I think I have a legitimate question here.
If Sunkara is editing (with Leonard) a collection of essays
about how we need to build socialism, how is this book different from a Jacobin
issue? Is it that they didn’t get the art team out?
But seriously, this is a fine addition to the series of
Sunkara-edited and contributed collections. It is a collection of several
essays united by the common thread of the common, on how we make the world
better for everyone. My main issue with it was that the essays were siloed –
here’s women’s issues, here’s race issues, and the thread isn’t really pulled
together until the final essay, a coda by Sunkara and Peter Frase. Not to say
that this isn’t important – but I wanted to see a more organic whole.
What was interesting was the common thread between the
siloed topics that might not have been intentional. Several of the authors
argued for the necessity of a universal basic income. This seems to be the
struggle of our time under the context of capitalism that may have some legs as
the robots rise and the millennials who feel the Bern start coming into more
power and the olds start dying off. The real question is if this is a reformist
move, or will take us to the promised land of worker control of the means of
production and the gradual withering away of the state, or if it is an end
point that if accomplished will foreclose other discussions on reform.
Two important essays close the book before the coda. Tim
Barker makes a clear argument against the too common celebration of the small
business, which is important because it shows that the capitalistic system is
the problem no matter how large the scale. I hadn’t thought of the subject much
at all, and it nicely disturbed some preconceived notions of mine. Then the
last essay is Seth Ackerman prodding on the idea that the socialist future is
not the end, but a beginning, an important reminder that we are not reaching
for the end of history on our terms, but instead a new beginning.
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