The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire — StreetlightX

Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck — 180 Proof

Put both on my to-reads, they look interesting.

Anything's beach reading if you have some shade! — StreetlightX

Waves look good hope you got some body surfing in

Reading an old one and no longer taken seriously.

The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz

Sadly, none of which really gathered too much in effect in policies or mandates against reckless market behavior.

Reading:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

By the way I was curious to rediscover older reading list of mine from years back (obviously this thread only goes back to 2015) and was able to dig up the original Currently Read thread from 2014, for those interested.

Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman

Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society by W.F Haug

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. She never disappoints.

From your list you might enjoy The Forever War, if you haven't read it already.

:up:

I first read this shortly after the book came out. When I was eleven I found it picking through the grown-up side in the library. Re-reading the wikipedia, I see that might have been an abridged version, so I just ordered a copy from Amazon. This is hands down my favourite science-fiction novel.

Same here. I'd already been in the thrall of 2001: A Space Odyssey (replay of the movie every New Year's Eve in the 1970s) for years when I'd first read The Forever War, which in my 12 year old mind was an extension of Kubrick's masterpiece (I wouldn't catch up with AC Clarke's "parallel" novel until my late teens). When Full Metal Jacket came out in the mid-'80s, I'd realized then that that movie (which I also love) was, for all intents and purposes, Kubrick's adaptation of Joe Haldeman's "relativistic" novel. Last I heard, Ridley Scott had the film rights to the book ...

:up:
Yes, there was a lot of talk about the film production a few years back. I've been holding my breath.

Started Hagakure (The Book of the Samurai or Hidden in Leaves) and its exactly what I would have wanted after The Zurau Aphorisms. Just starting but I find it interesting if outdated in its version of selflessness. Its arguments for abandoning the ego and facing each day "ready to die".

Not suicidally, I'm not doing it justice, but the opening aphorism touches on the idea that dying without leaving an impact is terrible and disagrees with it.

Thanks!

I do love 2001 A Space Odyssey, but Barry Lyndon is Kubrick's best imo

That said since Covid I've started a tradition of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai on NYE

@Maw - OK, quickie reviews of Smith's Imperialism and Suwandi's Value Chains: basically both books are really good compliments to one another. Smith's is very much a book on economics: its primary concern is with prevailing economic measures (GDP, Purchasing Power Parity, Productivity, Value-Added, Unit Labour Costs, etc), and doing deep dives into each of them to show how they obscure the enormous amount of productivity that happens in the global South, only to attribute it all to the global North. It's basically showing contemporary economic measures to be accounting tricks, all of which entrench and perpetuate the divide between North and South. It's alot of numbers, as well as the (deliberately) flawed methodologies behind those numbers. Pretty technical and I had to read it almost twice over. Smith's ultimate concern is with the question of 'value', and showing how contemporary imperialism can be can be understood in terms of Marx's theory of value.

The big distinction that he makes - which is the thing that I think is going to leave a lasting impression on me, no matter how much else I forget - is that between value created and value captured. For him, the North captures value, even as it is created in the South. It's this distinction that is papered over in bourgeois economics, which only has an eye for value-added as a matter of exchange rather than production. It literally does not have the conceptual capacity to make this distinction. The other thing it really drove home to me was just how novel the shift of global production to the South has been. I've been so used to hearing about production in developing countries that I never considered just how contemporary this has been - I mean, we're talking in the last twenty years, on unimaginable scales. Any attempt to come to grips with modern capitalism without recognizing this shift is going to come up short. It's not an easy read and it's a bit dry in places, but it is incredibly comprehensive and massively well researched.

Suwandi's book shifts the focus from economics to sociology - her study is a study in control. It looks at the mechanisms by which control is exerted by the North on the South, and busts myths about globalization being a matter of decentralization. Decision making happens in the North, no matter how much production has shifted to the South, which remains utterly dependant. The complementary side of that is her focus on labor practices - how this control actually plays itself out on the factory floor: the deskilling of workers, their 'flexibilization', the lack of bargaining power, etc. The crowning chapter is her fieldwork in a pair of Indonesian factories, where she details a few interviews she has with factory executives, and shows how much it's the imperatives from elsewhere that govern work on the ground. It's alot more qualitative than Smith's quantitative approach (and alot easier to read), and the two together really paint a nice (and depressing) picture of how contemporary imperialism functions.

Both are also pretty hostile to some other Marxist takes (like David Harvey), which reckon that imperialism either isn't such a big deal any more, or that it takes place outside the capital relation (through sheer violence and cohesion, etc). Both show nicely show imperialism isn't some extrinsic force to capitalism, but that it's central to it's function. Given that domestic markets in the North have been more or less saturated, and it's easier just to move capital out of the North than to attempt to drive down worker wages and standards (further than they have been), the shift in production is necessary for capitalism, not just some corollary. The big lesson for me is that imperialism needs to join the list which includes the explosion of finance, the reliance on real estate, basement low interest rates, and private equity and privatization, as among the major pathologies of contemporary capitalism. The latter issues are so often debated about in the West (because they are more 'tangible' for 'us'), but you hardly hear about the former (I'm guilty of this). Yet in terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, imperialism is probably the most damaging of them all.

:zip:

:up:

The big distinction that he makes - which is the thing that I think is going to leave a lasting impression on me, no matter how much else I forget - is that between value created and value captured. For him, the North captures value, even as it is created in the South. It's this distinction that is papered over in bourgeois economics, which only has an eye for value-added as a matter of exchange rather than production. — StreetlightX

Do you think the division between political north and south tracks the division between the two sides of 'profit upon alienation' in Theories of Surplus Value? And furthermore that profit upon alienation is strictly a redistributive mechanism of value, rather than a creation of value.

Nearly finished with Locke's Essay. This last bit is taxing, as he gets quite repetitive towards the end.

But, having said that, damn, what an impressive piece of work. Most of it holds up remarkably well 400 years later. Surely worth the time investment, I'm a huge fan now.

If my brain doesn't melt when I'm done, next up is:

Hume's Treatise.

Currently Reading:

Brunists Day of Wrath by Robert Coover.

Very interesting, thanks for the concise review, I'll have to add them both to my list!

Do you think the division between political north and south tracks the division between the two sides of 'profit upon alienation' in Theories of Surplus Value? And furthermore that profit upon alienation is strictly a redistributive mechanism of value, rather than a creation of value. — fdrake

Yes, but if I understand correctly, Smith is interested in the particular form in which profit upon alienation takes under imperialism. To the degree that profit upon alienation is redistributive, he notes that Marx outlined three such ways in which such redistribution could be maximized: by lengthening the working day, by increasing productivity, or by deceasing wages. Smith contends that Marx only examined the first two mechanisms at any length, because he (Marx) figured the labour market would always equalize wages via competition anyway - but he never contended that capital would go HAM in restricting the free movement of labour, which makes the third mechanism particularly relevant in the conceptualization of imperialism. It's worth quoting Smith on this point actually:

"Marx treated divergence of wages as the result of temporary or contingent factors that ceaselessly mobile capital and labor would erode over time, and which could be safely excluded from analysis, as he made clear in Capital III: “important as the study of frictions [local obstacles obstructing the equalization of wages] is for any specialist work on wages, they are still accidental and inessential as far as the general investigation of capitalist production is concerned and can therefore be ignored." This exclusion from consideration of systematic divergences of wages from a common average, implying the exclusion of divergences in the value of labor-power and the rate of exploitation, applies to the whole of Capital.

Marx’s level of abstraction is clearly inappropriate for our task. Study of workers’ status in labor markets and their mobility across borders reveals that, in today’s imperialist world, the condition of equality between workers is profoundly and shockingly violated; and ... global competition has not produced any measurable progress toward the international equalization of real wages—on the contrary, overall wage dispersion has increased during the neoliberal era. Neoliberal globalization has greatly relaxed restrictions on the mobility of capital across national borders, but there has been no such relaxation of the free movement of labor—on the contrary, imperialist governments are responding to increasing migration pressure by militarizing their borders and criminalizing migrant workers".

To that degree, what Smith calls 'global labour arbitrage' is the imperialist form which profit upon alienation takes in contemporary capitalism. The redistribution becomes geographic - extensive and 'horizontal', as it were - rather than intensive and 'vertical' between capital and labour. It's super interesting.

Yes, but if I understand correctly, Smith is interested in the particular form in which profit upon alienation takes under imperialism. To the degree that profit upon alienation is redistributive, he notes that Marx outlined three such ways in which such redistribution could be maximized: by lengthening the working day, by increasing productivity, or by deceasing wages. Smith contends that Marx only examined the first two mechanisms at any length, because he (Marx) figured the labour market would always equalize wages via competition anyway - but he never contended that capital would go HAM in restricting the free movement of labour, which makes the third mechanism particularly relevant in the conceptualization of imperialism. It's worth quoting Smith on this point actually — StreetlightX

Super interesting, thank you.

Discipline & Punish
by Michel Foucault

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower

Time, Capitalism and Alienation. A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time by Jonathan Martineau

• Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje
• How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter

Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — Baden

What did you think? I thought I was a fan of theirs but since I read this and Hard to be a God a few years ago, I've forgotten everything about them. Could be the problem was me, I don't know.

Recently and currently:

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon