EIGHT MORE BOOKS

I start today's post with an interesting book written some 35 years ago by a member of China's politburo

America Against America Wang Huning (1991)

There are eleven chapters in this book, and I would like to briefly point to

here:

• the uneven development of society and its various features;

• the values that dominate political life and their flux;

• the diverse character of the nation and its social efficacy;

• the formal and informal mechanisms that regulate people's social activities;

• the political forces active in society and their relations;

• the democratic and non-democratic elements in election campaigns;

• top-down political operations and their characteristics;

• non-political coordination mechanisms and socialized regulation;

• the reproduction of culture, values and even institutions and the connection with education;

• the role of ideas in the development and management of society;

• the various undercurrents that threaten future development.

Although these eleven chapters contain quite a few aspects, the object is a

large country, so the facets actually covered are only a limited aspect of

American society. From this perspective, I think the book falls short on two

counts.

First: The book is limited in its coverage and cannot possibly cover all

aspects of every tree in the American forest, so it should be said that there

are limitations. It cannot be said that these aspects adequately reflect the

subject matter of this book. I wanted to do a "peek-a-boo" thing, but the question is whether the "peek-a-boo" was found. I think we have found some, but not many. The good thing is that we can find a lot of other literature that can make up for the shortcomings of this book.

Second, I analyze American society as an observer rather than a researcher.

Some of the data and materials, though sourced, do not meet the standards

of rigorous statistics. I am afraid that some of the issues discussed may be

subjective, or even erroneous. Therefore, I hope that people will read this

book from a macro-sociological point of view, rather than treating it as

microbiology.

Parenti was an independent (in all senses of the word) academic, blackballed by academia by virtue of his activism but who was a prolific writer eg

• Inventing Reality – the politics of news media Michael Parenti (1986)

• Make Believe Media – the politics of entertainment Michael Parenti (1991)

• Dirty Truths Michael Parenti (1996) 

• Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti (1997)

This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of “democratic

capitalism” to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic eôorts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.

The political orthodoxy that demonizes communism permeates the entire political perspective. Even people on the Left have internalized the liberal/conservative ideology that equates fascism and communism as equally evil totalitarian twins, two major mass movements of the twentieth century. This book attempts to show the enormous differences between fascism and communism both past and present, both in theory and practice, especially in regard to questions of social equality, private capital accumulation, and class interest.

The orthodox mythology also would have us believe that the Western democracies (with the United States leading the way) have opposed both totalitarian systems with equal vigor. In fact, U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private proõt system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

History for Tomorrow Roman Kznaric (2024)

The insights of history are a shared treasury for the future of humanity. We

live in an era dominated by the present tense, which vastly undervalues the

accumulated experience of the past as a guide for where we go next. Faced

with the collective challenges of the twenty-first century, from the threat of

ecological breakdown and growing wealth inequality to the risks of

artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we are failing to draw on the

immense store of wisdom bequeathed by generation upon generation of our

forebears. There is an urgent need to look backwards to help chart a way

forwards.

Ecocivilization – making a world that works for all Jeremy Lent (2026)

The only way to structure society, it is assumed, is in the form of growth-based consumer capitalism—a system in which corporate profits ultimately drive the decisions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet, the health of the living Earth, and the destiny of future generations. Virtually all policy proposals under serious consideration to fix our grave problems work within the framework of the current system rather than examining the system itself. This book constitutes the dethronement of TINA. There is, in fact, an alternative.

A FAULTY OPERATING SYSTEM

The alternative we’ll be exploring, though, is not the kind that Thatcher, Reagan, and countless adherents of market-based capitalism had been railing against. Back in those days, and in fact throughout the entire twentieth century, the battle lines were clearly drawn between capitalism on one side and socialism (or, in its extreme form, communism) on the other. A society could either be organized primarily by the market or by the state.

There were, of course, many countries that attempted a blend between the two, most notably European nations after the Second World War that explored possibilities of a welfare state with a meaningful safety net for those who fell through the holes ripped open by the market. In the United States, after FDR’s New Deal, the state played a significant role in people’s lives. But the choice was always between the poles of market and state, closing off any other possibility for organizing human activity. Surprisingly perhaps, these opposing sides shared considerable common ground. Both prized their particular ideology over the dignity of normal human lives: Submit, people were told, either to the invisible hand of the market or the authoritarian fist of the state. Both worshiped at the altar of economic growth as the supreme aspiration of policymaking. And perhaps most consequentially, both viewed the entire Earth as nothing more than a resource to exploit in the interest of pursuing that growth.

