Piquant, irksome, challenging, head-turning, maddening—a collection that successfully endeavors to get your blood pumping.
Leftist considerations of a number of contemporary sociopolitical issues, edited by Nation senior editor Leonard and Jacobin founding editor Sunkara.
“From capital’s point of view,” writes Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano, “the social and political relations of production that come with [full employment] are untenable. Accepting such an economy would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament in the class struggle.” They may sound hoary, but these words have a stirring quality, a reminder that it is more fun to read the subversive broadsides of Vonnegut than the Grundrisse, but the latter’s analytical tools continue to find a trenchant foothold. “The ideas in this volume draw on a rich tradition of socialist proposals, long a force in American politics,” writes Leonard, and what the collection lacks in humor and self-skepticism, it makes up for not just in radical traditions, but also in original thinking on life beyond today’s ruinous oligarchy. Throughout the book, there is plenty to argue with—e.g., “for socialists, freedom is exclusively identified with the time we spend outside the sphere of material production,” a contention that denies the genuinely meaningful possibilities of work. But engagement—with the essays, with the world—is the point. The contributors explore the horizontal structure of local autonomy, exemplified by Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Fight for $15; the organizations at work in the LGBT movement confronting the economic marginalization and violence that still plague this community (the time has come to move from “legal equality to lived equality”); and the plentiful instances when small is not necessarily better. The contributors address both sweeping concerns—echoing Thomas Piketty, particularly regarding the African-American population: “As bad as income inequality is in the United States, wealth inequality is even worse”—and specific issues, including the idea of the “work-life balance”: as Leonard rightly notes, “working-class women have always ‘done it all.’ ”
Piquant, irksome, challenging, head-turning, maddening—a collection that successfully endeavors to get your blood pumping.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9829-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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