Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued.

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear

Recently, I was asked by industry publication Books + Publishing to write a few words for their long-running “books are essential” campaign. This is designed to “show the world that books are essential,” and is, I assume, a response to the continued neglect of the sector by successive governments and the deterioration of working conditions for writers and publishing industry professionals. It is a good idea and I was happy to do my bit. What follows, then, shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of the campaign or its intentions.

It’s not necessarily that I think other things are more essential or deserving of our attention  —  although sometimes I do think that. Mostly, I think we can do more than one thing at once. Demand better on several fronts at once. That the government should improve conditions for care workers, or raise Centrelink payments for the unemployed, does not mean we shouldn’t also be demanding better support for authors or the publishing industry. It is a trick of neoliberalism, the scarcity mindset, to imagine that we simply can’t afford to do everything, when the reality is we absolutely can afford to support workers in multiple industries at the same time. And I think writers, like all artists, become inured to their shitty conditions and do need advocating for.

Maybe a refresher of these conditions would be helpful, although I promise this is not the thrust of my argument.

Most novelists work for four, five years literally for nothing. We have no contract, and there is no job security obviously because, as I say, no one is employing us to write the book in the first place. We have no guarantee of publication, and basically no support. It’s important to acknowledge a few things that can ameliorate the grimness of this account: occasionally an author will get a two-book deal, and this temporary job security is nice, but the advance for a two-book deal is nowhere near a liveable wage while you write both of the books. And, if you’re very lucky, you may be “awarded” funding during the writing process from a state and federal government funding body like Creative Victoria  —  although the trend has long been downward in terms of real funding opportunities for artists, and these funding applications are time-consuming and the rounds highly competitive. In the best-case scenario, you might be subsidised to write a first draft, or conduct some research, after which you are back to doing it for free, with nothing but the increasingly desperate hope that when you complete your manuscript someone might want to publish it and maybe advance you a few grand against royalties (so you finally get paid something for all that work). This advance you will most likely never recoup, and therefore you will never see income from book sales. There are exceptions, but this is the case for the majority of novelists in Australia right now.

There are other ways you can make a little from your work. Public lending rights, for example, and advances if the book is licensed in other territories (and there is the odd perk: a festival might put you up in a hotel. Or you’ll get to do a residency somewhere pretty.). But none of this gets remotely close to a liveable wage.

Because we are inured to these conditions, it makes sense to us that there should be no support until someone wants to publish our book — a less and less common eventuality, by the way, as authors increasingly struggle to find homes for their second or third book, and especially if they write literary fiction (the death of the mid-list and all that). We already assume that we are the last consideration of state and federal governments. For the most part, our values do not align with the centrist political parties in power and we assume they know this and hate us back. But its ok because we think we’re shit too. The bad news and bad treatment just feels expected.

So maybe it is simply cynicism. No one cares — I think to myself — about writers banging on about why books are essential. It’s over. It is niche now, a cute little cottage industry. And begging for crumbs doesn’t feel good. But I am trying especially hard at the moment to fight cynicism. Cynicism doesn’t help. Cynicism is over (if you want it). I’ll get to that in a moment.

But maybe I need to account for my state of mind. I am distracted. I am dysregulated. I pick up my phone at alarming rates per hour. I am filled with a kind of ragged, nervous energy a lot of the time. Some of this stems from learning, last month, on the first day of classes in fact, that the university I work for has significantly cut the wages of sessional staff like me who teach associate degrees. This, after protracted negotiations with the union over a new EBA and the union seeming to celebrate its many wins. Also, I have a new book out and this is a little nerve-wracking, as it always is, no matter what you do to work against this. And I am not immersed in the next one yet, and being immersed in a book seems to help. But mostly it is other things. I don’t need these new reasons for being unhinged. I have plenty as it is.

For the last eighteen months, like everyone else, I have experienced the daily live-stream of the genocide in Gaza. Plenty of people have written so well about what it has been like to bear witness to this, so I won’t go into much detail here, except to say that my mind has felt, and continues to feel, sunk in an unceasing sense of horror at the atrocities unfolding before my eyes, and to feel like this for eighteen months straight does something to you. This horror has been compounded every morning by a fresh wave of disbelief and despair and deep shame that while Israelis continue to slaughter Palestinians in their thousands — and we have awoken each morning to new unbelievably horrific scenes that can never be scrubbed from our memories — literally no-one in power is doing anything to stop it. No-one.

Add to this the first hundred days of the second Trump administration, for which Gaza has become a plaything, a new real-estate opportunity for an emergent techno-feudal fascist state, and that daily horror and disbelief is complicated by new feelings. One of these is a countervailing sense of the inevitability of all this. It is a peculiarly sickening sensation, sensing something coming, seeing it in broad outline, in general shape, but not being at all prepared for the assault of its specificity upon arrival. We have been awestruck by the spectacle of it. The particularity of its perversions, the contours of its cruelty. And the collision of all these feelings has produced a kind of nauseated frozenness, a state of eye-twitching, don’t-know-where-to-look, can’t-think-of-anything-else fatigue that has been hard to shake.

Not to mention the reverberations of all this here in Australia. The gaslighting we have endured from our government and media, and the disturbing daily revelations, ever escalating it seems, of the campaigns against journalists and artists and academics who have dared to express any kind of solidarity with Palestinians as they are eradicated.

Understanding all this about my current state of mind, you might also understand why being asked to plead the case nicely to the genocide-complicit ghouls currently in government for more attention to the world of reading and books feels at best feeble and naïve, and at worst completely beside the point. “Books are essential,” we whimper, as the world burns and Sieg Heil-throwing billionaires make another $16 million every hour and take control of the West.

Books can wait, I think. I’m kind of distracted right now.

I want us to demand much more, obviously. Books are essential, okay, but in a capitalist hellscape where we are both consumed and exhausted by keeping up with daily horrors, books can sometimes feel little more than a small mercy, a welcome distraction, a little treat, or at best, a world of ideas and beauty and sense and sentence-making into which we can escape for snatches of time, and which keeps us alive inside just enough to keep on working in the capitalist hellscape.

People wax lyrical about bookshops as political or radical spaces, sites of quiet resistance, and I understand these sentiments, but sometimes the whole thing feels a little delusional. As if the bookshop is a simulacrum of a world that we have already lost. A world, where one can step back in time and pretend that we still care about these things, where people have the time and money and presence and peace of mind to quietly contemplate buying things that are several hundred pages long and might take weeks to finish, or the time and patience to keep doing this thing of writing and reading books. Where there are enough of these people to sustain this as an industry. These people milling about in silence need to wake up, I think to myself. They should be screaming. Lying down in the road. The time for reading has passed.

*

Everyone knows we don’t read like we used to. We can’t concentrate. We read with phones resting against the pages of books on our laps. The stats on readership in Australia are ever more dire. The Australia Reads report was released in February, and in none of the analysis in the media was the world we live in listed as a possible reason for the small numbers of committed readers in Australia. Devices got the blame, of course, but there was no mention of what we are seeing on these devices. None of the analysis mentioned how living under late capitalism may be affecting our inclination to crack open the new Trent Dalton. Although, of course, Trent is doing very well, by all accounts. I was recently told by a literary agent that basically nothing is selling besides crime, something called “romantacy”, and “escapist” literature, which I take to mean commercial fiction. And it is no surprise that in the highly stressful, horror-filled world in which we live, people are reaching for sentimental slop — working-class-kid-makes-good fantasies like those written by Dalton — or that people want to escape into aspirational fantasies about, say, the hectic love lives of successful artists living in New York, no matter how badly written the book may be. The same goes for the article published recently in the Australian on the disappearance of “big books”. It is the Australian, so of course there wouldn’t be, but no suggestion here either that the things we see on our clearly-to-blame social media accounts might sometimes mean that immersing ourselves in, say, a kaleidoscopic 650-page synthesis of modern London with a dizzying cast of made-up strangers might just feel like too much right now. 

Everyone knows we don’t write like we used to, either. The culture is debased. It is debased because of the lack of support for artists, but it is debased also because of the world live in. Think of all the great work that is being lost because artists are too burnt-out to produce it. Not just too tightly stretched to give their work the attention it deserves, but too overwhelmed, too angry, too despairing. Once, not that long ago, writers like me might have written other things besides novels. Criticism, essays. But I don’t have the time or the capacity to write anything else. I write the occasional book review when I can fit it in. I love writers’ diaries, and I’ve been reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf recently, but this form is long dead. No writer has time for writing books and diaries (not to mention letters!).

You might retort that what I’m complaining about is the death of a certain bourgeois lifestyle, that I’m mourning the loss of centrality to the culture that literature once enjoyed. But even if the government funded me and thousands like me at, say, a hundred thousand dollars a year to write and only write, we still wouldn’t get that kind of literary culture back (even if we wanted to). Because we have to live in the world we live in. We would still feel exhausted and overwhelmed. Because of all the horrors. Because it is too much. And I haven’t even mentioned climate change, the polycrisis, the number of times per week I hear the phrase “the end of the world”.

