Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
The idea that people’s futures might be economically determined deeply offends US sensibilities. We want to believe that individual moxie matters, that a person’s creativity, effort, and intelligence will lead to economic success. Stories of exceptional strivers, heroically overcoming a stacked deck of obstacles, divert our attention from the data. But the large megatrends are now indisputable.
Born on Third Base
Chuck Collins
What Jameson helped me understand is that postmodern subjective idealism is philosophically and epistemologically aligned with neoliberalism in a very fundamental way: in the same sense that postmodern subjectivity posits that the world is made up of individually competing realities (again, as a reasonable pushback against the racist, sexist, and colonial norms associated with positivism), neoliberalism posits an atomized worldview of individuals and individual products competing with each other to define marketplace reality. As Jameson essentially argues, __the individual subjectivity of postmodernism is a logical and cultural parallel to the market subjectivity of late-stage capitalism.__
A Marxist Education
Wayne Au
In humanitarian and development discourse, on the other hand, resilience is invoked to praise an impoverished population for its strength in the face of hardship. Such professions of sympathy, however sincere or well intentioned, can become powerfully cynical if they do not consider history, power, and the distance between the resilient subject and the person or institution calling them such. This is the point of a much-circulated poster in post-Katrina New Orleans, which bore a quotation attributed to a local lawyer, Tracie Washington: “Every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re so resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me.”
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John Patrick Leary
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