiers and police, this is just work, and once they have started on immigrants, they will readily extend their oppressive violence to white teenagers. They are simply following the orders of a system that dehumanizes their victims for them, turning them into an occupying force against their own population.

In our world of increasing authoritarianism, state violence and repression, One Battle After Another reminds us that when it comes down to it, there are just two main flavours in politics: Either we start from the position that all humans deserve the same rights to dignity and humanity and that we should work towards a world where we can live in harmony. Or we start from the position that there is a boundary between one group of humans who are deserving and another group who are undeserving, downstream of which is the entire apparatus of dehunanization to legitimise ever increasing levels of violence against the undeserving group. And once that boundary is drawn, you are locked into a trajectory where there is always a pressure for the deserving group to be made smaller, and smaller and smaller, as the definition of who is racially pure, or a contributing member of society, or has the correct politics, or isn’t a ‘public nuisance’, is going to get narrower and narrower.

The only recourse for those of us who believe that every human deserves life and dignity, that nobody is illegal, is to push the other way. To expand the circle until all of us are inside it, and who knows, maybe even large parts of the non-human natural world as well. There is no space for a ‘Third Way’, prevaricating, ‘moderate’, centrism that insists that much can be said on both sides, that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ and that we should trust the law to dispense justice. Viz. Wilhoit’s Law, by the time people are being thrown out of helicopters, the law will not protect you. There is, after all, a famous poem about this:

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

It certainly seems daunting now. But as Tony Benn told us “every generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory. And there is no final defeat.” We see this towards the end of the movie, as Willa takes up the mantle of her parents to go off and protest against immigration raids. Willa, Bob, Perfidia, and all the others, all links in the intergenerational chain for justice. As Ursula K. le Guin taught us in The Dispossessed, even after the Revolution the work will not be done. For all of us, it will forever be one battle after another.

Notes & Suggestions

• One Battle After Another reminded me of Civil War, which also plays with the theme of military occupation on US soil. However, Civil War’s complete absence of any political context to its conflict makes it by far the inferior movie.
• One Battle After Another also shows how the neverending struggle takes its toll on those engaged in it. Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is an excellent meditation the emotional and psychological toll the struggle takes, and how from one generation to the next we can take steps to mitigate this.
• If you haven’t already, join a workplace or tenants’ union, and consider supporting organisations like Amnesty International.

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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.

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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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 #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism

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

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