How Does Someone Become a Leftist?
A personal lineage through media.
Sometimes I get asked for recommendations of books, articles, media outlets, and whatnot that I’ve found useful as sources of information on current affairs and understanding complex issues. I sympathize with people who don’t know where to begin. Today’s media landscape both suffers from and is benefited by a glut of content. In such a landscape, curation is the chief concern, and it can be difficult to curate work that has breadth, depth, and quality. Our webs of information too often become a tangled rats nest where The Brothers Karamazov stands side by side with The 30-Minute Demented Cartoon [Movie].
This question also gets me thinking about the different paths that people take with their political consciousness. A person’s politics can be profoundly changed not just by their personal experiences, but also by the cultural works of art, politics, and journalism that they consume — at any age (I’m sure some Disney movie affected me at 10 years old just as much as Noam Chomsky affected me at 22 years old). The optimist in me believes that most people, once presented with certain facts about the world and coherent theories about how to understand those facts as a whole, can’t help but be moved towards a conception of justice that is humane, uplifting, and universal (barring the relatively constant amount of authoritarians amongst us, curse them). I also observe that many people in my milieu, who are generally progressive, if only in a kind of milquetoast liberal way, are incredibly impoverished of both information and ideology that could give their politics some much needed specificity and backbone. A person who thinks of themselves as progressive but who withers at the slightest provocation because they don’t have much knowledge on a subject —because they don’t read — may be useful as a mere body in a protest march, but they are liable to sway with the shifting political winds as they may find convenient. Someone like this, when asked if they support universal healthcare, may give a resounding yes. But when asked why, or how they think it can be achieved, what they are willing to do to achieve it, what stands in our way, or whether or not exploitation is inherent to the existing system, their mind goes blank and their conviction falters. In the best scenario, this isn’t because they don’t actually believe in what they say they want, it’s that they do not have the necessary information to be both politically and morally rigorous. In short, it’s a problem of education, not of people.
That’s the optimism talking. There’s also a curmudgeon. Case in point: I have heard someone in an intentional community (think hippy commune but not quite) express real surprise that the Taliban so quickly and totally overtook Afghanistan with the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, apparently ignorant of the entirely corrupt underpinning of America’s occupation of that country for decades. After literally a couple sentences on the topic, they then said, “But anyway, let’s talk about something other than depressing geopolitics.” …After a couple of sentences… The inability to actually discuss topics such as these astounds me sometimes. Another time I heard someone else in the same community say, with all earnestness, that they like the idea of being a CIA agent because it would give them special knowledge that other people wouldn’t have. They had actually thought about applying to be a Fed. I gotta say, when someone in your friend group says some shallow, borderline fascist shit like that, it kinda tarnishes the appeal of doing molly with them and making out on the dance floor, you know? Just a little bit. Another person, again with all earnestness, said that they would much prefer a return to the presidency of George W. Bush over the current (at the time) presidency of Donald Trump. Heaven help us. I hate to break it to you guys, but Bush is the one who made torture of prisoners by Americans official policy (it’d usually only been done by proxies before that). Bush is the one who murdered a million people in the Middle East. Obama continued that foreign policy. Trump ain’t got nothing on their body counts. Suffice to say, the indoctrination in this country can be astounding. This makes political education all the more important.
