Reviews and Comments

Because of how much I see this book praised in lefty circles, I thought I would love it when I checked it out from the library. But as the title says, there must be something that I'm not getting about this book, because it really didn't click with me. Of course the mushroom imagery and contemplation on living a life in the ruins of capitalism were exquisite, but there were a few niggling things that bothered me. Firstly, I was not too convinced by the author's claim of "We can learn to live in the ruins of capitalism if we follow the example of people who either are or are descended from people who fought explicitly to uphold capitalism and imperial exploitation of their own countries, and people who claim what they're doing is capitalism in its purest form!" Undoubtedly, these people are living a pericapitalist existence to borrow the author's own term, but shouldn't we strive for something more? Something that actually centres community, the refusal of exploitation, and building better and if needed unofficial institutions? And more specifically, something that explicitly names capitalism as the source of these ills, and seeks to find something to transcend it? Something just seemed missing to me there.

The second thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the author's description of Matsutake as being a capitalist product only when it was shipped from Vancouver to Japan. The author's description of Matsutake when it arrives in Japan is that of the seller trying to find the best home for the Matsutake, not necessarily the best price. This disregards the fact that brokers and agents are still valid methods of employment within capitalism, and that if looked at from a materialist perspective, the Matsutake remains a capitalist commodity, that is, something that is produced to be sold on the market, regardless of whether it will be a good fit with its eventual customer. There are more theoretical quibbles that I have, but it seems to me that this is more a work of poetry (in some cases explicitly) rather than the somewhat academic book it claims to be.

The rest of the book so far has been good (It's an anthology), but the essay I'm reading now is almost laughably bad. It's about the South Vietnamese experience trying to resist assimilation to American culture, which could be interesting, but the author is talking about the things they've lost like "Oh, those evil commies stole my manor house where I extracted rent from like 500 tenants, killed my father who fought in the South Vietnamese army, and stole my servant who literally had to work the day after giving birth at 5:00 AM" (that last one is literally said by the author as though it shows her dedication to her work and not her exploitation). The "happy ending" that the author settles on is that a South Vietnamese exile married a Belgian noble and became royalty of her own. Like I understand that immigration is a brutal process, and especially immigration to the USA, but let me play a sad song for the author on the world's smallest violin.

For some reason, I've found myself reading a lot of radlib books this summer. This book, despite claiming to be leftist, certainly earns its spot with the other radlib books I've read. As my title says it is terminally capitalist realist in that even when it acknowledges the failures of postwar social democracy and correctly articulates that it failed because it gave the bourgeoise time to fight back against it, this book argues that a return to such a system, albeit with a lower consumption rate, is the best that we can hope for. Furthermore, although it correctly notes that degrowth is antithetical to capitalism, it still advocates for social democracy as a means for degrowth because then the capitalism will be "regulated". Finally, it advocates for class collaboration because "the bourgeoise will be affected by climate change too" and seems outright hostile to the idea of an organic working-class movement for ecological sustainability. The previous points aside, were I a professor marking this book as a monograph, I would have to say that it failed. This is not because it is poorly written, but because it fails at every opportunity to prove or even defend its thesis. The central thesis of the book is that we can argue for degrowth on hedonist grounds because consumer society makes people unhappy. All well and good. However, the book does not give a single example of how a society based on degrowth would make people happier, and just assumes that the reader will agree that it would. This sucks because I do agree that a society based on degrowth would be both more fulfilling and more hedonically desireable. However, I can't reccommend this book to someone on the fence about these issues because there is no argument regarding this claim. Do yourself a favour and give this book a pass in favour of a better book on degrowth.