The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” .. hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6….Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

As someone who follows these things, I have never seen “viral” support for a title on Facebook or Twitter or the left media have a comparable impact. I draw two conclusions. Sometimes having someone possessing state power on your side helps things. And a lot of Americans are hungry for alternative ideas,and are not being reached through the channels the left is most comfortable with.

A sign at a rally during the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike.

2012 was the year that the class-oriented political rhetoric introduced by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) percolated throughout American society, affecting both the election and social struggles. This was so even as Occupy itself was in a downward spiral for much of the year.

Although the Occupy encampments had mostly been repressed by the beginning of December 2011, hopes for the movement remained high into the new year. In March, at the Left Forum in New York City, Michael Moore laid out an ambitious vision of Occupy expanding to every neighborhood in the United States. It seemed reasonable enough. But a hint of the real limits of the movement came later that night. After his speech, Moore led Left Forum participants on a march to Zucotti Park, home of OWS, just a couple blocks away. It was the six month anniversary of the movement. The mood was festive and relaxed. Some people hung around past the midnight, the official closing time of the park. Immediately the cops swarmed in, aggressively attacking demonstrators, as they had repeatedly in the past at any sign that the encampment might restart. And as had been the case in the past, notwithstanding the considerable good will harbored towards the movement by many in NYC, no organized force such as the unions or nonprofits mobilized to directly challenge the repression. The sole exception, as far as I know, was the Maoist political group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP, however, is incapable of mobilizing people beyond its small membership.

The remnants of OWS  increasingly seemed to take a confrontational approach towards the police that further isolated them from the broad penumbra of support that had earlier helped catapult OWS to global fame. May Day protests in some places, including NYC, brought back memories of the glory days, but the momentum was not sustained. The same can be said about the protests against NATO in Chicago. Hard to believe, in retrospect, that some observers were fearful of a replay of 1968 in Chicago, when antagonism between protesters and cops overshadowed the Democratic convention. The NATO protests, while not unimpressive, hardly registered in the American public debate.

Instead new struggles came to define 2012, all profoundly marked by the spirit of rebellion so apparent during the heyday of Occupy. Some people predicted that more traditional social justice organizations would pick up the ball that OWS was fumbling. A coalition of such groups, “the 99% spring,” including many important unions and non-profits,  was soon rolled out, with plans to train thousands in nonviolent direct action tactics. A vigorous debate ensued about whether this constituted co-optation of OWS or the taking of the movement to a higher level. This debate quickly subsided when the wan impact of the 99% spring became clear. A few protests were held at board meetings of major corporations and such. Little happened beyond that. The 99% spring renamed itself “99% power.” At this writing, the 99% power website does not appear to have been updated since May 31, suggesting that the concept has been quietly abandoned.

About the same time, the presidential election began to move to the fore in earnest, sucking a certain amount of energy away from the streets. Whereas in 2008 Barack Obama had tapped into deep wellsprings of hope and anger, in 2012 the mood on the left was glum. The Republican primary season offered a march of idiots, before Mitt Romney was able to overwhelm the field with money. Obama himself was something of a no-show for his reelection campaign. His most memorable moment was the first debate, when his bored and disconnected manner offered an opening for Romney. It was instead Bill Clinton, at the convention, and Joe Biden, during the vice presidential debate, who offered rousing defenses of centrist communitarianism that energized the liberal base. Much of the left, fed up with four years of drone strikes, negotiated cave-ins, deterioriation of civil liberties, and other disappointments too numerous to mention, heaped venom on the whole spectacle. Those of us who suggested voting for Obama as the lesser of two evils found ourselves on the defensive as appeals to vote third party or skip voting altogether seemed more popular, particularly among younger people on the left.

And yet, the election did not feel entirely meaningless after all. One important hint was Mitt Romney’s notorious 47% speech, where he framed the electoral contest as one between the wealthier half of the country, which pays federal income tax, and the bottom half, which mostly does not, and, in his view, is excessively dependent on government programs, notwithstanding that any serious accounting of government spending finds the top 53% receive more concrete benefits than the bottom half. A similar hint was offered in a column by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who encountered a “startling vehemence” in opposition to Obama among businessmen of Cleveland and Chicago. Exit polls indicated that the election did in fact have a strong class basis. Obama won a large majority of those voters in households making $50,000 or less, and lost all other economic brackets, although the Democrats are also popular with people with advanced degrees, an important affluent sector. Racial minorities, Blacks and Latinos but also Asians, who historically have a much weaker connection to the Democratic Party, voted for Obama in large numbers. Notwithstanding its racist overtones, Bill O’Reilly captured something of the implications of the election results in his notorious statement: “It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it. And he ran on it.” Where O’Reilly is wrong is in his belief that Obama is going to deliver many of the “things” these voters want, such as jobs or affordable health care. Obama instead almost immediately began devising cuts to social security as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations. Nevertheless, the right probably should view the emergent class-based, minority-friendly electoral  majority with alarm. Never in recent history have appeals based on racial scaremongering and social issues seemed so impotent. Already, the electoral debacle has thrown Republican obstructionism on immigration reform into question.

