More Diaries and Memoirs

Diaries, Letters and Memoirs

I’ve taken to adding memoirs, diaries and letters whenever I come across them and can download them to the file I last accessed a year ago. Here, therefore, is the new 54 page version Diaries, Letters and Memoirs and a selection of some of the more interesting -

• The Burden of German History – a transatlantic life Konrad Jarausch (2023) a fascinating read from a German emigre

• Economics in America – an immigrant economist explores the land of inequality Angus Deaton (2023) a Scot exposes the harsh realities of his new homeland

• Myself and other More Important Matters; Charles Handy (2008) a famous 

UK management guru reflects on his life (see also LETTERS)

• A Life Looking Forward – memoirs of an independent Marxist Samir Amin 

(2006) An Egyptian by birth, he became a Professor of Political Economy and active in the World Social Forum and in discussions about the African future. This is a nice tribute

• There is Nothing for You Here - finding opportunity in the 21st Century 

Fiona Hill (2021) A miner’s daughter from NE England recounts how she found 
the missing opportunity in the USA where, as a Russian expert, she testifyied at Trump’s impeachment but argues that opportunity is no longer available.

• Through the Looking Glass – writers’ memoirs at the turn of the 21st Century 

(Robert Kusek 2017) The go-to text for its summary of memoirs in the English language. Produced by and with the financial assistance of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow

• Escape to Life Erika and Klaus Mann (1939) Both famous, not least for their familial link to their father, Thomas, with the entire family forced to leave Germany because of the Nazis. This is a brilliant evocation of others who followed a similar route.

• The Noodle-maker of Kalimpong Gyalo Thondup (2015) The Dalai Lama’s brother tells the story of his life serving the DL.

• Familiar Stranger – a life between two islands Stuart Hall (2017) The New 

Left’s British guru first describes his life in the West Indies and then in the UK

• You Can’t Please All – a memoir Tariq Ali (2024) Another New Leftist 

describes his eventful life.

A New Voice

 At the start of the month, I did a post about the ongoing coup in the USA which listed some of the key articles helpful to an understanding of what is going on in that strange country.

Claire Berlinski is a blogger I need to add to the list. She has just started a series of posts called – Profiles in Cowardice, with this being the second and this, so far, the third. She uses a book produced in 1940 by a French historian Marc Bloch who was a resistance fighter eventually executed by the Nazis

Bloch was a medievalist, but his account of the Battle of France showed him to be 

just as skillful an analyst of contemporary politics. His book Strange Defeat 

(produced posthumously in 1946) is not a personal memoir, although it incorporate 

his perspective as a witness to the events. It’s a work of history, written by a 

participant in the battle, and it is written to the standards Bloch believed history 

should be written, even though he was writing of events, as he described them in a 

letter to Febvre, that “surpass in horror, and in humiliation, all we could dream in 

our worst nightmares.” 

He assesses both the proximate and the deeper causes of the catastrophe 

No segment of French society escapes his scrutiny. All are weighed in the balances, 

and all are found wanting. He carefully describes the failings of military, from the 

high command to the conscripted soldier, and the inadequacies of the French ruling 

class. He describes the shortcomings of the French bourgeoisie, the worldviews of 

rural and the urbanized Frenchman. He details the failures of politicians, of the left 

and the right, and those of the press, academics, teachers, and labor unions. 

All failed to prepare the country to confront the threat it faced. 

What drove the French army to disaster, Bloch concludes, was the accumulation of 

many mistakes. What characterized them all, however, was the inability of the French 

leadership to think in terms of a new war. “In other words,” he writes, “the German 

triumph was, essentially, a triumph of the intellect—and it is that which makes it so 

peculiarly serious.” It’s important to consider what he means in saying that France’s 

defeat was a defeat of the intellect. So is ours, and it is that which makes it not only 

serious, but extremely difficult to fix.

When Bloch writes of the failures of the High Command, it calls to mind two images. 

First, there are the elderly Democrats, who cannot be made to understand that this 

unleashed version of Trump, and the cult he commands, are not like anything in their 

experience. They cannot see that laws of politics with which they grew up no longer 

apply, and the strategies with which they’re familiar no longer work. They are in an 

entirely new fight, shaped by technologies they don’t understand—but their opponents 

do—and they lack the alacrity the circumstances demand.
Her second image is more dubious – its the so-called Russian invasion of our minds….

Other relevant posts are

Adam Przeworski’s February-March posts - 39 pages long!

Rules for Destroying a Liberal

From the Berghof to the Oval Office

The Great Capitulation

Why do we ignore the State?

I’ve been trying in these last posts to make sense of the sudden turn of the US to …. what exactly? Fascism? (as per Snyder) Autocracy? (as per Applebaum). But we really need more attention paid to the STATE which accounts for so much of a country’s GNP but which has come under increasing attack from free-marker ideologues. I have been trying to draft a book on the subject – using some key texts to help me. This is what I’ve come up with – with an outline of the book chapters to follow.

