Domestic Left #43: Reading roundup, January 2024
When I first started this newsletter, I envisioned it primarily as a way to share what I’ve been reading. Obviously, it has turned into something other than that, but hey, I’ve been reading some interesting things lately, and it’s always good to go back to your roots every so often, right? (The last time I did this was a full six months ago.)
Many of the book reviews will be familiar to anyone who follows my Goodreads account closely (e.g., no one). Following the book reviews are links to several articles.
After Work, by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek
This book is, as its subtitle promises, a fantastic “history of the home and the fight for free time.” It is especially eye-opening about the massive technological changes in the home that took place from the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th in industrialized societies. What we now call “utilities” (water, gas, electricity) and “home appliances” (refrigerators, gas and electric stoves, vacuum cleaners, washing machines) made the work of heating, lighting and cleaning homes, and keeping their inhabitants fed and clothed, vastly easier and cleaner. Bathing, for example, used to require the hauling of both coal and water into the household, and the burning of the coal to heat the water would coat the interior of the house with an extra layer of soot, just as the bather cleansed his or her body of, among other things, prior layers of soot from heating the house and cooking the food.
Also fascinating is the book’s account, in the chapter “Families,” of how these technological changes contributed to the creation of the concept of the male “breadwinner” — a member of the household who was almost entirely exempted from any obligation to labor within it. Together with the increasing social focus on children as objects of work rather than small workers themselves, all the work of maintaining a household, which had once been shared (in an albeit highly gendered way) among all of its members, increasingly became the responsibility of the “housewife.”
As the authors point out, the single-family home (whether a suburban McMansion or an urban condo, whether rented or owned) is a spectacularly inefficient use of resources, when considered on a society-wide basis. Most of the space in our homes is devoid of people most of the time, and the complex machines that are now considered an essential part of most homes (our lawn mowers, washers and driers, even our dishwashers and stoves) sit unused most of the time. In the chapter “Spaces,” they delve into the history of attempts to build alternative, more socialized living spaces, from the brief, utopian attempts to build housing communes in the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution to 60s-era countercultural communes and lesbian separatist communities in the 70s.
A particular strength of the book is its consistently feminist lens, and its (probably related, though not explicitly so) recognition of the value of privacy, even as it celebrates socialized alternatives to the single-family home. The authors propose, as a guide to imagining how people will be fed, housed, clothed and cared for in a postcapitalist world, “public luxury” combined with “private sufficiency.” Public luxury means taking social-reproduction needs that are currently met mostly through unpaid (and predominantly female) labor in the home and providing socialized alternatives: public child care, cafeterias, laundry services, etc., along with common indoor and outdoor spaces for leisure. Private sufficiency means providing adequate housing so that every individual or group of people who chose to live together (whether a traditional “family” or not) have the private, personal space that they need.
This seems to me a good goal, and it dovetails well with some of the key political struggles of our time: defending public education (which is already, in some sense, a “public luxury,” though one constantly under attack) and, in the U.S., fighting for universal healthcare — as the authors point out, the healthcare system is increasingly replacing in-hospital care with at-home care, expected to be done for free by relatives. It is also nicely consonant with the vision of the Green New Deal put forward by Kate Aronoff, among others.
However, I think the book could have benefitted from more engagement with the intellectual traditions of Marxism (something you can do even if your politics aren’t Marxist!). One of Marx’s central insights was that capitalism, far from being “individualist” in the way that its ideology projects, in fact requires the socialization of production — under capitalism, no one is producing widgets individually and bringing them to market, they are part of a widget-producing system. It is precisely the contradiction between the socialization of production and the privatization of profit which makes capitalism so brutal and inhumane, but its socialization of production creates the possibility — if the ownership and control of the means of production are also socialized — of human liberation.
Looking at things like utilities, education, and healthcare as social reproduction that has been socialized in fact (if not consistently in ownership or control) would have allowed the book to make a better connection between the home as a site of labor and more “traditional” (and more widely known) struggles of the workers’ movement. Indeed, as Shelton Stromquist discusses in his recent history Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, the fight for public ownership of utilities was central to workers’ political struggles throughout the industrialized world — and the high point of the “fight for municipal socialism” in Stromquist’s book, “Red Vienna” in the 1920s, was also the site of the most extensive, and most durable, experiment with social housing described by Hester and Srnicek.
