Finally got around to reading some comics this week. I decided to restart my collection of the space opera Saga - it fails to disappoint!

Reading

I finished a book and am still working through a few others!

The Socialist Challenge Today

I've (regretfully) started this book, mainly due to its short size. The book aims to capture the difficulty of the formation of a socialist (or socialist-orientated) nation-state in the Western world. The calamity of the SYRIZA party in Greece was hard to read, due to the seemingly infinite roadblocks that they'd endure and the nature of being trapped within the Eurozone. Any action that they took would have to contest with global capitalism - a creation of the European nations that plagues them to this day. I ended up finishing it today and found the closing notes a bit sober (if not pointed):

The profound political dilemma this book has tried to confront is this: for a socialist-led government in the current conjuncture, giant steps toward transformative change would be impossible, but small steps risk being swallowed into the logic of the system. Even meeting the first condition for building on electoral success—i.e., immediately delivering material gains for the working class—entails being honest about the obstacles in the way. Taxing the 1 percent—or the top 5 or 10 percent—is a good idea for all kinds of obvious reasons. The potential gains from under taxed and untaxed corporate and financial income and assets, not to mention personal wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, luxury taxes, and so forth are enormous. But the capacity to do this without effective capital controls needs to be faced squarely. Moreover, the idea that taxing the "billionaire class" would be sufficient to pay for the impressive range of policies proposed by socialists today is clearly fanciful—and tends to underestimate the need for weaning the working class itself away from the anti-tax propaganda of the neo-liberal era.

It's meant to be a honest perspective but I do think there's a bit of an immediate concession on what could work and a hyper-focus on federal level reforms that, if coupled with state changes, like the one designed by Bernie in Vermont, could make this transition a lot easier. However, it doesn't seem like the authors have much faith (or excluded consideration) of state-level pressure that could be applied to push for federal change in a meaningful way. It's as if by shooting for the highest target, one is destined to fail. They do follow up with something that's not really unchallengeable without engaging in some form of nation-state violence:

An overriding limit in all of the steps toward taking control over economic life, even in the case of relatively modest expansions of social provision, is the power of capital to exit and invest abroad (along with the refusal of capital to keep coming in).

We see the above most nominally in places like Cuba, where the United States and its allies use the weight of nation-state commerce levers like embargoes and sanctions to restrict the ability of a country to build independence of its own means. This practice is a readily available aspect of Western capital via the levers of nation-states and it's an old practice. In another book, Haiti: State Against Nation, Trouillot highlights how European countries used this as a way to weaken Haiti's fledging economy out the gate:

At the first testing ground of neocolonialism, Haiti experienced the somber implications of that policy for the third world very early. As a neocolony of two industrializing countries, it collected from neither the now-expected (even if meager and unsatisfactory) returns of the post-colonial order. Foreign aid was not fashionable—not even in the name of strategic interests; nor were development programs. The United Nations did not exist; nor did the World Bank, the IMF, the Organization of American States, or the British Commonwealth. Haiti's trajectory was against the current; its very existence defied the geopolitical odds. It was an agricultural exporter, yet imported primarily agricultural products—indeed a peasant country where food topped the list of imports. It was a country born of a revolutionary war, yet one subordinated to the military power of Europe and the United States. ... At a time when European nations were extending their sway in African and when U.S forces were occupying the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, Haiti stood alone with Liberia and Ethiopia, black states in a modern international order where political independence was associated—as if in nature—with whiteness. It was a country without national allies, an international anachronism.

I will say, for a book that wants a socialist world, The Socialist Challenge focused a lot on the West (understandably) but failed to connect aspects of national and foreign policy that reinforces the control and mobility of capital that we see today^[1].

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney makes some points that remind me a lot of interactions I've seen today. Namely, emphasis made by me:

To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One European author of a book on the slave trade (appropriately entitled Sins of Our Father) explained how many other white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy the captives — as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions.

I'm looking for a copy of that book to read because I'm curious about how these narratives were crafted. It was published in the 1970s in England so I'm expecting a smidgen of white victimhood being made into the central point of the book. It's safe to say that this book, and I'm only about a quarter in, is filling in the gaps I have in my understanding of the relationship that Europe had with Africa. Another point that stood out to me was Rodney's expansion on how "Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade it motion". He writes:

Furthermore, when one European nation challenged another to obtain captives from an African ruler, Europe benfitted from whichever of the two nations won the conflict. Any European trader could arrive on the coast of West Africa and exploit the political differences which he found there. For example, in the small territory that the Portuguese later claimed as Guinea-Biassau, there were more than a dozen ethnic groups. It was so easy to see one off against another that the Europeans called it a "slave trader's paradise".

This invoked the imagery of the current "competition" that the United States and Canada had in picking which eager member of AFRICOM's watchful eye would be selected to send their troops to Haiti in order to "control the gang violence" that's gone to the national stage. In this case, Kenya, at the whim of William Rufo, is working with the PNH (Haiti's national police), decided to pick up that mantle last year. Embarrassing. Perhaps more embarrassing as wearing white wigs in an African state house. Decolonization is a lifestyle and journey.

Writing

I wrote two posts last week. One was about my growing frustration in finding a job. I've gotten some great chances to talk to folks on how to improve my chances and folks have been trying to connect me with roles. However, it's becoming more clear that positioning seems to be less of a reliable option and that a direct referral might be the only option. I recently had a chance at a contract role that effectively disappeared due to a change in requirements, something that really messed up my planning as they spoke as if I was to be starting within a week. I've come to trust nothing until my direct deposit information is taken and even then, not until I get my first check. It wasn't like this for me but it's increasingly clear that dehumanizing is core to business operations.

The other post was about the end of my discussion of electoral politics online. I gave reasons that reinforce my want to distance myself from the conversation. Outside of being directly blamed online for the preemptive election of a Republican candidate^[2], I'm choosing to actively disengage with people who try to "educate" me on things. I routinely talk about my perspective on American, African and politics of the global South, being a party member of the All African People's Revolutionary Party and a labor organizer; it's necessary to understand as much as possible of the global context in which the world operates for one's activism to be meaningful beyond a little kickback.

Coding

I made good progress with livtet. I got the basis of search working and I replaced the command-line approach for getting book information from Calibre with a means of fetching information from its content server. I've made the logic for talking to the content server into a separate library, if for some reason, it can be useful to someone else and to begin isolating the remote places book information can be pulled from. I'm starting to focus on more what it looks like to view a particular book. The initial screenshot I shared in an earlier post no longer represents that and I'm hoping to have something neat by the end of this week.

Seeing

This isn't a photo, but there's a campaign to buy books for prisoners in New York City's prison. You can buy a book for an inmate here.