Meanwhile, the various calls to vote third party or boycott the vote made little obvious impact. Jill Stein of the Green Party, the most prominent left third party candidate, barely surpassed a tenth of Ralph Nader’s vote share from 2000, straggling in with .3%. Voter turnout was low, but this appeared to have more to do with disillusionment with the elections during a stagnant economy than any calls for a boycott. Furthermore, large numbers of Blacks and Latinos, who, one hopes, the left would like to see in its coalitions, made the effort to vote in defiance of voter suppression tactics promoted by Republicans at the state level. The most notable electoral strategy of the left outside of the Democratic Party was not at the national level but in a Seattle District for a Washington State Senate seat. There, economics professor Kshama Sawant, running as a socialist, lost with an impressive 27% of the vote. Third party advocates may want to consider zeroing in on vulnerable local races as places to begin to build power and insert alternate discourses into American life.

Although, as indicated above, the presidential election drew some of the mental energy of the left and its sympathizers, and Occupy mostly was in decline, new fronts of struggle opened up. Perhaps the most important of these developments was the upsurge in strike activity, somewhat anticipated by us last year. Most notable of these was the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) strike in September, and the strikes of Walmart workers, both in stores and on the supply chain, mostly during the fall. Both of these have immense implications, far beyond the number of workers involved, which, in the case of Walmart, was fairly modest. Schools have been the central terrain of attacks on the public sphere, and the last thirty years, if not longer, have been characterized by efforts to set racial minorities against teachers’ unions. Yet the CTU, under the new leadership of Karen Lewis (itself the product of an activist reform caucus), was able to rally a large majority of Black and Latino families to its cause. It will take many more strikes and related activities to reverse the ugly trajectory of charter schools, standardized testing mania, and the degradation of the teaching profession, but this was an important start. Inspired by the CTU, reform caucuses in teachers’ unions throughout the country are stepping up their activity.

Over the long term, the Walmart strikes may be even more significant. Walmart is pretty much the largest employer in the U.S., and it has effectively immunized itself against previous union campaigns. But the new wave of strike activity has thrown it on the defensive. Strikes at warehouses and ports demonstrated the vulnerabilities that “just-in-time” production creates. A national day of action on Black Friday saw widespread participation by Occupy groups and other community supporters.  Not long after, hundreds of fast food workers in New York City struck, opening another front in a sector that was seemingly off limits to unions as of last year. These campaigns were organized by unions, by community groups with close ties to unions, and by workers acting spontaneously. But the context for the growing audacity was the Occupy earthquake last year. More than at any time in decades, strike activity is involving workers not formally members of unions. This burst of energy was not confined to the CTU or Walmart and other retail workers. There was also the Hot and Crusty struggle, the Palermo’s Pizza boycott, strikes at ports, and more.

At the same time, the unions have not crafted an effective strategy against the Republican drive to push through right-to-work and anti-collective bargaining legislation at the state level. At the beginning of the year, a rousing effort by unions in Indiana to “Occupy the Superbowl” was scaled back as the leadership got cold feet. In the summer, the failure of the recall vote of Scott Walker marked an ignominious turn in the Wisconsin struggle. At the end of the year, Michigan demonstrated that the unions and their allies have still not crafted an effective response to “surprise” attacks by Republican legislators. An increasingly stark choice is taking shape–either unions will have to develop some more effective strategy to challenge these attacks, or workers will struggle under a context in which U.S. labor law has been further defanged. It is hard to see how such a strategy can be crafted without getting at least a little space from their supposed allies in the Democratic Party, even as the logic of the Republicans’ attacks is pushing the unions even further into the hands of the Democrats.

Class-based struggles of the thirties were accompanied by a revival in struggles against racism, eventually leading to the modern civil rights movement. Similarly, today we are seeing a renewal of these struggles, now often targeting issues of criminal justice and referencing the concept of “the New Jim Crow.” This years’ protests around the murder of Trayvon Martin marked an escalation from last years’ around the unjust execution of Troy Davis. In the summer, civil rights groups with the support of some unions held a “silent march” (apparently an effort to marginalize the unruly Occupy element) against the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police. Numerous events were held around the country in which the families of the victims of police violence spoke up. In the poorest neighborhoods, something more radical is afoot. Those most victimized by such policies as stop-and-frisk and mass incarceration are also a large portion of fast food workers, suggesting the sorts of alliances that might open up as these struggles intensify.

Challenging housing evictions was on the agenda of OWS pretty much from the start. But this year, the struggle became more concrete. Struggles like that around the Cruz family in Minneapolis and  the Hernandez family in Los Angeles inspired activists nationwide. An Occupy Our Homes day of action in December took things to a higher level, but not quite to a level where the media or politicians paid much attention. Expect these struggles to continue to grow over the next year or two.