The book also could have benefitted from more engagement with the history of “second-wave” feminism, especially in the U.S., and struggles within the home over the allocation of unpaid labor. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her book Fear of Falling, part of the reason why the second-wave feminist movement was especially explosive in the U.S. was because in the U.S. the middle class had “proletarianized” its own wives and mothers (in contrast to other countries, where smaller middle classes were more willing and able to employ domestic servants to do the most menial household tasks).
Nonetheless, a sharp and well-researched piece of work, and a great contribution towards expanding our vision of what a sustainable and postcapitalist future could and should look like.
Tower Dog, by Douglas Scott Delaney
A solid entry into the writer-man does manly work with other worker-men then writes about it genre. For over a decade (and still to this day for all I know), Delaney worked as a “tower dog,” installing and maintaining the physical infrastructure that give us the constant connectivity we’ve come to expect on our smartphones. This job was, at the time, the deadliest job in America — and probably still is. Each chapter of the book is introduced with a short article about a tower dog who fell to his (or in one case her) death while working.
Delaney does a fantastic job describing the rough-and-tumble swagger and camaraderie of men who do physically demanding and dangerous labor together. He brings in larger personal and social themes — his relationship to his father and his son, his own desire to succeed as a writer, the history of Levittown (the ur-suburb where he grew up), and the economics of the cell-phone tower industry — with a deft touch, and his prose is eminently readable, down to earth and sparingly accented with a wistful lyricism.
Out Loud: A Memoir, by Mark Morris
Written in a chatty, conversational tone, this book reads like Morris — one of the giants of modern dance — holding forth at a corner table at the bar, two to three drinks in. It’s fascinating when he’s talking about dance and music, but fairly pedestrian when he’s simply relating other details about his life (of which there are more than I think are really necessary). The biographical details don’t really add up to an overall narrative, and they aren’t artfully told, so they kind of come across as narcissistic. (“Hey, this is a book about ME! I’m going to tell you about everything I ever did or thought!”)
So, mediocre as a memoir/autobiography, but great as a treatise on art — bottom line: I wouldn’t pick it up unless you’re already interested in modern dance, but if you are, definitely worth reading.
Also, a good reminder that I should make an effort to go see more modern dance.
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, by Greil Marcus
Unlike, apparently, everyone that Greil Marcus knows, I don’t specifically remember when I first heard “Like a Rolling Stone.” I do, however, remember the first time I read one of his books, the magnificent Lipstick Traces. I don’t think this book makes as strong a case for the world-historical importance of its subject as that one did, but it’s still an enjoyable read.
For what it’s worth, for years I have skipped “Like a Rolling Stone” whenever I listened to Highway 61 Revisited, because it had become, in my mind, almost a parody of Dylan’s brilliance, a small-minded, too-long, and perhaps misogynist rant against some random rich lady. I no longer do, or think that. I mean, it is still probably all of those things, but it is also a truly great song — and it’s kind of fun to learn that the organ comes in a half-beat late in the each of the last bars of the first verse because Al Kooper was still learning the chord changes as the take was being recorded.
Foster, by Claire Keegan
Pulls at the heartstrings in all the right ways, and with a perfectly light touch. A jewel imagined in a dream that you can't get out of your head when you awake.
Cuyahoga, by Pete Beatty
A fun read in the style of a 19th-century tall tale (think Mark Twain meets an old hobo), but brings in some decidedly modern storytelling techniques in ways that you don't quite realize until they reach up and grab you.
Articles
A few things I’ve read online recently that I think are worth sharing:
This essay, on
, is a fantastic piece of writing. It is about an Ayahuasca healing and the author’s loss of two brothers, but more broadly about the work of healing and personal transformation. “Healing takes transformation; transformation needs a clearing.”I thought this December article from The Guardian about art therapy in a British prison was fascinating, and definitely in the “restoring a bit of faith in humanity” category.
One of my mentors in the labor movement, Chris Townsend, published a bracing but honest assessment of the state of the labor movement in early January. “He who tells the people revolutionary legends, he who amuses therewith sensational stories, is as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.”
Finally, I’ve been suffering a lot of writers’ block at work since the beginning of the new year. This post from
helped me feel slightly less bad about that.Bonus video content! A fantastic and hilarious new song, written, sung, and ANIMATED! by Antje Duvekot: