News Letter

Notes from Brazil launch; Indonesia essay; hyper-oligarchization

1. I have a review essay out in the London Review of Books, on the Indonesian revolution, and David Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi, here.

   

2. This month I launched the Brazilian edition of If We Burn, which we rendered as A Década da Revolução Perdida in American Portuguese. Boitempo Editorial has done a fabulous job with the translation, cover, and promotion.
   
   I find it quite funny than in the US, both my books have a mainstream, centrist publisher, and that in Brazil, both came out on resolutely left-wing imprints. I also find it very interesting that in Brazil, the response to one major part of the second book (the role of horizontalists / the Movimento Passe Livre) was the opposite of the response in the United States. I should come back to that divergence, somewhere, after more Brazilians have had a chance to read it.

   
   

3. This week Jeff Bezos bragged that he fired a major editor at the Washington Post for not saying “hell yes” to his plan to abandon a “broad-based opinion section” in favor of the strident defense of “personal liberties and free markets.” The fact that a billionaire would congratulate himself for using economic power to censor conflicting viewpoints and call it “freedom” is both terribly hilarious and perhaps the perfect way to understand ruling-class ideology in the United States. Personally, I always thought this was inevitable — Bezos would certainly abandon “hands-off” ownership as soon as it stopped serving his interests, and personally, I always thought that we had to view his purchase as subservient to his larger goals. You don’t get that rich and powerful if you don’t care quite a lot about accumulating wealth and power. I couldn’t believe how many journalists and cultural elites apparently bought the narrative that he simply wanted to save journalism.
   
   Indeed, if we view see his investment as a (very cheap) way to mute criticism of his real businesses, I think it really worked for over a decade. But even to me, the manner of his reversal this week was shocking. He did not just want to go to war with the newsroom and make the paper more right-wing. It would have been very easy to starve the paper of reporting resources, and to secretly privilege hiring decisions that serve his agenda; that’s the standard script for things like this. He wanted to be seen to be going to war with the newsroom and using his money to make the paper more right-wing. If he is a rational, self-interested capitalist, he must think this new posture will serve his larger goals. One journalist friend, who is a lot closer to these things than me, put it this way:
   
   “It’s crazy to see how fast these institutions are collapsing,” she said. “It feels like we are lying in the road, waiting to be run over.”

   
   

4. Last week in São Paulo I tried to buy a newspaper at the newspaper stand. The banca de jornal is an important part of the landscape of South America’s largest city, now also selling things like soft drinks, phone chargers, chewing gum, and so on. I grabbed a big stack of Folha de S.Paulo, which were still in a plastic wrapper. I figured I was the first to buy one that day, so I asked if I could open the package.
   
   “Oh no, we don’t have today’s edition. Those are from December. We only sell newspapers by the kilo. People use them for their dogs.”