Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
About ten years ago, Alain de Botton wrote a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It’s a perfectly fine book, not a great book. From the great tradition of writing about working, I far prefer the live interviews of Studs Terkel. And so, I’d greatly recommend his book Working.
But there’s something I do find admirable about de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Especially insofar as it says something about working in a corporate office.
Welcome to Part 2 of my summer reading list! In my previous post I wrote about some of the fiction I’ve been reading lately. Here’s some of the nonfiction on my reading list.
What’s on your summer reading list? I’ll do a summer reading list for fiction and one for nonfiction. Here’s some of the fiction I’ve been reading lately.
Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently published his first book, The Socialist Manifesto.
He’s trying to do a lot with the book. But here’s the main goal as I see it. Sunkara wants to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. He draws this distinction primarily in terms of the political methods people use in their pursuit. And he argues that the best political vision for our times is one that helps us move from the former to the latter. He does this via a historical project, covering everything from the feudalist roots of capitalism to German and Swedish social democracy to the Soviet Union and China to the history of leftism in the United States. Again, quite a project.
I’ll lay out some of Sunkara’s key arguments in The Socialist Manifesto. And I’ll offer some agreement and criticism along the way.
Sarah Smarsh and I both grew up in the rural Midwest. But she’s the only one of us who’s written a book about it. Good for her! Her book is called Heartland, and I’d recommend reading it.
I wrote a bit about the book in an earlier post. But here are some more detailed thoughts I had as I read along.
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