u/Fragrant-Gur-5804

“The book argues for returning to the basic ancient Greek assumptions that politics is an amateur sport, not a professional activity, in which ordinary citizens play a direct role in governing.” Although being far from an anarchist or communist text, Landemore still provides a robust framework for direct participation and public assemblies and a critique of hierarchical and representative politics. It does still shy away from directly critiquing capitalism or statism, thus not being as radical as it may seem at first glance.

Sortition Democracy
The critique and representation of politicians in popular media as conniving selfish liars who would do anything to get into power has become an established trope for most people. Thus, contemporary populism whether liberal or more typically now conservative, usually masquerades as being "anti-elite" and "anti-establishment". The reality, however, is that the system of representative electoral politics attracts a certain kind of personality to begin with. “Modern electoral systems tend to produce a professional political class, often composed of wealthy, well-connected, and ambitious individuals, that is detached from the broader public.” Given the popular representation, the reality of corruption, lobbying, etc. for someone to willingly become a candidate nowadays, either they are completely self-interested or delusionally naïve. Landemore appeals to the older definition and form of democratic politics, sortition. A system that uses lottery or some sort of randomness so that candidates are not aware beforehand that they can reach power. She discusses historical examples of this from ancient Athens to Medieval Venice to showcase the advantages of such a system. When applied, it is usually combined with some sort of term-limit, and heavy restrictions on permanent powers and decision-making. She also discusses more modern applications of this system in the form of US jury duty, Icelandic National Assemblies and France's Citizen Conventions.

Assemblies and Direct Participation
The author particularly dedicates a big portion of the book covering France's Citizen Conventions. These public assemblies were held twice, once in 2019 and again in 2023. They were somewhat of a response to the "Great National Debate" following the Yellow Vests movement of 2018, in order to placate and appease the public. They didn't actually hold any real de jure power, but did have some de facto influence. The first convention which was focused on solutions and legislation related to climate change, agreed on 149 proposals which were submitted to the French Parliament. Most of the proposals were outright rejected or heavily watered down. "Participants later scored the government's implementation as an average of 3.3 out of 10." The second convention was focused on end of life legislation, primarily access to palliative care and euthanasia. The final proposals (although still being edited) was largely passed through the government's "end of life bill" and thus had a more substantial real world influence. Importantly, these conventions also offer all kinds of opportunity for real scientific study of direct participation assemblies and sortition based systems. There are several key ideas that the author particularly pays attention to: firstly, that "normal" everyday citizens showed "high epistemic competence" regardless of educational level, class and/or backgrounds, people were heavily invested in learning about the issues and establishing clear methodological rigor for final decision making. Although, there were experts and social workers on hand, much like in a jury system or in a court setting, the assemblies still exercised the final say and usually didn't include the experts in their discussions or debates. Secondly, shy, awkward, or introverted people who would normally be very afraid of public speaking, let alone participating in political debates, were much more likely to be active participants compared to other electoral or representative based systems. Thirdly, participants were highly empathetic and much more likely to adopt systemic solutions and shift from normalized rigid NIMBY style arguments. The author quotes directly from interviews and surveys with words like "love" "solidarity" "care", etc. being commonly used by participants to describe one another and the whole experience despite the vast socio-economic gaps between the people.

Lessons Learned and Prefigurative Politics
The most exciting and interesting part for me, personally, was the discussion around improving the system in the second convention after observing some mistakes or missed opportunities from the first convention. The organizers noted things like selection bias and other statistical devices that could lead to certain systemic biases in their selection methods and tried to account for them. In doing so, they ask and discuss important questions such as who is likely to agree to participate based on a phone call, and who is likely to answer a strange number to begin with. Should we set hard-coded minimums on certain minorities to encourage their participation? Should we use different selection methods to eliminate statistical biases as much as possible? What kind of ways can the technocratic experts and facilitators framing and influence be reduced and controlled? What kind of economic incentives and replacements such as child care and transportation or direct monetary reimbursements provided to encourage participation without introducing new biases. Such questions are explored and discussed heavily by the author in the later chapters of the work. These kind of questions are not only relevant to these kind of assemblies but they can easily relate to a lot of the prefigurative politics, mutual aid organization and direct action affinity groups that are organized. From finding ways to encourage shy people to ways to decentralize tactics and avoid adopting vanguardism or rigid technocracies into the strategies of such prefigurative efforts.

