Global Battlefields
Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South
by Walden Bello
(Clarity Press, ISBN 9781963892109)
claritypress.com
Approaching his ninth decade, Walden Bello seems only to be accelerating his work.
In Deglobalization he laid out an alternative path which would refocus production away from exports and towards domestic needs, replace competition with cooperation and subordinate the market to social need. The last two decades have more than vindicated him. Yet Global Battlefields is the memoir which Bello was reluctant to write. ‘Why dispense advice to the young when your generation lost the struggle?’ he asks.
But we should be pleased he persisted. Bello’s political life runs from the underground of the Philippines Communist Party and Allende’s Chile through to sitting in the house of representatives and running for the vice presidency in his home country. Along the way, he has been arrested for occupying the Philippines consulate in San Francisco, tear gassed in Seattle, offered safe haven by Hugo Chavez when his former Filipino comrades placed him on a hit list, uncovered secret World Bank documents by sneaking into their DC offices, and spoken truth at close quarters to global elites.
He might be a giant of the anti-globalization movement, but Bello is an internationalist through and through. Here he tries to understand how the Trumpists successfully ‘ate our lunch’ by hijacking deglobalization to push a racist, far right agenda.
Bello never shies away from uncovering what we’ve done wrong, even if we find it uncomfortable. He greatly admired Chavez but delivered him some home truths – and wasn’t invited back. But Bello also helps us understand what went right – like the central importance of the alliance between Global South governments, civil society and grassroots activists in thwarting the WTO’s plans.
Logging Off
The Human Cost of Our Digital World
by Adele Zeynep Walton
(Trapeze, ISBN 9781398722927)
orionbooks.co.uk
In recent years, a growing number of ‘digital natives’ – those barely able to remember a life before ubiquitous IT – have begun to speak out against the digital sphere. Adele Walton has become a prominent voice, calling for action to prevent online harms after the tragic and preventable death of her sister Aimee.
Logging Off is the culmination of these years of advocacy. Walton urges readers to re-evaluate their relationships to digital tech by giving a human face to their harms and abuse. Between personal anecdotes about her own relationship to social media, Walton interviews experts, regulation campaigners and the families of the online world’s victims.
The world of technology can be impenetrable, and Logging Off fails to deliver the necessary clarity. Walton’s explanations of algorithmic infrastructure or concepts from critical tech scholarship can seem clumsy and occasionally inaccurate to experts, and near-incoherent to lay readers. Most chapters grapple with social media, youth online safety and mental health, so much so that topics like workplace surveillance or disinformation feel shoehorned in. These detours mask a gaping geopolitical hole in Logging Off’s argument for content regulation – such as the well-documented horrors of outsourced moderation farms in the Global South, despite Walton’s reporting on these issues elsewhere.
Walton makes a compelling – if under-developed – argument for platform regulation, and corporate responsibility as a way to reduce online harms, built around moving personal narratives and thorough reporting. In the hands of the right editor, the book could have done her tireless advocacy justice – but this ambitious attempt to render legible the vast field of critical tech to a non-expert audience regrettably falls flat.
Love in Exile
by Shon Faye
(Allen Lane, ISBN 9780241605981)
penguin.co.uk
There is no shortage of writing about romantic love on offer – how to get it, keep it, and deal with its loss are questions that never go away. But Shon Faye attempts to imbue these questions with a more political slant. Love in Exile is part-memoir, part-manifesto.
In an oversaturated market, Faye’s contributions are unique, containing insights drawn from Lana Del Rey’s repertoire as well as the oppressive history of Irish mother and baby homes and the sculpture of Michaelangelo.
Faye, a trans woman, has long felt exiled from heterosexual romantic love. A powerful desire to be seen as conventionally feminine led her to some troubling dating experiences. But dating men she did not respect – and who could accept their attraction to trans women for fear of being ostracized – left her drained of confidence and belief in authentic love.
But rather than stopping at her own experience, she astutely reflects on a general cultural malaise around love, a dissatisfaction befalling straight women – wooed in the first year or two, and facing drudgery for the subsequent decades.
Her prescription here is admirably bold, as she advocates for a kind of ‘divine love’, noting how even the secular notion of universal human rights is borrowed from faith. She’s not asking us to turn to organised religion – but to invest in selflessness rather than transactional bonds.
Love in Exile reads like a fourth part to bell hooks’ highly praised Love trilogy – and a trans-feminist take on liberation theology. Faye puts it best, ‘The word God is a shorthand for an unconditional love that dwells in all human acts of compassion – big or small,’ Faye argues. We should pay attention.
Flesh
by David Szalay
(Jonathan Cape, ISBN 9780224099783)
penguin.co.uk
David Szalay has a real gift with boring people. From Paul Rainey, the telemarketer antihero of his debut London and the South-East to the various non-entities which populate his anthology novels All That Man Is and Turbulence, Szalay realises his characters with a spare, exacting beauty reminscent of JM Coetzee, another great chronicler of the drabness of male life.
Flesh is the story of István, a man of few words and deep, undisturbed emotions. The novel tracks him from his listless and inappropriately sexual adolescence at the end of communist-era Hungary through to middle age and precarious affluence in 21st century Britain under the Tories. A deadpan picaresque, Flesh shows István stumbling from one job to another, from one bed to another, and from one brutal act of violence to another – either as witness, victim or perpetrator. The surface flatness of Szalay’s style serves to make the book’s sex and violence disconcertingly convincing: ‘She moves her lips to his again, and this time she opens her mouth and he feels her tongue on his lips and then opens his own mouth and her tongue goes into it.’ Szalay is brilliant at relating the numbing effect of trauma, and providing these moments with a lingering significance.
If there is a limit to Szalay’s method – an area he scrapes back too far – it is his dialogue. While authentically real-life, there are countless conversations in which characters fail to communicate with one another, indeed often fail to say more than three words consecutively. These scenes test the limits of the rule that a book may be about banality but cannot be banal,
Flesh remains a beautiful, stark book. A masterpiece of the ordinary.
