Nexus

I recently read "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari. My friend Dan recommended it, and I can see why: it's an intriguing book, bursting with knowledge, analysis, theories and predictions. The author is a professional historian, and the book liberally cites historical examples, but the book is more interested in describing how society works as a system: the parameters, the choices and limits available to us, how technological developments have opened or closed doors in the past and how they might change in the future.

 

 

Looking back, this kind of feels like two books to me. The first third looks at the history of "information networks" from the dawn of our species through the present day. This is a very broad but very vital topic: how ideas are generated, debated, accepted, spread, and how they affect us as individuals, groups and nations. The second two thirds focus on the impact of computers in general and AI in particular, sounding an alarm for the potentially existential threats they pose to our way of life. I found the first section extremely compelling and convincing, the latter part less so.

It's hard to summarize the whole book in a blog post, but my primary take-away of his argument is that, while we tend to think of "information" as reflecting reality, it doesn't necessarily have any connection to reality. "Information" is just data or thoughts, which could be true or misleading or false or fictional. Nonetheless, despite not necessarily being true information does have a profound impact on our entire lives. Concepts like "money" are purely human inventions that don't reflect natural law, yet the shared ideas we have about "money" control so many aspects of our lives. In fact, the most powerful forces in our history have essentially been myths and stories we tell ourselves: about religion, race, nations on the macro level; love, friendship, rivalry, heroism on the micro level.

I'll note early on my biggest criticism of the book, that some of the language feels a bit shifty. Harari calls this out in particular: he writes a lot about "information" but acknowledges that this word means something different to a biologist, a historian, a journalist, a computer scientist, and so on. I think his personal definition is carefully crafted and fit to purpose, but I get the nagging feeling that there's some semantic sleight-of-hand in how he uses it throughout the book.

Somewhat similarly, he writes a lot about "dictatorship" in contrast with "democracy," but he seems to basically define "democracy" as "a good government." He explicitly says that a democracy is not about majority rule, which I think is insane. In my opinion, you can have dictatorships that protect minority rights, or democracies that do not protect minority rights, but he seems to think that any system that protects minority rights is automatically democratic. He really should use different terms for what he's talking about instead of slapping significantly different meanings on well-established words. (It's wild that he defined "populist" and traces back the etymology but never does this for "democracy.")

Later on he somewhat snippily writes that he doesn't want to create neologisms so he insists on using common words. Which, fine, that's his choice. But I don't think you get to do that and then complain about how people are misunderstanding or misinterpreting your argument, when you're using common words to mean something different from how most people understand them. I vastly prefer Piketty's approach, using a neutral word like "proprietarian" that he carefully defines and then can usefully examine in his work, sidestepping the confusing baggage that comes with words like "liberal" or "capitalist" (or "democrat").

But those complaints about words aside, I think Harari's big argument is very correct and is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately, paralleling some significant changes in my own thinking over my life. When I was a baby libertarian in my late teens and early twenties, I whole-heartedly agreed with statements like "The solution to hate speech is more speech." As I've grown older and observed how things actually work in the real world, and how things have worked in the past, I've come to see that this isn't true at all: adding more voices does not automatically, consistently or reliably neutralize the harm generated by hate speech.

Prior to reading this book, I've tended to think that this is a symptom of the modern world, where the sheer volume of information is far too much for us to properly inspect and interrogate. We have enough time to read 100 opinions when rapidly scrolling a social media feed, and won't click on any of the articles they link to, let alone follow up on those articles' primary sources (if any). So we early believe the lies, spins, misrepresentations and exaggerations we encounter in our informational ecosystem. Why? We're biologically conditioned with a tendency to latch on to the first thing we hear as "true" and become skeptical of subsequent arguments or evidence against our previously received beliefs.

As Harari shows, though, the spread and persistence of misinformation isn't at all a modern phenomenon. One especially compelling example he gives is the history of witch hunts in Europe. In the medieval era, belief in witches was very local and varied a great deal from one community to the next: each village had their own folklore about witches, maybe viewing them as a mixture of good and bad: sometimes bringing rain, sometimes killing goats, sometimes mixing love potions. Late in the medieval era, the official Catholic church doctrine was that belief in witches was a superstition, and good Christians should trust in God rather than worry about magical neighbors. That changed when Heinrich Kramer, a man with bizarre sexual and misogynistic hang-ups, rolled into the Alps denouncing particular women for having sex with Satan and stealing men's genitalia. He was shut down by local secular and church authorities. He left town, got access to a printing press, and printed up thousands of copies of the Malleus Maleficarum, which gave lurid and shocking details about a supposed global conspiracy of secret witches who had infiltrated every village and carried out horrific crimes against children. This took off like wildfire and led to centuries of torture and execution of innocent people This is all very similar to QAnon, Pizzagate, and trans panics today. An individual can write a compelling and completely false narrative and set off a global campaign of hate and violence, completely deaf to the litany of evidence against these lies. Whether in the 1600s or the 2000s, having more information didn't bring the world closer to truth or solve problems, it led to immense misery and evil.

The conventional view of the printing press is that it broke the Catholic church's religious stranglehold on information and enabled the development of the Scientific Method, allowing people to freely publish and share their ideas. There is some truth in this, but it's overstated. Copernicus's groundbreaking book on the heliocentric system failed to sell its initial run of 1000 copies, and has been called "The worst seller of all time." Meanwhile, the Malleus Maleficarum instantly sold through multiple runs and continued to be a best-seller for centuries. The fact that Copernicus's book was more true than Kramer's did nothing to increase its popularity or reception or impact on the world.

Instead of unfettered access to information, Harari credits the Scientific Method to the creation of institutions with a capacity for self-correction. This was very different from the Catholic Church, which was (and is!) forced by its own doctrine to deny any error. Interestingly, Harari points out that most of the founders of the scientific revolution did not hail from universities, either. Instead, they were an information network of royal societies, independent researchers, journals and so on. The key difference here was that information was peer-reviewed: people wouldn't just say "Trust me," but would share their theories, experiments and data as well as their conclusions to their colleagues, who would look for errors, omissions or alternative explanations. And if an error later was discovered, journals would publicize the error, making corrections to the past record rather than cover it up or ignore it. While this seems like it would weaken the reliability of a source, it ends up building trust in the long run: the reality is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are fallible, and by embracing this self-correcting system we can move in the direction of greater truth, not merely the most compelling story.

Fundamentally, Nexus is arguing against what it calls the "naive" view of information, which is basically "More information will reveal the truth, and the truth will produce order and power." This idea is that more information is always good, because true and useful information will drown out the bad and lead to a better understanding of how the world works. Again, this view is easily disproven by history. One alternate view is what Harari calls the "populist" view, which essentially denies that an eternal "truth" exists at all, and equates information with power. Controlling the production and flow of information will produce power, which in the "populist" view is implicitly good in its own right.

Taken from another angle, Harari thinks that there is a "truth" which reflects "reality", but "information" doesn't have any intrinsic relationship to truth. Some information truly reflects reality, other information distorts reality. The consistent effect of information is that it connects - when we tell stories to each other, we grow more connected, and I can persuade you of my ideas and convince you to act in a certain way, or you can make me feel a kinship with you and act for your benefit. There is an even larger class of information that contributes to what he calls an "intersubjective reality". This is information that exists on its own independent of an underlying physical reality. Think of story-telling: you might make up an impressive work of fiction, someone else might write fan-fiction based on your world, a critic might write a review of your fiction summarizing what happens in it, a fan would argue that a character should have made a different choice than they actually did. You end up with this entire ecosphere of carefully-constructed and internally-consistent thoughts about an idea that doesn't have an underlying reality. You, the critic, and the fan are all choosing to participate in a shared intersubjective reality.

There is actually some evolutionary advantage to our ability to create and share stories. We talk about how our fight-or-flight instincts are biologically inherited from our ancestors who needed to quickly react to the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. Harari brings up the interesting point that our neanderthal and sapiens forefathers had a similar evolutionary advantage around their ability to cooperate in teams. You can have a small band of, say, chimpanzees or bonobos that may cooperate against another band, but you never see chimpanzee communities of hundreds or thousands. You can get bands of that many humans, though, thanks to their ability to share stories and ideas. These ideas may be built around myths, concepts of extended kinship, oral traditions of prior hardships and victories.

To this day we have a very strong reaction to all sorts of "primitive" stories: boy-meets-girl, good-man-beats-bad-man, sibling-rivalry, etc. These stories gave evolutionarily beneficial advantages in winning mates, having children, taking territory and defeating enemies. Today, we still strongly respond to those stories; however, in the same way that our daily lives have many more encounters with rude bicyclists than with saber-toothed tigers, we're far more likely to need to navigate an opaque bureaucracy than to kill a rival chieftain. But we don't have a gut-level appreciation for stories about bureaucracies in the same way we appreciate action or romance stories. And our brains don't retain information about bureaucracies very well: we can remember bible stories about rivalries and murder and who fathered who, but we are terrible at remembering lists of sewage inspection reports or NGO organization charts or certification requirements.

As an aside, this observation reminds me of William Bernstein, who writes about how man is a story-telling animal. We respond much more strongly to stories than we do to data, which was evolutionarily adaptive in the past (we won't eat the red berries because someone told us that they're poisonous) but gets us into all sorts of trouble today (we listen to our friend who says investing in bitcoin is safer than US Treasuries). Interestingly I think this observation is from his finance book The Four Pillars of Investing and not one of his history books, although the observation seems even more relevant to history. But Bernstein is a trained neurologist, has a keen understanding of how our biological makeup and mental hardware impacts our daily lives and how we organize as a society.

Harari is a big fan of the Scientific Method, as is Bernstein (in The Birth of Plenty), but neither writer is too rose-tinted. One thing I've heard in the past that Nexus backs up is that individual scientists almost never change their mind, even when faced with persuasive empirical evidence challenging their prior beliefs. Scientists are humans, with egos and prejudices and concerned about maintaining their prestige and positions. When science advances, it isn't like everyone reads a journal and changes their mind; it's that the old guard continues believing the old thing but eventually dies off, and is replaced by a new generation that grew up being persuaded by the better, new belief. Change is measured in decades, not months or years.

Which is fine, if that's how it works, but feels discouraging when considering the problems we face today. We may not have decades to react to crises like climate change or the subversion of democracy. And "decades" is specifically for the class of professional scientists who pay attention to evidence for a career; it's even less likely that the populace as a whole will change their mind to a truer, more correct belief. I mean, Newtonian physics was disproven something like 120 years ago, yet we still learn it in school and most of us follow it in daily life; those of us who have finished high school are vaguely aware of relativity, and have probably heard of string theory but don't really understand it.

All to say that, I don't think science can save us from urgent wide-spread problems. It's slow, and while it can influence the elites it can't change the mind of the masses. Harari seems to suggest that the real key is trust. If we're a society that trusts scientists, because we know they peer-review their work and admit mistakes and are continually improving, we may accept their pronouncements even if we personally don't have the time or inclination to check all their work. But if we don't trust scientists, we lose the benefits of science: longevity, productivity and affluence.

Science is ultimately about truth, but as Harari keeps noting, truth isn't the end-all and be-all: a society with access to truth does have some advantages (it can keep its citizens healthier and produce more reliable military equipment), but it is not guaranteed to triumph over a society with less devotion to the truth. Harari sees Order and Truth as two separate pillars upon which societies are built. You need both of these. Without truth you can't survive: you'll have feces in the water supply, desolate cropland with the wrong grains planted in the wrong season, walking on foot because you don't have motors. Think of something like the Great Leap Forward in China, which upended scientific truths and led to internal misery and the stunting of external power. (In a surprising coincidence, Nexus devotes a few paragraphs to Trofim Lysenko, who I just wrote about in my last post: he was a charlatan who convinced Stalin that genetics was bogus and led the USSR down a path that led to the evisceration of its sciences and widespread man-made famines.)

But you also need order in a society. If you don't have order, then you have anarchy, the collapse of the bureaucracy and the inability to function. Again, you can have bad sewage, because nobody is preventing others from poisoning the water supply; crops are desolate, because farmers know bandits will take any crops they grow, walking on foot because nobody is organizing the factory which makes motors. Between truth and order, you can make a convincing argument that order is the more important factor. Stalin was a moral nightmare, his internal terror was horrific to truth, which caused huge real problems like massive losses in the Red Army; and yet, the system was incredibly stable. Nobody dared challenge Stalin despite his many failures, the USSR endured for multiple generations and had a real shot at total world domination. Or consider the Catholic Church: it has consistently prioritized order over truth, defending bad ideas like the geocentric nature of the universe, disastrous crusades and self-destructive inquisitions; and yet it has lasted for two thousand years, far longer than the School of Athens, the League of Nations or the Royal Academy of Sciences.

In an ideal world, of course, you would balance these two. Those of us in the West will generally push for the primacy of Truth, but still recognize Order as an essential ingredient. There may be times when this requires tough choices, as in the 1960s with widespread dissent and protest against the Vietnam War and racial injustice. One thing I really like about Harari is that, like Piketty and unlike Marx, he foregrounds the importance of choice. Order doesn't inevitably triumph over Truth, nor Truth over Order; multiple stable configurations exist, we can help shape the kind of society we live in, and we should also recognize that other societies may follow other paths, with results that are different from ours and may be stronger or weaker than us.

Going back to the various views of information, Harari has rejected the naive view that information leads to truth, and truth leads to wisdom and power. He also rejects the simplistic populist view that there is no truth or wisdom, that information directly leads to power. His view is that information produces both truth and order. Truth and order, in tandem, generate power. Separately, truth also leads to wisdom. Wisdom relies on truth, but power does not require wisdom. It's an interesting view; I think I'll need to sit with it a while longer to digest and decide if I actually agree with it, but it does feel useful to me.

Phew! All of the above thoughts and reactions are for the first third of the book, which is mostly teeing up the second two-thirds. (There's a lot more I didn't get into in this post, like how advances in information technology enabled large-scale democracies for the first time, the historical development of the bureaucracy, or the 20th-century conflicts between democracy and totalitarianism.) I'm less enthused by the last 2/3 of the book which is mostly about the threat posed by AI.

Examining my own reaction, I think I have a knee-jerk skepticism. Overall I find his arguments persuasive but annoying. I am not at all an apologist for or proponent of AI, but I've been in the camp that views AI as the latest graduated step in advancing technology, whereas Harari sees it as fundamentally different from prior technologies. His point is that algorithms in general and AI in particular are agenic: they can actually take action. Up until now technology has merely augmented human decision-making. A human needs to consult a book, then execute the action described by the book; a human is in the loop, so there's an opportunity to stop and question the book's instructions before carrying them out. But a computer program can, say, deny credit card applications or impose a prison sentence or alter the outflow rate at a sewage treatment facility without requiring any human intervention. Two programs can directly communicate with one another in a way that two books or two TV shows could not.

In another interesting little coincidence, I just recently (re?-)watched The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock. Many parts of that movie felt like they were in strong conversation with Nexus. For example, in one scene her character Angela Bennett is trying to get back into her hotel room, but the clerk tells her, "The computer says that Angela Bennett checked out two days ago." She insists, "No, I'm Angela Bennett, and I didn't check out, I'm standing right here!" but the clerk refuses to engage with her and moves on to the next person. Even thirty years ago we had offloaded our decision-making to the computer, so what's different now? The fact that there won't even be a clerk in the future: just touchless entry at the door, with nobody to hear your complaint or the ability to override the system. And the ubiquity of the system: in The Net, human hackers had singled out Angela Bennett in particular (much like Will Smith's character in Enemy of the State); but in the future, AI might target entire classes of people: the sick, or anyone with a criminal record, or humanity as a whole.

The triumph of AI isn't inevitable: it requires us choosing to give it control. But if we do make that choice, we may find it impossible to reverse. We can't appeal to AI's mercy or wait for it to fall asleep. Harari repeatedly refers to AI as not just "Artificial Intelligence" but "Alien Intelligence": it isn't that it thinks like a human but more rapidly, it "thinks" in a completely different way from us. For well over a decade now AI has been a black box: we can't understand how it makes its decisions, only watch the final choice it makes. All this adds up to a very urgent and potentially deadly situation.

Harari does offer some suggestions for how to address the threat posed by AI, which I do appreciate. It's very annoying when books or articles lay out doom-and-gloom scenarios without any suggested solutions. The proposals in Nexus tend to be pretty narrow and technical. They include things like keeping humans in the loop, requiring us to sign off on decisions made by AI; along with this, AI needs to explain its reasoning. Harari also muses about banning or at least prominently labeling all bots and generated content online: we waste far too much mental energy arguing against bots, and the more we engage with them the better they get to know us and the more likely they are to persuade us.

As modest as these proposals seem, he acknowledges that they still seem unlikely to be implemented. In the US they would require legislative action, which is incredibly difficult these days, and even more so when the majority party is (perhaps temporarily) benefiting from AI support.

