Last week I didn’t 100% complete the vomitout of Chapter 1 (“Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”, aka WEALTH).
But vomitouts are peculiar. Or maybe my vomitouts are peculiar. I suffer from terminal terseness. I’ll go to vomitout the big love scene in the novel and I write down “They were happy together for at least a while.” And that satisfies my writing unconscious. “He did it! He finished the big love scene!”
It’s only when I come back to the scene later — as I did this last week in my first encounters with the adequacy of my outline — that I find out I really didn’t even begin to capture the scene.
So the vomitout for WEALTH is still incomplete. What to do?
I’m going to go on with Chapter 2, “Liberty vs. Justice”. (I’m not sure I have a one-word rubric for this one). My reasoning? I’ve got a head of steam for vomiting out, and what’s holding back the remainder of WEALTH actually depends on doing more background reading. So I’m going to try to multi-task this week, and do both “Liberty/Justice” vomitout (4 pomos a day) and reading for WEALTH (4 pomos a day). If I can do that, I can probably make some progress and get my other stuff done as well.
So what’s the reading for WEALTH? I’m going to try to do two books this week (in addition to Black Reconstruction, of course, on which the clock is still ticking).
Book #1 is Thomas Piketty‘s warhorse, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The title is an obvious nod to Marx’s Capital but the books couldn’t be more different. Marx is deeply theoretical; he is intent to teach you a new way of thinking about history. Piketty is deeply empirical: he is intent on proving, even to the satisfaction of a conservative economist, that the balance of power in the 21st century is shifting over to capital (mainly from labor).
In part you have to chalk up his empiricism and bending-over-backwards to the shame which all leftish thinkers feel over the failure of socialism/communism in the 20th Century. The transformation of Communism-as-liberation to Communism-as-despotism undid leftish thinkers, and rightfully so. It makes you think.
Book #2 is David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5000 Years.
Graeber is also leftish, but he is after something bigger than Piketty: he wants to reimagine economic history as a cycle deeply formed by attitudes toward debt. I am not at all doing justice to the book with a blurb like that, since Graeber, who is by training an anthropologist, delves into a welter of topics which are fascinating, brilliant, and annoying all at the same time. I read the book once a couple of years ago and am now returning to read it more carefully for 7Hard.