Status Updates From Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surp...

The deeper I get into this the more frustrating it becomes. Gilmore is clearly a brilliant, rigorous scholar, but has also absorbed many of the worst aspects of the Western academy. Aversion to power, fetishization of spontaneity, endless description of the systemic actions of the ruling class but denial of their agency as a group, it's all here and weakens what could be a much stronger analysis.

Gilmore's political economy of California is a deeply researched, extensively sourced review of the reshaping of the California economy during the Great Stagnation crisis of the 1970s. However, her deep aversion to ascribing any kind of agency to the ruling class in their project of expansive social control through the apparatus of the state in order to maintain their power (too "conspiratorial") is frustrating.