Review: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

"There is still one [city] of which you never speak. ... Venice," the Khan said. Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about? .... Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Are cities defined by their people? Their buildings? Their history? Their rhythms? Are cities designed? Or organic? Is a city knowable, or is a city really a thousand different cities all at once depending on whose eyes you see through? The answer to all of these contradictory questions is “yes, and they’re also so much more!”

Calvino sets all these facets of cities aglow through a series of vignettes of fantasy cities strung between a thin frame story of Marco Polo describing his travels to Kublai Khan. The cities are imbued with magical realism, sometimes veering towards surrealism and the absurd. 

The highs of the book stood out, but as a whole, it didn’t quite come together for me. I found the dynamic between Polo and Khan a little uninteresting. Some of the vignettes didn’t spark much in me. But the ones that did sparkle made me think, “yes, cities are just like that, and they’re beautiful.” It’s a book for city lovers. 

I highlighted a number of lines, here are a few I'll append for safe-keeping:

“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:”

“In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.”

“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. [Very Jane Jacobs!] At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.”

“However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it.”

“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. … Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”

“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

And my favourite vignettes that don’t work in excerpts:

• Trading Cities 4, on a city that is an intricate spider web of relationships
• Cities & Signs 5, on a city whose prosperity floats atop sooty wretchedness.
• Cities & the Dead 3, on two parallel cities of the living and the dead

Review: The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto

Between Canada’s relatively tiny population and the concentration of media in the hands of very few major corporations, there's a paucity of people's histories of our own country. Nora Loreto’s book on the decline of Canada’s social safety net attempts to fill this crucial vacuum. After all, how do we improve the systems we have — from education to housing to healthcare and beyond — if we don’t understand how we got here?

This work is broad in scope, and provides an approachable overview. I’d therefore recommend it to a curious leftist hoping to get caught up to speed on the basic beats of Canada’s history. How were social services organized before the welfare state was created? How did the welfare state come about? What were the major turning points in Canada’s neoliberal journey (particularly the Mulroney government of the 1980s and the 1995 Chrétien-Martin budget)? What sorts of rhetoric and political strategy does neoliberalism harness to push through its unpopular reforms?

Loreto focuses on the welfare state, and I understand the need for a writer to draw boundaries around their work somewhere. However, by not discussing production of resources and focusing only on expenditure of resources, Loreto’s polemics read a little utopian. Every subsidy to a corporation and every tax cut is criticized because the money could have gone to direct transfers to lower income people or other social programs. Questions of money are dismissed as unreal:

The deficit, the result of a fiscal imbalance between state revenues and state expenses, became as important, if not more important, than things that actually mattered and were real, like whether or not someone could afford groceries or access surgery. 

I agree with Loreto that it is deplorable that our government has aided the accumulation of massive amounts of wealth in the hands of the few. However, to meet the needs of everyone in our country, we need to ensure the long-term health of our country’s economy. I would have liked to see more discussion of state-owned enterprises or other investments that would lead to improved productivity so that we can reduce our working hours and care for those who cannot work. We cannot leave “thinking seriously about the economy as a whole” to the neoliberals while we get dismissed as unserious thinkers who just want welfare handouts. That does not garner trust in our ability to govern.

A further boundary is quietly drawn geographically. The US's gravity means it cannot be excluded from this history, however — puzzlingly — most of the rest of the world is. The demoralization of the left and the increased aggressiveness of neoliberalism after 1990 (both noted by Loreto) should both be viewed in the context of the dissolution of the world's first worker state (that is, the USSR), an event Loreto mentions only in passing. Canada is so small, we have to understand our history in a global context and not as a nation that just occupies the shadow of the US because our future certainly lies in international cooperation, not tying ourselves to a sinking empire.

Still, this book fills a void. Although its economic analysis falls somewhat short of what I had hoped for, as a history of Canadian rhetoric around social services it succeeds quite well. I smiled when Loreto turned one of neoliberalism’s favourite values on its head, concluding “Yes, sometimes even radical ideas are common sense.”

Review: Ludwig Fuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy by Friedrich Engels

This is a breezy read that starts with Hegel’s philosophical context, and traces the development of philosophical thought through Fuerbach to Marx. It fits a similar niche as Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History (1895), except that Plekhanov starts earlier and ends later (from 18th century French materialists to Plekhanov’s contemporaries), and comes in at something like six times the length. Engels’s chapter on Hegel is an excellent overview, and although his chapter on Marx’s historical materialism doesn’t have too much that can’t be found elsewhere, is clear and elegant and to the point. It is perhaps noteworthy that Engels introduces the dialectics of nature before he shows how dialectics applies to history.

The middle chapters I found less useful. Unlike foes like Proudhon, I do not see clear modern-day versions of Fuerbach. Though I haven’t read him directly, Fuerbach seems to have less depth and rigor compared to Hegel. As a result, understanding the Hegel-Fuerbach-Marx pathway feels like it adds less to my toolkit compared to works that focus on a greater number of thinkers (e.g., Plekhanov, or Losurdo’s historical contextualization of Hegel).

The difference between materialism and idealism and the development of the dialectical method are so important for marxist philosophy. There’s a real need for a modern overview, something with the scope of Plekhanov, but perhaps with more of the conciseness of Engels and some of the practicality of Mao’s On Practice, that teaches the controversies and brings us up to the current era.

Review: True Grit by Charles Portis

I'll remember this book for its lively and distinctive narrator voice, and the way it (unintentionally?) captures so much of the American psyche.

Mattie Ross is headstrong, principled, and speaks in folksy idioms. She narrates her story as if called to the witness stand. She regularly caveats information she knows only secondhand or scenes she cannot recall with great certainty. Those moments she recalls with great precision she states her willingness to swear on. Her narrative voice reflects her worldview: except for her close ties with her family, her relationships with people are largely transactional and her assessment of morality emphasizes its consistence with the law.

Lawful society versus the state of nature is a major theme of the work. Mattie's worldview comes into conflict with her life experience when she underestimates a bandit's willingness to defy her arrest and overpower her physically, thrusting her into a state of nature. In an effort to escape her captors she finds herself in a pit filled with snakes and bats. Forced by necessity, she rips the arm off a corpse (an act she views as unlawful desecration) and fights her way out.

The story itself is quintessentially American, both in the positive and negative sense. Mattie's quest symbolizes the importance of fighting for justice, although it is a retributive justice. Mattie values grit, and because of grit even a trigger-happy and vindictive bad cop may be the key to achieving justice. It's important to live by your principles, and everyone is unscrupulous and out to get you. Perhaps there is a work out there that venerates these positive qualities without also promoting these negative qualities; America is unlikely to fix its problems while instilling True Grit morality.

Review: Democracy or Bonapartism by Domenico Losurdo

This is an incredibly relevant work for understanding modern day democracy and its discontents. Losurdo traces history from the French Revolution through the 1992 US Presidential election to show the development of Bonapartism. We see how soft Bonapartism of the US and other countries of the West (versus the war Bonpartism of fascism) is remarkably stable, and yet fails to deliver on the emancipation and social welfare one might expect would come of universal suffrage.

Bonapartism is a political structure characterized by a powerful and charismatic executive, who legitimizes their power through the support of the masses, and who becomes the interpreter of the nation — that is, power is personalized. To pave over internal strife between economic classes within a nation, conflict is externalized, and the Bonapartist leader is imbued with a mandate to protect (and expand) the lofty ideals of the nation. Soft Bonapartism is able to shift from states of exception to states of normality, and part of its stability comes from its ability to change out heads of state when the current Bonapartist leader no longer can point to popular support. This is accomplished by having competitive elections between multiple factions of a single party.

Along with the increasing power of the Bonapartist leader comes a reduction of the power of political parties, if not through overt legal means, via the implementation of single-member districts over proportional representation. We also see increased monopoly over theoretical production, i.e., the consolidation of mass media under the control over a few billionaires. Though soft Bonapartism comes with universal suffrage (first for just white men, and now for nearly all adults), we also see a disemancipation in our ability to participate in political decision-making and debate.

Readers may be particularly curious about Losurdo’s assessment of the socialist states of the twentieth century. Losurdo argues that none of these leaders were Bonapartist figures (though Mao at one point came closest), in part due to the role political parties play in mediating power. Because political parties act as forums for political education and debate, they maintain the political engagement of the masses and act as insulation against the personalization of power.

Losurdo notes that we are currently in a wave of disemancipation, and that the end is not yet in sight. He has few answers for the steps going forward, although reading between the lines it seems like fighting for proportional representation and re-taking control over the means of information dissemination (education, news, etc) are likely bets. I’d recommend this book as a good introduction to Marxist critique of modern political structures, and as a first book by this author.

Review: A Safe Girl To Love by Casey Plett

This little anthology paints for the reader raw and honest emotion. The painful, everyday kind. The small, wrenching dramas of getting through the world. Plett introduces us to a series of trans characters. Most of them deal with returning to small town life, familial relationships, poverty, substance [ab]use, and romantic/sexual relationships. A surprisingly recurrent scene is for a character to get drunk and have their nipples twisted. A slightly less recurrent beat is for a Canadian to immigrate south of the border. (The author is Canadian, and has lived in the US.)

