Review: Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton’s 2023 autobiographical comic book relaying the her experience graduating university in 2005 and working in the oil sands for two years. Anna Wiener blurbed the book, and I thought it was an appropriate choice: both Wiener and Beaton wrote memoirs detailing their experience as women in the male-dominated gold rushes of their particular eras and locations — Wiener in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and Beaton in Alberta in the 2000s.

Both memoirs resonated with me personally. I graduated university not too long after Beaton. I considered the oil sands — many of my classmates were pulled into its gravitational orbit — but I couldn’t bring myself to so directly be part of the environmental devastation they wreck (a realization Beaton describes coming to in the novel). Unlike Beaton, I was fortunate to not have student debt, and so I had more of a choice. Instead, I left home for a different black hole: 2010s Silicon Valley.

A troubling question woven throughout the book is how working at the oil sands changes people. Beaton describes her experiences with sexual harassment and rape. Many of the men around her dehumanize her, treat each other with callousness and cruelty, and turn to drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Would the men she knows and loves back home turn into these hateful men too, if they were here? I remember coming to a similar realization in my early 20s. On the social media platforms built by 2010s Silicon Valley, I discovered the manosphere and its denizens' dehumanizing and transactional perspective of women and relationships. A similar troubling question writhed through my mind: which of the men around me were secretly retreating to the anonymity of the internet to post such hateful things? 

Both the Alberta oil sands and the Silicon Valley tech scene were places people went to make money. For both places, these workers — mostly men — left their homes to be somewhere where they had no community, to work long hours. That uprooting is hard. Its concentration in an area produces a culture that supports this form of sacrifice — often a toxic one. Beaton skillfully portrays this with empathy, without condoning or shrugging off the horrors. We see the difficulty of being separated from your wife and kids, and the small actions of recognition — like sharing cookies during the Christmas Eve night shift — that can make all the difference in such wrenching times.

Beaton also beautifully builds the tension arising between the desire to stay home and the desire to leave. It is familiarly Canadian: I have family in Cape Breton, and relatives who also left the Maritimes for Atlantic Canada. Her portrayal of the growing, gnawing sense of bleakness and isolation leading up to her sexual assault and the numb confusion afterwards were so moving that I put the book down for a while.

Beaton explores community and identity well. Her connection to Cape Breton is strong, and she finds other Cape Bretoners to form a community-away-from-home, who share some of her experiences. An interesting reflection comes towards the end where she is interviewed by a Globe and Mail reporter about her experience in the oil sands, and feels that the reporter is looking for salacious quotes about the awful men who work the oil sands. She is indignant: these people were her people too, in a way; the Toronto office worker hasn’t grappled with the fact that the men in her community would also be transformed by the oil sands.

The book touches on many political topics: environmental destruction, theft of land from indigenous people, illiteracy, sexism, the back-breaking and carcinogenic nature of manual labour, social inequality, and how the profit motive exacerbates all these problems. They don’t quite all tie together right, their linkages remain murky. In part, the genre of memoir acts as a limit: the author is constrained by their own slow-growing awareness of these issues. Still, it is a touching story with some memorable illustrations, and a time capsule of a very Canadian experience.

Review: Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács

This work is of interest for two reasons. The first is for providing a snapshot of how Lenin and the USSR were received by Marxists of other countries in the early 1920s. As Lukacs himself writes in his 1967 postscript, "As a document of how a not inconsiderable group of Marxists saw Lenin's personality and mission, his place in the course of world events, it is therefore certainly not without interest." The October Revolution changed the course of history, and it is interesting to see how socialists interpreted it at the time. 

The second is for the Postscript itself, which is a candid reflection of how the author viewed his influential work, the hits and misses. I find it valuable to see how admirable thinkers reflect on their work and mature over time.

