Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

Written in an informal, engaging style (Varoufakis frames the book as a long letter to his beloved, and morally and intellectually inspiring, Marxist father, and he frequently makes pop-culture references, for example to Don Draper from Mad Men), Technofeudalism is thought- and discussion-provoking (my Zoom book club read it). It's also - ultimately - unpersuasive. Varoufakis is an unorthodox Marxist, who is willing to concede forthrightly that Marxism failed in many ways. He also parts with orthodoxy in his assessment that capitalism is currently being eclipsed, not by a bright socialist replacement, but but a technofeudal one that will be and already is much worse. Varoufakis's central claim is that what he calls the two pillars of capitalism - markets and profits - are no longer operative in an economy increasingly dominated by digital-tech behemoths, whom Varoufakis refers to as "cloudalists." The idea is that Amazon, Google and Facebook have created monopolies of one kind or another, eliminating competitive markets. As a result, their income is due not to profits, but "rents" in the technical sense of the term. We have been turned into cloud serfs (and also cloud prols, if we work for or by means of tech - think the gig economy). The comparison to feudal lords is stimulating, but a closer look reveals that competition is not really dead. Amazon competes ferociously, for example, with Walmart's e-commerce side. Social media platforms increasingly resemble each other (so I've heard) and hence abandoning one for another happens all the time.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)

This is a quietly impassioned, but simultaneously extremely cogently argued, account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though I can't claim deep knowledge about this issue, I found the book quite plausible and compelling. Though Khalidi's main critiques are reserved for the Zionist project and its great-power enablers (first Britain, and then the US), he hardly shies from criticism of Palestinian leadership and the autocratic rulers of Arab states. Khalidi's most basic contention is that Zionism was a settler colonial project from the start. Given that in 1895, when Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat launched Zionism, hundreds of thousands of people already lived in Palestine/Zion, nearly 100% of whom were not Jewish, it's hard for me to imagine a credible counter-argument. Perhaps Adam Kirsch's description in his chapter on Herzl in The People and the Books (see earlier review) offers the most charitable case: Herzl wrote in his book that the current residents of Palestine would benefit from an influx of enlightened, motivated Jewish settlers. In short, the indigenous would be uplifted - a Jewish "civilizing mission." On this view, then, early Zionists like Herzl were at most ingenuous. Khalidi challenges this charitable view, using an entry in Herzl's diary to show that he was quite conscious that hundreds of thousands of indigenous inhabitants would have to be displaced. Revisionist Zionists like Yabotinsky, of course, were unabashed in calling for what later would come to be known as ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. I would be interested in reading more about how early Zionists spoke - both publicly and privately - about this issue. For me what was most eye-opening about this book was Khalidi's commentary on the Mandate system (1921-1948) and the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. I hadn't realized that the British Mandate for Palestine had stacked the deck so decisively in favor of the Zionists and against the Palestinians. Basically, it accepted the British commitment in the Balfour declaration and failed even to mention the Palestinians as a people deserving of self-determination. Khalidi himself was involved in talks in Washington that preceded Oslo. (He's from a politically and academically prominent Palestinian family, with members serving in various political offices in Ottoman times and later in Mandate Palestine; his father was a respected historian in the US, as is the author himself, now at Columbia. Khalidi integrates his family history and autobiography here and there, but it's not a main strand in the book, as I had hoped it might be - as Ari Shavit had done so brilliantly in My Promised Land) Though Khalidi participated in some of the negotiations, he became increasingly skeptical of the US's role as an ostensibly honest broker and also of the PLO's woeful ineptitude in negotiation and desperation to reach a deal, any deal. In Khalidi's view, Oslo only appeared to recognize Palestinian wishes and to dangle the prospect of Palestinian statehood, which however, was never on the cards. Though he's arguing a brief, Khalidi's tone remains sober, measured, and humane throughout, adding to his persuasiveness.