I was a little disappointed in the writing style. The prose was not particularly literary. The story-telling leaned a little too much on dialogue, perhaps hoping to capture in amber the way trans women of the 2010s spoke. Some parts seem overly explained, like the author isn't confident the reader is with her. For example, in one of my favourites—"Portland, Oregon", told from the perspective of a woman's cat—there's a scene included seemingly only to clarify for the reader that only the woman can understand the cat's speech, breaking the magic and mystery of the story unnecessarily.

The stories often ended without warning—sometimes even in the middle of a scene. Perhaps this is a commentary on life as a twenty-something going through transition. There is no end, you just continue going and changing and growing. But it makes for unsatisfying reading.

Review: An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich

The reason you would pick up this book is because you have not yet read Marx’s Capital and you would like an introduction. Presumably you hope to read only one such preparatory work before embarking on this journey, and so you are wondering if Heinrich’s offering suits your needs.

Heinrich checks a lot of boxes; at only 240 pages, this book is approachable yet quite comprehensive and precise in its overview of Marx’s three volumes. Despite these qualities, I wouldn’t recommend it as an introductory volume, because I think it fails to adequately present the discourse surrounding Marx’s work. Heinrich’s Introduction pushes the reader along a western chauvinist and nihilistic path that might take more than 240 pages (perhaps as many as 363 pages) to correct.

Heinrich intervenes in both the academic discourse as well as the practical Marxist discourse surrounding interpretations of Capital. However, he rarely names his opponents and even less frequently quotes them at length. Heinrich’s unnamed foes seem to be the weakest representatives of their various tendencies, resulting in strawmanned arguments. Heinrich declares easy defeats, positioning himself as the one true understander of Marx. At the level of academic discourse, the worst of these sins is his comparison of value form theory versus what he calls “substantialism” — always in scare quotes, and not (always?) a term his opponents would use to describe their own interpretation of the labour theory of value. His situation of Capital in practical applications of Marxism is even worse (particularly Chapters 11-12). During the twentieth century, revolutions guided by Marxism produced socialist states across the globe. This wave swept under-developed and colonized nations, not the industrialized nations early Marxists expected to see lead worker's revolutions. Heinrich has a sneering disdain for these efforts:

It is not sufficient for the transition to a communist society to conquer and defend state power during a weak phase of bourgeois rule, like Russia in 1917. Without the corresponding social and economic preconditions, a socialist revolution might be successful as a project to maintain the power of a political party, but not as a project of social emancipation.

Heinrich’s solution is, implicitly, that these workers not attempt to liberate themselves, and instead suffer under colonialism while they wait for the lazy western movements to figure things out first. The futility and illegitimacy of their movements being clear, Heinrich barely engages with Marxist economists and philosophers hailing from the USSR, China or the Global South. To the extent he gives a nod to non-Western interpretations of Marx, he continues his practice of battling unnamed foes, referring to them obliquely as, for example, “worldview Marxists.” To be safe, Heinrich also dismisses dialectics (an important philosophical foundation for Soviet and Eastern socialism) as useless at best and sophistry at worst.

Heinrich’s vision of a post-capitalist society (which he emphasizes is not at all inevitable) is one of full democracy, zero scarcity, and abolition of the value form. But what does the transition to this state look like? Heinrich has no answer.

Heinrich’s dismissal of Marx’s (non-Western) successors is mirrored by the absence of his precursors; Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc, feature little in Heinrich’s overview. As a result, Marx’s brilliant critique (understood properly only by Heinrich, of course) springs from nowhere.

So here we see the seeds of the misconceptions readers introduced to Marxism via Heinrich may be imparted with: a smug sense of western superiority, a depressed sense that nothing can be done to bring about a better world, an elevated sense of Marx’s genius severed from his intellectual context, and a certainty that all other interpretations of Marxism (by critics left unnamed) are patently absurd.

For readers who want less of an introduction and more of an interpretation, Heinrich’s book has some valuable insights. For example, I appreciated his reframing of the debates on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) as questioning if it even matters if it falls. (Heinrich says no, see above regarding the non-inevitability of the fall of capitalism. I agree no, there are many other reasons to end capitalism.) Heinrich also emphasizes that not only workers but capitalists too are subject to domination by capital, a crucial point frequently elided by leftist anti-capitalists. Chapter 8 (“Interest, Credit, and ‘Fictitious Capital’”) and Chapter 10 (“The Fetishism of Social Relations in Bourgeois Society”) were clear treatments of complex subjects.

But for those looking for a preparatory read, where to turn? My experience was Marx’s Inferno by W.C. Roberts, which presents Volume 1 in the fiery discourse of its time, and also emphasizes the impersonal domination of capital (following Heinrich), while refraining from smug strawmanned arguments. However, Roberts’s text is academic, and assumes familiarity with basic Marxist concepts. Perhaps instead start with Wage Labour and Capital, a pamphlet written by Marx with the intent of introducing his work to a popular audience.