Finally, a little after the one year anniversary of Occupy, OWS showed new signs of life, in two forms–the Rolling Jubilee #Strikedebt movement, and Occupy Sandy. The Rolling Jubilee, which purchases personal debt in secondary markets and retires it, has been subject to withering critique in some quarters of the left. One of the major criticisms, that it involves so little money that its effects are largely symbolic, strikes me as misguided. The two greatest direct action campaigns in the history of the U.S.–defiance of the fugitive slave act by abolitionists, and draft resistance during the sixties–were also largely symbolic. For the most part, the fugitive slave act was still enforced, and the military never lost the capacity to restock the forces in Vietnam.  Nevertheless, both of these movements greatly intensified debate and sharpened positions. Resistance to debt at a symbolic level, rather than people actually defaulting en masse, is what is likely to shift the debate at this point. A bigger question is whether Rolling Jubilee will be that mechanism. Much of the debt being purchased, at prices set by the banks, is fraudulent. Is it just legitimizing this fraud-ridden secondary market? Furthermore, it is not clear what the next step proposed by the Strike Debt group is, apart from vague calls to continue to resist debt. Still, if this activity does gain some ballast, it will not be the first time in recent memory in the U.S. that an action tarred by the far left as insufficiently radical actually made an impact. Similar critiques were popular as Occupy Wall Street was beginning.

The other initiative that thrust Occupy back into the spotlight was Occupy Sandy, the response to the “Frankenstorm” that hit New Jersey and New York hard.  Racing into the breach formed by a failed state response to a “natural” disaster has a long and honorable pedigree among movements, as those familiar with the history of Mexico and Nicaragua know.  The immense volunteer efforts associated with Occupy Sandy were simultaneously a depoliticized campaign which built good will for the movement and highlighted the ineffectiveness of the government response and positioning for the more explicitly political struggles ahead regarding rebuilding and construction of needed infrastructure.

This year saw mounting struggles in workplaces, in neighborhoods, against “the New Jim Crow,” around storm relief. An electoral contest between two neoliberals nevertheless produced a result with obvious class overtones. We have not even given due consideration to the reemergence of protests around reproductive rights, at this point mostly focused on the venality and stupidity of various Republican legislative acts at the state level. In fact, the prominence of women in most of the major labor struggles of 2012, as well as the eviction movement, Occupy Sandy, and the post-Newtown revival of calls for gun control,  is worth reflecting on. By contrast, in its heyday, Occupy struck many observers as male-dominated. Over the next few years, these struggles are likely to ascend to more intense levels. The question of how to pull them together into a coherent political project will require serious thinking and work.

The mainstream press doesn’t pay attention to books on the left. “The New Jim Crow,” one of the best selling books from the left in the last ten years, and a work that is reshaping the national discussion about racism, prisons, and the police, never merited a review in The New York Times.  Nor is the progressive press much better. How often do you see titles from AK Press reviewed in The Nation?

That’s why Left Eye on Books exists. Over the last two years, we have posted reviews of dozens of works of interest to left wing readers, most published either by university presses or small independents. Through our blog, we have brought attention to many more, as well as providing sober analysis of the evolution of the American left and related concerns.

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In this context, Weiss’ book is a welcome effort to sort through her intellectual legacy in the U.S. In journalistic fashion, Weiss describes many facets of the Rand phenomenon, including the author herself, who comes across as thin-skinned and traumatized by her family’s fate in post-revolutionary Russia. There is also the inner circle which she gathered around her, “the collective,” riven by purges sparked by her own extra-marital affairs. Among the most notable members of the collective was Alan Greenspan, the former chief of the Federal Reserve, who Weiss portrays as unrepentant about his Randian past. Weiss also describes those who have preserved and promoted Rand’s intellectual legacy. And certainly not least, he describes her growing prominence among the grassroots of the American right. Here Weiss directs attention to the contradiction between Rand’s atheism, considered a core tenet of her “objectivist” philosophy, and the religiosity of the American right. He suggests that if this contradiction can be reconciled, Rand’s influence in American life will deepen. It should be noted here that Paul Ryan does in fact both embrace Rand and the religiosity that is so essential to the contemporary American right. The gulf between Rand’s objectivism and libertarianism, once vast, has already shrunk, although the hostility towards neoconservative military adventures among libertarians remains a source of tension.

I can’t say reading “Ayn Rand Nation” left me with greater respect for the author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” However, it did alarm me to learn of the growing extent of her influence in the U.S. Weiss has a point in urging left and liberal critics of this influence to sharpen their arguments against her philosophy, and promote them widely. It would also be relevant to examine what has happened in the U.S. that a “philosophy” that amounts to a tribute to selfishness has taken hold so widely. It is all the more ironic given the widespread religiosity of the American population. Not only her atheism, but her moral perspective is utterly at odds with all major religions, including the forms of Christianity most prominent in the U.S.

