HAS THE INTERNET TRAPPED US?

Dick Pountain/The Political Quarterly/ 11th April 2019 12:23:31

Books Reviewed:

‘The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy ’ by Matthew Hindman, Princeton University Press 2018, pp240

‘Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age’ by Susan Landau, Yale University Press 2017, pp221

‘Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age’ by Martin Moore, Oneworld 2018, pp320

Few will dispute that we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution, but there’s still room for doubt about the precise nature of this revolution. Advances in technology stimulated by World War II, in particular the invention of radar and the digital computer, lead during the post-war decades to a revolution in electronics. The transistor and the integrated silicon circuit made computing power cheap and ubiquitous, and in the process has affected almost every area of our societies. The Internet is the effect of this revolution on our ways of communicating; automation, robotics and now AI (Artificial Intelligence) are having a similarly disruptive effect on work and industry; huge advances in materials science are making renewable energy technologies cheap enough to threaten the dominance of fossil fuels. The political implications of all these far-reaching changes are far from easy to fathom.

The debate is hot, with broadly speaking two main categories of protagonist, techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. In itself this is nothing new, for techno-pessimists have been warning us since well before Blake’s ‘satanic mills’, and techno-optimists reaching for the sky from Icarus to the Wright Brothers. However the 20th century’s communications revolution was of unprecedented scope, reaching around the whole world and into the depths of the mind: audio/visual broadcasting technologies spawned mass propaganda and mass surveillance. Orwell, in ‘1984’, foresaw some of the consequences, but the recent invention of television mislead him to depict it as a one-way problem, Big Brother to the masses. A mere five years beyond Orwell’s fictional dystopia, at CERN in Geneva, English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which works in both directions, and in 1991 he released the first web browser.

One of the most articulate current proponents for the optimistic camp is Paul Mason, whose ‘Post-Capitalism’ emphasises the way in which Internet technology reduces the production and distribution costs of information to almost zero, in the process deposing old media monopolies, and via automation permitting a reduction of necessary work and increase in leisure time. Early Internet libertarians like John Perry Barlow and Richard Stallman have for years promoted the idea of an anarchistic new order based on Internet-enabled direct democracy. However ‘fake news’, election hacking, mass surveillance and technological unemployment must cast doubt over such rosy perspectives, and the books reviewed here examine three different aspects of this darker side of the digital revolution.

Matthew Hindman, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, argues that the Internet economy is innately monopolistic. Using large web traffic datasets his experiments reveal that though the Internet does open up the production and dissemination of information to everyone, it also inexorably siphons all the revenue into a handful of monopolies every bit as powerful and pernicious as the old ones they are displacing. Individual hackers (he labels them freextremists) started with Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog’, passed on to the early net libertarians like Perry Barlow and Stallman and the Open-Source movement, then began a rightward march into 4chan, Anonymous, Reddit, Gamergate and a host of teenage nihilist meme artists. Their final destination was the Drudge Report, Breitbart, Bannon, the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails and support for the Trump campaign.

Hindman’s argument employs two key concepts – ‘network effect’ and ‘stickiness’ – that require some explanation. A network effect occurs when the utility of a new technology escalates very rapidly with its number of users. The first telephone was useless except as a demonstration, the second telephone made the first useful to a couple of people, but once hundreds adopted it the number of possible conversations, and the value of the technology, grew exponentially (and was monopolised in the USA by Bell Telephone Company, later called AT&T). This ‘increasing returns to scale’ was in evidence through previous industrial revolutions in banking, steam, steel, electricity and oil too, with Rockefellers, Fords and Exxons coming to dominate their sectors – in the digital economy, the commodity being monopolised is users’ attention.

Paul Mason did single out network effects as an obstacle to his optimism, as they lead digital monopolists to seek rents on intellectual property and to stifle competition, but Hindman goes further. He claims that network effects have been overemphasised and that ‘stickiness’ – the tendency of users to remain loyal to one website at the expense of others – is perhaps more important. His experiments show how stickiness is very hard, and very expensive to achieve, so that only the very largest companies (which initially got that big through network effects) can now achieve it. Getting sticky requires better design and better response speed than competitors, through world-wide server farms every bit as massive and as expensive as the factories of previous industrial revolutions.

