'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden

Had a weird moment towards the end of Edward Snowden's book when he mentions that he had his 30th birthday while in Hong Kong hiding from the press and secret services. I'm currently the same age as Snowden was when he became the most famous whistleblower in the world - my 30th birthday is this coming Thursday - and I cannot imagine myself ever being brave enough to do what he did.

Understanding how he became that whistleblower is, therefore, fascinating.

The most exciting chapters are, of course, towards the end when he actually gets round to the whistleblowing, when it becomes a real life globe-hopping spy thriller as he meets journalists to reveal the NSA's global surveillance system, and goes on the run, eventually ending up exiled in Moscow. 

(The US canceled his passport before he could get a connecting flight, and blocked other countries from allowing him asylum, thus enabling the US to discredit him by suggesting he is was a Russian agent all along. At the airport he is met by the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, who do, of course, offer him a job, which he refuses. He had hoped to reach Equador.)

The earlier majority of the book is comparatively extremely bland, but this is where we get to know him more as a person, the forces and events that shaped him into becoming the Whistleblower - his origin story. 

He had a comfortable middle class upbringing, where both parents (who divorced in his teens) were patriotic government employees. He talks about his interest in computers and hacking, and reminisces about the Internet of the 90s which he sees as a golden age of freedom compared to the Internet of today.

He became adept at computing from a young age, and wanted to serve his country - he had been imbued with strong patriotic fervour by his parents - so after a failed stint in the army (discharged for medical reasons), he begins his career in the American intelligences agencies, initially at the CIA, eventually at the NSA.

He was very good at his job, was promoted very quickly, and got access to a lot of classified documents, and what he saw shook his faith in the government he was working for.

Ultimately, the mistake the NSA made was to promote him too highly when he still had a lot of idealism about what America should be, what America should represent, so his conscience rebelled against what he was seeing, reading, and doing at work.

In a particularly affective chapter, he describes a time when he was spying on a target via their laptop - the NSA can access any device's camera and microphone extremely easily. Through the laptop's camera, Snowden was watching the man work while the man's toddler son was fidgeting on his lap. The laptop's microphone picked up the toddler's giggling. Suddenly, the toddler looked directly into the laptop camera and stared at it. Snowden felt like the boy was looking directly at him, peering into his soul.

'Adults in the Room' by Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece during the Eurozone crisis. His memoir is a political thriller: he rushes from meeting to meeting trying to avert an impending disaster, while being demonised by the press, plotted against, and openly spied on. In a memorable scene, he tells an American colleague something over the phone, and that colleague immediate gets a call from the US National Security Council asking about about what he's just been told.

His memoir is also a Kafkaesque nightmare: he struggles to deal with the convoluted rules, bureaucracy, tricks, and backstabbing of the Troika. In another memorable scene, he is presented with a copy of an agreement to be signed by him at a Eurogroup meeting later that day; he reads the agreement and is happy with it; and then at the meeting he notices that the agreement presented to him to sign is completely different to the one he had been shown earlier. 

It is also a tragedy, since it ends in failure and betrayal (spoilers for real world events).

While it is definitely the best political memoir I've read so far, I wouldn't say it is a consistently enjoyable read: a light-hearted fun romp, it is not.

It is dense and packed full of policy details and financial jargon, and was therefore often exhausting and hard to concentrate on. Not being super familiar with many of the characters involved, I often got confused about who was who and what their job was. 

Prior to getting involved in Greek politics, Varoufakis was a professor of economics, and fond of protesting. His limited experience of the political arena - off the streets - meant he struggled with the theatre and the game of politics. While he may have had strong arguments, he and his team lacked the political skill and resources to sell those arguments within the machine and win the game against vastly more powerful and experienced adversaries. Varoufakis is often frustrated that while the people he is arguing against often agree with him in private (or at least say they do), in public and in official meetings they have to be against him because of the complex forces and political allegiances at play.

As Varoufakis notes at the end, the Eurozone crisis and the Greek calamity were huge factors in the growth of Euroscepticism and contributed to the Brexit vote. Certainly, the EU does not come across well in this book, and it has certainly made me feel far more negatively about the European institutions as they exist today. Varoufakis is in favour of European unity in principle but hopes the current set up can be massively reformed, or that something better could be built from its ashes when it falls apart.

The complexity of the European issue has made me convinced of two points:

1) The Brexit referendum should not have been held because the question was too complicated to be reduced to the tedious and mendacious binary campaign narratives of Leave and Remain.

2) As shit as Brexit has been, going against the referendum result would have been a disaster given how toxic the issue of democratic sovereignty had become, both in the UK and in the rest of the EU.

'Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy' by Kerry-Anne Mendoza

When I was first starting to follow politics, I read quite a lot of Another Angry Voice and Scriptonite Daily. The latter was the blog of Kerry-Anne Mendoza, who went on to be a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Canary, the leftwing news website. At the time I remember being quite excited by The Canary launching, and then being thoroughly disappointed when it turned out to be clickbait trash. 

Mendoza's Scriptonite Daily blog posts were collated, revised and expanded to form her first and so far only book, with the simple title 'Austerity' and the rather overlong and clunky subtitle 'The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy'.

In the age of COVID and Brexit, it's a bit of an odd experience to return to a polemic criticising the austerity policies of the Cameron government. I had vague recollections of reading the blog versions of some of the chapters, and found myself in a sort of dialogue with my younger, only-just-starting-to-be-politically-engaged self.