One of my annoyances with this book is how Harari stumbles into what I think of as terminal pundit brain, the impulse to treat political factions as equivalent. He writes things like "Both parties are losing the ability to communicate or even agree on basic facts like who won the 2020 elections." It's insane to act like the Democratic party is equally to blame for January 6 and election denialism! Elsewhere, though, he does acknowledge the reality of the situation, making a cogent abservation about the abrupt transformation of right-leaning parties. Historically the conservative party has, following Edmund Burke, argued for cautious, slow and gradual change, while the progressive party has argued for faster and more ambitious change. But in the last decade or so, Trump's Republican party along with parties abroad like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Duterte in the Philipines have transformed into radical parties that seek to overthrow the status quo: getting rid of bureaucracies, axing the separation of powers, imposing new economic systems, and broadly and rapidly changing social relations.

This is a surprising change on its own, but Harari notes that this has also thrust the traditional left-leaning progressive party like the US's Democratic party into the unlikely role of the defender of the status quo. They aren't necessarily adopting more conservative positions, but they do want to retain the overall democratic system. While Harari doesn't dig into this aspect much further, it does really resonate to me. I often feel like the Democratic party insists on bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's very frustrating to hear, say, Chuck Schumer repeat the tired paeans to bipartisan cooperation and consensus, when the house is burning down behind him. I do feel a bit more sympathy for him when I think of how he wants to keep a robust pluralistic democracy running, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that his actions will help bring that about. My overall pessimistic feeling has been that that era is just over now, and while a populist left may be less stable than a broad-based democratic left or broad-based democratic right, it's the best option available to us now.

I think that Piketty is much more useful in this area than Harari. If we're going to marshal the resources to actually address climate change and similar existential issues, we need to retake democratic control of our wealth, which in practical terms means taxing the rich and limiting the influence of money in our politics. It's no coincidence that the ascendant conservative faction tearing down institutional systems is the faction aligned with the wealthy.

Harari points to the breakdown in political and social cohesion in the US. During the 60s the country was wracked by big divisions over civil rights, women's rights, war in Vietnam, and other points of friction. The entire Western world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. And yet the system still functioned pretty well. The Civil Rights Act was supported by majorities in both parties, the Nixon administration broke every norm of the justice system yet ultimately abided by court order. The fragile and messy democratic West eventually came through this period and triumphed over the more order-orientated USSR. Today, there's no bipartisanship, not a shared set of beliefs in facts let alone ideology, a lack of trust not just in specific bureaucracies like the CDC or the FBI but overall institutions like science and government as a whole, as well as a rejection of core structural decisions like the separation of powers.

Harari admits that he doesn't know what the reason is for this breakdown in consensus that has occurred over the last decade or so, but he implies that there's at least a chance it's the impact of alien intelligence: shrill political bots driving outrage on social media, algorithms steering individuals into more siloed media environments, and so on. Personally, though, I think you can draw a straight line from Newt Gingrich giving speeches to an empty House of Representatives in 1984 through to Donald Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters in 2025. There's a pundit-brain temptation for symmetry and a refusal to acknowledge that one faction just wants power and doesn't have qualms about how to get it or keep it.

Again, there's a lot of stuff in this book that I found valuable which I haven't unpacked in this post. I should mention that Harari does a terrific job at examining Facebook's culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar and YouTube's role in bringing right-wing nationalist parties to power in 2016. That's all stuff I'd heard before (and lived through!), but it's really helpful to view as a unified trend and not isolated phenomena. But once more, I think Harari's instinct towards bipartisanship blunts the potential insights he could have. He views the algorithmic pull towards outrage in purely capitalist terms, as angrier people will interact more with content, not only generating direct ad revenue but also providing Facebook and Google with additional data they can store to make their products more powerful. But he skips over the fateful Peter Thiel-led decision to axe the human team running the Facebook News team in favor of the algorithm in the first place. Likewise, he doesn't mention how the GOP House accused YouTube of left-leaning bias and pushed for a more "neutral" algorithm, which in practice meant less truthful content and more outrageous content. Harari argues that we have collectively given too much power to the machine; in my view, a specific faction has led that charge, and is benefiting the most from the consequences.

I should also mention that Nexus is an extremely readable book. It looks a bit long, but I flew through the whole thing in just a few days. The language is very readable, each section is just a few pages long and makes a clear and cogent point. For all my complaints, I think Harari does an excellent job at noting what parts of the book are well-established facts, which are well-supported inferences, which are controversial statements, and what are merely speculative scenarios.

Overall I think I'd recommend this book to others. I think the first section is fantastic, the latter two are arguably even more important but less fun. I am curious to check out Harari's earlier books, it sounds like he's been working in adjacent areas for a while. I like his mix of concrete history and abstract systemic theorizing, and am curious what other tools he has come up with.

Democracy (Yeah You Know Me)

As usual, the 2024 California ballot is a long one! I usually know out the gate how I'll be voting in the political races, but the propositions and measures usually take a bit more research. For future reference, here is how I am casting my vote!

President and Vice President: Kamala D. Harris and Tim Walz

Senator: Adam B. Schiff (ugh)

Senator Again For Some Reason: Adam B. Schiff (still ugh)

US Representative: Kevin Mullin

State Senator: Josh Becker

Assembly Member: Diane Papan

San Mateo County Board of Education: Maurice Goodman

Proposition 2 (bonds for schools): Yes

Proposition 3 (constitutional right to gay marriage): Yes

Proposition 4 (bonds for water projects): Yes

Proposition 5 (lowers required local votes for housing bonds to 55%): Yes

Proposition 6 (abolish forced labor in prisons): Yes

Proposition 32 (raise minimum wage): Yes

Proposition 33 (allows local rent control): Yes

Proposition 34 (revenge for Prop 33): No

Proposition 35 (medi-cal funding): No (I actually like what this would do, but it should be handled by the legislature, not a proposition)

Proposition 36 (repeal Prop 47, re-felonize most thefts): No

Measure J (Millbrae elementary school bond funding): Yes

Measure FF (Expand city council term limits from 2 consecutive to 3 consecutive): No

I have increasingly mixed feelings on our top-two primary/election system. I feel like early on it was really effective for shaking up ineffective but entrenched Democratic incumbents, and let to much more dynamic and competitive elections. In recent years, though, at least at the statewide level, the (usually centrist) Democrats have come up with an effective playbook of elevating marginal Republican candidates who can't win in a general election, so they can coast to an easy victory instead of competing against another Democrat who has a shot. The Harris/Sanchez and Feinstein/DeLeon races were actually interesting, while Schiff/Garvey is not. I increasingly think that ranked-choice with instant runoff is the way to go.

For better or worse, the fall elections can be simplified quite a bit thanks to candidates running unopposed in the first round or (for some races) a candidate winning by a huge margin and skipping the "runoff". Just a reminder to vote in every election to make sure that your vote actually counts, and to see the candidate(s) you'd like to see!

I'm taking a bit of a chill-pill in this election on my standard "vote No on Bonds" principle. I don't really have a great reason for that, more just a general feeling that these are worthy enough projects to overcome my dislike of bonds.

I am feeling a slight amount of relief at casting my vote early, but obviously still have plenty of angst to spare between now and the election. Living in California and the Bay Area, there aren't many competitive races or measures to focus on. If you're like me and have some extra bucks that you'd like to send to a good political cause, I recently started using Oath. This gives a good way to find down-ballot races throughout the country, races that are spending thousands instead of millions of dollars and where your donations can make an outsized impact. They have a pretty nice interface where you can filter by causes you're most passionate about (like climate change, gun safety, mental health, etc.) and specific states. You can donate to specific candidates, which I generally like more than giving to committees and organizations. (The great thing about Oath is that they only focus on competitive elections, so you aren't tempted to waste your money on high-profile but hopeless challengers to, like, Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Green.) And unlike a lot of other platforms, Oath doesn't share your email address with the candidates, which helps cut down on inbox spam.

So, yeah! I have lots of Thoughts and Feelings about this election, but probably nothing that would surprise long-term readers, so I may or may not write that up in a separate post. I hope everyone stays safe & practices good self-care during this intense time!

Vote This Way

As is tradition, here are the items on the ballot and how I will be voting for them!

 

President of the United States: Joseph R. Biden Jr.

County Committee: James Hsu Coleman, Jess Hudson, Sandra Lang, David Burruto

United States Senator Take 1: Katie Porter

United States Senator Take 2: Katie Porter

U. S. Representative: Kevin Mullin

State Senator: Josh Becker

State Assembly: Diane Papan

Judge of Superior Court: Sarah Burdick

County Board of Supervisors: Jackie Speier

Proposition 1: Yes

Senator is probably the most challenging item for me. My heart is truly torn between Barbara Lee, who has been a hero of mine for decades, and Katie Porter, one of my favorite current members of Congress. I had been assuming that one of them would make it to the November election, but it currently looks like Steve Garvey may make the cut (as Schiff follows Newsom's lead in elevating a Republican). Porter seems to have the better chance of advancing, so I Choose Her. I love the idea of doubling the Elizabeth Warren Caucus in the Senate.

I'm also a little torn on Proposition 1. Long-time readers will remember that, when in doubt, I have two rules of thumb when it comes to propositions. Vote "Yes" on taxes and "No" on bonds; and vote "Yes" on legislature-initiated propositions and "No" on voter-initiated propositions. Well, this one is a legislature-initiated bond. As with every bond we ever vote on, it's for a good cause: this time, treating mental illness. And as with all of these bonds, it will be funded by paying wealthy people tax-free interest for decades to come, taxing the working poor and transferring wealth up the chain. Literally everybody I can find has endorsed it, so I'll hold my nose and vote "Yes" while I continue to sputter about the irresponsibility of relying on bonds to fund continuing programs.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, All That Is Holy Is Profaned

I've enjoyed China Mieville's fiction for some time, and recently have started digging into his non-fiction work as well. He is a dedicated socialist, and his nonfiction seems particularly interested in the history of communism and how we might relate to it today. October was a fantastic novelistic (but completely historical) retelling of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. More recently I finished "A Spectre, Haunting", which is a critical analysis of The Communist Manifesto.

 

I kind of laughed at myself while reading this; in some ways it feels like penance for or a corrective to my recent reading of the very pro-free-trade books of William Bernstein that I was absorbing last year. There's a fun little bit of synchronicity in these books. Bernstein identifies 1820 as roughly the point where the modern economy of plentiful increase began, and The Communist Manifesto was written just a few decades after that, as people were grappling with the enormous shifts that had occurred within their lifetime. It seems like Marx and Bernstein are writing about the same things, but Bernstein takes the perspective of the capitalist bourgeoisie while Marx and Engels argue from the perspective of the proletariat.

I'm not sure if I've ever read The Communist Manifesto before. I own a pocket copy, which I bought back in the 1990s. I definitely wouldn't have identified as a leftist at that time; I was a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party. But I think I picked it up as a sort of vaguely defiant pro-free-speech act, exercising my right to consume information that might be considered dangerous and that I didn't agree with. A Spectre, Haunting includes as an appendix the complete text of the Communist Manifesto, and other than the beginning and the end it didn't seem familiar at all to me, so I suspect I just bought the book to have on my bookshelf and never actually read it.

There have been many translations of the Manifesto over the years, from its original German into almost every other language. The first English translation came in the 1850s, but this book uses a preferred translation from 1888, with some very minor noted tweaks. It also includes several introductions from Marx and Engels for subsequent editions; significantly, in these introductions they point out areas where the Manifesto had become outdated. Marxists often have a reputation of being dogmatic and inflexible, and I thought it was cool that the original authors were basically like, "Yeah, turns out we were wrong about this specific point, you can disregard it." But they make the astute point that the Manifesto itself has now entered history, and it would be wrong to modify it; in doing so, they avoid the revisionism that would later define Stalin and subsequent Soviet chicanery.

A Spectre, Haunting sort of circles around the Manifesto, looking at it from various perspectives and using it as a tool to look at history. Mieville writes about the specific history in which the Manifesto was written, both Marx and Engels' prior experiences and writings and the broader social and economic upheavals of the time. Interestingly, the Chartists prominently figure here - a year ago I didn't know who they were, now they're popping up in all of my books! Later chapters do section-by-section glosses of the Manifesto text, explaining references that might escape us today and analyzing what the authors are doing. Mieville also addresses the various criticisms made of the Manifesto over the years, covering both right-wing attacks on its fundamental arguments as well as left-wing concerns that it paid insufficient attention to other areas like gender, race or imperialism. The last main section of the book sort of muses on what the Manifesto means for leftists (and humans) today: which of its principles are worth holding on to, and how they might be applied to the historical context we find ourselves in in the 2020s.

My favorite part of this book was probably Mieville looking at the Manifesto as an author: analyzing what Marx is doing with language. He insists on treating the Manifesto as a manifesto: not as a scholarly treatise or a work of journalism. A manifesto seeks to stir action in its readers, and should be viewed and judged in that light. Mieville uses an analogy that I absolutely love: Imagine that, the eve before a battle, a commander is speaking to her officers. She rolls out a map and explains the features of the terrain: good sighting locations, chokepoints, marshes and fields. She points out where the enemy is located and how they will be approaching. She finishes with an exhortation: "We will fight them, and we will win!" Now, the commander is making a lot of different statements during that speech, and there are different levels of certainty and truth associated with them. She probably feels extremely confident that the terrain is as she describes. She believes that her intelligence regarding enemy movement is accurate, but she also knows that intelligence can be flawed, and the actual movement tomorrow may be different. And while she projects confidence in victory, she privately may have reservations. But, we really shouldn't judge her negatively for saying "We will win!" - her job is to inspire her troops, and if she is effective enough at sparking fervor among her followers, that might cause them to fight harder and, yes, win.

The point is, we can't really assess the effectiveness of a pre-battle speech in the same way we would assess the effectiveness of a weather forecast. They're different forms of communication, trying to do different things, and should be judged at how well they do what they're trying to do. Throughout the book, Mieville insists that in reading the Manifesto, we should remain focused on its Manifesto-ness: trying to create change in the world, not just reporting how things are or predicting how things will be.

Similarly, Mieville admires what Marx is doing with language on an artistic level. In an early preview of internecine leftist disagreements, he recounts how one scholar has sought to broaden the application of the concept of "Revolution" in the Manifesto: besides the clear political and economic revolution, we can also revolutionize how we think as individuals and how we can remain open to new thoughts and experiences. A dissenter grouses that "Revolution" clearly has one and only one meaning, that of a political rupture, the replacement of an old regime with a new one; if you expand the definition of Revolution to encompass everything, then it means nothing. Mieville notes that, for Marx, Revolution clearly did not just have one meaning: that, in fact, in all of writing, we're expressing multiplicities of meaning through our words. "Revolution" does explicitly reference political rupture, but there's a playfulness in how Marx uses it, so it also slyly alludes to, say, the revolution of one body around another, or the movement of a cycle. Again, I like how this sort of yanks analysis from the joyless single-mindedness of stereotypically dogmatic Marxists and brings these discussions back to the messy and complex historical situations in which they occurred.

As for the Manifesto itself: It's pretty interesting, rhetorically. Marx actually spends quite a lot of time praising the bourgeoisie and the role they had recently played in overthrowing the old medieval system of monarchs and nobles. There's quite a fusion of admiration and outrage towards this class. Marx's overall thrust seems to be, "we must destroy the bourgeoisie, but on the path towards that destruction, we may occasionally ally with them." As later introductions to the Manifesto would make clear, Marx and Engels rapidly lost that sense of potential collaboration: the nascent capital class was far more terrified of empowered workers than of old nobility, and didn't hesitate to make common cause with their former lords whenever the threat of revolution started to loom.

In writing about the Manifesto, Mieville covers a good number of what feel like inside-baseball disputes: even back in the 1840s, leftists were far more passionate about denouncing and arguing against one another than in taking on the organized power of the right. A good amount of energy in The Communist Manifesto is directed towards various factions that occupy a similar space to the Communists but have different strategies or goals, like the Utopians or the so-called True Socialists. Many of these groups disappeared entirely shortly after the Manifesto's original publication, and it's weird to think that they seemed worthy of such sustained ire when nobody even remembers them now.

The name "Communist" itself is fairly explained, at length in the Manifesto (building on Engels' earlier work) and in Mieville's glosses. To put it in the most succinct form, communists believe in the community of property; in other words, the abolition of private property. This does not necessarily mean the loss of personal property, but rather, wealth-generating sources (like agricultural lands, mines, factories, and so on) must be seen as commonly owned by the society as a whole, and their fruits must accrue to the whole society, rather than the narrow band of private owners.

At the time of the Manifesto's writing, it was important to differentiate them from "Socialists". Marx and Engels later came to accept the socialist label, but at the time, "socialism" was mostly used to indicate an interest in social reform: think the temperance movement. They wanted a new term to more clearly denote that they demanded the complete dismantling of the existing free-trade property-rights regime, which could be compatible with social reforms but could not in any way accept them as substitutions.

While Mieville aptly points out Marx's inside-baseball digressions, I couldn't help but think that some of Mieville's commentary falls into this category as well. As the book goes on, there's a lot of quoting of various leftist writers, leaders and activists, introducing me to feuds that I didn't know existed and still struggle to recognize the significance of.

