Reviews and Comments

I have mixed feelings about this book; I'd picked it up as it was recommended by China Miéville in "A Spectre, Haunting". The first two chapters ("What Is Ideology?" and "Ideological Strategies") were great – truly an introduction and overview, bringing to the foreground the many conflicing notions of ideology I'd encountered and linking them to political practice. I enjoyed the beginning of the third chapter "From the Enlightenment to the Second International" as helpful contextualization of the birth of the study of ideology, but then felt the book got lost in detailed intellectual history and rehashing of academic fights, so I began skipping and picked up again in the second-to-last chapter, "Discourse and Ideology", which turned out to just be a particular in-fight about semiotics with some other academics. The "Conclusion" was short and summarized the ideas of the first few chapter well. If you pick this up out of practical rather than academic interest, I'd recommend treating it as a primer and sticking to the first two or three chapters.

I found the historic part of this book (first two chapters) interesting, but not particularly helpful politically; I guess it's nice to rehabilitate the Luddites (and the anarchic style of organizing is interesting), but I'm not sure there's so much to learn from. The last two chapters I found more engaging. Particularly striking was the author's finding that people (workers, consumers) already engage in anti-automation, Luddite practices (like stealing from a self-checkout, or messing with food delivery robots in a fast food restaurant) and that it's good Marxist practice to build on that. Or this finding: "A large majority (85%) said they would support restricting workforce automation to jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do." [^Pew] So as an overview of what automation currently does and how the Left can relate to it, the book was good; as a source of ancient wisdom from the Luddites, not so much.

[^Pew] www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/08/how-americans-see-automation-and-the-workplace-in-7-charts/

This book has helped me articulate a few things I’d experienced before. For one, the sense of joy of being seen as a comrade. I distinctly remember being in a very large online seminar on labour organizing when one of the Indian workers casually addressed everyone else as comrades, creating a unity where before I’d only felt the detachment of yet-another-zoom-call.

It also reminded me of when someone I’d just met said they were quite excited about knowing me now because they so rarely encounter “peers”. I understand now that the it was comradeship that happened in that moment – meeting someone else who is also trying to change the world the way you are, and whom you recognize as being on your side, and who is ready to judge you and be judged by you about the value of your activities in pursuit of that goal.

I know a good number of people who are politically active, but only very few who I think would tell me that what I’m doing is pointless, and who would accept my telling them that their pet political project is misguided. These, I understand now, are my comrades.

I also liked the distinction between ally & comrade, with an ally being an identity you pursue ultimately on your own, and comrade being an identity that can only be ascribed by someone else.

For political movements, the notion that to be a comrade is to place the party above the self, and that joy comes from knowing that one is only a part of a bigger thing, and not ultimately necessary for it, would be a helpful one. I think framing making oneself superfluous as not just a way of preventing burnout but as a source of pleasure might aid in building more resilient organisations.

This is a wonderful book to stimulate thinking. I don’t think it makes for good front-to-back reading material, but the pattern-based style works great for flipping through, and every once in a while I struck on one that immediately made sense to me and appealed. Some of the patterns feel dated (I really hope we will not need so many patterns around how to defend ourselves against cars in thirty years!), but more interesting were those bits were things felt missing – there’s no pattern for a community house except for large families, nothing to think about more temporary living situations, and no help in how to set up a space for a party. But the way of describing a pattern is so straightforward that each lacuna made me want to design my own, and even if the book had only produced that feeling, it would have been enough.

The patterns for designing a livable city made me sad – it all makes sense, but it’s at best an aspiration for where we want to get. As a utopia, I enjoyed it.