PTO Books of the year

Time is a bourgeois concept, the New Year - doubly so. Nonetheless, here are the best things Joana Ramiro (host of #RedHacks) and I read  in 2019.

The Clamour of Nationalism, Race and Nation in Twenty-first-century Britain, Sivamohan Valluvan, Manchester University Press, (2019)

At the end of October, I interviewed Sivamohan Valluvan about his penetrating and sobering book on the dominance of nationalist ideology in contemporary Britain. Contrary to the prevailing tendency to characterise the current conjuncture as an era of 'populism' (with the implication of a dual polarisation towards the far right and the far left) Valluvan insists that it is reactionary nationalism that not only dominates but also inflects the entire ideological field - from the far right to the "muscular liberalism" of the vanishing centre and even parts of the radical left. Fortuitously, the interview's release was delayed until immediately after Labour's debacle in the December 2019 general election and the victory of Boris Johnson's 'disaster nationalism'. There couldn't have been a better/worse time for it. AD

People Get Ready, Christine Berry & Joe Guinan, OR Books (2019)

A small but feisty guide into the steps needed for the left to take power and what to do once it does, written by the same people that brought to you the Preston Model. 2019 may not have been the year we'll get to apply its lessons yet, but that also means you have a bit more time to read it and get ready. JR

Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling, Lida Maxwell, Oxford University Press (2019)

As Lida Maxwell explains in her fascinating book on Chelsea Manning and the phenomenon of whistleblowing, many of Manning's most prominent supporters initially sought to downplay the political significance of her transition - perceiving it as they did as an unwelcome distraction from her revelations about the brutality of the American occupation of Iraq. Maxwell persuasively makes the case that, in contrast to the more respectable figure of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning's critique of American power and her insistence on the entwining of the political and the (ostensibly) personal represented a far greater threat to the national security establishment. AD

The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour, The Indigo Press (2019)

I read Richard Seymour's disturbing new book on the social media industry in a way that the author surely wouldn't approve of: on a pdf on my laptop whilst flicking back and forth between the book and the twenty or so tabs that are typically open at any one time in my browser (all the while aggravating the RSI in my hands that I usually attribute to 'work' when it's just as much the consequence of repetitively scrolling through the parasitical platforms that operate under the misnomer of 'social media'). Whilst nodding towards the familiar argument that the platforms operate according to the logic of addiction, Seymour does not advocate a mechanistic, biologically reductive model of the addictive qualities of the platforms. Instead, he advances a Lacanian reading that emphasises the curious absence of pleasure in our engagement with the 'Twittering Machine', which disrupts and forecloses all other desires that we might otherwise pursue. AD

Clear Bright Future, Paul Mason, Penguin (2019)

Paul Mason's follow-up to Postcapitalism is a tour de force into the causes and effects of neoliberalism in the last thee decades and its chaotic demise since 2008. Unusually for a book of this tradition, Clear Bright Future spends its last third in a fascinating investigation into Marxist humanism and in the attempt to bring this much neglected discipline into the 21st century. A worthy read for both fans and frenemies of the veteran journalist. JR

It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, Ian Penman, Fitzcarraldo Editions (2019)

Writing about music seems a particularly thankless task. The sheer emotional force of good music and the fierce loyalty we feel to the artists we care about means that bad music writing offends in a way that bad writing about less evocative topics does not. In It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track Ian Penman writes so beautifully about music that, rather than leaving the reader with a frustratingly inadequate, partial account - so typical of much music writing - he opens whole new ways to approach an artists' oeuvre. In the case of Frank Sinatra - a musician previously reduced in my mind to 'My Way', 'Come Fly With Me' and hard-drinking rat-pack cliches - he reveals the uncanny post-war survivors' guilt and Cold War terror that backgrounds the 'easy' listening of torch song records such as 'In the Wee Small Hours' and 'No One Cares'. The most celebrated essay in the book is on Prince, and in the introduction Penman (despite writing more insightfully about the late Prince Rogers Nelson than anyone else) confesses to feeling that a deeper understanding of this extremely complicated, and (as the essay reveals) troubling figure eluded him. Yet the lyrical closing paragraphs on Prince are a miniature work of art in themselves and a model of how to nail a landing. Does anyone end an essay better than Ian Penman? AD

Now We Have Your Attention, Jack Shenker, Penguin (2019)

The Guardian's former Egypt correspondent, Jack Shenker spent the last few years following bubbling social and labour movements in Britain, witnessing the struggles of new unions like the United Voices of the World and political organisations like Momentum. Now We Have Your Attention is the candid result of this investigation, which shows - in rather beautiful prose - how, contrary to popular belief, politics actually happens outside Westminster. JR

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso (2019)

Just as the essentially social character of work under capitalism is veiled and hidden, Sophie Lewis argues that the notion of a child as the product of a mother or the nuclear family serves to obscure the social and essentially surrogate nature of all gestation. Rather than simply calling for the expansion of technologies associated with commercial surrogacy, Lewis asks us to stop disavowing the social character of reproductive work and to consider how we might repurpose some of those technologies in the task of building a queer communist future in which no child would 'belong' to anyone else. AD

Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor, Picador (2019)

This fantastical tale of gender and self-discovery actually came out in the United States in 2017, but it has only reached British shores this year. While the end might leave some readers rather pent up, Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl offers a delicious and opulent ride into language, gender theory and 1990s counter-culture. Expect androgynous nymphs, savage sex scenes and lots of punk references. JR

Chuǎng 2: Frontiers (2019)

The second volume of the journal Chuǎng, written by a collective of dissident ultra-left Chinese Marxists ranges from reflections on Chinese state terror against the PRC's Uyghur population to the level of class struggle and industrial strikes in China today, to the origins of Vietnamese Sinophobia. The centrepiece of the collection is the magisterial essay 'Red Dust', on the history of the Chinese revolution and China's capitalist transition. One of the many fascinating arguments advanced in the essay is that the racially tiered nature of the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere continued to structure the development of capitalism in East Asia - to the detriment of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines - in the post-war era. AD