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Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics
Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics is a field guide to the way we talk about politics in the United States today.
Keywords for Capitalism is a guide to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths of mainstream political media, but it also gives readers tools to understand the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building. “Liberal” and “centrist,” for example, obscure as much as they reveal about the positions they ostensibly describe. “Socialism,” though, is an idea and a tradition that has found new life in recent years. “Neoliberalism” and “intersectional” are routinely used and abused on the activist left, and by some of its mainstream critics.
Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics catalogs the evasions that make up an ideology of mainstream politics in the United States. It equips readers to use the words that really do mean something, and provides the tools to dismiss those that don’t.
In addition to challenging the jargon of the corporate media and politicians, Leary also leads readers through the very real debates about words with power: socialism, intersectionality, liberal, conservative, green, materialist.
Keywords for Capitalism is a guide to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths of mainstream political media, but it also gives readers tools to understand the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building. “Liberal” and “centrist,” for example, obscure as much as they reveal about the positions they ostensibly describe. “Socialism,” though, is an idea and a tradition that has found new life in recent years. “Neoliberalism” and “intersectional” are routinely used and abused on the activist left, and by some of its mainstream critics.
Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics catalogs the evasions that make up an ideology of mainstream politics in the United States. It equips readers to use the words that really do mean something, and provides the tools to dismiss those that don’t.
In addition to challenging the jargon of the corporate media and politicians, Leary also leads readers through the very real debates about words with power: socialism, intersectionality, liberal, conservative, green, materialist.
- GenresPoliticsTheoryNonfiction
120 pages, Paperback
Published June 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 29, 2022
Keywords for Capitalism follows Leary’s previous Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism and, like its predecessor, approaches the concepts under consideration with amused (and amusing) skepticism toward their purported meanings and uses, given that purported intent rarely matches actual outcome.
For instance, Leary sees the topic of “partisanship” often negatively characterized as a form of “tribalism,” and tribes are what “backwards” nations are populated by. “’[T]ribe’ is often synonymous with ‘ethnicity,’ yet . . . also marks linguistic and geographic disparities. But the word ‘nation’ does the same thing—so what’s the difference? One answer is that calling someone else’s nation a ‘tribe’ is a prerogative of conquest. As the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has summed it up: thirty million Yorubas are a tribe, but four million Danes are a nation.”
The tone throughout is ironic, presumably in response to the earnest contradictions embedded in terms like “policy” and “pundit.” Hypocrisies and contradictions (conscious and un-), historical shifts in meaning—the events that make wry skepticism a rational response to everything political, especially once contentious terms become part of administrative vocabulary. For instance, “’Inclusion’ is usually defined as the way you get ‘diversity,’ the concept to which it’s habitually bound.”
“On the one hand, it is diversity’s whimsical, unmeasurable sibling, a subjective matter of employees’ and students’ feelings and sense of belonging. And on the other, inclusion is a list of human-resources policy proposals, none of which ever seem to involve a labor union, free tuition, or a robust grievance procedure. . . It almost makes you think that the point of ‘inclusion’ initiatives spearheaded by managers is that they never have to end. Why, after all, would one expect them to ensure accountability for themselves? Here, the contrast with an older synonym, ‘integration,’ is instructive. Integration, as a word and (at least) as an ideal, is opposed by ‘segregation’; inclusion, by the much less precise concept of ‘exclusion.’. . A more ‘inclusive’ institution only needs to become a better and more effective version of itself. It’s something you should want to be a bigger part of.”
Leary ends his exegesis of “inclusion” with an example from the CIA boasting of its inclusion policies for women, where the organization notes that one of the CIA’s female agents “found ‘resilience’ in a childhood spent in a war zone, where she handled weapons and drove armored trucks before she turned twelve. The only problem with this story, though, is that her school of hard knocks was 1970s Rhodesia. . . When ‘inclusion’ can seem to celebrate the last ruthless embers of white colonialism in southern Africa, it’s outlived any usefulness it had.”
Even positive terms like “ally” and “allyship” are shown to be inherently weak and ineffective in terms of describing actions that can reduce disenfranchisement and bring about greater participation in democratic processes: “Allyship is best compared with ‘solidarity,’ our best word for the practice of making and nurturing allegiances based on principle and common interest. Solidarity, though, is a thing that you do—and you can only do it on behalf of another. An ‘ally,’ most of the time, is a thing you are, a feature of an individual person’s character. As such, it is too easy to do it mostly for yourself,” in the form of, say, virtue-signaling to your friends and family by clicking a “like” button on a Facebook post.
Keywords for Capitalism is often surprising and always interesting, thoughtful, and insightful.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
For instance, Leary sees the topic of “partisanship” often negatively characterized as a form of “tribalism,” and tribes are what “backwards” nations are populated by. “’[T]ribe’ is often synonymous with ‘ethnicity,’ yet . . . also marks linguistic and geographic disparities. But the word ‘nation’ does the same thing—so what’s the difference? One answer is that calling someone else’s nation a ‘tribe’ is a prerogative of conquest. As the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has summed it up: thirty million Yorubas are a tribe, but four million Danes are a nation.”
The tone throughout is ironic, presumably in response to the earnest contradictions embedded in terms like “policy” and “pundit.” Hypocrisies and contradictions (conscious and un-), historical shifts in meaning—the events that make wry skepticism a rational response to everything political, especially once contentious terms become part of administrative vocabulary. For instance, “’Inclusion’ is usually defined as the way you get ‘diversity,’ the concept to which it’s habitually bound.”
“On the one hand, it is diversity’s whimsical, unmeasurable sibling, a subjective matter of employees’ and students’ feelings and sense of belonging. And on the other, inclusion is a list of human-resources policy proposals, none of which ever seem to involve a labor union, free tuition, or a robust grievance procedure. . . It almost makes you think that the point of ‘inclusion’ initiatives spearheaded by managers is that they never have to end. Why, after all, would one expect them to ensure accountability for themselves? Here, the contrast with an older synonym, ‘integration,’ is instructive. Integration, as a word and (at least) as an ideal, is opposed by ‘segregation’; inclusion, by the much less precise concept of ‘exclusion.’. . A more ‘inclusive’ institution only needs to become a better and more effective version of itself. It’s something you should want to be a bigger part of.”
Leary ends his exegesis of “inclusion” with an example from the CIA boasting of its inclusion policies for women, where the organization notes that one of the CIA’s female agents “found ‘resilience’ in a childhood spent in a war zone, where she handled weapons and drove armored trucks before she turned twelve. The only problem with this story, though, is that her school of hard knocks was 1970s Rhodesia. . . When ‘inclusion’ can seem to celebrate the last ruthless embers of white colonialism in southern Africa, it’s outlived any usefulness it had.”
Even positive terms like “ally” and “allyship” are shown to be inherently weak and ineffective in terms of describing actions that can reduce disenfranchisement and bring about greater participation in democratic processes: “Allyship is best compared with ‘solidarity,’ our best word for the practice of making and nurturing allegiances based on principle and common interest. Solidarity, though, is a thing that you do—and you can only do it on behalf of another. An ‘ally,’ most of the time, is a thing you are, a feature of an individual person’s character. As such, it is too easy to do it mostly for yourself,” in the form of, say, virtue-signaling to your friends and family by clicking a “like” button on a Facebook post.
Keywords for Capitalism is often surprising and always interesting, thoughtful, and insightful.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
November 25, 2022
I hope the author writes three more volumes of similar books. I will buy them as they are released and anxiously await the omnibus edition. Smart and straightforward, funny without being jokey or trying too hard, and every once in awhile a beautiful, devastating passage of writing pops up.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews