Capitalism

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence. It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.

The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.

In the sphere of British environmentalism, Paul Kingsnorth is admired as a maverick in thought and deed. Starting out as a journalist with the Ecologist magazine, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an online portal devoted to stories about the more-than-human world in a time of ecological collapse. On resigning from both, he retreated as a self-proclaimed ‘recovering environmentalist’ to an Irish smallholding, where he has embraced the Romanian Orthodox church. Against the Machine, his tenth book, is billed as a summary of his intensifying disillusionment with events in the past 30 years. It is a serious work leavened with sardonic humour and is by turns rich in unsettling ideas and deeply pessimistic.

In what may be the only joke in this book – it is hard to tell, because quite often reading it I started to believe the whole thing was an elaborate parody – Samuel Miller McDonald begins his acknowledgements by expressing his ‘infinite thanks’ to his editors (he merits six of them) on the grounds that ‘no work can be good without good editors’. Apparently some works can’t be good even with good editors – unless the author is trying to tell us that his, like his oeuvre, weren’t especially good at all. Progress is a prolix, tendentious book, radiating self-regard, arrogance and flannel.

For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed. Fans of A.L. Kennedy will love this book.

Real wages have barely increased for more than a decade. Banks have had to be bailed out, and many still exist on a form of state life support. Growth has stalled, taxes are at 70-year highs, yet governments are still bankrupt. Unless you happen to be part of a tiny plutocracy made up mostly of tech entrepreneurs and financiers, there has rarely been a point, at least since the nadir of the mid-1970s, when the economic system seemed beset by quite so many challenges as it is today. The left has smartly stepped into the intellectual space that has been created with a series of well-timed polemics, which, while they vary in precise analysis and on solutions, have at least one thing in common. They argue that the system is fundamentally broken, and it will take radical action to fix it.

The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later. Moral judgments aside, how does Friedman rank in the world of 20th-century economists? By common consent, he stands with Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes at the apex of his profession. All wrestled with the defining problem of their age: the radical economic and political instability of the 1920s and 1930s. Their responses reflected their national situations.

The novel as a form is a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It was invented at the same time as capitalism – Robinson Crusoe tots up his situation in the form of double-entry bookkeeping. Its interests dwell on the disparate and unequal natures of human beings and feed off rivalry, social transformation, moneymaking, profit and loss. No rigid feudal society has managed to create an effective school of novelists; and having once struggled through Cement, Fyodor Gladkov’s classic of socialist Soviet literature, I would say that systems dedicated to forcible equality also struggle.