As a work that outlined the unity of Lenin's thinking, I found it lacking. I would have liked to see more of an intellectual development traced out, and maybe a critical balance sheet tallied up, while this work represented more of a snapshot of his final positions, and was so laudatory that I had to roll my eyes a few times. Overall, the work seems more aimed at criticism of the failures of other parties to bring about a revolution, than of really presenting the unity of Lenin's thought. Lukacs targets the opportunists (and sometimes the revolutionary utopians) of the West, pointing to Lenin's "thinking through each question radically to its very end: in radically transforming his theoretical insight into practice." (Then again, it is often more meaningful to define something in opposition to something else, as opposed to as an abstract thing. This is probably even more true of Lenin, whose writing was particularly polemical against strains of thought he identified as incorrect.)

There were some concepts defined concisely and clearly (revisionism and labor aristocracy, for example). But these exist elsewhere too. Your time on this earth is scarce, and there are probably other books you would get more out of. Like Lenin himself, Lih's Lenin Rediscovered (for understanding Lenin as a theoretician and practitioner of Marxism contra opportunists and ultras), or Losurdo's Class Struggle (for a dialectical approach to the challenges of constructing socialism in an underdeveloped country).

Review: Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

This was a disappointing read. The author gives little of the context necessary to understand the economic difficulties and political situation at the start of Gorbachev’s leadership (see, instead, Socialism Betrayed). The narrative centres on the personalities involved in the USSR’s collapse instead: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and US President Bush Sr (there was a surprising focus on the reactions of the United States — at times we got a near hourly breakdown of White House activity. Countries outside the West were nearly entirely absent from the book, perhaps due to Zubok's choice of sources.).

For all the author’s insistence that Gorbachev was a “neo-leninist” with strong sympathies with the intelligentsia, there was little intellectual curiosity about the philosophical debates and philosophical influences undergirding the USSR’s 1980s reforms (contrast again with Socialism Betrayed). Indeed, the author makes the USSR appear like a one-man show, when CPSU debate and governance was far more distributed.

When the narrative wasn’t honed in on the relative charisma of the key political players or regaling colourful gossip, it detailed nationalist sentiment and account balances. These aspects I found to be informative: separatism ended up being the final mode of collapse — if not the root cause of the collapse — and nationalism continues to drive geopolitics in Eastern Europe. Utopian socialists often insist upon the possibility of non-capitalist reforms, but the hard currency problems Gorbachev had to deal with, particularly in the wake of crashing oil prices, drove decision-making and concessions. While I remain persuaded that the USSR’s collapse was not inevitable (a position Zubok also takes), through Zubok’s book I gained a better appreciation for just how difficult the economy was to keep going (due in no small part to the catastrophic reforms implemented). However, it is also notable what Zubok chooses to exclude: the "second economy" that was so crucial of a factor in the USSR's collapse in Keeran and Kelly's account was nearly absent from Zubok's telling. 

Somewhat by chance, I read this work back-to-back with Isabella Weber’s book on China’s economic reforms, and the comparison between the two approaches is illuminating. The CPSU liberalized the finance industry and media before most of the rest of the economy, and as a result, quickly lost control of both the economy and of political legitimacy. The CPC retained control over media apparatus, banks, and key sectors of the economy, and as a result, was able to steer the economy through their desired reforms without lasting threat to their leadership. This exercise is, however, left to the reader. Zubok is more interested in ensuring that, counter to some Western narratives (including the Nobel Peace Prize committee), the reader understands Gorbachev to be a bumbling idiot.

Zubok's work leaves something to be desired as a reference. He is often too credulous of works that should be suspected of having clear bias, like memoirs by American politicians. Several citations I tried to follow lead to a chain of "as quoted in" references. He is sometimes sloppy when it comes to economics. In one egregious example, he writes that "the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP", which is nearly mathematically impossible.

Zubok tends to lose the forest for the trees. I was hoping for a political and economic analysis, but found myself having to construct this for myself from the very extensive material Zubok relays. Still, his beat-by-beat recounting of the last three or four years of the USSR's existence did give me a better understanding of the overall shape of that era of history.

