New Books in Politics and Polemics

Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the Founding Fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive--and racist--domestic forces. Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (U Virginia Press, 2020) begins and ends with the statement that the Second Amendment no longer makes sense. Noah Shusterman then sets about proving this point with a chronological journey to the Second Amendment. While that might seem a clear and straight-froward path, it starts in an unexpected place and time: Italy over 2,000 years ago with stops in France and England, but it gets to what will become the United States of America. In many ways this is an Atlantic history of the Second Amendment. Armed Citizens works in several different genres of history, including intellectual and political. The book also engages the history of race, racism, and white supremacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022) explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen explores the idea of how software can actually slow innovation. He makes the case that big companies in one industry after another have built "complex" software systems for managing their sales, marketing, operations and product offerings that are essentially moats against competitors. This mastery of software by major corporations, he argues, helps explain the "myth of disruptive innovation", rising economic concentration, increasing inequality and slowing innovation.James Bessen, an economist and technologist, serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University School of Law. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company. His profile in the New York Times is here.Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn't working for us anymore--what's more, it's not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story (U Chicago Press, 2022), Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we're not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.America today is not the Founders' America, but it can be Lincoln's America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country's history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Many Canadians think of their country as a paragon of liberal democratic values at home, and a moderating force on the world stage—not so, argues the compelling new edited collection from Fernwood Publishing, Capitalism and Dispossession: Corporate Canada at Home and Abroad. In this conversation with co-editors, Dr. David P Thomas and Dr. Veldon Coburn, we discuss the book’s numerous case studies of how the Canadian state, and the corporate actors to which it delegates authority, are central actors within a system of global capitalism that is premised on processes of accumulation by dispossession in order to reproduce itself.Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy where his research interests focus on the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and organized labour in what’s presently known as Canada. More information can be found at his personal website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (Lund Humphries, 2021) maps, critiques, and celebrates activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art.Gregory Sholette speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the vanishing distinctions between art, art activism, and traditional political activism, and the political dimensions of culture in a hyper-aestheticised world that is indicative of a broader crisis of capitalism. Sholette describes a new wave of activist art taking place not only within community-based protest groups, as it has for decades, but amongst professionally trained artists many of whom refuse to respect the conventional borders separating painting from protest, or art from utility.Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and activist. He has participated in, documented, and written about activist art for over forty years. He is the co-convenor of the school Social Practice Queens, a pioneering programme training artists to become social and political activists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Enjoyment appears as purely private matter, but this is by far not the case. Ever since Aristotle the philosophical social critique is tormented by the question, whether the libidinal tendencies of human subjects allow the construction of a just political-economic order. It seemed at first that in modernity this problem had been overcome. Economic liberalism and utilitarianism argued that egoistic private interests and social justice were directly linked and that capitalism united libidinal and political economy in the best possible manner. But the political-economic panorama soon turned out significantly more complex and contradictory. Tomšič’s book The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (Walther Konig Verlag, 2020) recalls central Marxian and Freudian insights and circumscribes the political stakes of psychoanalysis under the general banner of a Critique of Libidinal Economy.Samo Tomšič is interim professor of philosophy in Hamburg at the University of Fine Arts.Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The Democratic Socialists of America have exploded in the last few years, going from just a couple thousand members to close to a hundred thousand. This was from a combination of factors; two insurgent presidential campaigns by Bernie Sanders, a proto-fascistic movement coalescing around Donald Trump, the specter of climate change, a worldwide pandemic, general increasing economic inequality and a general sense that this world is bad but a better one might be possible. But what exactly is the underlying political philosophy of this organization? Is it actually for socialism, or capitalism with a stronger safety net? Is it a subsection of the Democratic party, or an independent movement? And how does it see political and historical change actually happening?In order to answer these questions, my guest Doug Greene has written a biography of the organizations founder, Michael Harrington. Starting with his early life in Jesuit education, Greene tracks Harrington’s political development through the 1950’s all the way up to 1982 when he founded DSA. Along the way, Harrington developed a conception of political change that would happen within the Democratic party, a conception that still clearly animates the approach of many on the left today. Written as a comradely critique, Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Zero Books, 2022) manages to give a genealogy of many of the tensions that still run through the contemporary left, and offers a sobering assessment of what can actually be accomplished when playing by realism’s rules.Doug Greene is a freelance writer and historian in Boston. He is also the author of Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution. His writing has also appeared in a number of outlets, including Left Voice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations.He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be ModernPierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

How are art and social justice intertwined? In Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism Paula Serafini, a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at Queen Mary University of London, explores the importance of art, artistic practice, and artistic movements to the struggle for social, environmental, and cultural justice in Latin America. Primarily focused on case studies from Argentina, although reflecting the cross-national nature of art and justice struggles, the book introduces the idea of extractivism, and demonstrates how art can be used to critique, challenge, and offer alternatives. Theoretically rich, with a huge range of examples, the book is essential reading across the arts, cultural studies, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how art can change, and perhaps even save, the world.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics