First up this week, I simply must stan another INCREDIBLE piece by Alyssa Battistoni, whose work everyone should read all the time. This one is ostensibly about a 1977 oral history book called The Romance of American Communism, but it’s also about how past political movements inflect current ones, how we relate to the historical failures of the left, and the emotional experience of struggle. Battistoni’s essays usually leave me with a lump in my throat, and this one was no different.
“[The Romance of American Communism] excels as an account of the feeling that suffused a particular historical moment and way of life. But it also conveys something core to the experience of political action more generally. It captures the affective energy that gives politics its transformative potential—the intensity of the ritual practices that strengthen belief, the way that the meaning of the larger project can suffuse the most mundane actions, how being in struggle with others makes people braver in all parts of their lives. ”
Like many of you, I’ve been following the internal struggle within the National Tertiary Education Union over the union’s decision to support pay cuts for up to 15% of staff. This article gives a good overview of the dispute, and also includes the immortal phrase “the NTEU’s leather-elbow-patched-brigade”, which might be the sickest burn I’ve ever heard and I treasure it.
An oldie but a goodie (via Matt) about how the Nobel Prize for Economics is part of a neoliberal conspiracy. The title of the piece is ‘There is No Nobel Prize for Economics’, which I at first thought was a metaphor, but turned out to be literally true:
“Sweden’s Central Bank quietly snuck it in with all the other Nobel Prizes to give free-market economics for the 1% credibility. One of the Federal Reserve banks explained it succinctly, “Few realize, especially outside of economists, that the prize in economics is not an “official” Nobel. . . . The award for economics came almost 70 years later—bootstrapped to the Nobel in 1968 as a bit of a marketing ploy to celebrate the Bank of Sweden’s 300th anniversary.” Yes, you read that right: “a marketing ploy.””
Speaking of economists - but the good kind - here is a piece on austerity and coronavirus government spending by economist Grace Blakeley, whom absolutely no one in my household has a crush on. This is Brit-centric, but I think broadly applicable to the Australian context as well, given that we have a right-wing government that is currently prioritising state intervention and spending. “Johnson has not constituted a ‘worker-friendly’ government in response to the shifting nature of his electoral coalition,” Blakeley reminds us, “he has simply recognised that the needs of capital – and the middle class homeowners upon whom capital depends for popular support – have shifted … This spending will continue for as long as it benefits the wealthy – and not for a minute longer.”
Ending on a slightly different note, here’s the story of a restaurant owner who made money by ordering his own pizzas off an app (i.e. a bizarre but neat demonstration of how the delivery industry is broken). Pizza arbitrage! Love to innovate.
Until next week!
Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash