Left Is Not Woke
by Susan Neiman
Polity Press, 2023; 155 pp.

There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of her work in earlier reviews. In Left Is Not Woke, though, she makes some good points, and I’m going to concentrate on them in this week’s column.

Leave it to the Federal Reserve to throw a knuckleball when the batter is expecting a fastball. These last few weeks have been just that, with the Fed saying nothing of abandoning their Quantitative Tightening (QT) position while engaging in what appears to be a Quantitative Easing (QE) position.

Critics of the increasingly bipartisan consensus of conflict with China face a difficult task. For the (fake) China threat is not a single concrete thing that can be pointed to or otherwise signified. Rather, as a manufactured thought climate produced by a series of interlocking incentive structures, like Kafka’s Castle it looms inscrutable but no less ominous.

Drug addicts suffer major withdrawal symptoms when they go cold turkey. In the case of high-tech startups and their banks (like Silicon Valley Bank), the super-low-interest-rate stimulant has been taken away by the drug dealer (the Fed) via interest rate hikes. With cheap credit drying up, firms switched to pulling cash out of SVB, all while the same interest rate increases caused the value of SVB’s assets to fall. SVB’s balance sheet couldn’t handle the fast withdrawals, which became a classic, self-propagating, panicky bank run, and the simultaneous fall in value of its liquid assets.

While no one expects politicians to be honest, one of the biggest lies that comes from President Joe Biden, members of his party, and those who echo their messages is that “the rich pay less taxes than you.” This crafted statement is designed to stir up emotions at the expense of facts in order to drive popular opinion to support a wealth tax despite its unconstitutionality and lack of

“Stay in your lane” is a frequently heard refrain nowadays, normally a piece of advice directed at those who, by virtue of some aspect of their identifying characteristics or profession or beliefs, express views which are deemed unwelcome. “Stay in your lane” is not often fair and appropriate advice to be given in debate.

I submit, however, that “Stay in your lane” is usually fair and appropriate advice to give a Marxist who opines on matters which concern the moral, efficient, and effective satisfaction of human wants.