I am guessing most can think about the critiques that come with such a mainstream work. Even though the topic itself is radical, the framing is consistently defanged purposefully by the author. In an effort to make the work more "journalistic" and "scientific" the final message is deradicalized and the author consistently stops short from outright critiquing statist institutions. Governmental actions and ideas generally or specific politicians (in this case all of them, actually) can be critiqued, but the system as a whole is still presented as a necessary evil that we must find a way to curb through regulations. Basically, the same arguments that are used by the typical liberal nowadays, but obviously the core premise is still much more radical than expected. Furthermore, there is no direct commentary on how these systems can function as replacements to the state apparatus as a whole. Arguments are made for assemblies to be more included in legislation and in consultation, but not so much for executive functions. Aside from promoting poorer class participation in the assemblies and positively discussing reforms to account for economic incentives for this, the author does not actually critique the capitalist status quo or directly promote any kind of socialist alternative. Alas, the lessons about horizontal organization and direct participation are interesting and ultimately make this work worth the read.

TLDR:
• Are humans naturally egalitarian? If so then what is the explanation for the rise of hierarchical structures and statism?
• Indigenous knowledge systems and political ideas heavily influenced the European ideals of the Enlightenment
• What is Politics YT channel and materialist critique of the work

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” I feel that The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow exposes the ideological constraints of conventional historical narratives. The authors dismantle the teleological model of human progress which dictates that human societies moved strictly from egalitarian foraging bands to hierarchical agricultural states. The systemic mechanism they expose is how historiography itself is weaponized to naturalize inequality and present the modern capitalist state as an inevitable consequence of population scale.

"I love freedom, but we can't cuz Human Nature!!!"
This annoying retort is probably quite familiar to you already. It raises the necessity of political anthropology as the field tasked with answering this important question. For over a century, a certain narrative, framing human nature as inherently selfish and competitive, has been pushed. Anthropology, in general, has already dismantled this framework by demonstrating that egalitarian societies are not anomalies but statistical norms across vast stretches of human history. Kropotkin critiqued the capitalist appropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theory by showing that cooperation and mutual aid are primary factors of evolution and species survival (to be clear this is due to mainstream misunderstanding of Darwin and evolutionary theory). The individualist survival of the fittest narrative is a retroactive justification for statism and capitalism rather than an objective biological law. Sure, fitness as a measure of survival is important, but it has long been proven that this fitness can be collective, in the form of interspecies symbioses or intraspecies grouping (herding), rather than on an individual basis. Graeber and Wengrow build on this tradition by arguing that early humans actively rejected hierarchy and had different systems to prevent it from arising in their communities. “Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.”

The Origins of Hierarchy
A core premise of the text is an appeal to indigenous knowledge systems. The authors state that European Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality were heavily influenced by encounters with indigenous American intellectuals. “That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. By documenting how indigenous confederacies practiced participatory democracy and guaranteed basic material needs the authors expose the European state apparatus as fundamentally coercive. This leads to a deep philosophical tangent regarding how we define security today. State violence is protected and property is protected but people are not. We have accepted a pathological definition of safety based entirely on the protection of accumulated assets rather than human life. They clarify that: “Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.” This builds on other works by Graeber, but most importantly, Pirate Enlightenment, which explores Malagasy influences on European ideas. Anyway, the authors then pivot to a structural question about political plasticity. They ask how humanity lost the ability to consciously design social systems. “If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species?" This acts as the driver for a big portion of the book, where they respond to different theories about the origin and persistence of human hierarchical structures.

The Materialist Analysis:
The critique here, one that I was only made familiar with after watching the What Is Politics series critiquing this work comprehensively, is actually a bit subtle. Until it is pointed out to you, then upon a reread it becomes incredibly obvious and somewhat frustrating what the work is actually pushing for. The authors are trying to establish that the depart from egalitarianism into rigid hierarchies was a voluntary ideological exercise. Basically, that "egalitarianism" lost in the marketplace of ideas. The good news, according to them, that we can simply voluntarily choose to bring it back. This general critique leads to several pitfalls (already covered in the What is Politics series, so only going to summarize them here):

Firstly, the main critique here is that this voluntarist narrative of humans choosing hierarchy ignores the fundamental material conditions. In its pure idealism it evades the question of how did this materially come to be, by focusing on how these hierarchical ideas crept in. When the material analysis of "settled agriculture leading to hierarchies" already answers this question way better scientifically.

Secondly, they somewhat redefine concepts like the state or egalitarianism to protect their voluntarist narrative. By demanding that a state must possess three specific pillars "sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics" the authors artificially classify obviously stratified and violently hierarchical societies as stateless simply because they lack one of those pillars. They combine this with some clear cherry picking in multiple instances where the authors selectively edit anthropological records. They omit the existence of slavery, systemic warfare, or strict caste systems within certain indigenous groups if those facts contradict their overarching thesis of fluid human agency and conscious political design.

Thirdly, they ignore ecological and material determinants. A lot of hierarchical structures, like patriarchy, are better explained through material realities, such as the link between pastoralism and patrilocality in this case. However, the authors try to paint a picture where these structures emerge from populations choosing these political superstructures through internal ideological discourse. Material realities like the carrying capacity of the land with certain kinds of technologies or the storability of a staple crop physically influence certain social and political structures into existence regardless of what the population actually desires. Sure, there can be a debate on which factors influence what and to what degree, but completely discarding them, seems very unscientific, and not even desired politically.

This last point, is important to stress. As harsh as material analysis can seem at times, because it removes agency away from societies/peoples, it also exonerates them. A given society is not patriarchal because all the men in it are evil misogynists who keep choosing to be so, there are material conditions that when changed lead to certain outcomes. Slavery did not exist because of racists and supremacists, racism was constructed to defend a system that originated due to certain material incentives. I share Graeber and Wengrow's sentiment, that egalitarian societies and their ideological discourse should be studied so that it can educate us and inform us in our prefigurative struggle. But, ignoring material realities can easily end in us blaming the victim. Class is by no means the only hierarchy that needs to be fought though, and understanding how different hierarchical ideas are excused or actively battled, is a critical contribution that makes this work definitely worth the read.

TLDR
• Smart Power: Han identifies the digital infrastructure that causes modern exhaustion and how it relates to self-exploitation
• The Digital Panopticon: We build our own surveillance systems and fill them with our own data.
• "i-d-i-o-t-i-s-m": the choice to become totally un-networked and refuse to share data
• Group-up: maybe the solution should be for us to connect rather than disconnect (even digitally)

If Byung-Chul Han's previous book made us realize how we boss ourselves in the Neoliberal achievement society, Psychopolitics identifies the exact mechanisms we use to do it. Han argues that modern economic systems have abandoned the physical machinery of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society in favor of digital optimization (yes, I re-critique the limits of that lens in this review as well). This new form of power offers a systemic analysis of consumerism, self-improvement culture, and the myth of "pull yourself up by the bootstraps".

Han identifies exactly how this system operates on an economic, material level. “As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the exploited working class - instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.” Because we view ourselves as individual enterprises (under the logic of self-improvement and individual growth), we internalize all systemic failures. If I fail to meet my nutritional goals or fail to optimize my daily schedule, I do not blame the societal and economic pressure that expects this level of constant performance. “People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system.” We just assume it must be a problem of our time management, not enough therapy, too much blue light, etc.

The Great Depression
Foucault wrote extensively about how the state controlled populations through hospitals, barracks, and physical interventions. This physical intervention is still present but it is self-regulated through the institution of the self. We are increasingly focused on neuro-enhancement and the chemical management of stress so that we can tolerate the conditions of self-exploitation. We try to biochemically adjust our minds to survive a relentless achievement society. We confess our habits to digital applications and we willingly surrender our psychological data so that predictive algorithms can map our desires and steer our purchasing behavior before we consciously make a choice. And when this system inevitably exhausts us, the reaction is not political resistance. “Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression” I feel that this specific observation exposes the core mechanism of modern labor control. Instead of organizing a labor strike when working conditions become intolerable, people go to a clinic to get an SSRI prescription (not trying to dismiss the reality of mental health conditions here to be clear). The systemic failure of the economy is reclassified as an individual chemical imbalance. It is not systemic oppression, don’t worry, you are just lacking serotonin.

Can I Be Your Friend?
Han correctly points out how this individualization of systemic problems completely neutralizes communal bonds leading to social isolation. “As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.” He maps out the etymology of the word "friend" and its relation to the word "freedom", to show that true friendship and solidarity (a perquisite for political organization) is purposefully being eroded by the neoliberal capitalist hegemony. When you view your entire life as a project to be optimized, other human beings simply become variables in your equations. Han points out that this isolation degrades the concept of democracy itself. “Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.”

