Welcome to the first reading list of 2025! Yes, the plan here at Base and Superstructure is to continue the tradition of writing about a few books each month.
To be honest, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, especially since I just had a few weeks off of work last month to get caught up. So, read on for a selection of what I’ve been reading. And please do let me know what’s on your list!
Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson – The Myth of American Idealism
So, Noam Chomsky and the editor of Current Affairs wrote a book! The occasion? Robinson summarizes Chomsky’s extensive foreign policy corpus. He collects that work into a narrative summarizing the history of U.S. foreign policy after World War II. And he adds to it some short essays on how the international power system works.
It’s a good idea, and it works well enough. It doesn’t work as a substitute for actually reading Chomsky, especially his work on Middle East policy, propaganda, and the international order. But it serves as a quick summary and guide for the interested reader.
Chomksy’s foreign policy views are reasonably simple, largely accurate, and grounded in sound moral principles. He claims that we should judge all countries by the same basic standards. They shouldn’t start conflicts and establish dominance over other nations. And yet, as Chomsky argues, all nations violate these basic standards, causing harm proportional to their power. As the world’s greatest power, the U.S. thereby causes the greatest harm.
The conclusions follow clearly enough. Americans should criticize their government’s use of power in the world. Chomsky adds his usual nod to popular movement building, though, as usual, he doesn’t recommend any particular approach beyond a grounding in enlightenment thinking and democratic, anarchist principles.
While this book appears on the January 2025 reading list, I actually finished reading it on election night last November. I found it a useful corrective to the notion that electoral politics might save us.
Guy De La Bédoyère – Populus
The basic idea for this book is simple and appealing. Bédoyère tells the story of the everyday life of people in the later Roman Republic and early Roman Empire.
In practice, this often amounts to retelling many of the stories of the most famous Roman historians (i.e., the ones from antiquity itself), but in a way that brings them together and organizes them into themes. The themes include everything from city life in Rome to family and home life to food, medicine, and animals.
In one sense, then, it’s not an original work. Someone who’s read the major Roman figures already knows most of the content.
But in another sense, it’s much appreciated. One would have to carefully work through at least a half dozen major Roman historians to get the material here. And, to boot, much of the material on everyday life comes buried in broader accounts that are mostly about political and military affairs.
In that sense, Bédoyère does a valuable service for the reader curious about the Roman everyday.
Yum Kitasei – The Deep Sky
And on that note, let’s move from the real to the sci-fi.
Earth stands at the brink of world war and environmental collapse. So, it sends a crew of 80 to settle another planet. The crew members maintain and pilot the ship, preparing to establish a new colony while sharing the burdens of childbirth. Kitasei’s novel covers the mission and its challenges. It also covers the intense training process in the form of flashbacks.
The novel focuses on crew relationships, leaving the core sociopolitical issues in the background. An explosion that takes the ship off course forms the launching pad for its central conflicts and mystery.
Kitasei convincingly builds the crew and their relationships. How would an ‘all female at birth’ international crew handle sociopolitical issues at home, the stresses and pressures of intense competition, and the challenge of representing all of humanity?
Ling Ma – Severance
As it turns out, quite a few authors wrote interesting pandemic stories back in the 2010s, in the pre-Covid era. In this one, a global pandemic begins in China, kills millions, and disrupts society.
And who says sci-fi always gets it wrong?
But Ling Ma seems more interested in characters, alienation, and corporate culture. And she succeeds in getting at these things in this story.
The main character and her boyfriend come off as bright-eyed, young millennial kids who move to the city and struggle to fit into a corporate world that has no place for them. The boyfriend talks about neoliberal layoffs and benefit cuts. The main character struggles over the juxtaposition of corporate success to the death of her actual dreams and interests.
It sounds familiar.
As the story splits into twin narratives of past and present – corporate life before the pandemic and scary scenes in a suburban mall during the pandemic – I found the ‘before’ narrative especially compelling. As the pandemic sets in, people gradually go home, suffer layoffs, or leave the city. The main character finds herself working in an empty office building in a deserted part of town.
As someone who has worked for a company going through downsizing and difficult times, I can say Ma describes the mood perfectly.
J. Moufawad-Paul – Demarcation and Demystification
Moufawad-Paul is a Maoist activist I first heard on RevLeft Radio. He’s written a number of works, and this one functions as a broader philosophical reflection on his work.
For such a slim volume, it’s an ambitious book. His goal is no less than the reworking of our very notion of philosophy, using Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach as a guide.
Here’s where he wants to take us: philosophy isn’t about making change. Rather, it’s an interpretive project. The role of philosophy is to demarcate and intervene in the various terrains of theory. It’s the job of theory, not philosophy, to do the deeper work of making change. Philosophy aims only at clarity via the demystification of ideas.
It’s an interesting book, and it’s surprisingly clear and readable given the subject matter. I don’t think it’s an accurate reading of Marx, nor do I accept the author’s distinction between philosophy and theory in anything like the form he draws it. But I do think Moufawad-Paul successfully makes a case for the need for a special project of clarifying ideas.
Sanjeev Sahota – The Spoiled Heart
This novel tells two parallel stories about a working-class Sikh British man named Nayan, as well as his family. In the first, he’s a dedicated union man running for the leadership of his union. And in the second, he navigates his personal life in the context of finding new love after the tragic death of his child and his mother in a fire.
Both stories are interesting, and both involve multiple twists and surprises.
In the union leadership election, we see all the complexities of the relations between race and class in the working-class world. Nayan’s opponent is a much younger black woman from an educated and wealthy family who works as the union’s new DEI director. She brings new ideas to the table, but she filters them through an unfortunate identitarian lens. The campaign gets personal and acrimonious.
In his personal life, we follow Nayan through the aftermath of the fire, a divorce, and a new relationship with a local woman. And then it all erupts in the most surprising of ways.
I won’t say more than that, given the high potential for spoilers. But I will say that the story is compelling and tough to put down. Every time I picked up this book, I had to read at least 50 pages. Sahota captures a slice of working-class life we rarely see, and he draws deep insights from it.
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