Review: How China Escaped Shock Therapy by Isabella Weber

This ended up being perhaps my favourite book of the year. Weber’s argument is clearly organized and based on extensive interviews with dozens of key figures involved in China’s 1970s-1980s reform period. I’ll summarize briefly some of the key conclusions I drew from her research and presentation:

(1) China’s reform should be thought of as indigenous, not “westernization.” In charting a path forward, the CPC and their advisors looked to ancient philosophy and liberation era (1930s-1940s) policy, and rejected the “Washington Consensus” that ended up wreaking havoc on Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

(2) The question was never whether or not to reform, but how to reform. There were clear failures of the existing system to address the new stage of development China had entered. Furthermore, the modern industrial system had become increasingly high tech, and China needed to catch up and keep up with this rapidly changing system.

(3) The two approaches to reform can be grouped into idealist “package reform” and pragmatist “experimental gradualism.” The package reform position, which aligned with the Washington Consensus, was idealist because it formulated an ideal market state, and believed that implementing the required infrastructure would be sufficient to achieve it, all in one step (“shock therapy”). The pragmatist approach, on the other hand, adapted to changing conditions, recognizing the interconnectedness of the economy, and made use of the dual-track price system to raise production in key areas without increasing prices. These two modes of thought (idealist package reformers versus experimental gradualists) had echoes in ancient Chinese debates.

(4) When trying to understand the impacts of price control liberalization, it is important to study not only Socialist Bloc countries; liberal capitalist democracies also resorted to price controls in times of war, and provide valuable case studies for understanding typical economic patterns. For example, post WW2, the USA followed rapid price liberalization and experienced high inflation and unemployment. In contrast, the UK followed slow, incremental reform, and avoided these catastrophes. These same results followed, respectively, in the wake of Eastern Europe’s rapid price liberalization and China’s slow price liberalization.

(5) The CPC’s success in economic reform stems from their careful study of economic policy from multiple schools of thought, as well as interviews with bureaucrats from nations that also conducted economics reforms in the late 20th century (Eastern Europe and Latin America). Surprisingly, economists and those with actual hands-on experience diverged wildly. Economists promoted policies more aligned with the Washington Consensus while those in charge of implementing these policies were far more critical of their successfulness. CPC policy was informed by their analysis of neoliberal, Keynesian, and Marxist economic thought and economic tools.

(6) Despite price liberalization and increased reliance on market forces, the CPC retained control over large parts of the economy. Unlike the CPSU, the CPC did not relinquish political control over banks, allowing them to direct capital flows via market means. State owned enterprises continued to play a large role in the economy. New growth, particularly in non-essentials and consumer products, was privately owned while crucial but slower growing heavy industry and energy sectors remained under state control.

(7) Economic reforms were rolled out gradually, responding to economic conditions and popular sentiment — more poetically summarized as “crossing the river by touching the stones.” The CPC advanced reforms only when they felt they were on solid, stable footing. At times, they rolled back reforms in response to public outcry or rapid inflation.

Economies are complex and dynamic: it can take a long time to change course, yet on the other hand, rapid change can lead to collapse and crisis in just a matter of months. China’s reforms should be considered a remarkable success regardless of one’s preference for free markets or absence thereof. The CPC achieved its goal of economic development without the devastation that swept across other former planned economies. I wished Weber had spent a little more time analyzing measures related to quality of life; economic development is not the whole picture of economic success, and all industrialized countries went through significant poverty and deprivation during their industrialization. Still, quality of life in China seems relatively high, and continues to improve. The world holds its breath to see how China will tackle future reforms: will it liberalize further, or return to more socialized ownership of the means of production? My hope (and hunch…) is for the latter, but regardless of the path they choose, I feel confident it will be charted via thorough study, careful analysis of changing conditions, and long-term thinking.

Review: Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny

Why did the USSR collapse? The question is of major political importance. If the problem is inherent to socialism, socialism cannot be the solution to the ills of capitalism. If the cause lies somewhere else, it must be understood and avoided if a socialist project is to succeed. The book’s authors, who are Marxists, argue that although the USSR was in need of reforms, these were far from fatal flaws; instead, its demise was due to right-deviation policies adopted by Gorbachev in 1986.

Philosophically, the authors trace two threads of Soviet thinking. The first thread, to which the authors are most sympathetic, connects Lenin, Stalin, and Andropov. This strain placed the proletarian class at the forefront while hoping to eliminate class devisions through the building of socialism. Had Andropov’s reforms continued past his untimely death, the USSR would likely have continued (the authors point to remaining socialist states as illustrative proof). The second strain is represented by Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and reflects petite bourgeois ideology that favours compromise with capitalism and downplays the importance of the proletariate in favour of a unified mass.

The strengths of the book are the authors' familiarity with socialist debates and their ability to situate policy decisions in this context, as well as their detailed presentation of the problems facing the Soviet Union by the 1980s. The discussion of the “second economy” — extralegal or illicit trade outside the planned economy — was particularly thorough and convincing as a contributing factor. The authors also provide clear, compelling rebuttals of several typical alternative explanations for the USSR’s collapse. The work is well-organized and strikes a good balance between historical detail and general themes such that their arguments are generally well-supported without getting lost in minutiae. 

The weakness of the book is that it remains unclear how the USSR should have navigated their difficulties. Although the second economy is elevated as one of the most important points of failure, I am not convinced that the relatively small and measured reforms the authors advocate would have solved this problem. Closer comparison with China, Vietnam and Cuba’s economic policies would have done much to strengthen their case. In particular, to what extent can capitalist relations be re-introduced into a socialist system to address certain economic problems without causing instability or unwanted excesses and crises? However, I did appreciate the authors' point that the goal is not only to develop the productive forces but also to "perfect the relations of production." The authors overly lean on the word "revisionism" to build their case for Gorbachev’s missteps, and I think scrubbing their argument of this bit of Marxist jargon would have led to a sharper critique. Additionally, the question of national identity remains murky. Although the authors show how national differences led to fracturing and although they emphasize the importance of understanding nationalism, it remains unclear what specific actions could have ameliorated the situation, or why it arose when and where it did. The solution appears to be to simply not allow nationalism to develop — but this is easier said than done. Quelling nationalism is not so dissimilar to chauvinistic oppression, and oppression can provoke its own destructive reaction. Similarly, self-determination and democracy are closely related, and a socialism that does not also strive to perfect democracy—rule by the people—is just as bad as one that does not strive to perfect the relations of production. Finally, while the authors engage with Western scholarship on the USSR's collapse, there was little treatment of Eastern — particularly Chinese —scholarship, possibly due to a language barrier.

Overall, this is an essential read, if not quite complete. The definitive study on this crucial question remains to be written.

Review: The Iliad by Homer

The experience of reading an ancient text is one of discovering something both new and familiar at the same time. Familiar, because these characters and stories and motifs are woven through so much of our culture. New, because to read the original work is different from seeing the ripples it casts.

The Iliad tells the story about the Trojan War, but only a brief slice of it in the middle. The story of Paris and Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, is referenced only briefly. The poem ends before Achilles is taken down by an arrow to his vulnerable heel. There are no men sneaking through fortifications via wooden horses; in fact, the walls of Troy still stand at the end of it all. The audience would likely have been familiar with all these stories, but they are not the story The Iliad wants to tell.

The Iliad opens with the scene of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. Agamemnon has taken for himself Briseis, a slave woman Achilles captured in a raid in their war against Troy. There are clear parallels with Paris taking Helen from Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, kicking off the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. As a result of this quarrel over Briseis, Achilles sulks by the seaside for most of the rest of the book, and in his absence, the Trojans press their advantage to the devastation of the Greek forces. These battles occupy the bulk of the poem.

In a dire moment, Achilles’ beloved comrade, Patroclus, offers to put on Achilles’ armour and scare off the Trojans, but divine trickery leads him to overextend, and he dies at Hector's hands. Achilles is swept into a vengeful rage, and enters the battle. The tides turn, and the Greeks chase the Trojans back to the wall. Achilles isolates Hector, who finds himself at a disadvantage, having also been deceived by the gods. Hector begs Achilles to return his body to Troy and treat it with respect, but Achilles refuses, promising instead to desecrate his body. He kills Hector, then drags around his body in violent disrespect of the dead.

