Welcome to the May edition of the reading list! This month I’ve got three classics of leftist analysis. Along with a foray into contemporary fiction.
Enjoy, and let me know what you’ve been reading lately!
Mark R. Beissinger – Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power
Why read a study of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union? Aside from historical interest in the ways bureaucracy grew uncontrollably and stood in the way of progress in the USSR, it also looks similar to bureaucracy in the U.S. corporate world.
Imagine that!
Beissinger documents how excess bureaucracy leads to rigidity. Orgs fail to coordinate action, and factions fight over control. They have contrary goals, and individual units turn against one another. And then they ‘solve’ these problems via scientific management schemes and discipline.
In the Soviet Union, this worked in a cycle between Taylorism and anti-bureaucratic measures. And in U.S. companies, it takes the form of swings between centralized work dominated by executives and decentralized work dominated by middle managers.
It also explains much of the instability we see in Soviet history. The USSR toggled back and forth between technological utopia and disciplinary mechanisms.
Lizabeth Cohen – Making a New Deal
Cohen studies the experiences of working class people in 1920s and 1930s Chicago as a window into U.S. class politics in the New Deal years. What turned workers from largely apolitical and non-militant stances into a key part of the New Deal Democratic coalition?
As Cohen tells it, their culture contributed heavily to the transition. Politicians mattered, as did CIO organizers. But so did the ways these workers viewed movies and related to ethnic mutual benefit societies.
And she makes her case well, though it’s difficult to tease out cause from effect.
Cohen contrasts how ethnic communities came together in cross-class alliances in the 1920s to the ways they related to New Deal programs in the 30s. In the former case, they staved off attempts to create a homogenized American culture, preferring local movie theaters and ‘mom and pop’ stores to national brands. But in the latter, they jumped into the Democratic Party as they were put together in CIO unions and benefited from the Democratic program.
Ideologically, Cohen reads workers as ‘moral capitalists,’ or as people committed to the moral view that companies should provide their workers with a good living. Fundamentally, they were committed to social democratic class compromise rather than to any revolutionary vision.
Indeed, and this remains a key challenge for the left.
Matt Haig – The Midnight Library
This book follows Nora, a woman suspended between life and death after a suicide attempt, gifted with the ability to play out new scenarios for her life. She can live out a life where she became an Olympic swimmer, a glaciologist, and an animal shelter worker, among other possibilities.
Though it’s not the most original plot, Haig plays it well. He transforms Nora into a complex, compelling character. And as she reaches her (honestly, not too surprising) resolution, she learns lessons along the way. Lessons she could pass to all of us.
I read this book as a break between Gore Vidal novels. And it turned into a welcome break. And though the ending is quite predictable, I found the journey worth taking.
Robin D. G. Kelley – Race Rebels
Kelley tells a history of working class black Americans that goes beyond formal institutions like unions and civil rights orgs. In that sense, he takes up a project similar to Cohen. But he focuses on black Americans. He reminds us that most resistance – everything from work slowdowns to rent strikes to talking back to a bus driver – take place outside of “official” orgs.
This book is at its best when Kelley analyzes resistance on public transit, in pop culture, and in international solidarity. What many would interpret as ‘lashing out,’ Kelley ties to the broader context of the racist aggression many black working-class Americans face. And black Americans often led the way in, for example, solidarity in the Spanish Civil War.
Kelley plausibly argues, further, that obstacles to interracial activism is often less about ‘lack of class consciousness.’ Rather, it’s about the racialized nature of the class consciousness workers do possess. Due to this, white workers and black workers miss their common interests, even when they do think of themselves as a class.
Things go less well for Kelley in the places where he appears to argue that hidden resistance is somehow a unique property of black workers. This feeds into the unfortunate view, now common in ethnic studies (and sometimes even political science!) programs, that marginalized groups hold special forms of class consciousness inaccessible to white workers. That’s quite untrue. And I think workers of every demographic group probably participate in hidden resistance of some kind.
Rebecca Solnit – A Paradise Built in Hell
Solnit travels the U.S. (and Mexico) looking at how people respond to disaster. She covers everything from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire to the nightmare of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 New Orleans.
She finds that, contrary to the narrative of ‘elite panic’ wherein elites posit that poor or working-class people respond poorly, she finds that people respond quite well. They create communities of care and non-hierarchical forms of mutual aid. Even in horrific circumstances.
I think Solnit is basically right about this, and the sociological evidence agrees with her.
That said, she tends to romanticize the behavior of ordinary people during disasters. And she seems to think, unrealistically, that we could transfer this behavior to normal times via something like ‘consciousness raising.’
In that regard, Solnit’s book has roughly the same pluses and minuses of, say, David Graeber’s work. But she’s probably a better writer than Graeber. In other words, she paints a picture of a nice society. But she seems to have few answers for how to get there, aside from mutual aid orgs or ineffective non-profits.