The book is divided into three parts: the first two ('The Demolition' and 'Austerity and Democracy') are Mendoza's; part three ('10 Economic Myths') was written by two other authors and was added as extra material to this edition. This third part is only twenty pages and effectively debunks some economics myths which might be made of straw.

Mendoza is strongest where she is criticising a specific policy, describing the harm it is causing - for example the bedroom tax, benefits cuts, and Michael Gove's education reforms. The best chapters are therefore in the first half of the book. 

The book's origin as a series of blog posts hampers the flow between chapters. Despite Mendoza's attempt to add a frame narrative, there is no real sense of a narrative building across the chapters: they work as standalone pandemics about certain subjects, but are not linked very convincingly into a wider arc. I felt very little impetus to read more than one chapter at a time.

What's more, some of the chapters cover quite a range of topics, but only cursorily. For example, in Chapter 10, 'Outsourcing the justice system', Mendoza gives two pages on the growth of G4S, 2 pages of G4S failures, 3 pages about how awful the American justice system is, and 2 pages on Legal Aid cuts. These are all important topics, and none of them are covered adequately. Without the added material, the book comes to less than 200 pages: there was plenty of room for further expansion.

The frame narrative is the 'Rise of the Zombie Economy' part of the overlong subtitle. This is where the book starts to come apart, degenerating towards incoherence and conspiracism. It contains by far the worst parts of the book.

The story begins with the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, where the post-war economic order was established, and organisations such as the IMF and World Bank were founded: this 'set the roadmap for domestic and international economic policy to this day... they have overseen the transfer of power from the State to private institutions and corporations. This is the endgame of the neoliberal project - whether the key players know and intend it or not.'

It was somewhat surprising to encounter Bretton Woods presented as the beginning of Neoliberalism; most leftwing narratives date it to the late 70s with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan and the increasing influence of Milton Friedman. Neoliberalism is an imprecise and not entirely useful term, since you can stretch it to encompass quite a wide range of views; hence it becoming ubiquitous and almost meaningless in some online discourse these days.

Despite dedicating Chapter 2 to explaining the 'Zombie Economy', Mendoza never really makes clear what it is, only using vague comparisons to a 'real economy'.

It is 'a night-of-the-living dead economy that consumes value and defecates debt'. 

So the Zombie Economy is about destroying value and creating debt, got it.

'The Zombie Economy exists to overcome the barriers to capital growth. It creates financial instruments that increase the paper value of an asset by financialising it.' 

Ah, so the Zombie Economy is about using debt and finance to increase value, got it.

'The purpose of... the Zombie Economy is for creditors, investment banks and investors to make maximum profits from lending... The purpose is to move people away from making money by producing things, towards making money from money.' 

OK, I think I get it: the Zombie Economy is about restructuring the economy away from physical industries such as manufacturing towards the financial services industry.

'It's priority is rather to transfer public spending from the real economy, where things are made and people are supported, to the Zombie Economy, where profits are made and people are abandoned.' 

What? Are you saying that profits are not made in the 'real economy'? What does this even mean?

Chapter 2 begins with a section titled 'Understanding Value', where Mendoza explains that value is:

'A Good Idea + Skill + Usefulness = Added Value'

That is certainly an idea of value. 

Mendoza does not explain the difference between 'Value in use' and 'Value in exchange': utility versus price. Mendoza does not talk about the price mechanism or of "value being in the eye of the beholder".

Indeed, her presentation of the Zombie Economy seems to rest on the belief that 'Value in use' is the correct, good, proper, real, value, the one used in her so-called real economy, whereas 'Value in exchange' is the evil, false value used in the 'Zombie Economy'.

After giving her definition of value, Mendoza then complains that 'the problem is, this has ceased to be the way our economy has actually worked for some considerable time (if it ever was)… The way most wealth is accumulated today is not based on this simple premise of adding value by creating something useful and being rewarded for that contribution.' Sounds like there might be something missing from this analysis.

There are many things missing from her analysis. 

I expected the topic of 'Zombie Banks' to come up at some point in a book about a 'Zombie Economy'. Nope. I would expect a book about Austerity to talk about the international bond market and bond yields. Nope. The famous, and famously debunked, paper 'Growth in a Time of Debt' gets a brief mention in explaining the turn towards austerity, but there is no real attempt to understand the motives behind those implementing austerity: they may as well be cartoon villains.

In her overall conclusion, Mendoza returns to her frame narrative to talk about 'The endgame of Austerity':

'The inevitable endgame of neoliberalism is corporate fascism, and the de-civilisation of our world. The only way out is to abandon capitalism in all its forms... French poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote 'the devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.' This is the trick pulled by the neoliberal project. Convince billions of people that there is no plan'

We've reached the part of the book about sinister plots to take over the world and destroy civilisation.

And the only way out is to reject all forms of capitalism - unfortunately she does not explain this solution in detail, as 'the purpose of this book is not to present solutions in detail.' She teases a future book that will explore this, but it hasn't come out yet.

There are good things in this book - the polemics against specific policies are well done - but the whole is ultimately frustrating and unsatisfying. There are better books out there which feel like complete, properly structured books, with a proper narrative and consistent argument. 

'Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization' by Grace Blakeley covers what I think Mendoza was trying to say with her 'Zombie Economy' stuff, but with coherence and an actual narrative arc.

'Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea' by Mark Blyth gives a thorough rundown of the theoretical underpinnings of austerity and the effects it has had when variously implemented across the world.