There are people in the U.S. besides James Livingston who believe socialism has triumphed, but they are not typically on the left. (photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

The seemingly obvious answer to the question above is  no.  Presently the main policy debate in Washington is over how to cut the deficit, and what cuts to “entitlement” programs would make the most sense. Foreign policy discussions often focus on which interventions should be considered priorities, while ending the empire of bases and stopping the bombing of countries is off the table. The trend in schools, at both the secondary and higher level, is to insert more of the logic of business and profit-taking into these institutions. Inequality remains steep, and notwithstanding Occupy Wall Street’s famous success at “changing the discourse,” no significant policy proposal to reduce it is on the table. “Socialism” is an insult in the U.S., much more than an ideological orientation. When self-identified socialists manage to accomplish something, they tend to lie low. For example, the right is louder than the left in noting the role of the International Socialist Organization in spurring the confrontational approach of the Chicago Teachers’ Union. Even a very brief assessment like this one should not fail to note that the unionized portion of the paid workforce is now down to about 12%, while the prison population has soared. It is hard to square the picture painted above with a triumphant left.

Yet in a recent piece published in Jacobin Magazine, Rutgers historian James Livingston argues for the strength of socialism in the U.S., and that the left has, in some sense, “won.” Livingston makes his case in the context of comparing present history to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalism did not conquer feudalism through a series of revolutions made in its name, or parties explicitly advocating for capitalism. Therefore the whole question of whether people are advocating for socialism is overrated. In fact, Livingston seems to feel that people advocating for socialism may be an obstacle to its achievement, echoing Hardt and Negri’s call to empty the churches of the Left. In which case, it is not difficult to understand why he feels good about the situation in the U.S. The churches of the left are already mostly empty here.

Livingston offers a heterogeneous list of phenomenon to build his case for the gains of socialism in the U.S. He argues that socialism has no particular political valence. This lack of political valence means he can throw almost anything at all critical of the unhinged domination of market values, anything, roughly speaking, to the left of objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand, into the mix as “socialism”. Catholic philosopher Robert Novick, liberal president Franklin Roosevelt, and neoconservative Irving Kristol  are all in this sense “socialist,” something which some tea party acolytes, but few others, might agree with. Long ago, the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi made the point that the self-regulating market was a utopian myth whose attempted realization triggers self-defense efforts with a variety of politics. Livingston’s novel and confusing spin is to call all these efforts socialist.

In Livingston’s view, the U.S. volunteer army is an enclave of socialism, since

The U.S. military is now the farthest outpost of the New Left or the Great Society, where affirmative action has worked to turn a once profoundly racist institution into job training, higher education, and social mobility for working-class kids of every color. It’s the last stand of that once-upon-a-time War on Poverty: a public works program that, within its limited purview, has redeemed MLK’s promissory note of equality. It’s the site of rigorous historical consciousness and training, where the most searching critiques of American empire have become routine: since 1992, it’s become our most reliable intellectual opposition to imperial idiocy.

“Socialism” also seems to involve any organization that might conceivably shape a market, including “trade unions, consumer associations, and other interest groups as well as … public policy.” Advertising and consumerism are also a part of the emergent set of social relations that will constitute socialism. Apparently all this will lead to legitimizing the self-management of society. Furthermore, “The economies of scale and the technological innovations enabled by corporations in the early twentieth century extricated capital and labor from the “process of production,” making both factors superfluous.” In other words, capitalists don’t typically run corporations so much as collect rents, and workers work less and less in factories, and are paid more and more through “entitlement programs” administered by the state, and apparently this creates the terrain to delegitimize capitalism and the logic of wage labor.

“In short, capitalism has stopped making moral sense because it has stopped making economic sense.” Various new social movements (civil rights, feminism, gay rights, et al) have improved social relations for the better. And finally, the internet has opened up new vistas where goods like music and information can be distributed without the mediation of money. Based on this heterogeneous list, “socialism no longer functions as an ethical principle with no bearing on the historical circumstances of our time, which is about as useful as a crucifix when the real vampires approach. Instead of a pious wish that things should be better – an “ought” with no purchase on the “is” – it begins to feel like the fuller expression of an actually existing social reality, something we can live with, build on, and build out. It begins to look like a usable past.” Whereas Walter Benjamin famously wanted to pull the emergency brake on the train of history, Livingston seems to want to place a brick on the gas pedal and yell “full steam ahead!”

It would be difficult to engage with every aspect of this article. In summing it up, I’ve skipped over a sizable amount of philosophical positioning. I don’t have the time and space to undo his conflation of liberalism and the left, two very different political perspectives. And it would be difficult to engage even with all of that which I have included. So I will just make a couple of points. Livingston largely seems to see the U.S. as a coherent political actor absent its relationship to the wider world. Furthermore, he emphasizes continuities in the political economic evolution of the U.S. Although it isn’t always clear, it sounds like he is calling for a deepening of the regulation of the economy, first concretized in the progressive era, and an expansion of the welfare state developed in the New Deal era, as well as a soupcon of the democratization of social life via civil society. As a position paper for the Democratic Socialists of America in 1972 this may have made some sense. Four decades later, it is simply baffling. He altogether fails to illuminate the way a relatively brief period in which class differences were being attenuated in the U.S. has given way to something else entirely.