Google, Amazon and Facebook no longer depend on the common Internet, whose distributed architecture was designed for resilience by the US military, but employ ‘peering’ over their own private cables to bypass congestion and be faster than competitors. Users are most loyal to those sites which offer the most diverse rather than best quality content, and this diversity comes from millions of users donating their content for nothing. The Internet isn’t free, it’s paid for by advertising, almost all of which is captured by these few mammoth corporations, thanks to their stickiness. I purchase second-hand books on Abebooks. I watch video clips – on music from Bill Evans to Alina Ibragimova, on guitar building and repairing, on Japanese street food – and it really does feels like the space the optimists describe, into which anyone can post videos of their special interests for free. But Abebooks is owned by Amazon and all those videos are on YouTube, which is owned by Google. Everything I buy or watch provides information that will be sold to advertisers, and Google and Facebook between them now collect 70% of this revenue.

Hindman is particularly concerned about the Internet’s effect on news gathering and dissemination. Local newspapers could once garner higher advertising revenues than national ones, since their readership was better-targeted, and this supported the whole ecology of local print news. The Internet reversed this position since the giants now target their advertising with uncanny precision and grab practically all the revenue. Local papers are unable to compete effectively in the digital realm and are pushed out of business.

The digital news sites that replace print, like BuzzFeed and Vice, are financed by investors and major brand advertisers: lacking any tradition of separation between editorial and business they employ in-house staff to generate ‘native’ ads in identical style to editorial content, which they hope be shared ‘virally’. They also delete or redact any user posts that might offend advertisers. This absolute dependence on advertising to subsidise free access means that the Internet giants need to garner all the information they can from users, which nowadays is an awful lot, from geographical location to tastes and even political opinions.

The holding of such data poses multiple problems over privacy. Advertisers use it to target ads specifically at you, but it might also be stolen by criminal hackers, or intercepted by the intelligence agencies of both of your own and foreign states. Susan Landau is another professor, of Computer Science at Tufts and Law at the Fletcher School, but previously worked on privacy at Google and engineering at Sun Microsystems. Her book ‘Listening In’ is the most technical of the three, focussed on encryption and the way that intelligence agencies may breach the privacy of individuals in the interests of state security. In 2016 Landau was an expert witness for Apple, before a US House Judiciary Committee, when the FBI sought to force the firm to decrypt an iPhone taken from two dead terrorists in San Bernadino, California. (The hearing was dropped after FBI cracked the phone without Apple’s help). Her book offers an excellent, accessible account of the histories of digital networks, smartphones and the techniques of cryptography, cybersecurity and hacking. Among Landau’s many examples are: the Stuxnet worm, a US/Israeli hack attack that destroyed many of Iran’s uranium refinement centrifuges; the Russian interference in the 2016 US election; and the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of state spying on US citizens. Landau is a techno-realist who accepts that the state has a responsibility for the security of its citizens that may clash with their right to privacy, and she firmly declares that this trade-off is a matter for democratic political debate rather than technocratic fiat.

Political rather than economic effects are the subject of Martin Moore’s ‘Democracy Hacked’. A senior research fellow at King’s College London, Moore explores how the Internet’s ubiquity, anonymity and freedom from governmental control is eroding the democratic process. Starting from a summary of the counter-cultural origins of the net, he follows its subsequent transmutation into a vehicle for the Alt-Right. He believes that we’re currently moving out of the long era of rule by rigidly-hierarchical, sporadically-elected, centralised parties and entering a new, barely fathomable, era of algorithmically-targeted campaigns that exploit those massive data sets of voter information collected via the Internet as an invisible side-effect of our routine purchases, video viewing and online socialising.

During the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the Internet proved very effective at mobilizing mass resistance, but tragically ineffective at defining goals or consolidating progressive regime change. In later years the net-assisted triumphs of Trump, Modi and Duterte, and the UK’s Brexit referendum, hinted that the Right was going to benefit as much as the Left, with Corbyn and Macron as possible exceptions. Moore analyses the 2016 US election to identify three different modes of election hacking: by individuals, by plutocrats and by hostile foreign powers.

