Curiosities for the crisis

Rjurik Davidson, author of Unwrapped Sky (Tor, 2014) and the forthcoming The Stars Askew, gives his recommendations for summer reading and viewing.

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What to do for summer? As in the last couple of years, I’ve put together some suggestions for books to read and films to watch. This year, they’re arranged around the theme of crisis, which has been on my mind lately.

Crisis – it’s a word we’re going to be using more and more. Seven years since the 2008 global financial crisis, and the mess shows little sign of abating.

A long boom nourished the long years of social democracy that dominated the second half of the 20th century. This was a time of political stability, in the rich countries at least – the time of baby boomers and mass education and suburbia filled with the latest technological knick-knacks.

But the long boom couldn’t last forever. The massive destruction of World War Two was repaired, the technological revolution ground to a halt, and corporate profit rates began to decline.

Australia has in recent times remained afloat on the back of its mining boom, but that too is coming to an end. The international economy might just have entered a new more crisis-prone phase.

What follows are a few suggestions that might get you thinking about what this means. Though some of the suggestions might seem a little depressing, it’s important to remember that periods of crisis are also periods of opportunity for the left. Crises tend to lead to polarisation. People look for radical solutions in radical times. In the shadows of crisis lurks the possibility of light.

Documentary

What sparked the 2008 crisis? It began with the subprime crisis, in which US banks happily lent prospective homeowners money, even though it was clear that many of those people would not be able to pay their mortgage. This occurred partly as a result of changes to the financial sector; mortgage brokers and banks could buy and sell debt without much regulation.

The documentary Inside Job – narrated by Matt Damon – does a good job of introducing some of the key players and neoliberal policies that contributed to this crisis. Though the film has a social democratic outlook, it’s impossible to watch without rising fury at the sheer greed and lies of the US elites, in particular the financial players whose sole aim seems to be to enrich themselves.

Film

What was the human cost of the crisis? The film 99 Homes is not the kind of film you’d expect to come out of the US. The film industry there is itself neoliberalised and seems to have devolved into endless rewritings of superhero films. 99 Homes is instead the kind of social realism that Ken Loach might make.

When unemployed builder Dennis Nash cannot pay his mortgage, the rapacious real estate magnate Rick Carver takes charge of his eviction. Nash later becomes Carver’s henchman and is quickly transformed into an instrument for the same forces that ruined his own life.

A morality tale with a powerful sense of tragedy, 99 Homes does a fine job of depicting Nash’s moral quandaries. Unfortunately, as the plot develops, the film mistakenly confuses illegal actions with the perfectly legal forms of predatory practices that the housing crisis encouraged. Still, the essential dilemma of Nash is well set up and the eviction scenes devastating to watch.

As an aside, I’d also recommend two films featuring Marion Cotillard – surely one of the finest actors of recent years – The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night. Both are relevant to the crisis-ridden times. And in both, Cotillard gives virtuoso performances.

Journalism/politics

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is an important analysis of climate change, which has been made all the worse by the global financial crisis. Readable, informative and pressing, this should be required reading for any environmentalist.

It’s climate versus capitalism, argues Klein. Which one will we choose? Any book on climate change faces an irresolvable contradiction: how do you convince anyone to read about what is a fundamentally depressing topic? While I’m not quite convinced by Klein’s resulting attitude and tone – aimed to inspire hope – the book is both readable and prescient.

Klein’s voice is just one going against the current flood of right wing misinformation. The question is how the left can express itself collectively. That is, it’s a question of political strategy, which Klein is fairly weak on.

Economics

If Inside Job, 99 Homes and This Changes Everything show us different aspects of the crisis, what lies at its core? David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is an excellent introduction to capitalism’s crises.

Harvey begins with the generally accepted figure that any capitalist economy needs 3 percent growth. As with Naomi Klein’s argument, this immediately suggests that the contradiction between the environment and capitalism is irresolvable. Our societies simply cannot continue to grow (and thus increase in population) ad infinitum – something has to give.

Leaving that aside, there are plenty of other barriers to growth. Harvey paints us a picture of capitalism as a system of revolving crises, which are solved in one arena only to erupt somewhere else. Though Harvey can be a bit dry, the material is compelling enough to carry you through.

The classic

Crises shake things up. Old ways of doing things cannot be maintained. New political forces emerge. Across Europe, we’ve seen the re-emergence of left social democratic forces, but more worryingly, a re-emergence of the far right and fascism.

The French National Front, the “true Finns”, Sweden’s “Democrats”, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi movement in Germany – all these parties are based on virulent racism and anti-left rhetoric. What do they represent and how can one fight them?

Probably the finest of his writings in exile, Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany examined the rise of the Nazis. In this book, Trotsky’s political acumen shone forth as he tried desperately to rouse the left and the working class out of its passivity and alert it to the terrible danger it was facing.

The novel

What kind of world will we live in, if we don’t deal with the crisis? Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a powerful prediction of the kinds of disaster we face. A “biopunk” dystopia, the book presents us with a world of climate catastrophe, in which frequent plagues sweep through the population and corporations control agriculture through genetically modified crops and use violence to organise and develop markets.

Set in a Bangkok below sea level but kept dry with levees and pumps, the novel develops into a political thriller. The city is a neoliberal paradise, which is at the same time a disaster zone. There’s violence, political jockeying, all written with noirish style.

Some find the thriller plot hardest to enjoy. And, like any of the “punk” subgenres (cyberpunk, steampunk), Bacigalupi’s biopunk is a combination of critique and celebration (look how cool this technology is).

Still, it’s one of the best recent science fiction novels and a dire warning about the crisis-ridden future unless we apply the brake, as Walter Benjamin might have said, to capitalism’s runaway train.