The writer Freddie DeBoer has made the point that the swelling of the ostensible left’s ranks in recent years with largely unlearned and undisciplined newly minted leftists has been a net negative for the movement’s messaging and discipline and I generally agree. I constantly read and otherwise immerse myself in social criticism, adversarial journalism, and leftwing thought not as a pastime (though it is that sometimes), but because I want the clearest specificity possible for what we face and what we must do about it. The aforementioned utterances I heard at this bohemian hangout are indicative of the shallowness of cultural accoutrements and signifiers. Two of the people who said those things are swingers. Swingers! They go on dates with other couples and fuck them at the end of the night. Fun! And one of them wants to be a CIA agent. Cool. Go be a war criminal after the orgy. You’ll need some casual fucking and recreational drug use to take the edge off of surveilling children for months so that you can murder their parents in a drone strike. Sex is not politics. Surface-level signifiers of radicalism in fact signify nothing. They are merely a way to express in-group cohesion, not a way to change anyone’s minds, which is the actual task of politics and solidarity. This gets back to the necessity of political education. Frankly, I don’t trust people who don’t read because they are just as likely to serve justice as injustice. Or as Henry David Thoreau put it:
Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God…
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war [against Mexico], who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who…sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade…They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed…
In my small contribution to a better informed and civic citizenry, the specific recommendations I will give in this post are mostly books, feature-length documentaries, long articles, and long-form news coverage and analysis. Don’t get me wrong, short-from political content has some purpose. Memes can be fun, like this one, but they are absolutely insufficient for building any kind of resilient philosophy. Memes are a poor excuse for language. Spending two-seconds talking about an important event, kneecapping the importance of it with an ironic comment, and then uncomfortably shifting the subject because "It’s too sad! :(" is certainly one way to go through life I suppose. I would suggest being a bit more resilient than that. I think this is important. People who do not engage with history and current affairs frighten me because, when the chips are down, I don’t trust them to have my back. Such widespread divorce from knowledge, and unifying theories to explain that knowledge, leaving those tasks instead to the appointed experts of our society, has deep implications. As John Ralston Saul wrote in Voltaire’s Bastards:
Knowledge became the currency of power and as such was retained. This civilization of secretive experts was quite naturally obsessed not by the encouragement of understanding but by the providing of answers…But what are answers when there is neither memory nor general understanding to give them meaning? … Hordes of essential answers fly about us and disappear, abruptly meaningless. Successive absolute solutions are provided for major public problems and then slip away without our consciously registering their failure. Neither the public and corporate authorities nor the experts are held responsible for their own actions in any sensible manner because the fracturing of memory and understanding has created a profound chaos in the individual’s sense of what responsibility is.
In other words, those who do not know history cannot have any hope of understanding what is happening to them today, nor can they have any sense of what is true and what is not. Anything they are told from on high must be the words of received wisdom. Such a society, unmoored from memory, cannot even cohere around basic accountability for its leaders. The leaders must know best, because the rest of us literally don’t know anything at all. A civilization such as this, controlled by a cloistered class of experts, true believers in their own power just as any monarch, must result, it seems from the evidence, in a swelling underclass stripped of their connections to memory, troubled by their lack of meaning, stumbling dumbly and violently with incoherent questions on their lips, all the while being rationally managed by those with all the answers.
So anyway, this is all basically a long preamble to me giving an overview of the path that led me to leftist media, and to give some recommendations for places to start if you’d like to bolster your critical thinking skills. After these suggestions, it’s choose your own adventure!
Starting with public radio! I love me some public services, and even though our public radio system isn’t quite what it could be if it was funded more, it does serve an important function. Most people have access to radio. Good public stations will cover local issues in addition to spinning some offbeat tunes. Different stations will have slightly different vibes based on their hosts and programming choices, but in the U.S. most stations generally carry and follow the model of NPR. I have a lot of problems with NPR, but that is only because public radio led me down the path where I could gain critical insight and language which actually allowed me to be critical of it. You should always be critical of the media you consume! No exceptions. Nobody likes a simple doctrinaire.
I started regularly listening to public radio after I graduated high school. It was part of my everyday commute to community college. The local radio station where I’m from, KCBX, broadcasts Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! every Monday-Friday starting at noon. Many other stations around the country carry it as well. It is remarkable that Democracy Now! has such reach because many of their guests and the topics they cover would never be touched by mainstream media with a 50-foot pole. It’s good to know that I can hear Amy Goodman’s voice (and her throat clearing) so consistently. As a partner of mine once characterized the show: “I’m Amy Goodman, here to tell you everything that’s horrible in the world!” And yeah, the headline portion that opens the show is always pretty dour, but so is the world. That’s just life.
After the presidential election of 2016, Democracy Now! interviewed someone I’d never heard of before to get their take on the election of Donald Trump. His name was Glenn Greenwald. The interview was about an article that Greenwald wrote for The Intercept which put the blame for Trump’s election squarely at the door of the neoliberal Democratic Party which had spent decades at that point abandoning the working class and empowering Wall Street and the military industrial complex. By today’s standards, Greenwald’s piece was hopeful. He argued that the Democratic Party must learn proper lessons from 2016, or else. Well, we’ve been getting a lot of or else ever since then. After I heard the interview, I went over to The Intercept, read Greenwald’s article, which seemed perfectly sane and well articulated, and started reading The Intercept’s news coverage regularly. Though it has gone through some shakeups over the years, with both finances and personnel, including the departure of Greenwald in 2020, The Intercept remains a great source of longform investigative reporting on issues that expose the deep rot and corruption in our political and economic system. It’s the kind of difficult, expensive reporting that is becoming much more rare but is so essential to a functioning democracy.
In regards to Greenwald himself, he made his first major splash as one of the reporters who Edward Snowden personally reached out to in order to leak the NSA documents in 2013. By demonstrating his convictions in protecting and advocating for Snowden in the face of media backlash and a global manhunt, as well as his good handling of the leaked material, Greenwald was trusted in 2019 by another source which leaked to him documents showing the farcical judicial process which led to the false imprisonment of leftist Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula for short). Greenwald’s reporting on that story led to the release of Lula from prison and a vacating of his conviction by the Brazilian Supreme Court. Since leaving The Intercept, Greenwald has remained a stalwart critic of establishment power and is a useful source of analysis of current affairs on his show System Update. Some critics of Greenwald claim he is a reactionary, an acerbic figure who lost his way because he questioned the Russiagate narrative (he and other critics have been vindicated on that front) and criticizes liberals more than he does conservatives. But I think any levelheaded person who looks at Greenwald’s work will understand that he is consistently anti-establishment, if not even straightforwardly of the left. In that aforementioned article for The Intercept, he wrote:
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
Anti-war. Anti-Wall Street. Anti-free trade. Anti-weaponization of identity politics. Anti-meritocracy. Anti-exploitation. Pro-economic justice for common people. If that’s not a leftwing critique then I don’t know what is. Greenwald is also viciously anti-Sam Harris, which means he’s good in my book.
Now here comes the big one. In perusing The Intercept’s content, I started listening to their regular podcast hosted by Jeremy Scahill, himself an important investigative journalist who’s done a lot of great work on America’s crimes in the War on Terror. In one episode from 2018, Scahill interviewed a fellow journalist named Chris Hedges, formerly of the New York Times. I encourage everyone to listen to that interview. Even though it was recorded in 2018, an eternity ago in our current political climate, Hedges always grounds his critiques in evergreen language derived from literature, philosophy, and his decades of experience as a war correspondent (the man has seen some fucked up shit). I once showed the interview to a partner of mine, and we both laughed at the bluntness of Hedges’ very first line:
Scahill: Is there a difference in your view between the Democratic and Republican parties given everything we’re seeing now in the era of Trump?
Hedges: Well, of course, there’s a difference. It’s how you want corporate fascism delivered to you. [Chuckles ensued]. Do you want it delivered by a Princeton educated, Goldman Sachs criminal or do you want it delivered by a racist, nativist, Christian fascist?