The Privilege of Disconnecting
Han’s proposed method of resistance in this book is the concept of "i-d-i-o-t-i-s-m" (the choice to become totally un-networked and refuse to share data). He views the ultimate act of rebellion as digital silence. His word-choice might be a bit off-putting here, but he connects the use of the term to its Greek etymology which meant something more like "private citizen". Anyway, there is a theoretical appeal to the idea of logging off and refusing to be quantifiable. But I find Han's solution to be a severe structural oversight. He writes as if physical state coercion no longer exists and he argues that power mainly operates through digital seduction. Just like I argued in the review of Burnout Society I feel that this is entirely false for a big portion of the human population. Yes, for a tenured academic in Germany or a tech executive in California, power might feel purely psychological. However, if you look at the reality of most of the world, you will observe the persistence of direct police violence and physical border imperialism. The algorithms that send notifications to the creative class are the exact same algorithmic structures used to automatically terminate warehouse workers and delivery drivers if they deviate from their assigned routes for five minutes. For the marginalized and the working poor, data tracking is not merely a game of self-optimization. It is a strict digital enforcement tool tied directly to their physical survival and material conditions. Furthermore, "Idiotism" and the refusal to network requires a certain kind of privilege in many cases. In the ever-growing gig economy, an Uber driver or a Deliveroo captain can't really afford to sign out. Furthermore, for a book that is focused on attacking individualist self-obsession and bossing, the solution feels very personal and anti-thematic. Shouldn't the solution here be more large scale and socially organized? How can the oppressed rally together to "seize the means of computation" or to storm the Bastille (storm the Silicon Valley?). So I don't know how I feel about that.

Han accurately explains how technology hijacks our psychology and he articulates exactly why the current economic model creates profound mental exhaustion. However, we cannot just individually disconnect our way out of algorithmic capitalism. Because, like he points out, the system relies on our isolation. The required action is not simply becoming an un-networked individual, but to organize and group-up. Whatever form that takes, even if done digitally, in my opinion, is the kind of prefigurative politics that we need to be looking towards.

Part memoir, part travel journal, and part historical exploration, Tharik Hussain's Muslim Europe is a well-balanced journey with both spiritual and political implications. Hussain's personal evolution (finding himself drifting deeper into Salafi and fundamentalist Islam before eventually being guided toward the progressive light of mystical Islam) is a familiar origin story for many in the progressive Muslim community. Not all of us, however, are inspired to document that shift with the same vulnerability and grace that he manages here.

The book is essentially structured by region. As Hussain travels, he interviews local Muslims, historians, and tour guides about the enduring presence of Islam, both past and present. He also grounds each stop in the historical and sociopolitical context of how the faith initially spread there. I found it interesting how his route takes him from the little-known Sufi lodges of Cyprus to long-forgotten tombs in Sicily and Malta, before landing in the more widely recognized historical landscape of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). I am not entirely sure why, but he avoids delving into Eastern Europe, Anatolia, or Russia, anchoring the narrative strictly to the ruins and institutions the he personally visit. Maybe, because he wanted to focus more on Western Europe and the Mediterranean that is considered peak "Western", while Eastern Europe is already considered a tad "Oriental" by default? Anyway, the overarching theme here is the dismantling of Europe’s "Islamic amnesia"; the systemic erasure of the complex cultural, historical, and scientific influences that Islamic societies had on the continent. By excavating this history, he effectively reaffirms contemporary European Muslims as an integral, native part of the landscape rather than a foreign addition.

This naturally brings us to the political dimensions of the work, and the part which I found most refreshing. Hussian does well to actively dismantle the hostile, Islamophobic rhetoric leveraged by right-wing populists who frame Muslim immigrants as inherently "anti-Western" and incapable of assimilation. He thoroughly demonstrates why this framework is factually bankrupt by arguing that Muslims are already woven into the Western fabric by default. Why and how? Well, because they are bound by the shared institutional history and culture that he explores. Furthermore, he tackles the annoyingly lazy "East vs. West" or "Christianity vs. Islam" dichotomies that plague contemporary political discourse. He instead makes an effort to detail the practical tolerance, coexistence, and structural complexity of the various Muslim societies and empires that thrived across the region.

Ultimately, while many readers might be familiar with the broad strokes of this history, the depth and scale of Hussain's journey are astounding and guaranteed to surface fascinating new insights. For me, though, the most rewarding aspect was how effectively he grounded this massive historical text in an intimate spiritual journey. The way he brings the landscapes, architecture, and localized cultures to life leaves you wanting to book a flight and retrace his exact steps. I definitely recommend checking this one out!

TLDR:
• Green Capitalism: switching the resource from oil to minerals/metals doesn’t solve the problem
• Neocolonialism: exploitation continues, now sponsored by national bourgeoise complicity!
• Child Labor: no it did not end with the industrial revolution, it just got outsourced to the colonies
• The Myth of Consumer Choice: Individualizing systematic failure and blaming the "consumer"

Given the constant media push for electric vehicles and a "green transition," I wanted to look closer at the material base of these technologies. Siddartha Kara investigates the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the source of roughly 75 percent of the global cobalt supply, which is a necessary component for the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries powering our phones and cars. The book details the harrowing conditions of the "artisanal miners" who dig toxic minerals out of the earth with rebar and their bare hands. While I really did enjoy the rigorous on-the-ground investigative reporting Kara provides, I find that his ultimate conclusions fall into a familiar liberal trap.

