Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2020

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine about epidemiology, sociology, or the history of ideas. Also, I'm writing book reviews during faculty meetings downtime.

István Z. Kiss, Joel C. Miller and Péter L. Simon, Mathematics of Epidemics on Networks: From Exact to Approximate Models

My attempt at a summary grew to a full-length review (which needs a better title).

Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

This is Wright's last book; he died, very sadly, while still working on it. In it, he continues a long and (unironically) proud tradition of socialists re-writing the Manifesto: start by saying why capitalism sucks, while admitting some of its virtues; then explain how it can be bettered; identify the existing social force(s) which will replace it; and talk about how those forces will undertake the revolution. Wright says sound things about how capitalism molds people into selfish jerks (or crushes them), is undemocratic and (for most) unfree, and offends basic notions of fairness. (He sensibly refrains from asserting that capitalism either causes or requires racism, sexism, imperialism, etc., which is at the very least a highly debatable generalization, though of course racist and sexist capitalists can be expected to exploit workers in racist and sexist ways on top of everything else.) He then sketches what he'd like to see instead, which is a market economy with lots of public provision, some collective ownership, and a lot of worker and consumer cooperatives. Fantasies of central planning are, rightly, not part of his socialist vision. (He does not touch on the delicate problem of how to coordinate the democratic decisions of the members of a cooperative with the democratic decisions of the wider socialist commonwealth when the two disagree [e.g., about whether or not to shut down an oil company], or how to delineate the right scale for the cooperatives [is the oil company one cooperative, or does each rig, refinery and gas station become its own cooperative?].) He also delineates different ways of attacking or at least trying to replace capitalism, ranging from frontal assaults by violent revolution to separatist utopian communities to temporary carnivals of defiance to quietly trying to build alternative institutions that can grow to take over the larger capitalist ecosystem, a sort of vision of socialism as algal bloom. (That is not his image.) The end of the book looks at what would be required for a "collective actor" to try to effect such a transformation --- and there it ends, with a promise that he was just about to say how the trick would be turned.

We will never get to hear Wright's thoughts about how to solve that last riddle, because he died while the book was still incomplete, and what we have here was polished to publication, but not exactly completed, by friends and disciples. This is a fitting tribute to a scholar of real distinction, who made his reputation by combining sound* sociology with unorthodox, "analytical" Marxism that wasn't afraid to actually think, and who tried to remain connected to real-life struggles for a better world.

*: More waspishly, no worse, methodologically, than the rest of post-1960s American sociology.

Jane Langton, The Memorial Hall Murder, Natural Enemy, Good and Dead, Murder at the Gardner

Classic mysteries from the early 1980s, where the very particular settings, and often specific works of literature or art associated with them, are just as important as the murders. I read all these as a boy, but return to them now with delight, and perhaps more appreciation for their non-murder-mystery aspects. (For instance, Good and Dead is also a fine novel about the decline of "mainline" Protestantism, which rather passed me by as a teenager.)

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

A fine study of what