Essential Reading

The State in Capitalist Society Ralph Miliband (1969) Still the clearest exposition – if Marxist

What does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules? Goren Therborn (1978) A good analysis from a Swede

The Great Arch – English State development as Cultural Revolution Philip Corrigan and 

Derek Sayer (1985) Very good on the slow development of the UK state

The Future of the Capitalist State Bob Jessop (2002) Jessop is not an easy read. I would suggest instead Pierson’s book

The Modern State Christopher Pierson (2^nd ed 2004) All you need to know about the State

On the State – lectures at the College de France 1989-92 Pierre Bourdieu (2014)
The Origins of Political Order F Fukuyama (2011) The definitive 2 volume book
Political Order and Political DecayF Fukuyama (2014) The definitive 2 volume book

The State – past, present and future Bob Jessop (2016) Rather turgid going

Reclaiming the State – a progressive vision of sovereignty for a new-liberal world William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi (2017) An interesting take by economists

On Tyranny – 20 lessons from the 20th century Timothy Snyder (2017) A short book from 

a US political scientist
How Fascism Works – the politics of us and them Jason Stanley (2018) from a US political 

philosopher
The Return of the State – restructuring britain for the common good ed Allen et al 

(PEF 2021) A social democratic interpretation
Mission Economy Mariana Mazacatto (2021) An Italian economist makes a strong case for

the State. see also https://www.philosopheasy.com/p/the-entrepreneurial-state-unmasking

The Problem of the State Michael Mair (2021) A bit too philosophical for my tastes
The Return of the State and why it is essential for our health, wealth and happiness 

G Garrard (2022) A Canadian/British social democrat makes a strong argument
The Project State and its Rivals – a new history of the 20th and 21st Centuries 

Charles Maier (2023) An economic historian puts the discussions about the State in 

historical perspective

Autocracy – the dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum (2024) A Polish/American journalist dissects the beast

The Structure of the Book

is unusual for reasons I explain in this Warning

• People do not normally read a book about administrative reform with any expectation of pleasure.

• Such texts will normally figure as required reading in student courses, for example, in public administration reform.

• But this is not a textbook on administrative reform….

• It starts with my involvement, in the late 1960s, in community politics rising to a position of strategic influence in the West of Scotland local government - one held for some 20 years.

• On the basis of the innovative strategies I helped develop in a Regional authority covering half of Scotland, I then found myself working and living for the next 20 plus years in Central Europe and Central Asia - as a consultant in “institutional development”

• These are my musings about how and what I think I’ve learned (so far) about the process of change from my experience of attempting it in some dozen countries

• As I’ve dared to suggest that we need to ration books, I need to explain why I’m inflicting this one on you and why I’m fed up with books which have nothing but text. So I’ve tried to liven things up a bit by the use of tables and boxes and the odd diagram

Preface

in which I recall how a radio series first aroused my interest in organisations, reflect on the book’s origins and on why I think it may be of interest

1. The state of the State - in which I encounter the deficiencies of local bureaucracy (56 years ago), forcing some of us to start rethinking the role of the State - privatisation had, in the 1980s, left us wondering how far this development could redefine its role; and the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and of communist regimes then had us concocting pathways to capitalism and democracy.

2. Administrative Reform in the new millenium - which captures one man’s attempt in 1999 to convey to a foreign audience his understanding of the organisational changes which had taken place in the 30 years from 1970 to the new millennium

3. Impervious Power – the eastern approaches - which reflects on the experience of western con-sultan ts in central Europe and central Asia as they wrestled with the transition to what their tiny minds assumed to be democracy and free markets.

4. Question Time

A little British book about “the attack on the state” provoked me in 2018 into exploring some questions about the huge literature on public management reform (mainly academic) which has developed since the 1990s. include the following -

- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?

- Where can we find the measures of the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?

- How do countries compare internationally in the performance of their public services ?

- Has privatisation lived up to its hype?

- what alternatives are there to state and private provision

- why do governments still spend mega bucks on consultants?

5. The Management Virus - The private and public sectors alike seem to have been taken over in recent decades by hordes of managers. How has this happened? How do we stop it?

6. The echoes of Praxis - As someone who has straddled the worlds of politics, academia and consultancy, I am disappointed by the sparseness of the practitioner contribution to the literature. By default we are left with academics who interview those in government and sometimes train them and with consultants – although the former are the more voluble

7.Take Back Control? - which explores the implication of the quotation which adorns the book’s cover and asks how exactly might democracy improve the operation of our public services? Is this just a question of giving local government more power, as some would argue – ie giving a greater voice to the local public through their local representatives having a stronger legal and strategic role? Or does it require a more open and participative process – as many would argue? Or does it perhaps mean a greater say by the workforce in the everyday management of public services? Or a combination of all the above?

Hilary Wainwright is amongst the very few who have taken this question seriously – although the Dutch, with the Buurtzog model, are now exploring the question

8. Theories of Change - in which I question the compartmentalisation of the subject of change into studies of psychology, technology, organisation and society.

