Watching TV and Reading

Netflix: A History of the New Yorker Magazine 

Watching a documentary about the famous New Yorker magazine.
It brought back memories of reading it since I was in college.
I haven’t read it recently as much as I used to. Maybe start again?

Reading This Week

Concentrating on this book seemed very challenging as I read it, because the authors range widely through history. The seven cheap things are: “nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.” (p. 7) The time frame is the last several hundred years. The geographic extent of the phenomena that the authors cover is also broad: “although Europe features in it, capitalism’s story isn’t a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosí to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam.” (p. 90) I’ve tried to select some quotes to capture some of the key points of the book, though I admit that I’m very challenged by reading it, and I might not understand it very well.

Cheap money is at the heart of history, say the authors: “Although, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ cheap money links the two. The modern art of war became a way to turn gold and blood into capital.” (p. 80)

The authors think in terms of categories of people, mainly binary categories that defined humanity and all its activities: “At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women. Human bodies were forced, sometimes medically and always juridically, into one of two inescapable categories: man and woman. The resulting entangled binaries—of Society-Nature, Man-Woman, and paid work–unpaid work—have left us with a way of thinking that has committed humans in capitalism’s world-ecology to making spectacular oversights: we continue to think of ‘real work’ solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible.” (p. 116)

Food to feed the people who did the work is another important consideration: “Cheap food is ‘cheap’ in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system.” (p. 143) Through cheap food, societies succeed. Hunger in contrast “began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature.” (p. 149) However, “cheap food regimes … guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well—as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest.” (p. 158)

“Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World’s order was kept through race, police, and profits. …  Capitalism’s ecology has shaped the modern nation-state and vice versa, through the colonial frontier, through the interactions between early capitalists and ‘savages,’ and through the technologies of communication that capitalism fostered at its inception.” (p. 180-181)

All in all, I’m overwhelmed by the enormous amount of detail in this book. Do I really understand it? 

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