The next book — the penultimate book — comes as a surprising change of pace: to honour Patroclus’ death, Achilles throws an athletic competition. It is, at first blush, an odd interlude. We go from life-or-death nailbiting threats, to friendly competition. But I think this chapter is the key to understanding the story The Iliad wants to tell: for each of these athletic challenges, the winner is determined not only as a matter of skill, but also based on negotiation where parties disagree on who wins, or where skill fails to produce a clear winner. As translator Emily Wilson writes in a footnote:

The funeral games as a whole show the Greeks working towards a political model in which several powerful men who share no ties of kinship might be able to share power amicably together, using models of collective decision-making that need not result in violence or incandescent rage—as in nascent oligarchic and democratic Greek city states.

In the final book, with encouragement from his mother, Achilles ends his rage. He meets with Hector’s father, and negotiates to return Hector’s body. Under the cover of a ceasefire, Hector is given a proper funeral and the poem ends.

So the poem starts with a mismanaged quarrel, two men refusing to find a way to cooperate and respect each other’s honour, and ends with two men reasoning out a solution that grants them both honour, without force or violence. This dynamic plays out in the intrigue between the gods too, who also eventually negotiate solutions to which of the Greeks should live or die, and whether Troy should fall or not. In contrast, the devastation of war is never far from mind when reading the battle scenes. With very few exceptions, each man who falls is named, and linked to a family or a place, sketched out as a particular person — even the most minor of characters. 

The Iliad is therefore a political work: an argument for the form of democracy of the elite that Ancient Greece became known for. Had it began with the story of Helen and Paris, it could not have made this argument: the natural climax would be the fall of Troy, which happens via military force, not political negotiation. Had it included the wooden horse, the lesson would be one of cleverness and trickery, not one of levelheaded politics saving the day. And so this ancient text — familiar and unfamiliar — tells just a small section of the story of the Trojan War.

Review: Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer

A quirk of reading a book digitally is that the ending can really sneak up on you. At one point, I checked the progress bar and was shocked to discover barely 5% of the book remained. Well, I guess that was the climax, I thought to myself. That moment encapsulates the lacklustre experience of reading this novel.

The story is told through five pairs of eyes. We already know how two of these tales end; the fates of the Psychologist and the Lighthouse Keeper are revealed at the end of Book 1. Although their ends are fated, the unfolding of their journeys is not without merit. Both characters grapple with questions of belonging and identity and purpose, and the relationship between the gay ex-Priest and the half-indigenous child brimming with curiosity was sweet.

Through the other characters we follow three paths of responding to the alien world of Area X: to leave and seek a full life beyond, or to accept the strangeness of it all, either through a slow Understanding and ultimate relinquishing of the self, or through a bright burst of faith and acceptance. These journeys clash with my own epistemology; the characters discover scientific knowledge is fallible, that what matters and is knowable comes from Being. I’m not opposed to reading works that challenge me philosophically and emotionally, but I didn’t find Vandermeer’s case to be convincing. Setting a story in a fantastical setting means the world can work according to any logic — or lack of logic — you want it to. Some of the other Goodreads reviews complain about the dearth of answers to the mysteries of the world Vandermeer introduces in the trilogy, and I think this is really the root that these other readers are grasping at: Vandermeer rejects the material world and the human ability to conceptualize it. If you approach the world scientifically (as his characters start out doing), it is a nihilistic and unsettling worldview, for all that the novel ends with what appears to be hope, peace, and acceptance.

I am curious to what extent the author has really found a sense of acceptance for the philosophy he develops in Acceptance. My hunch is that the nihilism of it troubles him too. First, this third instalment, having set up the New Frontier in book 1 and having burned down the legitimacy of the Old World in book 2, meanders without clear aim. The three characters from the later timeline find themselves in Area X but without clear goals, and just wander about until it eventually ends. Second, these first three books were published in quick succession all in 2014, with a surprise fourth book coming out only in 2024. As disappointed as I am with this trilogy, I have queued up the fourth one out of curiosity for how the author revisits or revises these themes after the turmoil of the late 2010s and early 2020s.