9. Inconclusion - Back to democracy

Notes; chapter by chapter

The COUP IN THE US IS VERY REAL

There is no excuse for people failing to understand what is happening in the USA – substack offers many attempts at explanation with Mike Brock (who profiles himself very coherently in the link) and his Notes from the Circus perhaps being the best. His post “The Plot Against America” detailed the history of the right-wing writers who have railed against democracy, including forgotten names such as Curtis Yarvin, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Willian Rees-Mog eg -

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises's protégé Murray Rothbard, took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed” landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.

The Political Quarterly is one of my favourite journals – ploughing the social democratic cause since 1930 and has recently documented Trump’s travails in Venn diagrams

I am heartened by the substack just started by Adam Przewoski - perhaps the most insightful writer still alive about democracy - who has decided to give us a weekly assessment of what is going on in the US. This is his post for the 2nd week  and the most recent.

And also by the more than 100 legal challenges which have been made by US States, unions and other bodies to Trump's actions - itemised on this tracker

Other relevant articles

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets?_sp=18e4be2f-5eaa-4083-9b8c-7d5f05d2466a.1738893276242

https://medium.com/emergent-dialogue/building-my-case-for-epistemic-liberalism-and-why-the-sovereign-individual-is-epistemically-59c9201e72c6

https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-america/comments

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/this-weeks-ten-reasons-for-modest?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=365422&post_id=158231811&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=aefb6&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Paul Krugman’s discussion with Kim Lane Scheppele https://substack.com/home/post/p-158545490

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157558457 US in FReefall

https://substack.com/@larryjdiamond

https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=310897&post_id=158714964&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=aefb6&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

MORONIC INFERNO

Such was how Martin Amis saw the US in a collection of his essays he released in 2009. I have been trying this past year to put the finishing touches to a book about the State and about the efforts made over the past 50 years to “reform” it – both in Europe and the States where Trump, in his latest reincarnation, seems to have gone quite mad in his wanton destruction of state departments – assisted by teenage prodigies under the tutelage of Elon Musk who seems to be operating as a dictator. Indeed some analysts are claiming that what we are seeing in the US is little more than a COUP

Kurt Andersen is one of America’s most insightful analysts of its craziness – first plotting in Fantasy Land – how America went haywire (2017) and following up some three years later with Evil Geniuses – the unmaking of America; a recent history, situating both books thus

Whereas “Fantasyland” concerned Americans’ centuries-old weakness for the untrue and irrational, and its spontaneous and dangerous flowering since the 1960s, “Evil Geniuses” chronicles the quite deliberate reengineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right, and big business.

I’m surprised that the more people don’t talk about the groupthink which is permeating the US system – so well explained in Gillian Tett’s 2015 The Silo Effect and Matthew Syd’s Rebel Ideas – the power of diverse thinking (2019)

Further Reading

The Moronic Inferno and other visits to America Martin Amis

Discussion with Kurt Andersen https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrpDUr/

What is Techno-Feudalism?

Yanis Varoufakis is not only a political activist I greatly admire – he has also a superb command of the English language to which he owes not so much his time in the UK (and US) but rather to his Greek upbringing which taught him the use of myths to help the narrative along. Most of his books – even his textbooks – are a delight to read. But I struggled with his latest book “Techno-Feudalism – what killed capitalism?” (2023) and have gone back to it thanks only to the discussion Chris Hedges had with Varoufakis on Youtube recently. Efgeny Morozov has been a critic of the internet’s effect on society for more than a decade, with his most famous book being To Save Everything, click here – the folly of technological solutionism which appeared in 2013 but if you want to get a sense of what lies behind the talk of “techno-feudalism” I strongly advise you to read Morozov’s amazing overview of the subject in a recent issue of New Left Review viz Critique of Techno-feudal Reason – an extensive article which put the use of the term in an historical context.

The French writer, Cedric Durand, published How Silican Valley unleashed Techno-feudalism in 2020 although it appeared in English only in 2024 and had this reply to Morozov’s article.

One contrary view of Varoufakis' argument is here 

Other Reading/Viewing

The Digital Citizen L Ceccarini (2021)

The Rise of Technosocialism brett king and richard perry (2021)

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism – a warning to the middle class Joel Kotkin (2020)

Varoufakis - overthrow the tech tyrants! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8xSGzqdKC8

British LIES - again

We can no longer believe anything which comes from the UK Establishment. The Metropolitan police force epitomises all that is rotten in that system and has been caught in yet another lie when it reports that Jeremy Corbyn forced his way through a police cordon during protests around the BBC for its abominable coverage of the Gaza genocide. Jonathan Cook has the full story here

Ways of Seeing

Almost 3 weeks since I last posted - I just haven’t been in the mood although I did want to recognise the sad passing of Charles Handy this month – a favourite writer of mine who inspired quite a few posts and of Johan Galtung, the great peace activist and philosopher, earlier in the year.

But I have managed to edit last year’s posts which I proudly present as Ways of Seeing – the 2024 posts. Make sure you don't miss this year's collection entitled Ways of Seeing – the 2024 posts