Mitchell Chatfield > Recent Status Updates

I should note the part on the cemeteries agency was very good too. Downhill since then

On track for 2 stars. Most this reads/listens like liberal dog water you find in some hidden page of the guardian. Lewis’ piece is by far the standout: it’s gritty, to the point, and properly a human interest focus. The other rubbish focuses on space (not too bad but the through line of ‘life in space’ is rubbish), numbers (attempting political impartiality badly), and pedo hunters

Currently 13 pages in and this is going to be a frustrating read - the blatant dismissal of Sartre without seeming to engage in the content of his arguments does not set this up well

NB: started reading about a month or so ago

Carroll’s introduction of Habermas around page 120 is rubbish. He introduces Habermas’ critique, which as it turns out by a footnote a few pages over is largely a misreading of Nietzsche’s actual work. Perhaps a self report: I care not for anything Habermas has to say. I want Stirner and Nietzsche and direct relevance to the same.

Very interesting tangents and cultural set up around the financial lead up to the civil war

The 20 year edition has a delightful and funny introduction

This chapter on Vorticism seems - on first reading and with no knowledge of Vorticism outside this work - to be edited with too light of a hand. There are quotes which are relatively self explanatory that are then explained in the following sentence, which moves me from feeling like I’m reading a polished work to a long shot research essay for an honours project.

I’m only up to chapter 4 and already some great comedy (and through it, insight) has arisen. ‘Shut the fuck up Williams’ being said to chastise an uppity younger student who was professing knowledge they could not have possibly obtained first hand to an older student. The importance of the lived knowledge, and that the rest is more or less unimportant trivia, rings very true.

Interim update: very good with one major exception. ‘Evil’ this ‘evil’ that; ‘biggest catastrophe in human history’ etc.
To be sure much of the 20th century had some heinous acts. But ‘evil’ is a superlative when discussing Germany or the USSR. Very few heavily authoritarian regimes avoid acting in such ways - making the term useless and devaluing whatever else follows.

In looking at Fact Finding Meetings, it is surprising how hierarchical Mao is - such as workers and peasants not needing to attend discussions relating to commerce

‘At the very least, the vulgar interpretation of psychoanalysis is grist to the mill of neurotic fatalism’ is a wonderful one liner

If history started around 1860 or 1890 maybe some of the claims in chapter 4 would stack up. Alas.
I find the comparison of ‘work used to be X’ often ahistoric and anachronistic. And so it is here. I hope to be disproved. But the history of class society I suspect shows work has been a ‘being’ as long as there has been specialised or at least professional labour.

Audible version: mis edit at 3:46:43

Lasch does a remarkably good job constructing the classes that will be analysed, but veers off into ‘ideas matter’ on topics adjacent to the sanctity of family. It starts promisingly focussed on material reality but (at the ~40% mark) turns back on itself, with appeals to common sense and similar.

Paused/DNF 17 August 2024

A remarkably midwit structure regarding a coal plant: ‘still, is the potential to save 150 jobs worth the plants potential to pollute the planet?’

This book tends to treat the audience like 9 year olds from a few decades ago. Even the book itself assumes that question is implied throughout the preceding sections. It’s belittling and infuriating to spell it out

A common motif is ‘how terrible! The workers and the customers were shafted because of private equity’ as if somehow the status quo doesn’t involve both groups - but workers especially - being hung out to dry at every moment. The critique may be correct, but its implications are so naive

Balance between workers and owners in the 1970’s USA? Really? Maybe it’s too critical for a pop audience text, but ‘balance’ doesn’t describe the literal hundreds of years of bloody and deadly struggle (cf Foner)

Just listened to a spurious claim that robber barons were not as bad for society as PE firms are; and that robber barons didn’t rely on worker exploitation. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see that’s plainly false. Cornering manoeuvres, swindling, and the thick teat of the state were their backbone - not some glamorised early-Rio-Tinto resource extraction

Currently not very far through, but the premise seems to be fundamentally liberal - the American economy would be fixed for workers if only the business owners who make jobs were doing more. I’m really not sure that the McManagement style is the solution: it plays to regressive fantasies that the golden age is somewhere back behind us

Intro and chapter on Freud: excellent
Chapter on Klein: a bit crummy with some tropey appeals. If I wanted a Marx view I’d read about Marx explicitly, the same of the SS, not necessarily read about Klein…

As the maxim rings true: those who reference ‘postmodernism’ don’t understand it, and the more attributed to the label the less understanding there is. The book flowed better without any detour into Lyotard’s murk, but the decision to include suggests that from the authors view the PoMo section shouldn’t simply be cut out.

Even based on 20 minutes of introduction this is shaping up for >4.5 stars. Clark neatly sets out his objectives and what he will be forgoing to do so - a focus on the how not the why, with Sarajevo at the centre

The use of ‘but surely’ really puts me off and makes me question all other claims surrounding it. The Irish were meant to be economically dependent? According to what other than our retroactive implication? I don’t doubt the outcome but I’m not sure based on the evidence in the book the Tudor’s had that view…?

Feels like the book has recently lost its tone. There is a proliferation of unwieldy comma-filled sentences. It’s also recently been seemingly repeating itself: yes, the Dutch, British and French each engaged with the markets in different ways. That was evident 40 or more pages ago?

So far: a little torturous (but necessary) in detailing of the models of development and their respective debunking. My main complaint, other than a generally one directional development (ie sometimes leaving the reader to do a lot of inference work about how a counter argument fails) is stylistic; it’s not sharp enough in style to be ‘hard’ nor polemic enough to be early-Marx/Baudrillard tier entertaining.

Currently listening concurrently with David Harvey’s contradictions

On track for 5 stars. Excellent synopsis of fed interventions, and has a semi narrative base while swapping between main threads to show a slightly more real material impact - as shown by the Feltner (?) family being referenced in chapter 16 at the end of the book so extensively

Finished main text. Addenda to be read.

Pages 133 and 134 I suspect will be the basis of a lot of the eventual review. There are some speculative pro-capitalist claims which I’m not sure hold much if any water, especially given the very quote from Stirner seems to rebut such an assertion.