Links I liked

I had no sooner started a weekly ”Links I Liked” feature than I lost my connection to the blog.

Until then I had dumped any excerpts of useful material I had found on the internet (with the relevant link) in a special folder - and extracted only stuff that I knew I was going to use in a pending blogpost. The result was a file which kept on getting larger but which I rarely looked at. The ”Links I Liked” feature gave me the incentive to go back to the folder and put up useful stuff which is easier to find that rifling through a 200 pages file.....

This past week saw a couple of book reviews

The Boston review is an impressive new find for me – although their review of Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx by  Francesco Boldizzoni was a bit opaque for my liking. It started well

The first four chapters move quickly through a series of proficient and deftly connected capsule summaries of thinkers across a range of fields, from economics to philosophy to sociology.

Although those who have spent more time with these authors may occasionally be frustrated by the glosses of complex arguments, the point is not to cast new light on any one idea, but to show, through volume and range, the many ways that people have thought about capitalism’s end, and the many ways they have gotten it wrong: thus far none of the predictions has proved correct.

And continued with a typology for which I’m always a sucker –

There are, Boldizzoni argues, four kinds of predictions.

-       There are theories of implosion, wherein capitalism collapses because of pressures that arise from the workings of its own logic.

-       There are theories of exhaustion, which predict capitalism will “die of natural causes”—it runs up against environmental limits, or moral advances enable people to move beyond it.

-       There are theories of convergence, wherein capitalism and socialism become more and more alike, appearing as mirror images of modern rationality and bureaucratic organization.

-       Finally, there is “cultural involution,” wherein capitalism kills off the non-economic values that made it work in the first place.

Some of these tendencies seem more significant than others: theories of implosion, for example, recur far more frequently than theories of convergence.....

The trouble is that I don’t know what a ”cultural involution” is when it’s at home! A google query didn’t really help but it did unearth a real gem of a book I will come to in a moment.. But I liked the sound of the Italian’s book – precisely the combination of potted intellectual biographies I like

The second review was a critical one of Rutger Bregman’s latest - Human Nature – a hopeful history - which came out of his previous extraordinarily well-written Utopia for Realists (you can see what I mean by clicking the title since it gives the entire book!)

I also like intellectual history – particularly of countries. So I loved “How the French Think” and consider that Perry Anderson’s The New Old World is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

So the website Reading the Chinese Dream is a real find – thanks to this review in the New York Review of Books

The web site is 

devoted to the subject of intellectual life in contemporary China, and more particularly to the writings of establishment intellectuals.  What you will find here are essentially translations of Chinese texts that we consider important, together with discussions of related issues 

One of my regrets is that, despite my best intentions, I haven’t been able to access similar sites about European debates eg French let alone German. Eurozine is the only site which gives the occasional glimpse….

European Think Tanks, of course, are very active and many of them – such as the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – offer bilingual material.

Time was when I was a great fan of the New Labour Demos Think Tank - which has become a rather bipartisan outfit these days and, like most London-based think-tanks, focused on England.

Scotland, after all, has had its own parliament for 23 years and therefore its own think-tanks – such as Common Weal which as just produced two interesting documents on Resilience Economics and Resilient Scotland  

Finally a quite remarkable book which came to my attention only today as I searched for a definition of the phrase “cultural involution”. It was published in France in 2004 – before, that is, the global financial collapse which it anticipates along with the ecological one - Convergence of Catastrophes by Guillaume Faye who, on further investigation, turns out to have been the sort of ultra-right winger with whom France has long been familiar

The English translation only saw the light of day in 2012 – which says a lot…..