Books I'm Reading and Enjoying

Since I haven't had the time to post anything substantial for a while, and since the fall my general business has made my posting rather sparse, I figure I'll expend a post promoting some of the non-fiction books I'm currently reading.  Like many people I have the tendency to read several books at once, moving back and forth between them (and sometimes in the same hour), so as to not get bored by one narrative.  If a book (fiction or non-fiction) becomes more engrossing than others than the others will temporarily be set aside, but usually I'm cycling between multiple books––some of which connect to what I'm researching/writing.  So aside from rereading Capital, as mentioned in the previous post, here are some of the non-fiction books I've been reading at the same time.

1) Governing by Debt (Maurizio Lazzarato)

I expected to dislike this book, due to my problems with its predecessor (The Making of the Indebted Man), and am only reading it because, despite said problems, Lazzarato still managed to say some useful things about the financial crisis that were fresh, anticipated other analyses, and were somewhat interesting.  Governing by Debt, though still mired in some of the idealist problems that hampered his previous book, has actually surprised me in its ability to step beyond the limitations––imposed by an overreliance on Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari––of Indebted Man.  What was most unexpected was Lazzarato's decision to return to Lenin's analysis of finance-capital; usually autonomists treat Lenin like a relic.  (There are still things I dislike about it, particularly the failure of Lazzarato to slip into theoretical speculation rather than deal with concrete material processes.)

"Crisis and fear constitute the inexorable features of neoliberal capitalist governmentality. We will not escape the crisis (at best it might change intensity) quite simply because crisis is the form of government of contemporary capitalism."


2) Being and Being Bought (Kajsa Ekis Ekman)

I've been meaning to read this one for a while.  Not simply because Ekman does a good job of demonstrating how the pro-prostitution "feminist" discourse is full of shit (the first chapter tears apart the entire contemporary "sex worker" discourse and demonstrates that the people who make it do not represent the majority of women in the sex industry, lie about empirical research, and make the most contradictory claims), and from a position indebted to marxist analysis, but because I'm also intrigued by the second half of the book which is about surrogacy.

So far I've been impressed by certain aspects of Ekman's abolitionist argument, but less impressed by others: there's a throwaway sentence that runs the danger of being transphobic and that has nothing to do with her argument, some other random comparisons that are problematic, and a refusal to really engage in the entire class nature of this question, though she dangles this fact out now and then, due to some fear of the use of the word "proletarian" because it sounds too… victimizing?  This last point is somewhat ironic considering that Ekman takes the piss out of the whole "victim" discourse that pro-prostitution ideologues often utilize.

"Like all systems that accept inequalities, the neoliberal order hates victims. To speak of a 'vulnerable person' points to the lack of, and need for, a just society… Making it a taboo to talk about victims is a step towards legitimizing class divisions and gender inequality. This takes place in two stages. First we are told that the victim is by definition weak, passive and helpless. But because in reality vulnerable people develop a variety of strategies to cope with their situation, it is 'revealed' that the idea of the victim is false. The vulnerable person was not passive and helpless, but exactly the opposite: she was strong and brave with a devil-may-care attitude. As a consequence, victimhood must be abolished. It follows, therefore, that we must accept the existing social order––including prostitution, a class society, global inequalities––if we want to resist labeling people as passive and helpless."


3) The Entropy of Capitalism (Robert Biel)

Having copy-edited the second edition of Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, a subterranean anti-revisionist classic (a PDF of the first edition can be found at the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online in the UK section), and being lucky enough to have Biel write me a very nice plug for the back of my own book, I have intended to read The Entropy of Capitalism for some time.  It's been sitting on my shelf, waiting for the next round of multiple books, and I am now annoyed with myself for not having read it earlier.  Why?  Because it's the most creatively unique book about marxist political economy and political ecology (though this description of the subject matter doesn't do it justice) that I've encountered in some time.  I should qualify this statement a bit, considering that I have encountered a lot of creatively unique books that have something to do with marxist political economy that have been more "creative" and "unique" than this book but, unlike this one, have been the kind of books that "theory heads" like because they spend most of their time in the world of nebulous speculation, making up words and categories that are so divorced from concrete reality that they are ultimately useless.  Biel's creativity is definitely tied to the concrete.

Of all the marxist analyses of capitalism and the environment that I've read to date, Biel's is by far the best.  One of the reasons it took me so long to get into it was not because of lack of interest but because some of the descriptions I'd read made me think that its topic was so rarified, what with its reliance on thermodynamics and information theory, that it would be a more difficult read than it actually is.  Really, Biel's use of the concept of entropy, thermodynamic systems theory, etc. is just a way in which to creatively engage with multiple questions about capitalism as a structure that generates crisis that links every aspect of the crisis together and is able to talk about all of the complexities as a single structure.  So at the end of the day it's not just about the environment, although it is about that, but about the capitalist system as a whole and its entropic limits (and here it does a better job understanding the financial crisis than Lazarrato does), which means it necessarily is about political ecology while not being about political ecology at the same time.  Does that make sense?  Probably not, but it's difficult to explain this book's extensive terrain that, while extensive, is still focused.  Plus, he does all this while still upholding his anti-revisionist ML background, peppering his sober analysis with quotes from Lenin and Mao.

"Addressing the issue of a system which lurches towards disaster by processing signals so as (in place of corrective action) to accentuate the current trajectory, we introduce the notion of 'exterminism'. […] Sanctions, bombing, depleted uranium weapons and privatised military contractors are part of this. Capitalism's traditional delusion of an omnipotent science controlling nature is projected into that of a high-precision, robotised war. Denial becomes crucial at this level. In the imagined model, where irregular repressive forces battle a self-propagating, rhyzome-like enemy, chaos would rule at whole-system level, with predictability maintained only within gated notes of privilege. […] A key symptom of the system's decadence is the hollowing-out of its core: not content with continuing to devastate its periphery the ruling order seems bent on consuming its own civilisation in a kind of auto-cannibalism."

As an aside, the second edition of Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement is finally going to press and will be out in May.  It is also an extremely important book, both in its time and now (with the new additions), and I will review it in more detail when it's released.