Malcolm Harris's Reading List

"We talk about ‘helicopter parents’ a lot, this idea of parents hovering over their children. That book is sort of a study of The Real Helicopter Moms of New York City . It’s an ethnography, as well as including some personal elements – because she is a parent of a child in New York City right now, engaged in the same sort of concerted cultivation practises that she’s talking about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It really clarified for me where this helicopter mom-thinking is coming from and how much anxiety is tied up in it, and how much in practise it really resembles known patterns of Neoliberalism. So removing playtime from the park, and putting it at some play centre that you pay for is really, really textbook enclosure behaviour. She uses this language, it’s not a connection I’m making: this commons of social development and of child sociality that is a commons, a resource that belongs to everyone, and the social forces that are compelling richer families to enclose that commons and how it’s happening. I think she gives a really compelling account of how that works, practically, psychologically, materially, from a lot of different angles. Definitely have been parented. I think it’s a little too early to say what will be the dominant Millennial parenting style. I do, because I think those are the people who create society, in a way. Those are the people in whose image American society is created. So even though most people don’t do that kind of parenting, it’s not average, nor is it necessarily desirable, but it is considered the standard now because those are the people who make television shows, for example, or movies or the laws. So, as I talk about it in the book, parents who emphasize kids playing on their own and developing their own social ties based on their interests or feelings rather than their parents’ perceptions of their economic interests find themselves not just socially excluded but even at risk for criminalization. Well, if you let your nine-year-old go to the park to play by themselves, there’s a chance that you will be arrested. It’s one of the ways you can distinguish our cohort from past ones – we have a significantly lower baseline of social trust. And it makes sense. If everything is structured around competition, how can you trust anyone not to take advantage of every opportunity they have? “If everything is structured around competition, how can you trust anyone not to take advantage of every opportunity they have?” We’re raised with this idea that if you don’t do it, somebody else will. If you don’t take it, somebody else will. Whatever advantage you have, you better take it while you can because there’s a big race. How in that environment do you develop social trust? You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust people. It’s adaptive. It’s in your interest not to trust people."

"That was a direct quote from one of her interviewees, from a violinist who had gone through that training. I think this book does a really good job of showing the next stage of the competition: this machine that mostly produces losers. We only think about the winners, the 0.5 out of 10 or whatever who become the soloists, but the vast majority of these people are discarded, and the amount of work they put in first is just huge. Wagner’s book is split into how much work they’re putting in and how they all fail. I think it does a really good job of reframing how we think about achievement, high achievement. We always talk about the winners, and we never think or talk about the people who are putting in just as much work, who are working just as hard as the winners, and get nothing. This book is really good at that. Yeah, well we didn’t come up with it. It’s definitely the one that’s been passed down. Education is job training, it’s about your future. We don’t tell kids anymore, and adults don’t tell each other, that school is for intellectual exploration, or developing your interests, or focusing your creativity, or developing your imagination, and if we do talk about those things, it’s only in the context of how those are useful skills in the future for future employment. Like: ‘Oh, actually, employers want creative workers, so we should really get some creativity back into school because now they’re complaining that workers aren’t creative enough.’ It shows the relationship between education and industry."

"One of the things I really liked about this book is the people it was focusing on: the sort of generic achievers. He makes clear that that’s what the system is designed to capture, the main thing they’re looking for is people who have not lost at anything, who are good at winning. That means they are top of their class at Ivy League schools, they have achieved whatever they have sought to achieve, no matter how long the odds. But they don’t have to have any particular interests or skills. That’s all they’re looking for, that’s the standard. So that yields people who are successful at doing what they’re told, but not necessarily very good at thinking through what they want, or their own attitudes or thoughts. “These guys are literally crying over their beers about how miserable they are, how hard they work or how badly they’re treated” Then they’re stuck in these jobs. All that’s asked of them, again, is generic competitive behaviour. And they realise that they’re not happy. Now that they are employees at Goldman Sachs, or wherever, they have won again and once again it has not made them happy. You get scenes where these guys are literally crying over their beers at the bar to this journalist about how miserable they are, how hard they work or how badly they’re treated, about how nothing they do means anything to them… Yes, and I think it’s intentional. I think burnout is a labour management strategy. If you’ve seen that graph of arousal and task performance – if you push people over a certain level, their performance declines. This is very basic labour psychology. But for employers facing a labour market where they’ve got all this human capital – people are very educated and are still cheap – they’re in a position to just people over that top. Once they fall off the cliff and breakdown or burn out, they can go get a new one, and push them off the cliff next. If you’re not invested in the long-term wellbeing of your employees or the long-term retention of your employees, then the dominant strategy is to burn them out. You get more out of them that way. Right, there’s no sense in them investing in individuals if individuals are going to do it themselves. If they can create a competitive atmosphere where people are forced to do that work on their own individual behalf, then firms gain."

"That’s definitely part of it. One of the things you see on the progressive side, politically, when we talk about inequality and poverty and systematic racism, is that the state has been forced to play too small of a role. That Neoliberalism has taken the state out of poor people’s lives, and that what we need to do is put it back in so that they can be taken care of by the welfare state. This book is supposed to be about young black and brown boys and their experience, but it becomes about their interactions with the state because it is the agent that punishes them constantly. Rios talks about almost all of the subjects experiencing their first serious state punishment in school. Our problem is supposed to be that the state is not big enough or it’s not active enough. But it turns out that the state is incredibly active – but it’s active in a harmful, punitive, aggressive way where kids are walking around afraid that they’re going to be grabbed by police, constantly. Afraid for their physical safety. That that’s how they experience the state, not as absent but as very overwhelming in the present."

"Yeah, the content is not related to Millennials, obviously. The essays that make up this book were written before we were born as a cohort. But I think what Delphy does – she’s alive and still working in France – so well in this collection is use dialectical materialism, the Marxist method, more expansively to show how it can illuminate social conflicts of any sort and how you can apply it to data and systems that are produced within capital and break them down and come to understand them through the structure of conflicts. She does this in Close to Home mostly with gender, and female and male opposition — as social forces, not with any biological essentialism. But she does it, I think, amazingly well. It’s one of the most rigorous applications of Marxist thought and method that I’ve seen. It definitely affected the way I thought and how I thought about using the resources that I used for my own book. Yeah, that’s definitely my ideology, explicitly, and it’s how I understand the world. It’s not something I talk about in the book at all, I think the name Marx comes up zero times. Neoliberalism comes up one time. But you don’t have to say, ‘Marx, Marx, Marx,’ to be doing Marxism. What I’m looking at is a world that is structured by class conflicts. It’s not that I’m saying young people are metaphorically the proletariat, or whatever. It’s about seeing that the most useful explanatory relation for our society is the dynamic between workers and owners. So we can understand Millennials best through the changing dynamic between workers and owners in our society. That’s an idea that people are not exposed to, I think, a frame that people are not usually exposed to, but one that explains what’s going on much, much, much better than the official versions do. If people find my book illuminating, it’s a credit to that mode of thought. I’m definitely going to be interested to see how that shakes out. I’m curious to see what the differences are going to be. I certainly think people from different cohorts will get different things out of it, but I think people from any cohort could get something out of it. And it’s not going to divide evenly. I’m sure there will be Millennials who don’t find it a credible account and there will boomers who think this is exactly what they’ve seen. But if Millennials read this and see their own lives and can think about the world in terms of the social conflicts I talk about in the book, then that would be great. That’s definitely my goal more than anything."