Plutocratic hackers include billionaire libertarians like the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer and who see the Internet as a way to defeat government. Mercer was a virtuoso programmer who worked on computational linguistics at IBM for 20 years, then made his fortune by applying similar machine learning techniques to hedge-fund investment. An early investor in Cambridge Analytica, he helped apply these techniques to the extraction of personality profiles and political susceptibilities from people’s Facebook data. Mercer and the Kochs in the USA and Aaron Banks in the UK purchased masses of voter data, then paid agents like Cambridge Analytica to perform ‘behavioural analytics’. Their key discovery was that in democratic politics it’s not necessary (perhaps not even desirable) to change a person’s mind but merely their behaviour – whether they’ll vote or not and for whom. Personality traits indicate which emotional tone will prove effective in personally-targeted election messages: subversive but not illegal. Pages 60-70 in which Moore explains this process are alone worth the price of the book.

As for Foreign Power hackers, Moore singles out the Russian model of information and disinformation warfare, showing how president Putin’s KGB experience gives him a degree of tech savvy notably lacking in Western leaders. His final chapters examine ‘Platform Democracy’, his term for the ambition of the Internet giants to usurp the powers of the state. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Uber are working hard to penetrate the healthcare, education and transport sectors with innovative and ‘disruptive’ services that parallel what they’ve achieved in retail, entertainment and social media. A case can be made that the extraordinary infrastructures and AI capabilities they’ve invested in are indeed more efficient than any state equivalent, but they remain commercial and unelected enterprises with no commitment except to shareholders. Moore goes further to illustrate what happens when states themselves do apply such technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation, using as examples India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba’s cooperation with Chinese local government to run a Social Credit system. Leaving aside questions over these systems’ actual effectiveness, they grant the state a sinister degree of extra knowledge and power over its citizens: participating in political protests can be punished by loss of benefits.

In 1988, Guy Debord published ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’, an afterword to his famous work, which anticipated the way communications technologies might revolutionise a state’s repressive apparatus: “Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.” All three of these books testify in different ways to the accuracy of his warning, and urge us to curb the power of the Internet giants and redeploy their technology for the renewal of democracy, while the choice is still ours to make.

DEMOCRACY’S MID-LIFE CRISIS?

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 28th November 2018 15:06:55

Book Review: ‘How Democracy Ends’ by David Runciman

Publisher: Profile Books 2018

Pages: 250

Bookshop shelves are groaning under the load of new apocalyptic works predicting the imminent demise of Western Civilisation from war, depression, epidemic, climate change, oriental, Islamic or robotic conquest. David Runciman’s is very much not one of these. It could have been called instead ‘How Democracies End’, though one sympathises with his publisher’s preference for the more dramatic singular. What he actually offers is a crystal-clear account of how some real democracies failed, an analysis of possible modes of failure and the kinds of state that may replace them. He then applies this analysis to the UK, USA and Europe, arriving at a best-guess as to how close our democracies really are to collapse.

He starts by using a simplified, functionalist definition of democracy – you have a democracy if you hold regular elections and the losers accept that they have lost – so on the opening page he is watching the 2017 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump with a group of his American students. Levity turns to horror at Trump’s Mussolini-style victory speech, and the obvious discomfort of Bush, Obama, Clinton and the military chiefs on the platform. But the speech was only rhetoric, however distasteful, the Democrats had accepted the election result, and Trump remains POTUS for now. Only once in US history had the losers refused, in 1861, and that started the Civil War. As Runciman pithily puts it “democracy is civil war without the fighting”.

Chapter 1 dissects the event that most frequently ends a democracy, the coup. Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy and also of the coup, with Peisistratos’ seizure of power in 561 BC. Runciman examines more recent Greek history as one of his test cases: the 1967 Colonels’ Coup was a classic coup d’etat with tanks in the street, marshal music on the TV and arrests of the government and opponents, and he contrast this with the events of 2015 during the country’s financial collapse, to illustrate that there’s more than one way to do coup.

Following a classification invented by US political scientist Nancy Bermeo, he identifies six types: the classic military coup d’etat; the Executive Coup where those already in power suspend elections; Election-day Fraud; the Promissory Coup that calls an election to legitimise its rule; Executive Aggrandisement that chips away democratic freedoms; and Strategic Manipulation via gerrymandering and voter suppression but short of actual fraud (very topical).

In July 2015 the left-leaning Syriza government held a referendum that granted them a popular mandate to defy the EU, demand debt relief and threaten default. The European Commission, Central Bank and IMF counter-attacked by threatening to close Greek banks – no government can survive the cash machines shutting down. Finance minister Varoufakis resigned and Syriza capitulated, introducing swingeing austerity. Both Varoufakis and Runciman describe this as an almost-coup, where governmental authority is subverted by financial pressure but democracy survives, after a fashion. Runciman draws an important observation from this 1967/2015 comparison: traditionally coup plotters needed to let everyone know the government had been deposed, but nowadays they will instead try to conceal the transfer of real power.