Class is hardly mentioned in Livingston’s piece. As noted above, he briefly alludes to a trend by which capitalists are increasingly divorced from building and maintaining productive enterprises, instead identifying sources of rent. Those at the bottom depend more and more on government transfers. He regards this as practically proto-socialist, hyping up the supposed erosion of the legitimacy of capitalism. This itself greatly underrates the ideological problem, presuming that polarization will be transformed into hatred for capitalism. But armed with the entire political elite, commercial media, think tanks, numerous “mega-churches” and much of academia, capital can do a great deal to shape popular thought along other lines, as has been done for decades. Furthermore there are many reactionary notions among the working class that can be used against them. It would take work to overcome this, obscured by Livingston’s inevitablist hyperbole.

A look at what he identifies as a “socialist” institution in the US, the military, helps illuminate the direction of classes. He sees it as an enclave of New Deal values, which he problematically equates with socialism, but this romanticizes the current situation. During the heyday of the New Deal regime, the U.S. state made some cross-class claims on the lives and labors of men. Men from a variety of classes served in World War II, and even Korea. Already by the time of the Vietnam War, as the parts of the New Deal coalition were beginning to unravel, the expansion of higher education and student deferments limited the participation of the middle class. And then the anti-war movement, the unintended incubator of the neoliberal middle class political subject, succeeded in eliminating the draft while failing to radically alter U.S. militarism. The military became”volunteer” i.e. an economic draft of working class youth, particularly given their declining prospects as union membership started to collapse. More recently, several other “anti-socialist” trends are apparent. One is differentiation–valorization of a handful of units–special forces, Navy SEALS–as the true saviors of national security, and related devaluing of the rest. Another trend is outsourcing and privatization, the contracting out of major parts of military activity to private companies whose workforce is recruited globally, both at the “elite” level of fascistic mercenaries drawn from ex-military of the U.S., South Africa, Israel, Chile, etc and the “proletariat” level of shit-work drawn from surplus labor pools like the Philipines and Pakistan. A third trend is telecommunicating/automation, as drone strikes are conducted by professionals comfortably operating in Virginia and Nevada. All this leaves the mass of soldiers in the U.S. military increasingly gratuitous and devalued. Do not be surprised if the recent spate of stories about suicides and drug abuse among troops turns into full blown pathologization of them. These trends parallel those in other industries and sectors of the U.S. This is because, like corporations, the military was never a socialist institution in the first place. It was not in the least self managed or democratic. Thus it was not particularly difficult to reconstruct it on more in-egalitarian lines.

New Deal “socialism,” such as it was, played out in the context of U.S. hegemony. The U.S. emerged unscathed from World War II, and was by far the largest economic actor in the world at the time. It’s lack of a colonial empire enabled it to reconstruct world order by embracing demands for independence in the colonized world. Meanwhile, competitive pressure from the Soviet Union strengthened the hand of such internal actors as anti-communist unions and civil rights organizations. All of this started to come unwound forty years ago. First, there was a more difficult world economic environment, as Germany and Japan became much more competitive, and oil producers cooperated to raise prices. Later the Soviet Union imploded, undoing a familiar order. More recently, the rise of China and the apparent ability of Latin America to limit the influence of the U.S. through regional unity has further reshaped the world. In the more difficult environment, the U.S. state developed a tight alliance with the top 10% or so of its population, relegating the rest to mass incarceration, “precarious” labor markets, and a disappearing welfare state.

How does the U.S. look in this context? It is simultaneously too small and too large. The U.S.’s 300 million people is a modest sized population in the new context. Efforts to keep pace with Europe by unifying the hemisphere (the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) have collapsed. Efforts to unify North America are basically a dud. The U.S. has failed to turn “illegal” immigrants, mostly from Mexico, into citizens, instituting instead a quasi-Apartheid system that intensifies competition at the bottom of the labor market. We should not be surprised if Mexico begins to look south, or attempts to balance its Northern neighbor with powers to the south and west (China).  A genuine North American union seems off the table. There is no elite or popular force in the United States interested in such a project.

And then there is the U.S.’s present global role, which is too large, “overstretched,” as many describe it. It involves exercising military, economic and diplomatic power. As Livingston seems to believe that socialism has something to do with the proliferation of civil society organizations (sometimes called non-governmental organizations, or NGOs) and efforts on their part to regulate and shape markets, it should be noted that the U.S.’s global strategy of the last two decades might be summarized as minimizing the impact of NGOs and states on the economic rights of multinationals and finance capital. This attitude eventually drove many NGOs to reconstitute themselves as the respectable wing of the “alter-globalization” movement and the social forums of the next decade, challenging the direction the U.S. was moving the world economy. This opposition ended, or at least slowed, the attempt of the U.S. to unify the top 5% or so of the world around a financially oriented economy (“globalization”). If anything, the U.S. has further antagonized this community globally by asserting the rights of powerful states to kidnap, torture, and assassinate people from around the world in the decade that followed 9-11. The most recent mutation involves adopting these techniques to try to globally stop the democratic potential immanent in the internet. Think of the persecution of Bradley Manning and Megaupload. On cultural questions raised by the rise of political Islam, indigenous peoples, and the rise of civilizational states such as India and China, the U.S. is dogmatically universalist. On environmental questions, it is actively obstructionist.

