One of the reasons I’ve been quiet recently is because of the reading demands for The National Book Awards this year, which \ come with a requirement that keep quiet about anything published this year, lest I tip the hand of the jury in our deliberations. Also, I’m finishing a couple of books, which means most of my writing time is at the service of my editors.
But if you’re curious about what at least one of those books looks like, here’s a taste. A chunk of what will be a short volume on the polycrisis has just been published at the Journal of Peasant Studies, and it’s temporarily available to all. Yes, it’s long, and there are parts that get into the theoretical weeds, but the payoff includes understanding why the women who brought you Bella Ciao in the 19th century can also help us navigate the far-right politics of the 21st century. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:
After the revolution, suggest Marx and Engels, we’ll be spending a lot of time in the food system. In The German Ideology, they offer a glimpse of an unalienated life in which we will be free of the constraints of specialisation, emancipated from jobs as ‘a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic’, free instead ‘in the morning to hunt, in the afternoon to fish, in the evening to herd livestock and to criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’ .
While their example celebrates a happy emancipation from the division of labour, this rare peek at a communist utopia also disappoints. The day seems to pivot between men doing animal killing and offering opinion. To the untrained eye, this doesn’t appear terribly distant from a late capitalism in which bros do keto by day and podcasts by night. Women, children, romantic partners, and the elderly are elsewhere. The lack of maintenance activities in a communist paradise, the invisibility of reproductive labour or care work, a purely predatory relationship with the web of life, a lack of concern with energy, an absence of collective joy, and an oddly solitary vision of how people might spend their days come together to suggest that it’s possible for future communards to be both unalienated and incel-adjacent.
Read more here.