Recent Reads 7.9.2023

 Thoughts on Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper’s “The War on Neighborhoods”

 

This is a Chicago based book, so I am a little biased in that the streets and neighborhoods the authors cover are familiar streets. Chicago is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, and some of the neighborhoods, like Lawndale featured here, have vast disparities in all sorts of resident outcomes compared to other neighborhoods. If you look at a map showing cancer rates or a map showing shootings, you’ll see the same things. There are bad outcomes in the south and west sides and comparably better outcomes in the north and a lot of the southwest sides. This is largely racially coded as the only public investment that goes into the neighborhoods are in policing and incarceration. It’s a problem that has all sorts of policy decisions at its root and has continued through to today.

 

Thoughts on Malm’s “Fighting in a World on Fire.”

This is an interesting text because it is a children’s adaptation of Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” which is not something you see every day. It’s a manifesto for ecoterrorism for kids. I know there’s a severe problem with climate change, but I’m afraid this is a wrong path. It puts people at great personal danger both in terms of in the act but also through the incredibly overzealous charging from governments which exist to protect capital and the status quo. You can try to be a Ghandhi or King, but you know what happened to both of those men? The same thing that happened to numbers of others who have names we don’t remember. However, I am torn because we do have these problems and it doesn’t seem as if the current regime in power or the protest movements that exist will move the needle before it is too late (is it already too late?). The whole thing made me think of the Children of Kali, from Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. There they seemed like a necessary evil – but that was fiction. I often feel like the agglomeration of evidence for climate change will make its existence and the need to do something quite obvious, but then I read the comments and there are so many willfully disengaging with the truth or making excuses for inaction. We do need large governmental and corporate action at the global level, and any one individual feels powerless in the face of the existing half measures. Malm and company understand that urgency, but ultimately, I don’t know where best to channel that energy.

 

Thoughts on Fredrick Harry Pitts’ “Value.”

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting with this text. I think I wanted a more cut and dried history of value from labor theory of value to the marginalists. That is more or less in here, but it felt like it got more esoteric to me, and less grounded in exchange. I mean, there’s not a single equation in the text, not a one. It’s a short text and was worthwhile but didn’t resolve anything for me. Instead of a brief survey it is more a starting point of an argument. Heck, the last paragraph begins with the idea that value is still up for grabs (134), so there’s always something more to learn.

 

Thoughts om Nancy Fraser’s “Cannibal Capitalism”

This is the first book I’ve read by Fraser, and I think I read it at the right time. I had just read Delong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which was a decent history of the past 150 years but was too optimistic about the future – especially in ignoring climate change. Fraser’s text was a good counterpoint to that, in showing the challenges we face, and that the current political and economic system that we have, and which delivered it, is not up to the task of solving the problems it created. Will we be able to deliver on the promise of reorganization before it is too late though? I am skeptical but would like to be surprised.

 

On Robert Bevan’s “Monumental Lies”

This is a good examination of the controversy about statues and what they mean and how we should deal with them. The problem is that there is a huge chunk in the middle that is more about architecture. This large section felt like it should be part of a related but separate project – or maybe that’ more my USA-centric parochialism showing in that I am less concerned about the legacy of fascist architecture in Italy than I am about the Confederate statues in the US or the honoring of people who held other people as property (and got rich from that trade).