22 June 2006

Another new book

I just bought a new book: Another world is possible if… by Susan George. I do not know who George is, but the title intrigued me. It is also published by Verso, which I have a crush on. I am not sure, but I love the books by Verso, the way they feel, the way they read and the stuff they talk about. Sometimes they are too complex and sometimes they are not challenging enough, but when I go into a bookstore, I look first for Verso books.

At first I thought this book would be critical of the counter-culture, her introduction deals rather sufficiently yet briefly with this labeling, but it is not. It is instead a blueprint for the counter-culture. We shall see how I find it. If nothing else, it will provide me, akin to Ann Coulter’s books, with material to write about, usually critically.

The book is laid out in strange chapters, they are arranged by the steps needed to achieve this new world (such as targeting the correct opponents, combining knowledge and politics, etc…). Simply put George says we can achieve a new world if we change the world (read: make the world a-new). Tautological? Of course, it is. She would argue that the new world of the title is a large systemic change whereas the new worlds of the blueprint are smaller changes. This resurgent Marxism, however, still suffers from the problems of the original Marxism. It assumes this dual structuration of the world, one we can call the base (superstructure) and the other we can call ideology, party, culture, or any of a host of terms depending on one’s focus in life as they went through their schooling. What if this duality does not exist but rather merely appears to exist. What if there is something more fundamental which links the base to the ideology, etc? I am curious to see if George escapes this dilemma or if she plies her way through some changes neglecting why these factors came into place originally.

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