The examination of coups leads on naturally to a discussion of populism, which is coming to dominate democratic politics everywhere. Runciman asserts that the essence of populism, of both left and right, is a belief that democracy has been stolen from the people by elites, and that claiming it back means flushing these elites out from spider-like hiding places. Hence the logic of populism is the conspiracy theory, the promulgation of which has been greatly facilitated by the rise of social media. He identifies the 1890s (Gilded Age) and late-1940s/early-50s (start of Cold War) as previous periods when conspiracy theories were as rife as they are today, with a nod to Richard Hofstadter’s superb study ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. As to the causes of rising populism, economic distress, too rapid technological change, rising economic inequality and the absence of war are the main factors.

Shocking as it may seem, war patently favours democratic patriotism over populism, by temporarily suppressing private economic interest, and Runciman examines the different ways that democracy fought off populism before WW1 and after WW2. The populist rage of the 1900s didn’t simply evaporate under Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd George and Jaures but morphed into both social democracy and fascism in the interwar period. Back then democracy was quite limited, leaving plenty of headroom for its reform: taxes were low; welfare states had yet to be built; unions, political parties and the state were still trusted. None of those conditions apply today.

Runciman’s central thesis is that the appeal of modern democracies is twofold, to both personal dignity and public good. Citizens of a democracy have their views taken seriously (even if later thwarted), and they also reap material benefit from stability, prosperity and peace. However problems arise because dignity is an immediate individual benefit while the material benefits are public, shared (increasingly unequally) and long-term – we come to value our individual dignity higher than the long-term benefits, as witnessed in own-foot-shooting episodes like Trump and Brexit. In the chapter ‘Something Better?’ Runciman applies this thesis to alternatives to democratic government, asserting that the gap between what’s promised to individuals and what to society as a whole is what distinguishes these alternatives.

For example Marxism-Leninism promised to collapse the gap, making personal and political lives the same. Bolsheviks at first believed this would render state power and police force unnecessary, but the result, Stalinism, hardly bore out such a belief. 21st century authoritarian regimes promise instead collective, rather than personal, dignity through nationalism. Material rewards are delivered by economic growth, steered by the state in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, or by ‘trickle down’ in a free market (Trump’s magic MAGA spell). Runciman describes this as “pragmatic authoritarianism”, which also describes Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Hungary and more. It appears to be spreading as fast as was once hoped for democracy.

Another dangerously tempting alternative is epistocracy – rule by experts – which eliminates the personal dignity factor altogether by in effect saying “you’re too dumb to vote because modern societies are just too complex”. It may sometimes look as though we’re there already, since our career politicians are skilled only in political maneuvering and depend upon consultants and experts to run things. However, in what is perhaps the most important section of the book, Runciman carefully distinguishes between epistocracy and technocracy.

Epistocracy has been around ever since Plato complained that democracy meant rule by the ignorant. Versions of it predated most modern democracies, in the shape of limited suffrage. Runciman stresses that true democracy with universal suffrage imposes no conditions on the knowledge or skill of voters, only the condition that they stick around to suffer the consequences of their own mistakes. This is what, in principle if not always in fact, gives it the power to learn and adapt. Technocracy isn’t really rule at all but more of a service through which rulers call upon those experts – from economists to high-tech engineers – who built the machine that is society, to maintain and repair it. These experts can’t and shouldn’t decide whether the machine needs replacing (or even shutting down), and so technocracy can and does co-exist with either democracy or authoritarianism.

Maintaining its twofold benefit is, for Runciman, the positive virtue of democracy, but its equally important negative virtue is the power to (eventually) throw out politicians and governments who don’t deliver. Against the more alarmist commentators, he believes that the positive virtue is currently under more threat than the negative. Globalising digital technologies both enable and encourage divisive demands for personal respect, pushing towards ‘identity politics’ and anarchism, while simultaneously destroying jobs and demanding more and more technical expertise to solve social and economic problems.