Colonial Exploitation Uninterrupted:
The text functions as a clear example of how green capitalism actively relies on neocolonial violence. Kara painstakingly traces the supply chain from the muddy, collapsed pits of the Katanga region directly to the sterile showrooms of Tesla, Samsung, and Apple. He exposes the concept of "clean energy" as a geographic displacement of pollution and human suffering. Basically it is not as clean as it seems, who would've guessed? Big Tech frequently claims their supply chains are audited and free of child labor, but Kara shows that these audits are a linguistic mask for corporate-driven exploitation. The raw material mined by children is simply mixed with industrially mined cobalt at local buying houses, completely laundering its origins. The imperial colonizer gets to feel environmentally conscious while the actual environmental and human destruction is outsourced to the colonized. It does not take a lot of effort to see the historical echoes here. The modern extraction of cobalt utilizes the exact same geographical and economic pathways carved out by King Leopold II for rubber and ivory over a century ago. The group being marginalized remains the same, and the mechanism of marginalization remains the same. The Congolese people are treated as mere instruments to be exploited so that multinational corporations can satisfy their desire for endless "growth".

How Much is that iPhone?
I find the most striking part of Kara's documentation to be his focus on the real lived part of the extraction. He observes the "creuseurs" laboring in pits that routinely collapse, burying workers alive in the pursuit of heterogenite. The book reads as a travel journal or diary, making it feel much more intimate and human. He details how the raw material extracted by bare hands is laundered through local buying houses, known as "depots," before being mixed with industrially mined ore. He discusses process and maps out regions, government policies and corruption. But, he is at his strongest when he goes into the mud himself, taking first names and getting interviews from the families of miners who are forced to let their children work in the mines. "There is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo," and it is truly saddening the horror that the people on the ground face there. When Siddartha tells them the prices of smartphones and tech that their labor ultimately leads to, they are shocked.

International Development? Sure…
The government officials live in another world, however. Corruption and complicity from the ruling regime of Kinshasa continues a tradition of the state betraying its own people. The national bourgeoise as Fanon would call them, simply step into the shoes of the former colonizers, acting as intermediaries for foreign capital. The Congolese officials facilitate these mining concessions and suppress labor uprisings function exactly as Fanon predicted, they police their own people for the sake of the colonizers. They are the local managers of global imperialism, and it doesn’t really matter for the colonizer, it is even "cleaner" that way. The Belgian state had to get their hands dirty and send armed men to police their colonization and extraction, now the Silicon Valley bros and Chinese state sponsored mines just rely on the complicity of the Congolese elites. I find it incredibly frustrating to see the masking of this resource extraction as "national development", it's like state-level gaslighting. Anyway, by prioritizing state revenue and personal enrichment through corporate kickbacks, the state apparatus continues the exploitation and the cycles of violence and oppression required to maintain it.

Myth of Consumer Choices:
However, I have some problems with the book's underlying "liberal" agenda. What really surprised me was that after documenting scenes of children buried alive in tunnel collapses and landscapes completely poisoned by toxic runoff, Kara ultimately appeals to corporate accountability. He frames this systemic problem as a failure of international human rights law and consumer awareness. He wants the reader to believe that if we just hold tech CEOs accountable and demand "clean" supply chains, the system can be perfected. I think this is a glaring contradiction. The extreme poverty and violence that force families into these toxic pits is not a glitch in the capitalist system, it's part of the design. The tech sector cannot exist at its current scale without the procurement of criminally cheap labor. Instead, Kara keeps trying to guilt the reader to feel individual responsibility by focusing on "consumer choices". This is just like the individual carbon footprint BS, but applied to metals and minerals. Did the consumer truly choose for this system of planned obsolescence and impossible to fix or DIY phones and batteries? I am sure it is not even that radical to say that most people think that the monopolizing and exploitative behavior of the Technofeudalists needs to be stopped at the source on a systemic level.

By advocating for supply chain transparency rather than a total overhaul of the principles of global production and consumption, the book stays within a safe, institutionalized boundary. It provides all the evidence needed for a radical revolt against the myth of infinite capitalist growth, but then settles for asking billionaires to be more legally responsible. Kara treats the problem as a moral failing of individuals within the supply chain rather than a fundamental flaw in the economic model itself. Still, it is worth reading as it intimately exposes the hidden, violent material reality of "green" capitalism, and its direct prose makes it an engaging read.