I think that one of Mieville's biggest goals for A Spectre, Haunting is to argue that we should still pay attention to The Communist Manifesto even though a lot of it seems to be self-evidently wrong. Communism isn't inevitable. Workers' lives haven't continually gotten worse under capitalism. We don't seem to be heading towards a post-scarcity society. The capitalists have not been forced to ally with their workers. So, why read the Manifesto? It does seem to be important as a symbol, as a point in history, stating battle lines and trying to create class consciousness. Even though Marx's confident predictions mostly failed to materialize (with some notable exceptions, like progressive income taxes and universal education), it feels like he's correctly identified the prime cleavage in the world, between the owners and the workers, and that's still the main tension at work in the world today. He does so with a decently compelling framework, depicting this as a moment in history and explaining how these tensions have driven changes in the past. He also writes with passion and force, seeking to create and instill a sense of destined revolutionary purpose.

That gets at another kind of awkward thing about the Manifesto, both as it was written and, increasingly, as it recedes into the past. On the one hand, Marx famously asserts (or, to use Mieville's framing, exhorts) the inevitability of communist triumph. The ineluctable forces will inevitably lead to the downfall of the bourgeoisie and the eternal reign of the proletariat. If it's inevitable, though, then why should I as an individual do anything? Why expose myself to hardship, discomfort, ridicule, pain, death, when it's all going to happen anyways? And now, from 175 years in the future, we ask ourselves: if it isn't inevitable, is it even possible? Or is the struggle doomed? And if it's doomed, why should I do anything?

Mieville directly addresses this. As with a lot of the, erm, "complicated" parts of the Manifesto, it can be helpful to look at what Marx and Engels wrote in their later books. And we also shouldn't necessarily take them at their word: Marx might be saying that triumph is inevitable, but if he actually, truly believed that, then he wouldn't be writing so passionately to convince people to take a stand. Once again, how he writes carries meaning, and is something we should consider along with the literal content of his prose.

This argument, and others like it, made me think a lot of religion. Growing up in Protestant churches, I've spent a lot of my life reading the Bible and reading writings about the Bible, seeking to explain it, contextualize it, apply it, to reconcile apparent contradictions, to highlight easily-missed asides. And, well, that makes me think a lot of how people write about the Manifesto: having a text that's very important to your movement, but that has a lot in it that seems wrong or irrelevant, and trying to figure out how to relate to it and how your movement as a whole should address it.

I was glad to see that Mieville directly addresses this religious aspect occasionally ascribed to the Manifesto, and a little surprised that he eventually sort of embraces it: there is a religious tinge to what Marx is doing, even though a lot of people (and, heck, Marx himself) would deny it. Religion is ultimately about faith, and it does take a certain degree of faith to hold fast to the idea of proletarian victory in the face of endless setbacks.

The book ends with some urgent words for the present day. Without directly naming them, Mieville seems to endorse a DSA style of strategy, seeing politics and parties as only one potential avenue for struggle. History has shown that workers' movements will likely be betrayed at any opportunity, and it's foolish to pin all hopes on any political organization. The movement should build power wherever it's possible. Sometimes that will mean aligning with other factions to promote the interests of the capital class, but it must do so intentionally. For historical context, Mieville points to the various reforms in England in the late 1800s that shortened the working day and abolished child labor. From one perspective, these changes benefited the capital class by making work more tolerable and reducing the fires of revolution, thus allowing them to keep their comfortable position at the top of the pyramid. But Marx and Engels still supported those movements, as they directly benefited the working class, and, incidentally, provided them with more time and energy for education, organization and action. Likewise, movements like today's "Fight for $20" don't disrupt the existing power structures and arguably legitimize the continued exploitation of marginal workers; but they're still worth pushing for, as they improve lives, make people less desperate and sustenance-driven, and, incidentally, put more dollars into working pockets that could be used to build worker power.

He also writes about the importance of breaking away from the idea of the "party line" and purity tests. For most of the time since the Manifesto was written, there's been a kind of obsession with defining what the one correct position is to take on any specific issue, and browbeating any dissenters into either embracing that position or leaving the movement. Mieville promotes the idea of a "band" rather than a "line", a range of reasonable ideas that reasonable people might have, and embracing internal discussions and debate without turning every dispute into a do-or-die ultimatum. Reading this reminded me of an old church motto that I've always loved: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity." Leftists must agree on certain core principles: the importance of peoples' needs over oligarchs' luxuries; the right of individuals to control their own destiny so long as they don't interfere with others' rights to do the same; the right of a society to govern itself; that all human being have equal worth. But some leftists might prioritize individual action over collective action, some might feel primarily motivated from spiritual feelings while others are committed atheists, some might seek political alliances while others eschew them. When we see these kind of intra-familial disagreements, we should approach them with an attitude of curiosity and humility, and engage in honest dialogue. Who knows, maybe we'll learn that our own prior beliefs were wrong; and if not, we can still remain in fellowship with our comrades so long as we agree on the big picture, while agreeing to disagree on this or that point.

Mieville sees the modern socialist movement as being too obsessed with optimism, and I realized that I'm personally guilty of that. When people tell me that they're worried a bad trend will continue or a good movement will end, I have a knee-jerk reaction to emphasize the positive and to state that we are in control of our collective destiny, and a better future is possible if enough people are willing to work for it. It is kind of cruel to berate people for not believing that things will turn out well: they have one level of mild trauma for thinking darkly of the future, likely caused by more trauma in the past where they personally saw bad outcomes, and then you're (I'm) suggesting that their reasoning is flawed and piling on more trauma. I do think it's important for us to have hope - again, why bother fighting this fight if we don't think there's a chance we can win? - but hope doesn't mean that everything will turn out the way we want in the time we'd like. We should be prepared for setbacks and backsliding, and more importantly, not dismiss those among us who warn of them.

The book ends with a kind of weird call to hate. He explains it pretty well; quoting Aristotle, he says that when you're angry at someone you wish revenge upon them, but when you hate someone you wish for them to not exist. Like many (most?) people, I think of hate as an unalloyed evil, something to be completely eliminated. Mieville argues that in order to complete the great project suggested by the Manifesto, we need to hate the evil institutions that we'll have to eliminate: the hierarchical class system, the exploitation of workers. We can't impassionately analyze and critique and offer compromises and reforms: we must see them as wrong and strive to eliminate them completely. In Marx's analysis, the bourgeoisie loathes the proletariat, but they don't completely hate them, because they need them: without the value extracted from the working class, the capitalist class would cease to exist. So they can deride their manners and fashions and poverty, but not seek to eliminate them. In the other direction, though, the proletariat can absolutely hate the capitalists: they're the ones doing the work, and could get along just fine without their profits being extracted. And so they're free to push for the complete elimination of the other class. They have nothing to lose but their chains.

That was sort of an odd note to end the book on, which I guess is in keeping with the book as a whole. It's varied and challenging, thoughtfully provocative and grounded, straddling history and the present. I left it with a much better understanding of what actually is and isn't in the Manifesto, a better appreciation for Marx's rhetoric, and a much better context into the endless internecine feuds within the Left. It feels weird to keep bouncing between pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist books, but I like to think that this helps keep my mind sharp and my politics actively engaged.

Send Luxemburg On Over

I don't remember now where I first heard of Rosa Luxemburg. It might have been from one of China Mieville's lists, or a reference from Jeremy Brecher or one of my other readings on labor movements. The specific book I've been trying to track down is "The Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions", but I haven't had luck securing a copy yet. I did, however, find a cool graphic novel biography appropriately titled Red Rosa. Since I don't know much about her life, I thought it would be worth picking up.

 

The book reminds me a lot of "Eugene V. Debs". Both are graphic novel biographies of prominent leftist figures who were active from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. They both give pretty comprehensive overviews of their subjects' entire lives, include significant excerpts from their writings and speeches, and give brief introductions to the many other figures in their orbits. There are some strong parallels between their lives, despite living in separate hemispheres and having pretty different backgrounds. Both were active in starting socialist parties, both were deeply committed to grass-roots democracy, both were passionate pacifists who were imprisoned during World War I for speaking out against the senseless conflict. And both had nice moments of grace, like Debs' love of flowers and Luxemburg's rapturous appreciation of birdsong.

MINI SPOILERS

Rosa lives a pretty remarkable life. Born into a Polish Jewish family, she has early experiences with ostracism; while her family isn't severely poor (and does well enough to keep a servant), she sees and experiences a lot of suffering in her early years. This sparks an early passion for economic justice, which leads her to discovering the writings of Karl Marx and a local community of socialists. 