This is really where it all happened for me. After hearing Hedges, I was ruined. There was no turning back. I was now a leftist for life. I went out and bought all of his books. I now preorder the new ones. I have to stop myself from including a Hedges quote in everything I write, he always seems relevant. He is a richly rewarding writer because he offers ways of thinking that are supported by some of the best in human thought and cultural work. He bolsters his work with important thinkers throughout history: Gramsci, Aristotle, Homer, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Melville, Steinbeck, Thoreau, Paine, Proust, Shakespeare, Baldwin, August Wilson, Hemingway, Kant, Weber, Fanon, Camus, Wolin, Orwell, Hume, Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Sophocles, Cicero, the list goes on, all while keeping his feet firmly on the ground by staying true to his convictions and standing shoulder to shoulder with the least of these. He teaches literature in prisons for free, often to people with life sentences. He visits political prisoners. He sues the government for breach of human rights. He interviews radicals and gives the most exploited a platform from which to speak. He speaks and writes in support of every important cause. He gets arrested. And, critically, he is constitutionally incapable of being subservient to institutions. Hedges has been fired or quit from multiple news outlets (once for trying to organize a union) and literary organizations when he could not accept their policies that were counter to his principles. But he keeps going. He is moved by the deeply human and therefore he moves me too. He has a preacher’s sensibility. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School and became ordained as a Presbyterian minister, putting him in the rarified category of a pastor who is honest about the fact that he doesn’t believe in god. “You’re not a reporter,” a colleague of his once told him, “You’re a preacher pretending to be a reporter.” Every talk that he gives is a sermon in the best way possible (see this speech he gave analyzing capitalism through the lens of Moby Dick). This sermonizing quality perhaps plays on my own upbringing in Christian summer camp and youth groups. I’m familiar with the language. Though some people find Hedges too polemical (what’s wrong with that as long as you’re good at it?) and apocalyptic (we’ll see who’s right), and, as with any writer he has certain pet habits that have come to annoy me only because I’ve read nearly every word he’s ever written (even the beautiful James Baldwin annoys me sometimes), Hedges is a towering cultural critic of the left whose words should be heeded by more people.
Now from here, the straight line bends and turns into branches into webs into ecosystems unchartable. Many works build on each other. So here begins the list of recommendations. I’ll start with some news, analysis, and commentary outlets not already mentioned. True leftwing critique does not get the number of eyeballs and dollars that corporate media does, so what outlets exist are generally small and scrappy, but there are a decent number of them to peruse:
Bad Faith podcast by Briahna Joy Gray — This is one of my cannot-miss thinkers. I watch every episode. Gray is perhaps the best interviewer in leftwing media, a skill that becomes so obvious when someone trying it doesn’t have it. She is thoughtful, clear, direct, and asks all of the questions of a guest that are required to both give the audience a basic understanding of the topic and to push the interviewee into sharper clarity on their views. As iron sharpens iron, Gray sharpens her guests. She has a law degree and it shows. But she’s not jargon-y, esoteric, or ironic. You can feel her sincerity and she’s not afraid to call out someone’s bullshit in real time. She presents a great breadth and depth of leftwing thought. You can honestly start with any interview of hers, but I’ll recommend this one that she did with writer and socialist Vijay Prashad.
The Real News Network — This is the current host platform of The Chris Hedges Report, formerly on RT, where Hedges interviews writers about their work. Their executive editor, Maximilian Alvarez, also does great interviews of working people and journalists covering their stories on his Working People podcast.
Breakthrough News — A good source of interviews, analysis, and commentary on both national and international stories. One of the hosts, Rania Khalek, based in Lebanon, is particularly good with her interviews. Brian Becker’s Socialist Program is also a great source of deep dives on certain topics.
Empire Files by Abby Martin — Abby Martin is just great. When she gets angry, she really shines. She’s confronted Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Blinken with tough questions. She produced a documentary on the Great March of Return in Gaza. She was pushed out of RT for decrying Russia’s invasion of Crimea live on-air. And she exposed the widespread dehumanization and fascism that characterizes Israeli society.
Useful Idiots — Originally published by Rolling Stone and hosted by Katie Halper and journalist Matt Taibbi, this podcast became independent in 2021 and Taibbi later left to focus on other writing projects and was replaced by journalist Aaron Maté. Both iterations of the show are good, and it’s worth checking out their archive and continuing episodes of interviews.
Novara Media — Good interviews. They’re based in the U.K., so it can serve as a good primer for the intricacies of U.K. politics.
The American Prospect — This online outlet does a lot of great work that focuses on the U.S. economy from a leftwing, anti-monopoly, anti-trust framework.
Jacobin — This seems to be the closest thing to an (unofficial) official Socialist publication in the U.S.
Second Thought — A video essayist who analyzes news, geopolitics, and world history from a socialist perspective. His essays on Hollywood’s relationship with the U.S. military and America’s gangster role in world affairs are good places to start.
Books:
Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky — In the summer of 2016, I read two books, considered classics today, that are seminal to my understanding of the world. Herman and Chomsky’s shattering examination of why and how mainstream media distorts information to serve establishment interests was a revelation to me. Using what they call the Propaganda Model, they discuss the different pressures on news media that cause its coverage to reflect elite consensus rather than anything that could reasonably be called objective. It is a perfect mix of academic rigor (it’s got graphs!) and strident polemic. Though leftwing critics such as Todd Gitlin made similar critiques as Herman and Chomsky in earlier works like The Whole World is Watching, it was Manufacturing Consent that was and is the real blockbuster. The first time I ever heard about this book was when Robin Williams name dropped it in Good Will Hunting. I bought it shortly after that first viewing. Shoutout to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for making that happen.
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn — This was the other book I read that summer that changed everything. In reading one of the earlier chapters on the American Revolution, after Zinn had already gone about ruining the heroic myths of Christopher Columbus and other settlers, I remember thinking, and I may have even said this out loud to myself: “Is he actually going to try to ruin the Revolutionary War now?” Yep, he sure did. It was not a true revolution, as that term is properly understood. It merely replaced one ruling cohort for another and put in place a constitutional republic — impressive, considered, and groundbreaking though it may be — which manages the continued exploitation. It’s easy to forget now just how much of Zinn’s foundational text is never uttered in any public school teaching from K-12. Those who levy charges of anti-American indoctrination against Zinn’s work should wrestle with the fact that so many of the stories that Zinn highlights in A People’s History have been considered verboten in the American school system for generations. Who’s really doing the indoctrinating? Chris Hedges noted the immense power of Zinn’s book on his pupils when he taught it in a New Jersey prison. As the prisoners read the book out loud in class, they would exclaim throughout, “Damn…Damn!…We been lied to…” The lie of omission is what America does best. Zinn’s work is one crowning entry in correcting that mendacious historical record.
Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges — If I had to pick one book by Hedges, this would be it. He tells the stories, from throughout history up to today, of what happens to those who rebel, and why rebellion is a moral imperative that carries with it the only hope of sustaining the essentially human. All too often, the wages of rebellion is death, but it is also often the only way we have to affirm life.
Listen, Liberal! by Thomas Frank — Do you have any lingering sympathies for the Democratic Party? This book will cure you of that virulent illness. Thomas Frank made a name for himself by viciously attacking the Republican Party and critiquing the conservative movement that had so successfully convinced many rural citizens to “vote against their interests” in books like What’s the Matter With Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew. Thankfully, he is just as biting against the neoliberal version of the Democratic Party that has become a full partner in the project of unrestrained global capitalism. Frank is like the fun uncle version of Chris Hedges. The main difference between Hedges and Frank is that Frank is funny! While Hedges is generally dour in most interviews and talks he gives (I don’t blame the guy), Frank is always smiling, laughing, and cracking jokes. He’s a goofy Midwesterner with a great head on his shoulders. He is a joy to listen to. This interview he did with Briahna Joy Gray is highly recommended.
Notes of a Native Son | Nobody Knows My Name | The Fire Next Time | No Name in the Street | The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin — I cannot emphasize enough the delicate yet powerful beauty of Baldwin’s thought. I could throw every exemplifying adjective at it and still not do his language justice. These longform essays are some of the best that American literature has to offer. And I have never seen someone who writes so beautifully and also speaks almost exactly the same way that he writes. I could listen to him for hours (and I have). Baldwin’s mind is mindboggling to me. He is withering in his attacks on American hypocrisy. He is devastating in how he demonstrates the inhumanity that follows from a society’s collective mythmaking. The sheer density of multifaceted ideas in his work floors me every time. He offers cutting observations of culture, sensitive depictions of individuals, nuanced ways of thinking, and gut wrenching descriptions of a war both outside and within himself. He extracts every ounce of meaning from minute details that others may consider mundane. He tosses forth ideas of tremendous import and clarity in single, casual sentences, like it was nothing. Another writer could spend an entire book and life interrogating just one of these throwaway observations by Baldwin. He does what the best writers do in that he gives confident voice to ideas, concepts, and feelings which you yourself could never have independently formulated but which you will now carry with you forever. He is astounding.
With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald — Do you have any lingering notions that our justice system is fair, elites are held accountable, and people get what they deserve? This book will cure you of that mental disability. Greenwald goes through example after example amply demonstrating that we really live in a lawless society, and that when the rule of law loses any coherent meaning — because it is rightfully seen as illegitimate — there’s not much cause to believe in our purported “democracy” either. If this book doesn’t make you want to burn everything down I don’t know what will.
A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville — I must admit something. I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, or anything by Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or Engels. Does that make me a bad socialist? I don’t know. For some reason I had a lingering aversion to anything with a capital “C” on its communism. This book helped to cure that. It is an ode, a paean, a poem, an acclamation, a glorious and sometimes downright beautiful and heartrending appreciation of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It also includes a full reprint of the Manifesto (with footnotes!), so it’s like getting two books in one. This really is a great place to start for the skeptic. Miéville puts the Manifesto into historical and cultural context, explaining its import, its enduring legacy, and offering truly inspirational visions of a better, achievable world. Through his passion, Miéville made me actually want to read Marx, and then I did! Cause, you know, it’s two books in one, it’s right there, on the next page, it’s so convenient.
The Divide by Matt Taibbi — Do you have any lingering notions that our economy is set up so that anyone can succeed given enough gumption and hard work? That white collar criminals are punished for their corruption? That the law protects us from systematic exploitation? That our capitalist government does right by its people? This book will cure you of that disgusting disease. Taibbi made a name for himself in doing some of the best contemporaneous reporting on the 2008 financial meltdown and its lingering effects on the American public. He sat in hidden court rooms that were nothing more than conveyor belts for judges to perform mass evictions of families, many of which were fraudulent and were often performed in abstentia. He interviewed Wall Street bankers who told him quite frankly they knew what they were doing was wrong but that no one was stopping them. He was one of the first reporters to elucidate the contours of what really happened with the crash, and how complicit the government was in both causing it to happen and in ensuring that the only people who would be taken care of in the new economic wasteland of the American empire were the bankers who caused the crash in the first place. Again, if this book doesn’t make you want to burn everything down, I don’t know what will.
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins — Do you have any lingering notions that America is the good guy? That we’re a democracy spreading democracy? This book will cure you of that rancid delusion. The Cold War was not simply a conflict of ideologies. It was a series of campaigns of mass murder, even genocides, aided and abetted by the United States in its quest to secure absolute dominance of the global capitalist system. It was an anti-communist crusade, just as virulently religious in its dogma as any other crusade before it. Millions of people are dead because of what we did. This book shows the human evidence of what we have wrought.
Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse — Do you have any lingering notions that America’s invasion and occupation of Vietnam was a well-intentioned mistake? That we did the best we could to help a beleaguered people in the face of Communist expansionism? This book will cure you of that trite syndrome. What America did in Vietnam, as well as neighboring Laos and Cambodia, is practically incomprehensible in the depths of its brutality. It rivals anything that was done by any faction in WWII, and I mean anything. America’s war in Vietnam was one long colonizing campaign of wicked dehumanization, mass murder of civilians, systematic torture, widespread rape, pillaging, and ecocide. There was no such thing as discriminate or proportional warfare by the U.S. in Vietnam. Success was measured by body count. American soldiers ran amok. The order of the day: kill anything that moves. My Lai was not an aberration. It was official policy. 3-5 million people were murdered in that American made hellscape.
