The Ideas Letter

We open Ideas Letter 36 with Jacob Dreyer’s tour de force essay on the twisted and often reactionary nexus between China and Silicon Valley. The contradictions inherent in those relationships are intensifying and inspire dark and surreal ideological forms.  

He is followed by Vivek Chibber, one of the sharpest Marxist social scientists writing today, who has done more than any scholar to renew our appreciation of the fundamentality of class—both historically and contemporarily. The essay is a powerful demonstration of his analytical sharp elbows when it comes to today’s culture. Indeed, Chibber’s virulent debate with subaltern-studies doyenne Gayatri Spivak dominates an edited volume assessing his theory of the postcolonial. 

Our curated content kicks off with a piece penned by my Amman-based colleague Omar Waraich and me for Foreign Policy.  In a critical review of Kenneth Roth’s memoir, we ask whether the former Human Rights Watch director’s “playbook” remains valid in a very different world than the one that conceived it.  We follow with Cameroonian writer Georges Macaire Eyenga, whose skepticism about the beneficence of technology in Cameroon is a clarion call for the primacy of politics.  

Daniela Gabor, a heterodox economist of the first rank, proffers a preview of the new political-economic order ushered in by a Trumpian consensus. In a word, the neoliberal masks are off. Then Yueran Zhang offers a little-remembered moment in post-Cultural Revolution Era China, and the unanticipated opportunities presented at that conjuncture for workplace democracy. 

We conclude with a podcast from The Dig in which Danielle Carr gives a genealogy of unwellness in America, and the myriad psychiatric appendages to that story. 

Our musical selection for this issue takes us into the world of early 1960s avant-garde chamber jazz (think turtlenecks and Bennington College). Clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre leads a marvelous trio of pianist Paul Bley and double bassist Steve Swallow.