One little thing I appreciated was how the artist showed Rosa's relative comfort. She's fiery and eloquent about the damage done by inequality; but she holds forth while being waited on by a maid, who you occasionally see rolling her eyes. The artist doesn't dwell on the contradiction, but I appreciated that she doesn't cover it up either. We see Rosa teaching the people around her, using examples and metaphors and logic, describing the difference between the use-value and the monetary-value, how economic relationships supplant human relationships, and the systemic effects of the accumulation of capital.

Rosa's strongest qualities may be her ambition and her fearlessness. She's determined to go to Switzerland to study, at the only university that admits women. While there she has the first of what will be several passionate love affairs. Rosa doesn't seem to have a particular "type", and her lovers are very different from one another. Each one seems deeply meaningful to her, but she also fiercely remains her own woman, not letting herself be defined by her relationships.

She eventually gets married, but not to someone she loves: it's a friendly understanding with a German comrade, using the marriage to secure German citizenship. Most of Rosa's life takes place in Germany. Building on earlier research she did on the economic and historical development of Poland, she shifts towards building and expanding the German Socialist Party. Under the Kaiser there aren't any meaningful powers given to the assembly, and in any case the structure of the Bundesrat significantly curtails the representation of smaller parties. But Rosa firmly believes that change is only possible at the individual, ground level, and the work done reaching and teaching small groups of laborers, soldiers and commoners is more important than any political maneuverings.

Besides teaching and inspiring the masses, Rosa also continues her research and theoretical work, eventually developing a thesis that critiques and corrects one specific aspect of Marx: the problem of surplus value. Marx describes a cycle where the small group of capitalists extracts more and more labor for less and less pay from the working class. The question is, who buys all the stuff that they make? The poor can't afford to buy it all, and there aren't enough rich to consume it all. Rosa's thesis is that capitalist economies can only continue to function by offloading their externalities onto non-capitalist countries, taking raw materials from them and forcing goods onto their markets. This ends up elegantly tying together critiques of capitalism with critiques of imperialism, seeing these as two intrinsically related phenomena. It's a critique that rings true, particularly in a setting that includes the Opium Wars of China, the U.S.'s various "gunboat diplomacy" incidents in the Americas and the Pacific, and really all sorts of colonial initiatives and foreign wars.

Rosa seems to be very extroverted and social, making a lot of friends in Germany and abroad, mostly people at various points on the leftist spectrum. She also bumps up against quite a few people who are unhappy with her: some of this is driven by misogyny or xenophobia, and some from ideological disagreements: a few people are aghast that she would dare to question Marx.

Thanks in part to Rosa's tireless advocacy, the ranks of socialists swell, and they are increasingly influential in the German government. Rosa remains ambivalent about this, unsure whether it's valuable for socialists to participate in what she sees as a corrupt system. This comes to a painful head when World War I breaks out, and the socialist deputies unanimously vote to support the war, their patriotism overcoming any connection to the international solidarity socialist movement. She feels personally betrayed by this turn of events and eloquently speaks out against the war.

She's thrown into prison for her "sedition". Her friends try to get her out, but she sees this as an opportunity: since she's charged with a crime, she can defend herself in a court of law, and her bright young lawyer (and most recent lover) will be able to call evidence and put on a show for the public, highlighting the cruelty in the ranks and the horrific cost of war. She is eventually released from prison, and rather than lying low she immediately resumes her work.

After the war ends, the Socialist party comes to power, but once again Rosa feels betrayed: the new head of government, a former pupil of hers, won't undertake any revolutionary actions, and instead perpetuates the status quo. Rosa and a core of committed leftists start the "Spartacus League", a forerunner to the German Communist Party, advocating for more revolutionary action. This leads to a heartbreaking sequence of events that ends with with Rosa being assassinated by the Freikorps, paramilitaries acting with the tacit support of her own former party.

Throughout the book, we can see the heartache Luxemburg endures, from the horror of war to despair at the actions of her former comrades. But we also see her love of beauty, her connection to nature, her deep affection for the men in her life. Even when things seem really bleak and she's isolated in a prison, she feels connected to the world around her. After the comic ends, a nice afterword describes her legacy: how Lenin and Trotsky saw her and the various places she's held in the esteem of leftist groups around the world.

This was a cool book, and on the whole I think I like it a bit more than the Debs book, partly because of a stronger focus on the main character. I learned a lot, not just about Rosa's life but about that whole period of time in that part of the world; this felt like a nice counterpart to October, a broader and more distant perspective on that era, the left struggles and the process of revolution. More specifically, after reading this book I have a much better understanding of why the Socialist and Communist parties of Germany failed to join in coalition after the 1932 elections: if one party assassinated another party's leadership, you could hardly blame them for holding a grudge!

END SPOILERS

Rosa lived a remarkable life, and both reacting to and participating in many of the momentous changes during this time. I still want to track down one of her actual publications; there are a lot of excerpts from her work in here, and she has a really strong, clear voice, both direct and thoughtful. The world has evolved in many ways since her life and some of her concerns may seem less relevant today, but the big picture is still very much with us, especially in this era of drastically rising inequality and nationalism. There's an evergreen debate about top-down leadership versus bottom-up organizing, and a lot of Rosa's writings on the topic really resonate with me.

Oh The Humanity!

Strike! is probably my favorite non-fiction book that I've read in the past five years, and maybe my favorite history book that I've ever read. I find myself regularly thinking about it in many contexts: understanding current labor struggles, imagining alternate systems of power, recognizing the hidden history of particular American geographies.

I've been meaning for a while to read other books by the author, Jeremy Brecher. While he seems to be best-known for that particular book on the history of labor in America, he seems to have very broad interests along generally left-aligned social policies; in particular, he has written more extensively about globalization and climate change than about labor. Of course, all of these issues intertwine, and it's likely for the best that he doesn't overly specialize in one particular area.

 

I decided to pick up Save The Humans?, mostly because it's one of the most recent books he's written. It ended up being an interesting and compelling read; not as visceral as Strike!, but very cogent and relevant.

The structure caught me a little off guard. Rather than a straight polemic, it's more of a polemic wrapped in a memoir. He loosely spins out his biography, being born to New Deal parents on the eve of World War II, through his involvement in "the 60s" (which he notes ran roughly from 1965-1975), the process of writing Strike! and his journalism and professional work since then. Along the way he describes his budding political consciousness, from early activism against nuclear warfare through racial justice and economic justice, then a grounds-eye view of the birth and devastation of financial globalization and the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries, culminating in the death sentence that climate change poses to us.

Strike! had a powerful message, but one that you had to infer. Save The Humans? is more explicit in its messaging, and Brecher is careful to lay out possible courses of action along with his analysis of the problems we face. Fundamentally, we as a species are wired to make decisions based on the benefit to ourselves or to those closest to us: our family, tribe or nation. In the past this has been beneficial, in a bleak Darwinian struggle for resources. Today, though, the problems we face can't be solved by individuals acting in their own self-interest; in fact, that very tendency has caused and continues to exacerbate our problems. If a rival nation is stockpiling nuclear weapons, then our instinct is to stockpile those weapons ourselves. If a river is already dirty because someone else is dumping waste in there, we feel entitled to dump our own waste as well. While in the past these tendencies caused small harms, today they lead to enormous, species-threatening harms that could result in a catastrophic end to human existence on Earth. In order to break out of this spiral, Brecher thinks we need to fundamentally shift our mindsets from individual action and benefit towards collective action and benefit: when faced with a decision, not picking the choice that leads to the greatest outcome for ourselves personally or for our family or nation, but the best outcome for the human race and our planet.

Brecher never uses the phrase "game theory" in the book, but I often found myself thinking of the Prisoner's Dilemma. We can have a great number of people who are all acting with the most rational interest, and end with the worst possible outcome for everyone. The classic Prisoner's Dilemma tends to suggest that the solution is the creation of a higher power or authority that can override self-interest. Brecher suggests a kind of bifurcated approach that combines bottom-up and top-down activism and enforcement. He's a passionate believer in democracy and individual action, with moral authority flowing from small communities of people, but he recognizes that these small communities have little chance of standing against the large bureaucratic global powers that largely run the world today: corporations and governments. He envisions new transnational organizations, authorized through groups like the UN General Assembly, that take their direction from small-scale and wide-spread activism but that have sufficient power to compel major actors to behave. He sees encouraging examples from the past century, including moral crusades like those of Ghandi and MLK, divestments and boycotts against South Africa, broad alarms against nuclear proliferation, and even sees retroactively encouraging outcomes from the peace movement against the Vietnam war.

While not as exciting a book as Strike!, I did thoroughly enjoy Save The Humans?. In retrospect it's kind of a summary and updating of all the various books Brecher has written over the years, and I think a reader could get more detail and inspiration by checking out his earlier books, but this one does a fantastic job at showing how all these topics are inextricably connected and how action taken in one sphere can help all the others as well. It can be hard to avoid doom-and-gloom feelings when contemplating climate change, and Brecher doesn't sugarcoat the problems we face, but does offer much encouragement in providing a vision for how we could meet and overcome these challenges.

Time For Socialism

Yep, I'm continuing to devour any and all of Thomas Piketty's books. I recently put two of his new ones on hold at the library; I need to wait a while longer for A Brief History of Inequality, but I almost immediately received Time For Socialism.

 

Unlike his other books that I've read, which I'd describe as tomes written from an academic background but oriented towards the general public, TFS is a compilation of monthly columns that Piketty wrote for Le Monde during the eventful years of 2016-2021. The book is subtitled "Dispatches from a World on Fire", which I'd say is a fairly accurate description of a period starting with Brexit and Trump and ending with COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, all set against the ongoing explosion of economic inequality and rising ethno-nationalism that Piketty has worked against for decades.

Being newspaper columns, these pieces are shorter, though interestingly of rather variable length. Piketty is generally responding to major events of the last week or two, but contextualizing them in terms of broader trends, most notably the disaffection of poorer people with globalization. Like his major works, though, he makes excellent use of charts and graphs, plotting out how schisms have evolved over time or who benefits from certain policies. A lot of this is rather familiar, especially for those who have read Capital & Ideology, and some ideas are repeated across multiple columns, but it is helpful to have another set of concrete examples to refer to.

One cool thing about these columns is that they were written explicitly for French people living in France, unlike his books that are aimed at a broader audience. As a result, he spends a decent amount of time getting into the micro of France's particular issues. One example is the reform of their pension system; apparently, for decades it's been a very balkanized system, with different schemes based on whether someone worked in the public sector or the private sector or a non-profit or as a homemaker, etc. Of course, today most people will hold many jobs throughout their life, possibly across multiple sectors, and as a result nobody really understands what to expect from their retirement: the system as a whole is well-funded, but completely opaque. Piketty critique's Macron's vague proposal for modernization, and also makes a forceful push towards greater equity: both by requiring higher-income people to fund the system (as in the US, French people don't need to pay in anything after exceeding a certain annual income), and also by considering life expectancies and social class (poorer people tend to have shorter lives, so they spend fewer years in retirement, so even if they received the same monthly payments as wealthy people, their total payments over their life will be a transfer to the state, while a long-living wealthy manager will receive more than he paid in). Anyways, that's one of those hyper-local things that is unique to France, but also a nice concrete example that can be inspiring for finding similar inequities in our own systems.

As with "Capital & Ideology", Piketty's big fear is the political-economic realignment underway, with far-right parties courting lower classes with a mix of ethno-nationalism and promises of financial support, while left-wing parties are increasingly associated with the cultural and economic elites. You can tell that he has a healthy amount of disdain for Macron, who has exacerbated the dynamics by giving a massive tax cut to the wealthiest French citizens while proclaiming the virtues of globalism. Still, Piketty is always solution-oriented, and many of his columns contain concrete proposals for policy actions that could increase equality and lower the risk of reactionary revolt.

Along with France's interior concerns, Piketty also pays a lot of attention to Europe. He sees the formation and evolution of the European Union and its market as kind of the original sin that led us to the predicament we're in now: back in the 80s, international treaties liberalized the flow of money and people across borders, but did not set in place any kind of overarching budgets or accountability. This led to what he variously calls "fiscal dumping" or a "race to the bottom": since a billionaire can transfer his assets to any country with the click of a button, nations are heavily incentivized to slash rates as low as possible to persuade the wealthy to keep their wealth inside their borders.

That isn't at all to say that Piketty wants to abolish the EU; rather the opposite, he sees transnational cooperation as being essential to ensure equity and to tackle existential crises like climate change. But he believes that we badly need accountability along with freedom, with visibility into the flows of wealth and enforcement to pursue bad actors.

To that end, he champions several concrete proposals to reform the EU. One big item he frequently mentions is the Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe. This envisions a shift somewhat like the United States' shift from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. In the current status quo, a tiny nation like Luxembourg can singlehandedly veto any reform supported by 99.9% of Europe's population. Piketty dreams of a new Europe with a representative assembly that is accountable to its constituents and empowered to create meaningful change, a powerful antidote from today's status quo where "Europe" makes decisions behind closed doors by unelected bureaucrats and national politicians can deflect any blame onto Brussels.

And, while Piketty is primarily focused on the eastern side of the Atlantic, he also behaves as an America-whisperer at times, seeking to explain our chaotic movements of the last six years in terms of long-term trends in the Western world, particularly where we are following in the movement of the  Belle Époque or where our history of racial conflict presages the rising racism in France. He recounts across several columns the seemingly bizarre reversal of the Republican and Democratic parties from the Civil War to the 1960s, explaining the incremental steps taken along the way and how they reflected the evolving cleavages in the electorate. He points excitedly to America's extremely high marginal tax rate in the middle of the 20th century and how it coincided with our greatest period of economic growth, giving the lie to the idea that lower taxes unleash growth. He makes a very persuasive argument that America's world-leading investment in education starting in the 1800s led the way for our dominant economic position in the 1900s. Anyways, it's interesting to see ourselves used as an example for other countries, much like it's interesting to see France used as an example for us.

All in all, another great little book from the author of great big books!

Primary Color

I have a backlog of half-written posts waiting to be published, mostly on hold because I'm getting deeply wrapped up in Europa Universalis IV. There is a time-sensitive thing coming up, though: the primary election here in California! As usual, here's my personal take on each race and measure. I'm skipping over uncontested races.

 

I'm honestly not very passionate about a lot of these offices, so there's less color commentary here than normal. But that doesn't mean it's unimportant! In local and county races, candidates can win outright with 50%+ in the primary, not even appearing on the more-popular November ballot. The smaller turnout in the primary also means your vote counts for more and has a bigger impact.

Senator: Alex Padilla

Senator Again For Some Reason: Alex Padilla

15th Congressional District: Kevin Mullin

21st Assembly District: James Hsuchen Coleman

Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tony K. Thurmond

Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder: Mark Church

Sheriff: Christina Corpus

Measure E: Yes. (Even though I continue to strongly believe that we should be raising taxes rather than issuing bonds to support public services.)

Governor: Gavin Newsom

Lieutenant Governor: Eleni Kounalakis

Secretary of State: Shirley N. Weber

Controller: Malia M. Cohen

Treasurer: Fiona Ma

Attorney General: Rob Bonta

Insurance Commissioner: Ricardo Lara

Member, State Board of Equalization, 2nd District: Sally J. Lieber

A Political Post

In 1932, the National Socialist party won a plurality of seats in the Reichstag. The other political parties in Germany refused to join in coalition with them, leaving a minority government in control through the end of the year.

That changed in 1933, when Franz von Papen, the head of the conservative Zentrum Party, agreed to join in coalition with the National Socialists, raising Adolf Hitler to the post of Chancellor. Papen believed that Hitler was a useful fool, a buffoon, who he could manipulate and use to secure his own political position. Hitler had other plans. After the Reichstag fire, Papen supported the Enabling Act, ending representative democracy in Germany. Papen was shoved aside, along with the rest of his party, once the Night of Long Knives had passed and the Nazification of Germany was complete. Democracy would not be restored until more than a decade later after tens of millions of people had been killed.

History does not repeat itself, and America is not on the same course as Germany in the 1930s. Our poor are less desperate, and we do not yet have ubiquitous paramilitary forces. But we would be foolish to ignore the lessons of history.

Fascists always start out as political minorities. As long as they are shut out of power, they will stay that way: the tools of the state are sufficient defense against a dangerous and violent internal force. But once they are let in to power, they will not retreat or surrender. Fascism ultimately believes that the people must be subordinate to their rulers, not the other way around, so votes are meaningless. Fascism thrives on conflict, seeking glory in conquering enemies. And there will always be enemies. Fascism is predicated on differentiating the pure from the "other", and has an existential need for someone to fight.

One advantage the United States has at the moment is a relatively unified left. By its nature, the left will never be as united as the right; but we are in a much better situation historically than Germany was. If the left parties in Germany had managed to work together, a great crisis might have been averted.