Anarchy is therefore another alternative to democracy, perhaps arising after some disaster, nuclear or climatic, or else actively courted by libertarians of both right and left – though the Silicon Valley titans who rejoice in the power of their new technologies to disrupt traditional capitalism prefer to be called accelerationists rather than anarchists. Runciman is not a tech-utopian like Paul Mason or Yuval Noah Harari, but he deals fairly, intelligently and in some depth with potential tech futures, concluding that some will be “wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable. It is a spectrum of possibility as wide as any human experience has ever known.” All we do know is that the benefit gap grows ever wider, and that while Trump will eventually go, Zuckerberg and his ilk will carry on, precisely because they do not threaten democracy directly, but rather indirectly by sapping our attention.

So is this an optimistic, pessimistic or apocalyptic account? None of the above: if pressed I would have to call it ‘stoical’. Marxists will object to Runciman’s lack of emphasis on class, but the eclipse of class consciousness lies at the heart of his analysis. Social Democrats may object that a Keynesian refloat of the economy could defuse populist wrath, but in his discussion of Thomas Piketty, Runciman points out that inequality on our present scale has never before in history been dispelled without the large-scale violence of revolution or world war. In his conclusion he offers no solutions, but neither does he predict that democracy is going to end suddenly and soon. Gradual erosion is more likely, at a different pace in different countries, and to different degrees. His closing words are:

“Western democracy will survive its mid-life crisis. With luck it will be a little chastened by it. It is unlikely to be revived by it. This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends”.

SAME BOAT, BUT IN STEERAGE

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 20th July 2018 13:56:24

Book Review: “A History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”
Authors: Raj Patel And Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso 2018
Pages: 312
Price: £16.99

Consider the humble ant. Its ‘brain’ contains 40,000 times fewer neurons than our own, it lacks language and can’t reason, its repertoire of possible actions is finite and small – and yet it builds nests of great complexity, complete with highways spanning great distances and farms in which fungus is cultivated or aphids milked for food. Ethologists learned that these abilities result from the playing out of very simple ‘rules’, such as ‘move in the direction where the smell of formic acid is strongest’, rather than individual or collective calculation. Or perhaps consider those single-celled cyanobacteria which 2.45 billion years ago transformed the whole planet by replacing its carbon dioxide atmosphere with one rich in oxygen, thus permitting the evolution of the rest of plant and animal life.

What if Homo sapiens turned out to be more like these creatures than we like to believe? What if our own world isn’t the result of any philosophy, ideology, or political program but simply us playing out a simple rule called ‘maximise profit’? That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Patel and Moore’s “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things”. The intrinsic dynamic of capitalism, seeking ever greater profit, generates complex cycles of cheapening of some fundamental resources of the planet.

Patel and Moore call these resources Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives. You can increase profits by reducing wages, which means food has to become cheaper for workers to surviive: cheap energy is required to make the fertilisers to grow this cheaper food.The family maintains and reproduces workers for free (in the absence of wages for housework). Playing out the profit rule causes periodic crises, which have always been solved up until now by geographic expansion and colonisation, but eventually we’ve run out of planet. Disposal of wastes is undervalued by economists – treated as an unpriced ‘externality’ – so we now face environmental crises over global warming, plastic pollution and more.

The authors arrived here by combining the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein with the ‘ecological rift’ theory of the early Marx (as revived in recent times by John Bellamy Foster) to analyse capitalist ecology as a whole, closed system in which all resources are finite, not free, and all wastes have to go somewhere. Their analysis weaves together tightly several strands of Left activism that are at present separate, including labour rights and inequality, feminism, modern slavery, post-colonialism, and environmentalism. The distinctive ecological perspective which renders this interweaving possible is the book’s most important aspect, as these separate strands often clash in political practice: feminism versus male labour rights, immigration versus native labour rights etc. etc.

Inhabiting this novel viewpoint forces Patel and Moore to define their Seven Cheap Things in very particular ways – not entirely divorced from everyday usage but more abstract and far deeper. Tthey call them ‘real abstractions’, after Alberto Toscano. As with the ant, so with the human, everything that is produced – food, clothing, homes and workplaces, transport, communications, computers – must be co-produced with the rest of nature. When looking at a farm one can clearly see a connection between labour and soil, but when looking at a software developer there’s no such obvious link, which tempts us to think a distinction between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes, as though they were independent of one another.

