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I have mixed feelings about this book; I'd picked it up as it was recommended by China Miéville in "A Spectre, Haunting". The first two chapters ("What Is Ideology?" and "Ideological Strategies") were great – truly an introduction and overview, bringing to the foreground the many conflicing notions of ideology I'd encountered and linking them to political practice. I enjoyed the beginning of the third chapter "From the Enlightenment to the Second International" as helpful contextualization of the birth of the study of ideology, but then felt the book got lost in detailed intellectual history and rehashing of academic fights, so I began skipping and picked up again in the second-to-last chapter, "Discourse and Ideology", which turned out to just be a particular in-fight about semiotics with some other academics. The "Conclusion" was short and summarized the ideas of the first few chapter well. If you pick this up out of practical rather than academic interest, I'd recommend treating it as a primer and sticking to the first two or three chapters.

I found the historic part of this book (first two chapters) interesting, but not particularly helpful politically; I guess it's nice to rehabilitate the Luddites (and the anarchic style of organizing is interesting), but I'm not sure there's so much to learn from. The last two chapters I found more engaging. Particularly striking was the author's finding that people (workers, consumers) already engage in anti-automation, Luddite practices (like stealing from a self-checkout, or messing with food delivery robots in a fast food restaurant) and that it's good Marxist practice to build on that. Or this finding: "A large majority (85%) said they would support restricting workforce automation to jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do." [^Pew] So as an overview of what automation currently does and how the Left can relate to it, the book was good; as a source of ancient wisdom from the Luddites, not so much.

[^Pew] www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/08/how-americans-see-automation-and-the-workplace-in-7-charts/

This book has helped me articulate a few things I’d experienced before. For one, the sense of joy of being seen as a comrade. I distinctly remember being in a very large online seminar on labour organizing when one of the Indian workers casually addressed everyone else as comrades, creating a unity where before I’d only felt the detachment of yet-another-zoom-call.

It also reminded me of when someone I’d just met said they were quite excited about knowing me now because they so rarely encounter “peers”. I understand now that the it was comradeship that happened in that moment – meeting someone else who is also trying to change the world the way you are, and whom you recognize as being on your side, and who is ready to judge you and be judged by you about the value of your activities in pursuit of that goal.

I know a good number of people who are politically active, but only very few who I think would tell me that what I’m doing is pointless, and who would accept my telling them that their pet political project is misguided. These, I understand now, are my comrades.

I also liked the distinction between ally & comrade, with an ally being an identity you pursue ultimately on your own, and comrade being an identity that can only be ascribed by someone else.

For political movements, the notion that to be a comrade is to place the party above the self, and that joy comes from knowing that one is only a part of a bigger thing, and not ultimately necessary for it, would be a helpful one. I think framing making oneself superfluous as not just a way of preventing burnout but as a source of pleasure might aid in building more resilient organisations.

This is a wonderful book to stimulate thinking. I don’t think it makes for good front-to-back reading material, but the pattern-based style works great for flipping through, and every once in a while I struck on one that immediately made sense to me and appealed. Some of the patterns feel dated (I really hope we will not need so many patterns around how to defend ourselves against cars in thirty years!), but more interesting were those bits were things felt missing – there’s no pattern for a community house except for large families, nothing to think about more temporary living situations, and no help in how to set up a space for a party. But the way of describing a pattern is so straightforward that each lacuna made me want to design my own, and even if the book had only produced that feeling, it would have been enough.

The patterns for designing a livable city made me sad – it all makes sense, but it’s at best an aspiration for where we want to get. As a utopia, I enjoyed it.

This book is easy to read and has a compelling central idea. It talks about what made the moon race work so well and indicates how to replicate the success. However, I worry that through the very writing of this book, the very mission-ness of the idea gets lost. I am sure that McKinsey already has a long presentation deck on what makes a mission a mission and how to properly set up a mission and execute it (and spend billions in the process). Using the moon race as an example is easy because it obviously succeeded and happened a long time ago, but it's also a cop-out to not have to say why similar efforts (many of them started with the advice of Mazzucato herself) are failing. The contemporary examples she cites are not compelling; she points towards the "Energiewende" (energy turn) in Germany as a positive example, a term describing the change from fossil fuels to renewables. However, while the term itself is well known, it is no mission. To the extent that it at some point was a mission, it has failed: coal plants continue to run, and Germany is building fewer renewable energy farms than it used to.

Similarly, Mazzucato has worked on the "UK Industrial Strategy" [1]. What has happened to it? Has it failed? Is it succeeding? Or do we only call things "mission" if they end up working – if so, why bother defining the term as a goal at all?

All in all, the concept of a mission economy is compelling, but all the hard parts seem to be in execution and navigating a political climate in which you cannot rely on a cold war to get everyone's support for your mission. Those parts do not get addressed by the book.

[1] www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-mission-oriented-approach-to-building-the-entrepreneurial-state

This is a nice book. The author gives the rundown of climate movements of the past few years, focusing on Ende Gelände, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future. He's clearly actually been part of a lot of those actions and, as far as I can tell, he gets them pretty right. The tone is hopeful all in all and the central idea – that there should be a more militant flank focused on destruction of fossil fuel emitting devices like SUVs and pipelines – is made well, in particular the clear but charitable case against ideologues of pacifism in activism.

However, and this bugs me deeply, the author does not actually answer the question posed in the title. Nowhere in the book is there any kind of guideline of tactical advice or even finger-point to resources on how to go about this. There is no map of pipelines in Europe, no overview of IEDs used in attacks, no hint at ecotage manuals the author would find valuable. And even if the author wanted to address merely the best ways of building this radical flank, some advice on how to organize people for the kind of action the author wants to see, like coordinated SUV destruction or regular-enough pipeline attacks to make fossil fuel an investment risks, is sorely missing. The author does talk about the more militant first wave of eco activists around 2000, noting that the hundreds of thousands of acts of property destruction and violence committed by the likes of the ELF did not yield lasting success because they failed to be flanking a larger mass movement, but gives no hands-on advice for how to do better.

I believe this is a missed chance because I'm assuming the book is targeting activists who could become more militant. But it's exactly those activists who are open to militancy that will likely already support this point. When XR was in its infancy, people were actively trying to position it as the radical flank to Fridays for Future, recognizing that XR itself would need such a flank at some point. There is no dearth of people willing to commit property damage and sabotage in the climate movement, but what's holding them back is not the lack of justification but the lack of a plan for how to do so effectively.