But ultimately, it's the right in America that will have the more important job over the next decade. Will they give in to temptation like Franz von Papen, welcoming the energy and support of ultra-right nationalists? Or will they remain true to their stated principles, following the tradition of the post-WW2 GOP, and denounce the antidemocratic pull?

So far, the signs are very discouraging. It feels like a dike is bursting. The most powerful and influential leaders in the Republican Party are not using their power to defend representative democracy: they are pouring gasoline on the fire, parroting false grievances, systematically eroding faith in the democratic process itself.

I'm not one to impugn motives; I can't see into anyone's soul. They may think that desperate dictatorial measures are necessary because they fear what their foes may do in power. They may truly disdain democracy and think it unnecessary. Some might even have become unmoored from reality, believing the ludicrous conspiracy theories spun from the darkest corners from the Internet.

While I don't judge motives, I do judge actions, and far too many politicians have taken a dangerous plunge on the road from democracy to fascism, of overturning the voters' will and imposing their own. My goal over the next 2-6 years will be to get as many of these people out of office as possible. In some cases that might mean holding my nose and supporting a primary challenger. More often it will mean supporting their opponent in a general election.

While many are guilty, the senators who falsely claimed electoral fraud and opposed the peaceful transfer of power have the greatest responsibility for our decline. They are:

Marsha Blackburn

Mike Braun

Ted Cruz

Steve Daines

Bill Hagerty

Josh Hawley

Cindy Hyde-Smith

Ron Johnson

John Neely Kennedy

James Lankford

Kelly Loeffler

Cynthia Lummis

Roger Marshall

Rick Scott

Tommy Tuberville

Of all of these, Josh Hawley is probably the one that concerns me the most. He is the vanguard of a social-nativist movement, akin to the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, or the PiS in Poland. While a big responsibility of the right will be to expel fascists and reaffirm faith in democracy, a big responsibility of the left will be ensuring people like Hawley cannot outflank on economic issues and create an enduring nationalist bloc. In my view, one of the biggest bullets we dodged during the Trump administration was Steve Bannon's failure to realign the Republican Party along economically populist lines. Folks like Hawley are picking up that cause, and it may be one of the biggest risks of our era.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, but it's incredibly important work. I hope you will help if you can.

How To Vote

California obviously has a lot of challenges right now, but I still love this state and am glad and proud to be a Californian. One of the many virtues of this state is its robust vote-by-mail system. Like many states west of the Rocky Mountains, VBM is normalized and heavily practiced here, which is always good for democracy in general (higher participation, easier access to information) and is particularly good in a pandemic year.

This is "the big election", the Presidential year when turnout numbers will be highest and interest the strongest; but this ballot is actually quite a bit shorter than in previous years. Statewide California offices are filled in midterm elections, and while we do have a lot of propositions there aren't as many as from other years. Still, there's a lot of important stuff in there. And, without further ado, here is how I will vote!

PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris. Biden was not my first choice in the primary, but the choice here is really clear. A man with clear empathy and compassion in the office will be a balm after the last four years. I've been a decades-long admirer of Harris, and it's been great seeing her grow in stature on the national stage. I think she'll be up for the job she has to do.

U. S. REPRESENTATIVE

Jackie Speier

STATE SENATOR

Josh Becker

STATE ASSEMBLY

Kevin Mullen

SAN MATEO BOARD OF EDUCATION

Rod Hsiao

SAN MATEO COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Maurice Goodman. It's a shame that Goodman and Mandelkern were forced into the same district, I would have happily supported either, but Goodman gets my nod.

SAN MATEO HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT

Greg Land and Ligia Andrade Zuniga

CITY COUNCIL OF MILLBRAE

Ann Schneider, Anders Fung, You You Xue

PROP 14: STEM CELL BONDS.

No. One of my general rules of thumb is to vote "Yes" on taxes and "No" on bonds. Taxes take money from everyone, often particularly the wealthy, to fund services for everyone. Bonds use the tax code to transfer money from the working class to the investing class. If this research is truly a priority for the state, we should budget it through the General Fund.

 

 

PROP 15: MAKE BUSINESSES PAY FAIRER PROPERTY TAX

Yes. I would honestly prefer a clean repeal of Prop 13, and worry a little that this measure will make future reforms to the property tax harder. Still, it's a massive improvement on the status quo, and I'd rather succeed in passing Prop 15 than fail in repealing Prop 13. 

PROP 16: ALLOW DIVERSITY HIRES IN PUBLIC JOBS

Yes. My other general rule of thumb on ballot initiatives is, when in doubt, I tend to vote in favor of initiatives that were placed on the ballot by the legislature, and against initiatives that were placed by voter signatures. One thing that I really like about this year's official voter information guide is that it also lists how many people voted "Aye" and "Nay" in the Assembly and Senate; when there's an overwhelming majority in favor of something, it increases my confidence that it's a good idea. (Because of our reckless over-use of constitutional amendments in the past, tons of basic things can't be done by the legislature, so they often need to kick things back to the voters to approve.) Anyways: This proposition makes sense, will align the public sector more with how the private sector has been working, and should help make things better!

PROP 17: RESTORE VOTING RIGHTS AFTER LEAVING PRISON

Yes.

PROP 18: ALLOW NEARLY-18-YEAR-OLDS TO VOTE IN PRIMARIES

Yes.

PROP 19: PROPERTY TAX CHANGES

Yes. This seems to be two mostly unrelated changes smooshed together into one measure. Letting seniors move to another house and keep their old property tax bill should be a good change all around: it lets seniors afford to make sensible changes like downsizing, should create some more liquidity in the infamously sluggish California real estate market, and generally promote the kind of turnover we see in the rest of the country. (But again: Just repeal Prop 13!) The more important thing is the back half, though, which closes a gross loophole that lets the wealthy pass massive assets along tax-free for all future generations. Particularly after reading Piketty, I'm all on board for breaking up permanent wealth.

PROP 20: RESTRICT PAROLE FOR SOME NON-VIOLENT OFFENSES

No.

PROP 21: ALLOW RENT CONTROL

Yes. See my vote for Prop 10 two years ago. I'm more unambiguously in favor now, partly because it seems likely we will see more natural decreases in rent prices in CA over the coming years (due to environmental and other factors), and also because I'm more radicalized now on the social utility of limiting profits.

PROP 22: EXEMPT UBER AND LYFT FROM PAYING EMPLOYEE BENEFITS

Strong no. Crap like this has made me start to think that, when private companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to pass constitutional amendments to benefit their bottom line (see also: every insurance-related initiative you've ever voted on), they should have to match that amount dollar-for-dollar into funding our schools or another worthy endeavors. Let's make that an initiative! Uber and all of its ilk who built their entire business models on evading taxation should get bent.

PROP 23: INCREASE DIALYSIS CLINIC REQUIREMENTS

Yes. Though, to be fair, this is kind of like Prop 22 but funded by unions instead of private companies. Still, it's for a better cause.

PROP 24: CHANGE CONSUMER PRIVACY LAWS

No.

PROP 25: REPLACE MONEY BAIL WITH RISK-BASED BAIL

Yes.

MEASURE RR: SAVE CALTRAIN

Yes. I have a bad feeling about this one, though. It's been in the works for a while, and the timing turned out terrible, asking voters to approve it when transit ridership is at a (pandemic-induced) decades-long low. But I've been pleasantly surprised in the past at locals stepping up to support public transit, and hope to be surprised again!

 

Oh, and I almost forget: Let's grade my performance from the primary!

Honestly, not much there to react to. I still think Warren would be a better nominee and President, but I also am getting increasingly excited by the prospect of her writing legislation in a trifecta federal government. Imagining her as the chairwoman of the Senate Banking Committee, crafting bank regulations, makes me giddy. She'd also be a fantastic Attorney General to revive the agency's moribund antitrust enforcement wing.

I don't pay as much attention as I should to my state representatives, but it was really cool to see that Kevin Mullen is responsible for two propositions on the ballot: 19, which should restore more sanity to our housing tax system, and 18, which extends the franchise to younger voters.

That's it for this election! I am so exhausted by politics of the last four years. A big part of me is looking forward to, hopefully, things being calmer going forward. But, of course, that isn't how politics works. We'll still need to deal with the root causes of all the problems we're facing. The endless fires are a result of global climate change. Massive inequalities are a result of our unfair tax system. The pandemic is definitely not helped by our terrible private health care system. The ongoing and consequence-free state murder of black citizens is a result of institutionalized racism. All these, and many more, problems will require big, ambitious, hard changes with lots of money and influence supporting the status quo. No matter who or what wins at every level, we'll need to keep on pressure and keep pushing to ensure that necessary changes happen. The good news is, the new crop of people should be vastly more receptive to such pressure than the previous set.