This pursuit of endless growth on a planet with limited resources has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: Even as we reel from the impact of little more than one degree Celsius of global heating, the world’s current policies have us on track for a staggering three degrees increase by the end of this century—and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, continued untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Our civilization is already running at forty percent above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, and even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. Animal populations worldwide have declined by a staggering 73 percent since 1970. In the oceans, coral reefs are on track to be virtually annihilated by the middle of this century. At this rate, we’re well on the way to causing the sixth great extinction of species since life began on Earth—except this is the first driven by the actions of a single species. Surveying this devastation across the board, in 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Look around the natural world, and you will see fractal patterns everywhere. From microscopic living structures to the entire Earth system, nature uses a fractal design with similar patterns manifesting at different scales. You can see them in the shapes of tree branches, coastlines, cloud formations, lung brachia, and neural networks, to name just a few. Ecologies are themselves fractal, with tiny cells that are part of an organism, which is nested in a population, which is embedded in an ecosystem, which is integrated into the living Earth. In all cases, the longterm health of the larger system requires the flourishing of each of its parts. This universal principle of fractal flourishing inspires the ultimate objective of an ecocivilization: to create the conditions in which the flourishing of each of us naturally contributes to the greater wellbeing of the systems in which we’re embedded.

Lent’s Conclusion

The Japanese experience is the poster child for a decidedly grim theory of transformative change in history laid out compellingly by historian Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel’s thesis is as simple as it is disheartening. Stable times, he argues, invariably cause elites to accumulate wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Historically, he maintains, only cataclysmic systemic shocks have reduced inequality, in the form of what he calls “the Four Horsemen of Leveling”: war, revolution, pandemics, and state failure. Even these four “horsemen” only achieve leveling if they are apocalyptic in scale, rupturing society’s bonds with extraordinary levels of violence, suffering, and misery. Scheidel’s research is extensive and authoritative. If his thesis is correct, the implications are daunting. It suggests that the only pathway to an ecocivilization is a blood-soaked one, littered with bodies. In the words of historian Roman Krznaric, “no historical thesis could be more disempowering,” because it renders futile all well-intentioned efforts to transform society by peaceful means. Is apocalypse, indeed, our only gateway to a better future, or are there alternative routes that might avert calamitous suffering? The bulk of this book has sketched the contours of an attractive potential future for humanity and the living Earth—one that creates conditions for all to flourish. In this final section, we’ll investigate how we might possibly get from here to there. How can we transform our currently ruinous system into one that’s beneficial for all? What are the most effective strategies that might enable such a transition to happen?

The Alibi of Capital – how we broke the earth to steal the future on the promise 
to get a better tomorrow Timothy Mitchell (2026)

The aim of this book is to ask how we came to organise collective life on the principle of the impoverishment of the future; explore the development of this principle in the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territories, the expansion of cities, the building of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon; see how lives today are encumbered by the repayment of earlier extractions; and connect this mode of impoverishing the many and enriching the few to the climate crisis. Its aim is also to examine the political and economic language that developed to describe and order these forms of life – terms like capitalism, technology, finance, the economy and its growth – and ask whether they are adequate for making sense of how the impoverishment operates and of our inability to act in the face of climate breakdown.

Rather than seeing capital as a relation to the future, the alibi substitutes an old view of capital as funds that have been saved up from the past, to be loaned to entrepreneurs, typically to invest in the machines or technology required to make more money. In the popular imagination, and many economists’ models, this technical equipment comes to stand for capital itself. The windfalls and interest payments accrued by investors and entrepreneurs can then be described as the reward given to those whose apparent ‘savings’ have been used to grow more wealth – rather than the charge imposed by investment funds and financial institutions that, thanks to their state-guaranteed privileges and protections, organise the command of payments from the future.

In other chapters of this book, we will introduce a number of terms for understanding the place of economics in both facilitating and obfuscating the capture of the future. These include the idea of ‘technopolitics’, meaning an approach to studying politics and political economy that treats technical and material processes not merely as the object of political and economic analysis but as the arrangements through which our politics takes shape; ‘capitalisation’ and ‘economisation’, referring to the ways in which goods and activities are captured and made calculable; the ‘EconoCon’, referring to the production of ‘the economy’, by analogy with Michel Foucault’s reading of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, as a device for ordering desire and managing the future; and ‘oikodicy’, by analogy with the theological concept of ‘theodicy’, for understanding the role of economics in the justification of human suffering.

For now, however, let us stay with the simpler idea of Uber. Despite the evidence to the contrary, economists continue to attribute the extracting of future rents to supposed improvements in technology. In the case of Uber, the firm employed its own economists to describe the increasing command of surplus as a customer benefit. The company’s monopoly provided the private data through which such claims could be made. In setting passenger fares and drivers’ wages, Uber benefited from exclusive control of the information gathered from every ride taken. This enabled the firm to adjust charges according to an algorithm that calculated how low drivers’ wages could be pushed, or how high passenger fares increased, to maximise its own share at every moment. Known as ‘surge pricing’, this evasion of fare regulation and minimum wage payments was promoted as the technological source of new value. The proprietary data from millions of private fare payers was used to construct the argument.