The authors refuse and refute this distinction. They define ‘cheapness’ as “a set of strategies to manage the relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises”, where ‘web of life’ refers to those myriad complex cycles of co-production. Cheapness means more than just low cost though: it’s a strategy for mobilising work – human, animal, botanical, geological work – for as little compensation as possible. Capitalism, as Marx saw, transmutes all the invisible relations of humans to nature into production and consumption at the lowest possible price, in a process whereby money flows through nature. Islands of cash exchange exist within oceans of potentially cheap natural resources like minerals, plants and labour, and these islands are bounded by frontiers through which capitalism continually expands in order to resolve its periodic crises.

Patel and Moore begin their historical analysis from the year 1419 when Portugese sailors first sighted the (literal) island that they called Madeira. When they first landed it was entirely covered with trees, but within 40 years half had been cut down for shipbuilding and land to grow wheat for export to Portugal. The rest were cut down later for space to grow sugar and fuel to refine it in the world’s first factories. The small native population were enslaved, then reinforced by more slaves from North Africa. The authors claim this process set in train a great change of mindset, from earlier Christian notions of Providence to a total split between Nature and Society and a relentless pursuit of profit in exploiting the former. This change affected, and indeed still mostly affects, a newly emerging class of capitalists rather than the whole population: “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change, but most of us are in steerage”.

This Nature/Society split sanctioned not just the pursuit of profit but the creation of all the Seven Cheap Things. Illiterate indigenous peoples, being uncivilised, were relegated to the category of Nature, which sanctioned enslaving them. Women, who did not fight, sail or rule but cared for babies, could equally be relegated to Nature rather than Society. The colonial idea spread rapidly throughout Europe, and soon the discovery of the Americas found sources of cheap gold and silver (ie. cheap money) and later cheap guano to act as fertiliser for cheap food, the better to feed cheap factory workers driven from the land into cities. Marriage and the family ensured that these workers were maintained and reproduced, in effect for free, by unpaid wives: “Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care... To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to ask for an end to capitalism”.

Each of the Seven Cheap Things receives a chapter to itself, which traces its changing relation to the others through history, using concrete examples. The levels of recursive influence involved may tax one’s power of visualisation, which suggests the book might reward a second reading (regrettably their Systems approach denies us solace from that old Marxist trick of merely intoning the magic word ‘dialectical’).

Occasionally their ‘real abstract’ view of a thing may feel over simplified – for example marriage among the aristocracy was always more about merging dynastic land-holdings than about the care or reproduction of labour – but that’s intentional, to abstract away from obscuring details. To risk a medical metaphor one might say that while Marx described the skeleton and musculature of capitalism, Patel and Moore expose its circulatory system and main organs, but it remains for many others to put flesh and skin onto its numerous limbs (think Vitruvian Man or the goddess Kali). The authors took a brave and wise decision to decant much of the detailed support for their arguments into copious references: the main book is only 212 pages long, with four to six references on most pages so that end-notes, bibliography and index fill another 100.

The book’s tone is radical but forensic – like a doctor describing a malignancy – and neither sentimental or moralising. The authors understand that capitalist states always in the end perpetrate forms of violence, whether on nature, on animals, or on human lives, during the resolution of their crises. Their chapter on Cheap Lives flaunts an excruciating list of the scientific racist taxonomy used to label possessed peoples under the Spanish sistema de castas in South America: negro, sambo, mestizo, mulato and worse.

In their concluding chapter Patel and Moore align themselves with various indigenous struggles provoked by resource theft or pollution like Standing Rock and Pan y Rosas; with Black Lives Matter; with Occupy and other recent grassroots campaigns. If frontiers are the motors of capitalism, then climate change marks the end of room for further expansion. They propose an agenda of resistance based on recognition (of the problems), reparation (not of money alone), redistribution (of land, energy and food), reimagination (of alternative futures), and recreation (liberation from drudgery by technology). It’s a distinctly anarchistic and anti-state stance, but rather tame given what went before, a flaw that might be fatal were it not shared by most similar commentaries, from Paul Mason's Post Capitalism to Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End. The very vagueness tells us something about the daunting size of the task.

It struck me though how well their emphasis on ecology complements Jeffrey Sachs’ The Age Of Sustainable Development (about the UN’s Millenium Goals) which demands global coordination of state and non-state actors to combat simultaneously world poverty and the climate crisis. It also fits rather neatly with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a critique of global finance. Read all three books and you may glimpse the outlines of a new vocabulary for social democrats, one that could prove more palatable to young people than the hermetic Marxist jargon still wielded by too many on the Left. An important book then, which deserves wide discussion.