Summer Reading 2010
It’s the summer holiday season, so here at New Left Project we’ve assembled an eclectic mix of recommendations for some entertaining summer reading with a political punch.
John Newsinger
One book that I wish I hadn’t read so I can take it on holiday with me to read is Mary-Kay Wilmer’s The Eitingons. This is a really amazing family ‘history’. A remarkable story that is beautifully written, throwing light on things you already thought you knew about. It is a compelling and unusual revisiting of the Stalinist experience.
Another book that everyone should find time to read is Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine. Anything by Pappe is worth reading, but this volume really hits the mark.
And if you are holidaying in Italy (and even if you aren’t), Tom Behan’s The Italian Resistance is essential reading. A tremendous book!
As for novels, if you haven’t read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yet, then now is the time. It is emphatically as good as they say. Also pretty tremendous is China Mieville’s fantasy novel, Kraken. Very few writers could so effortlessly introduce trade union issues into a novel of the apocalypse. If you have not read Mieville before then I can only envy you your first encounter with his back catalogue. And lastly, a must read is Madison Smarrt Bell’s All Soul’s Rising. This is the first volume of his Haitian Revolution trilogy. It is certainly one of the best historical novels I have ever read and I cannot praise his achievement highly enough. I shall be rereading it this holiday.
John Newsinger is a senior lecturer in History at Bath Spa University. He is the author of many books, including ‘The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire’.
Nina Power
Being a fairly curmudgeonly type, I don’t really like the idea of summer reading, implying as it does some kind of listless sangria-addled page-flicking on a beach. Having said that, there is a way in which at least some trips put you in a reflective mood, which is often fairly good for getting to grips with serious issues or difficult concepts (going on holiday with me sounds fun, no?). To that end, I would recommend trying to read Vol 1 of Marx’s Capital, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Only joking. I usually try to read some left-wing, or at least strange, account of whichever place it is I’m visiting. Reading Regis Debray’s vicious anti-travelogue, Against Venice, near St Mark’s Square whilst overhearing Antonio Negri talk about how he hand-makes pasta a couple of years ago was particularly amusing.
This summer I will be trying to finish my book on the political subject, so I’ll be reading lots of Ludwig Feuerbach and Louis Althusser. I will also be re-reading, and this is my genuine recommendation for summer reading for all, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart. Hochschild’s 1983 book (which is still in print, hurrah!) introduces the idea of ‘emotional labour’ into the sociology of work, and specifically in relation to women’s work (she uses the example of the air hostess as someone who has to literally sell her bearing, her smile and her kindness in order to perform her job). Hochschild’s book is an incredibly useful backdrop to current debates about intellectual or immaterial labour and the feminisation of work, which can often be complex and murky.
Out of loyalty and interest I will also be reading any new Zer0 books that come out: I am particularly looking forward to Evan Calder Williams’ book on apocalypses. Owen Hatherley’s new book for Verso, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain will be wonderful as well, owing to the inclusion of some of my photographs. Oh, and Owen’s writing too of course, ha ha.
Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. Her most recent book is ‘One-Dimensional Woman’.
Stuart White
If you read one book this summer, I’d make it Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
The book is the outcome of the Real Utopias project which Erik has run at University of Wisconsin-Madison since the 1990s. This project has examined a range of proposals for transforming capitalist societies in a more egalitarian and democratic direction. These include new forms of associational and participatory democracy; radical new economic entitlements such as unconditional basic income; and new kinds of pension funds to democratise control over investment.
Envisioning Real Utopias brings many of these proposals together. But rather than just summarising them Wright links them to a new conception of socialism as an alternative both to capitalism and ‘statism’. Wright argues that there are three kinds of power: state power; economic power, notably the power of capital; and social power, the power of organized associations of citizens. Socialism is not about merely subordinating private economic power to state power. It is about subordinating both state and economic power to social power. This requires measures both to democratise the state, increasing its accountability to organized citizen groups; and measures to make economic power more accountable to such groups.
The book also contains a highly illuminating discussion of strategies for achieving change. Wright is sceptical of what he calls ‘ruptural’ strategies which entail decisive revolutionary breaks with capitalism. He is somewhat more cautiously optimistic about prospects for ‘interstitial’ and ‘symbiotic’ strategies. The former includes direct action to build new social relationships from below. The latter consists of an ambitious social democratic reformism. Neither approach is without its limits and problems, but each has some potential. A case of combining anarchist and social democratic insights to get something that goes beyond both?
Stuart White is Director of the Public Policy Unit and University Lecturer in Politics at Jesus College, Oxford.
New Left Project Editors:
David Wearing
By far my favorite holiday book of recent years has been William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal, a beautifully written account of the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857, aka the Indian War of Independence. Dalrymple mined the archives in Delhi with enormous care and dedication, bringing together a wonderful array of first hand accounts which he synthesises into the narrative with real sympathy and insight. In doing so, he punctures many myths about the nature of Western imperialism and the “clash of civilisations” narrative, as well as creating a book that is an absolute joy to read.
Anyone on the left concerned by the coalition government’s cynical exploitation of the deficit to attack social programs and drive forward a neo-Thatcherite agenda (under the fatuous veil of “progressive liberalism”) should make a point of reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Far more than a journalistic exposé of corporate wrongdoing, this is a serious political analysis of the way in which vested interests exploit crisis situations to impose economic policies that would otherwise face insurmountable public opposition. As Britain faces its own “Shock Doctrine”, Klein’s account of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the neoliberal project could not be more timely.
I’ll be off to France in July, so that’s influenced what books will be going in my suitcase. Zhou Enlai may have been right when he famously opined that it is “too early to tell” what the real significance of the French Revolution is, but I’ll be spending some time with William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution to see if any tentative conclusions can be drawn. To bring me more up to date, Rod Kedward’s La Vie en bleu: France and the French since 1900 comes highly recommended.
David Wearing writes for The Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique. He is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the School of Public Policy, University College, London
Jamie Stern-Weiner
Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World is an exhaustively researched history of the rise and fall of the ‘Third World’ as a political program. Its legacy can be seen today in alter-globalisation movements and in moves by Venezuela and other South American countries to secure independence from their traditional tormentors. As neoliberal ideology is reasserted with a vengeance post-Crash, Prashad’s analysis of the successes - and ultimate failure - of the Third World project could hardly be more relevant.
I’ve just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a searing indictment of factory farming in the US and, at the same time, a highly personal account of the author’s transition to vegetarianism. The book addresses the relevant arguments directly and seriously, and I suspect Safran Foer’s evocations of the horrors of industrial meat farming would leave a sour taste in the mouth of even the most dedicated carnivore.
The book I’m most looking forward to reading this summer is The Punishment of Gaza, Gideon Levy’s analysis of Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008-2009. Levy, a reporter and editor for Ha’aretz, is one of Israel’s most outstanding journalists, who has consistently catalogued and criticised his government’s crimes in Palestine and elsewhere. His book, which promises to locate the attack in the context of Israel’s broader policy towards Gaza since the 2005 ‘disengagement’, will surely be a must-read for anyone interested in the conflict.
Finally, Noam Chomsky has two books forthcoming – Making the Future and Gaza in Crisis – which will bring his total output this year to four. Yes, four. I know, he makes me feel like a despicably decadent slob too.
Jamie Stern-Weiner studies Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He maintains a personal blog at http://heathlander.wordpress.com
Edward Lewis
I don’t know what I will read this summer. I know that I could do with finishing some good books that I’ve started. Given my reading habits, these are too numerous to mention, but I’d be happy to get through what’s left of James Garvey’s The Ethics of Climate Change; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel; and In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, by Albo, Gindin and Panitch.
I have three suggestions for others. The late G.A. Cohen’s last book was Why Not Socialism? It represents the intense distillation of conclusions Cohen arrived at over many years – in a mere 82 very small pages, he articulates his view of how the traditional socialist ideal should be conceived, and his verdict on the central objections to it. There is a wistful feel to the book at the beginning as Cohen lays out the socialist ideal in the context of a camping trip; at its end there is a qualified optimism. And throughout, it is imbued with the elegance, cogency and imagination that were characteristic of Cohen’s work.
My second suggestion, is Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright. But for some of the reasons to read this remarkable book, see Stuart White’s entry instead.
Lastly, there is Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save. I don’t see it as a particularly left-wing book, but nor do I think this diminishes its importance for those on the left. Singer argues persuasively that the cost to an individual, through donations to aid organizations, of *saving a life* in the poorest parts of the world is in the region of $600-$1000.
What are our moral obligations in this situation? Can we really fulfil them in the world as it presently is? Whatever our answers to these questions, they surely deserve our urgent attention. I can think of no better aid to thinking about them systematically than this book.
Edward Lewis is a teacher
James Quinney
In the year that Britain’s answer to Ann Coulter, Melanie Phillips, published her book entitled “The World Turned Upside Down”, I can’t think of a better time to read the truly brilliant book of the same name by Christopher Hill. Charting the history of radical ideas during the English revolution, it’s the perfect antidote to those coffee table Whig histories propounded by the likes of David Starkey, Niall Fergusson, etc.
My holiday reading top-tip however, would have to be The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins. I was actually given it for Christmas and it certainly enlivened some of the duller moments of the festive season. Rather than being a dry, critical biography, Collins takes the more unusual approach of focusing his narrative on a sort of journalistic investigation of the whereabouts of Thomas Paine’s earthly remains. Beginning with Paine’s death in 1809, it’s a beguiling and often hilarious journey that introduces the reader to an eclectic band of radical agitators and nonconformists and charts the influence of Paine’s work far and wide.
James Quinney works in publishing and is New Left Project‘s trusty webmaster.
Alex Doherty
Thoughts of summer reading brings to mind my last vacation – a few days at the beach in the Korean city of Busan last summer. On the beach I was reading Karen Armstrong’s excellent history of religious fundamentalism.
In that book Armstrong offers a sympathetic and insightful historical account of fundamentalism and its various causes. Unlike the standard leftist view of intolerant religion Armstrong recognises that fundamentalism is more than the political urge perverted and diverted under state oppression and that fundamentalists, however ignorant and cruel, are not wrong to be horrified by aspects of secular liberal culture.
This year I will be reading Clive Hamilton’s The Freedom Paradox. In a talk based on the book Hamilton argues that in countries such as Britain and Australia the militant defenders of sexual freedom and the porn industry are fighting a battle already won and that advocates of depersonalised sex and pornography are the handmaidens of the commercial exploitation of human sexuality; a view that seems to be gaining ground even amongst third wave feminists such as Natasha Walter whose latest book I also hope to read soon.
In his talk Hamilton recommends the novels of Michel Houellebecq – a writer I had previously ignored. I had assumed Houellebecq to be little more than an attention grabbing controversialist; his novels are notoriously explicit and he is well known for regular Muslim baiting. Hamilton though describes Houellebecq’s work as a subtle critique of the commercialisation of sex and the atomisation of modern society – I look forward to seeing if Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island lives up to Hamilton’s praise.
Alex Doherty has written for Z Magazine, Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. He maintains a blog here.
About this article
Published on 20 July, 2010
By John Newsinger, Nina Power, Stuart White, NLP Editors