American Midnight by Adam Hochschild — As bad as things are right now, this book is a sober reminder that things have been much worse and could be that worse again. Hochschild presents the history of what the U.S. did to its own citizens during WWI, perhaps the most jingoistic era of our country. Thousands of people were imprisoned for years simply for exercising their right to free speech. Labor unions were destroyed. Conscientious objectors were beaten, humiliated, imprisoned, and killed. Wanton censorship was exercised at all levels of the media, both commercial and independent. Thousands of citizens willfully deputized themselves in the project of hunting for insufficiently patriotic residents and beating them, torturing them, deporting them, or murdering them. The nation underwent an orgy of hysteria, aided and abetted by a sophisticated government campaign of propaganda and surveillance, only rivalled by the War on Terror era. The legal apparatuses that allowed all of these human rights abuses to happen are still in place today.
Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson — Do you hate your job? Do you want to hate it even more? Then this book is for you. Professor Anderson brings up a simple but profound notion that is not often considered: if most people spend most of their waking hours giving their labor to a company, while supervised by a boss that holds power over them, where they have little to no democratic say over company policy or their working conditions, then how can we say that we live in a democratic society? Anderson argues that most jobs are their own private governments, often tyrannical ones. The mythological idea of the free market is used to exalt our current capitalist system. Who wouldn’t like a system that allows for maximum economic freedom? However, the current system of capitalism is effectively an inversion of the sort of labor equality utopia that classically liberal economic writers such as Adam Smith (constantly sacralized by modern economists) championed in their works. Those thinkers’ version of a free market economy at the time stood in opposition to the feudalism, oligarchy, and social hierarchies of lords, nobles, kings, and wealthy merchants. The liberal economists instead envisioned the majority of the labor force working for themselves and not for wages (wage slavery is bad). In Smith’s conception, skilled artisans with at most only a few employees would ply their trades and sell their goods and services on equal standing with everyone else within the market. This has little to do with small groups of ultra-wealthy capitalists hoarding money and power, controlling the systems of government and law, and monopolizing huge sections of the economy to the point where most workers have little opportunity to be self-employed or to sell their labor elsewhere for better conditions. When obscene amounts of money buy access to power and policy creation and relegate everyone else to irrelevance, when corporations partner with the criminal justice system and military apparatus in order to protect their own interests, and when the courts consistently favor companies at the expense of individuals and labor movements, then it cannot be said that we live in a democracy. This book also has a fun structure where Anderson first presents her main arguments, and then different writers have their own sections responding to her arguments, some critical, some supportive. Then she responds to those responses and then closes the book. There is a great passage where she responds to a smarmy establishment economist with barely constrained disdain. It’s wonderful.
Documentaries:
The Wobblies — If you’d like to see the cutest goddam radical senior citizens telling their stories from the heydays of the American labor movement, this is the documentary for you. It’s got great old-timey labor songs; adorable grannies saying that all cops are bastards; communist lumberjacks; tough guy hobos and train hoppers; it’s got it all.
Sicko — Michael Moore’s exposé on America’s broken healthcare system. Even though it was made pre-Obamacare, the severe problems it highlights are still with us.
The Gig Is Up — There is a new servant class in our society, and we call them gig workers. I really don’t have much patience or sympathy for people who unthinkingly utilize apps such as Door Dash and GrubHub and Uber and Lyft and whatnot. These apps are a capitalist’s wet dream. Until more labor protections are secured for gig workers, no one can utilize these services with a clean conscience.
Cowspiracy — Factory farming is a revolting perversion that will destroy us all if we don’t destroy it first.
HyperNormalisation — I really dig the vibe that director Adam Curtis has for his films. He only uses stock footage, often in very off-kilter, funny, and moving ways. His narrative threads can be a little hard to follow sometimes, especially if you don’t already have some familiarity with the topics he discusses, but he brings to bear impressive, wild, unlikely connections in world history that show just how weird and fucked up everything really is. Bonus points for his use of Aphex Twin in the soundtrack.
And that’s all I’ve got! This is by no means exhaustive, nor should it be. I just wanted to give some starter recommendations for lefty media, and to share a bit about how someone who isn’t a red diaper baby could nevertheless grow up to have red diaper babies of their own someday. I hope this was helpful to someone. Thanks for reading.