Links I liked

I confess that I surf too much and collect too many hyperlinks and excerpted text which I am too lazy to read - let alone post about. The result is that the file which I label “rawtext” is currently 180 pages long….Don’t take my word for it – thanks to pcloud you can actually view it for yourself here (and it does contain some great material – including paywalled text from my LRB and NYRB accounts!)

One blogger deals with this by posting a weekly “Links I liked” - a great way of honouring good reads without having to spend a few hours on a post…

It’s in that spirit that this post is written – but also in the vague hope that it might flag up material for me to return to in future posts…….

My mail is generally the first thing I turn to when I open the PC - Dave Pollard’s blog has a feed to which I subscribe and his latest post is a typically thoughtful one about “good questions”

For a variety of reasons (not least technology) we do tend, these days, to be very self-centred – which makes “good listening” something we have to work at according to a podcast inspired by a book called “You’re not Listening”. That, in turn, took my thoughts back to the idea of good conversations, encouraged by the likes of Theodor Zeldin and the Conversation Café people.

Another feed I get is from Oxfam’s resident blogger, Duncan Green, which duly alerted me to Global Megatrends – mapping the forces that affect us all (Oxfam 2020) which looks a must-read!

Another feed from “Reviews in History” told me of Thatcher’s Progress – from social democracy to market liberalism through a market town (2019) an interesting-looking book by Guy Ortolano which explores how the national mood changed in the 1970s. Googling the title alerted me to an intriguing blog which invites authors to apply the “page 99 test” viz looking at a single incident on that page and briefly explaining how it relates to the book’s wider analysis.

Having exhausted the contents of the mail, The Guardian newspaper is my next destination. Their ‘Long Read” is generally a useful source and so it was with today’s which dealt with the crucial issue of food and its adulteration - a terrific article which alerted me to a fascinating blog  

Michel Albert (who died, sadly last year) was a Frenchman I have admired since I first came across his “Capitalism v Capitalism “ in the heady days of 1990 and random googling brought me today to Occupy theory, the first of a 3 volume series Michael Albert wrote to mark the Occupy movement, the others being Occupy Vision and Occupy Strategy. But it turns out, after some confusion on my part, that it’s a different Albert, this one being still alive; one of the architects of the participatory economics movement; and author of what looks to be a great memoir - https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/remembering-tomorrow-introduction-by-michael-albert/

I know that the UK left the EU a couple of weeks ago - but the question of what attitude “progressives” should take to the EU still exercises me. Lexit was the position adopted by British leftist Leavers to which I didn’t pay much attention. Busting the Lexit Myth was a pamphlet issued in 2018 by Open Europe which attracted a fairly withering response from  https://www.labourleave.org.uk/the_lexit_mythbuster_that_never_was

And I’m sorry that I also missed England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (Pluto 2018)

Dissent magazine is a US leftist journal whose articles can be accessed in full. Try, however, to copy the url of an article you like and you will be blocked. Excellent approach which I wish more journals would use.......

Naomi Klein has a powerful article on the Green New Deal which explores the intellectual and moral as well as political challenge it poses

But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out. And how could it be otherwise? Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for a way to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.

This is where the right-wing climate change deniers have overstated their conspiracy theories about what a cosmic gift global warming is to the left.

It is true that many climate responses reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge to large parts of the left as well as the right.

-       It’s a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve.

-       And it’s a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from low-carbon sectors or rampant resource extraction.

Some other hyperlinks

Podcasts is a medium I have tended to ignore. And the BBC archives are the best for English speakers see, for example

-       Arts and Ideas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvk3

-       free thinking BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn

-       https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn/episodes/player

https://www.mixcloud.com/notebookoncitiesandculture/sonic-curator-david-toop-the-sound-of-silent-art/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5

Changing the Beast – being part V of a series

In certain circles, to be accused of trying to reform – rather than transform – capitalism has long been one of the gravest criticisms. Not only this accusation but the very distinction has, however, always seemed a bit ridiculous. What would “transformation” actually mean? And who on earth could be attracted to the notion of wholescale nationalisation and associated bureaucratic power – to say nothing of even worse scenarios?? 

Temperamentally, I grant you, I’ve always been an incrementalist – rather than a revolutionary – influenced first by Tony Crosland’s 1956 revisionist “The Future of Socialism”; then, at University, by Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” and, in the early 80s, by Charles Lindblom – who got us all to respect incrementalism.
  
Although Margaret Thatcher kept assering that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable

By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control. Pages 57-66 of my Dispatches to the Next Generation plot the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles

But a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things – first the suggestion that the entire engine of the system (profitability)was reaching vanishing point; and, second, a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs.

Now the titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism” 

Paul Collier’s book – “The Future of Capitalism – our present anxieties” to which I have devoted 4 posts – touches only very briefly on the second of the changes. But I recommend the book for its rare moral – rather than technocratic - tone and for it being the first book I can remember which takes as its starting point the concerns of ordinary people and tries to identify practical policies which might actually deal with issues such as the decline in social trust

Essential follow-up reading

I realise the previous reading list was too long. The following are they key bits of writing I would recommend for those who want to know more

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..(google sample only)..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). A short, overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas - more than a decade after his death

Associationalism for 150 years – and still alive and well in Denmark; Kaspersen (2002)

Communitarianism Revisited; Amitai Etzioni (2015) The father of the modern movement revisits the issues

Those curious about the “Varieties of Capitalism” literature and able and willing to subject themselves to the torture of academic writing can skim one of the following..

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/db5f/97bbe6f769bdf8ca138a89bd090f35e3a39d.pdf

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~phall/VofCIntro.pdf

http://web.unideb.hu/jkapas/pdf/Kapas_varieties%20of%20capitalism.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328807093_Rhine-and_Anglo_Saxon_Capitalist_Models_and_the_1960-1993_Automotive_Industry_in_Germany_and_the_United_States/link/5be427cc92851c6b27af5c67/download

https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-socialism.pdf