I read four of the reviews highlighted. I agree - none of them attempted to read the book. So I attempted to read the book. I understand why they failed. Imagine this: a girl walks over to a desk and writes down on a piece of paper, "Please drink a glass of water." One or two hours later, she wanders by the desk again and finds that piece of paper. As she reads it this time, she forgets that she was the one who wrote it and thinks to herself that she should probably do what the paper says. Maybe she's a bit skeptical at first, so she finds a friend and asks, "Do I really have to drink a glass of water right now? I'm not even thirsty." The friend answers, "I don't know. Here, let me have a look." She reads what's written on the piece of paper and tells the girl, "Yep, that's what it says. You have to drink a glass of water." If the girl walks by this piece of paper too often, she would get a terrible bellyache pretty quickly. And that's how she ends up being ruled by things and suffering. You could charitably call the voice "whimsical" but you couldn't really call it "for kids." It's like "explain like I'm five and you're roofed out of your mind on shrooms and pentothal." I've read Pipes and I don't have a clue what the author is talking about. The author of the New York Times chose the title. In German, it's "Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie Endlich Alles Anders Wird" (Communism: a little history that ends very differently). The German title doesn't try to appeal to kids, which is good, because the illustrations are for kids the way Spiegelman illustrations are for kids. The argument put forth by the Howling Monkeys is that this is an unserious work that disregards the failures of Communism and that it has taken on an undue amount of attention simply by being published by a "serious" press. And frankly, I think those criticisms have merit.Capitalism exists today all over the world, and it's called capitalism because capital rules. This isn't the same as saying that capitalists rule, or that the capitalist class rules. In capitalism, there are certainly people who have more power than others, but there isn't a queen who sits on a throne high above society and commands everybody. So if people no longer rule over society, who does? The answer may sound a little strange. things do. of course we don't mean this literally, since things can't do anything, least of all rule people. After all, they're just things. And not all things have this power, only special things o. Or to put it better, only a special form of things do. These special things don't fall from the sky or come flying down to Earth inUFOs shooting people with laser beams. They're just the things that people create to make life easier, to serve them. Strangely, over time, people forget that they made those things, and soon enough, people begin to serve the things!
One hundred percent of these criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of the title, a basic denial of the fact that all commodities cost money in capitalism and a misconceived view of how academic publishing functions. None of this concerns the book’s actual content.
Capitalism first developed in England around five hundred years ago. At that time, feudalism, still ruled, which means there were queens, princesses, and many maids. But most people were peasants. Peasants worked the fields in small village communes or together with their families. Since they had no machines and few inventions, they had to work a ton. Even though they worked so much, they were still poor. Even worse, the church, which was very powerful at that time, demanded every tenth piece of bread the peasants produced - and the princesses wanted even more than that! Every so often the people had to go to the princesses' courts and work there for several days. But they always knew exactly how much the rulers were taking away from them. Otherwise, they were pretty much left alone. you see, the princesses understood little about working, and so they couldn't really tell the peasants how to do their work.
I thought the book was silly myself, but it's half about the failures of communism and the other half hopeful they don't mean the future has to look like an oxford shoe stamping on a human face forever. It's the second part the Howling Monkeys are objecting to.The argument put forth by the Howling Monkeys is that this is an unserious work that disregards the failures of Communism
Alas, the history of communism is littered with failed attempts by communists to be better at capitalism than the capitalists themselves. As Ms. Adamczak argues, this is because most communist criticisms of capitalism take one idealized aspect of capitalist society and pit it against the others, unwittingly perpetuating the framework communism sets out to abolish. This recipe for disaster recurs throughout history, and the only way to stop it is for everyone to learn about the unsuccessful attempts at revolution, so as not to repeat those mistakes in their current struggles. Hence, “Communism for Kids.”
So have you read it? "The future doesn't have to look like that" is basically Graeber's schtick, and he's hella more readable than this. And while he plays a little fast'n'loose with anthropology, he doesn't straight up make shit up like claiming merchants didn't exist before the 16th century and then call it metaphor. And I read the translator's/article author's blurb, but I don't agree with it. This is far more your wheelhouse than mine but the phrase I'm used to seeing is "Marxism-Leninism" because the true hawks will point out that there has yet to be a true Communist state because they're impossible by inspection. It seems to me that a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument (for kids) about the different structures of economy would be criticized by the right, but not howling-monkey criticized. The argument against this book is not just that it's wrong, it's that it's trite and wrong (and filled with heinously ugly illustrations).
I have read the book. It was trying to do what the translator says it was trying to do. It fails. Part of the definition of communism is the absence of a state. Marxism-Leninism was about the party taking over the state, creating a socialist society, and then doing away with the state, at which point you'd have communism. So there were states run by communists, but there has never been communism. That said, there's a reason you see more anarchists than tankies now, and why they're strident about prefigurative politics.