The U.S. has largely maintained its power through a sort of carryover of its financial power from when it was genuinely hegemonic. That day is over, and now it is hanging on because few other actors in the world actively want to deal with the mess an implosion of U.S. power would cause. This situation won’t last forever. It is possible that the end of U.S. power will be as dramatic as the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Or perhaps a better analogy is Spain after the demise of the Hapsburg project of creating a unified Europe. Spain held on and pretended it was a great power for several centuries more, even as it became a center of backwardness and repression. On the other hand, a revolutionary process from below could conceivably reconstruct the U.S. on terms that would contribute to the larger project of creating a viable world order, one that would undoubtedly take cultural and ecological concerns as seriously as political economic ones. This would require a great deal of work to overcome the disunity at the bottom. It is not immanent in the present direction of the U.S. It does involve seizing contradictions opened by the current economic crisis. It furthermore involves integrating many aspects of the U.S. experience and popular memories. But this is not the same as seeing it immanent in every trend. It involves real work, often against the grain. At one point, Livingston condescendingly suggests that left efforts to push against the individualist ethos of the U.S. constitute a demand for the masses to “get religion.” We should in fact embrace this description. Every successful religion involves finding commonality and introducing a new ethos among disparate actors, and a successful left project would as well. It also involves learning from actors around the world, something entirely missing from Livingston. It involves pulling the emergency brake of history and yelling “stop!” It is the only option for a left worthy of the name.

Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” currently at the top of the list of “blue” bestsellers.

The folks at Amazon have created an “Election Heat Map” that indicates trends in the purchase of political books. In line with the practice of TV networks on election night, states are labeled “red” or “blue” depending on what sorts of books are selling more. “We classify books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and/or customer classification, such as tags. We compute percentages, updated daily, for each state and the US by comparing the 250 best-selling blue books during the time period against the 250 best-selling red books during the same time period, including new book launches.” Although the methodology leaves a lot to be desired, the results are roughly in line with those of social scientists who have mapped out networks of books based on the “people who bought this also bought” function and found little overlap between, roughly speaking, a “liberal” wing and a “conservative” one. I say roughly speaking because, in that data, as in the current “heat map,” the “liberal” side is quite heterogeneous, in stark contrast to the conservative side. Here I will describe the composition of “blue book” and “red book” America. The lists shift from hour to hour, but are fairly consistent in substance. Similarly, while I only look at the top twenty, a glance at the top hundred, which Amazon keeps track of, shows the same patterns.

First, on the blue side, there is a very wide range of political opinion, which can be loosely grouped into several categories. There are radicals, including Howard Zinn, Michelle Alexander, Chris Hedges, and James Loewen. The radicals are extremely pessimistic about the existing political class, and often believe that core American ideals themselves constitute part of the problem. They typically implore readers to build social movements to push for radical change. It should be noted that the radicals have themselves been critiqued from the left by various marxists, anarchists, and black nationalists. But this hard left position has no presence on the Amazon list, in line with its weakness both in producing widely read books and in making an impact on American public life.

Next to the radicals would be such left liberals as Barbara Ehrenreich, Donald Bartlett and Joseph Steele, and Joseph Stiglitz.They tend to identify problems whose size and scope is more manageable than those mapped out by the radicals. Depending on their mood, they may call on people to engage in protest, or they may attempt to shame liberal politicians into acting in a more progressive manner.

A little to their right are those aligned with the Obama administration. Only one book on the list explicitly defends the administration of Barack Obama: Michael Grunwald’s “The New New Deal,” which celebrates the stimulus as an important piece of legislation. But Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” which basically argues that the Republicans have lost their minds, might be taken as a covert defense.

Then there are several authors that can’t really be classified as liberal, at least in the way that term is used in the U.S., to mean “left of center.” Thomas Friedman is loathed not only by radicals, but also by left liberals like Wonkette. Richard Dawkins’ argument for atheism, like those of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, is also an argument for supporting Anglo-American wars in the Middle East. And Jonathan Haidt, who tries offers a psychological explanation for why people are divided about religion and politics, usually sounds more sympathetic to the conservative side of that divide when discussing his work.

A number of other books– “The Other Wes Moore,” “Globalization: A Very Short Introduction,” “The Passage of Power,” and “The Travels of A T-Shirt in the Global Economy“–I find difficult to classify without more information. I suspect that they can all be loosely described as liberal, in the sense that they believe sober examination of the world can be followed up with intelligent reforms that make things a little better for the worst off. Many of these books, as well as some of the others described above, such as “Nickel and Dimed” and “Lies My Teacher Told Me” are on the list because they are currently being purchased by college or high school students who they have been assigned to. This in itself, I think is telling. A good chunk of the market for liberal and radical books (loosely defined) is the captive market of students. While radicals have little presence in the mass media, their ideas are shared in academia.

So “blue books” range from radicals to the center-right world of Friedman and Haidt. In this sense, it is a different spectrum from that offered by mainstream media like The New York Times or NPR, which rarely includes radicals, and only sometimes offer space to left liberals. It does seem to capture the range of opinion among the college educated middle class in the U.S. What about the “red” side of the equation?

The books the “red state” public are reading about Obama are undiluted, racist garbage.

The most popular category on the red side is denunciations of Obama, most paranoid rather than illuminating. Paul Kengor warns us that Obama’s “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist. In fact, Obama condescended and dismissed Davis in his autobiography. Dinesh D’Souza locates the roots of Obama’s “rage” (huh?) in the anti-colonial writings of his father. Ed Klein worries about, among other things, Michelle Obama’s “inordinate” power over her husband. None of these books are remotely serious, even allowing that they were quickly written, edited and published to be timely. It is inconceivable that a scholar twenty years from now will consult any of them to learn about the Obama administration.

The only other significant category of books among the red ones are manifestos exulting economic freedom for the wealthy by the likes of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Von Hayek. It is possible that Friedman and Von Hayek are selling primarily to students, although the economics discipline is actually a little to the left of their ideology, for the most part.

And that is about it, although a book about the killing of Abraham Lincoln, “by Bill O’Reilly” (yeah right–at least Martin Dugard, likely responsible for the entire text, is also acknowledged on the cover) is on the list. Not present in the red top twenty, and only minimally present in the top 100, are any books that address the position of the U.S. in the world today, actual policy options politicians are considering, accounts of social life in the U.S., indeed anything besides paranoia about the Black president and restatements of libertarian ideology.

As mentioned, Amazon’s methodology leaves something to be desired here, but the pattern described above is in line with efforts to more rigorously map buying patterns based on the “people who bought this also bought..” function. The pattern is not that blue books constitute left/liberal perspectives, while red books offer conservative views. Instead, blue books network together heterogeneous books ranging from the radical left to the center right, while red books do little besides reiterate far right talking points and libertarian ideology. In the map linked in this paragraph, from 2008, the only exception on the red side is Saul Alinsky’s community organizing handbook, “Rules for Radicals,” which was often discussed on Fox News. The pattern lends some credence to the Ornstein and Mann position noted above, that the U.S. political divide is increasingly a split between those with some grounding in reality and a purely delusional worldview. But it should also be noted that blue books do not map onto the Democratic Party in any simple way. Radicals have a real presence here, while their numbers among elected officials are miniscule. This is also suggestive of larger trends, namely the agonized debate among progressives every four (or even two) years about whether to vote for the Democrats or not. The heat map accurately indicates that the radicals are part of a public debate that includes mainstream Democrats and even the center-right. At the same time, the failure of the radicals, and even left liberals, to make a political impact is manifest. Hence the torment about staying in the Democrats or leaving. Finally, we should note that notwithstanding the ideological homogeneity of red books, and the larger numbers of blue books which students are forced to purchase, Amazon indicates that red is outselling blue by a wide margin, 57% to 43%. This likely has a lot to do with the impact of Fox News, which promotes these books with a single mindedness not matched by any blue force, including MSNBC. It may also be the case that a few right wing books sell a lot, while many liberal/left books sell in moderate amounts. It is disturbing nonetheless.

Writing at libcom, Nate Hawthorne suggests there are several lessons relevant for contemporary anarchist groups in STO’s history. He notes “I think its priorities and the way it set priorities were a problem in that the group repeatedly put long term projects on the back burner in response to a new development that was treated like either an emergency (sometimes because it really was, involving serious state repression) or treated like a new opportunity not to be missed. I think the limits of how STO set its priorities are part of what makes Staudenmaier’s book valuable for anarchists – we learn as much or more from failures as from successes.” He goes on to say “While many anarchists are and should be anti-Leninist, the “anti-“ there means something different from our being, say, anti-police. That is, the character of our opposition is different. Seeing how much STO managed to accomplish within (and despite!) its Leninism is useful for remembering that we are able to disagree strongly but still find points of commonality politically.” At threewayfight, Matthew N. Lyons writes “This is a detailed, thoughtful account of one of the most interesting radical groups to emerge from the 1960s left. STO was one of very few Marxist groups in the U.S. that promoted both revolutionary politics and open debate and discussion. They had important things to say about racial oppression in the U.S., the working class as complex political actors, and how dialectics can be a useful, practical tool — not just dogma or dead theory.” Finally, “ish”, writing at The Cahokian, offers a more autobiographical perspective: “I joined the communist left in Chicago, which was in fact the home base of STO. The descriptions of STO’s work, first in factory-floor organizing, and later in anti-imperialist solidarity work, anti-fascist activism and in regroupment-oriented party-building on the left, were all intensely familiar. The language that STO used to discuss its work and direction was the language I learned. The era of post-radicalization “lull” and de-industrialization was the era I grew up in politically; these were the same issues the RSL (Revolutionary Socialist League) dealt with as well. I left Chicago for New York in 1981, but many of the scenes and issues and forces described in “Truth and Revolution” were as I remembered them. It made me wonder if all the groups struggling to stay relevant in that dark time of counterrevolution were all going through the same process without realizing that a period of organizational decline was universal among communist and socialist groups.”

We need a reviewer for this book. If you are interested, please leave contact info in the comments.

Describing the book in Haaretz, Nirit Anderman says a meeting at the Israeli consulate about the prospect of moving to Israel was a turning point for Pekar. “The clerk, irritated by the desperate man staring at him across the counter, told Pekar that moving to Israel would be a massive mistake and that he had no chance of finding work if and when he arrived. In an instant, Pekar’s lifetime illusions of life in Israel were popped like a sorry balloon.” He also notes that “The book, like the story itself, ends with Pekar’s death.” Anderman quotes the book’s illustrator, J.D. Waldman, who had to finish the project after Pekar’s death, as saying ““The book is not prescriptive. It’s not saying: This is how you can change things to make it better. It’s subjective… This is the history of Harvey’s point of view.”

Photo: David Shankbone/ Wikimedia Commons.

Gore Vidal died on July 31. The “author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist,” in the words of Wikipedia, was an important figure for the American left. Virtually no American author as well respected in the mainstream took such radical stances. Like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, he did not simply appeal to American’s better side to remove the sting of injustice, but, instead, challenged core principles of the American creed and self image. Unlike Chomsky and Zinn, Vidal had a real presence in the mainstream American literary world. He was also comfortable with electronic media, writing for television and film and engaging in memorable televised debates. At the same time, Vidal spoke from a nativist, upper-class perspective that sometimes veered close to, or passed into, racist terrain.

Jay Rothermel wrote an essay published on MRZine in 2010 that captured well some of Vidal’s strengths and weaknesses.

Few US novelists have been as successful as Vidal while at the same time being defiantly and outspokenly a rationalist, an atheist, a bisexual, and supremely derisive about the two-party electoral system (even when himself descending into the fray of electoral cretinism). His career nicely illustrates the deep contradictions imperialist culture reserves for the independent-minded artist: taking a critical and contrarian stance to the most ignorant, vulgar, and hypocritically squalid aspects of life under capitalism, but embracing a merely individual, negative view of opposition, sooner or later leading to quietist cynicism.

Vidal, like most petty-bourgeois radicals of his generation (Chomsky, Mailer, Sontag, et cetera), is strongest when exposing the many crimes and base motivations behind Washington and Wall Street’s bloody rule at home and abroad. But when it comes time to give an answer to the “question of questions” that naturally arises from such criticism — “What Is to Be Done?” — all he can muster is nostrums: in response to Nixon and Reagan, Vidal could only suggest a new constitutional convention or replacement of the federal government by a parliamentary system. Tired of “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace“? Mourn eloquently, but don’t organize.

On the other hand, Rothermel notes, unlike most of his peers, he did not capitulate to the reactionary mood inaugurated by Reagan and deepened since 9-11. But Vidal could not transcend such postures as apocalyptic conspiracism and despair that the American ruling class is unbeatable.

Ultimately, Rothermel reserves his strongest praise for Vidal’s under-appreciated novels:

Few novelists are as meticulous and graceful in their style, and as confident in the organization of material. “The Messiah” (1954) is a richly textured fantasy perfectly delineating a stultified and increasingly irrational Cold War hothouse culture… “Duluth“(1983) is a brief, hectic, and funny novel about everyday life in the US as it might be narrated by a Martian (or an expatriate novelist). “Empire“(1987),”Hollywood“(1990), and “The Golden Age“(2000) tell the story of Vidal’s finest fictional creation, Caroline Sanford.

Sharzer argues that local alternatives may indeed survive and flourish to the extent that they fill market niches, but they remain nonetheless bound to the rules of an economic system that must expand and centralize at any cost… Put differently, the sum of our individual choices, purchases, and micro-alternatives cannot prefigure social transformation, which must instead come through broad-based movements that confront and disrupt, rather than attempt to escape, the social relations and value structure of capitalism.

Scharzer sees the localist impulse springing out of pessimism about the prospect for profound social change. Instead, localists envision environmental catastrophe, rather than mass movements, rendering justice on a failing system. He derides localists for their “petty-bourgeois” obsession with lifestyle and manners. Here, New Socialist takes issue with him:

D-Town Farms (in Detroit) may not be much of a thorn in the side of Cargill (the giant agricultural corporation), but is a community garden in a designated food desert… “petite bourgeois?” …There seems to be an unspoken assumption in “No Local” that everything can be categorized as directly challenging capital, and therefore worthwhile, or not directly challenging capital, and therefore unworthy of a place on the radical left… can projects like D-Town Farms not exist alongside and as a complement to the campaigns for food regulation and price controls that Sharzer advocates…?

New Socialist also faults Sharzer for heavy dosages of nineteenth century theory, but it sounds like the ideas in “No Local” are well worth grappling with. Sharzer maintains a No Local Facebook page where he posts related materials.