*

The argument in Mark Fisher’s influential 2010 book Capitalist Realism hinges on the famous line attributed to Frederic Jameson that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Fisher describes the prevailing sentiment in the first decade of the new millennium in this way:

The widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

Drawing on Lacan, he argues that to imagine alternatives to capitalism we need glimpses of “the Real” to puncture the capitalist “reality” we have tacitly agreed to accept:

For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through this repression. The Real is a unrepresentable X, a traumatic void, that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.

I do wonder what Fisher would have written about the current moment, because some things have not changed much since 2010 and some have changed dramatically. Fisher dismissed the climate crisis as a potential issue that could force a confrontation with capitalist realism, because it was already politicised, but the crisis has become much worse over the last fifteen years. No longer is it an urgent issue only for the global South, but also for people living in centres of western power, as the recent Los Angeles fires demonstrated so dramatically. Even more critically, however, I wonder if the genocide in Gaza is not exactly the kind of glimpsing of “the Real” under the “reality” capitalism presents to us that Fisher was looking for.

Fisher does mention Palestine in passing in Capitalist Realism, in reference to teachers unions and their “noble causes” — the support of which, it seemed to him, was not achieving very much. But, as I say, things have changed. What is unfolding in Gaza could be well described as an intrusion of the Real that can “only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality,” because it has shown us, and shown us day-by-day, in the most vicious and heartbreaking way possible, how western imperialism works.

It is one thing to know how this works in the abstract but quite another to see it in action. To see in real time the various mechanisms grinding into gear, all the players playing their part, performing their roles as reasonable and rational actors, even morally serious actors — firing up the rhetoric of “proportional response”, “right to self-defence”, “respect for international law”, “hostages” versus “prisoners” — while in reality being entirely comfortable with their complicity with war crimes and ethnic cleansing as long as it doesn’t lose them votes or viewers, and while we can see with our very own eyes the Real directly contradicting their accounts of events, slipping through the cracks thanks to Palestinians live-streaming their own extinction.

The standard defence of capitalism, the liberal defence, that is described here by Badiou, and quoted in Fisher, is that at least we are not as bad as them:

Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.

Always a weak argument, this is now clearly laughable. None of the standard defences for western capitalism stand up any longer, and everyone knows it. As Fisher notes, we have of course known this for a long time, but we have simply agreed to live with it. We disavow it, like we do the university system under which we work and study, but this disavowal only helps these systems run more smoothly because performing a cynical distance from something so obviously bad for us is what allows us to function within it.

I would argue — perhaps with absurd and misplaced optimism in a historical moment where populism and fascism are on the rise all over the world — that far fewer people seem content with cynical disavowal in 2025 than they were in 2010. Instead of being lulled into an apolitical stupor by the hopelessness of change in a totalising system, after the last eighteen months of exposure to the real, many are overwhelmed by rage and looking for places to channel it.  

This is because of the incredibly brave and unwavering Palestinian journalists and citizens who have disrupted regular programming on social media. Capitalist realism has failed to conceal or incorporate live-streamed genocide, and millions of people around the world have responded not with disavowal and tacit acceptance, nor cynical passivity, but by mobilising in huge numbers. This sometimes-spontaneous outpouring of dissent and disruption has shown us the fragility of capitalist realism.

Fisher may doubt protests as a political force because the system anticipates and incorporates protests — releasing our frustrations at the weekend rally so we can return to work with a clear conscience the following Monday — and I may argue the point in this case (when they are as big and insistent as they have been, and when they have become such strong sites for solidarity and organising across groups and movements etc), but the response to the genocide in Gaza has not been simply large-scale rallies. The clamping down on the student encampments, the arrests and expulsions of its participants, and the new definitions of antisemitism adopted by universities may look like a win right now for centrist governments in America and here in Australia, but the encampments themselves — and so many other actions inspired by the broader Palestinian-led BDS movement from which they sprang — remain a remarkable expression of political dissent, one that quickly brought the whole university system into question. Once you start demanding that universities divest from arms manufacturers and act as ethical institutions the whole thing can start to seem pretty shaky. “The university must be reimagined,” read a line in the letter I signed along with over a thousand colleagues supporting the RMIT student encampments — and this line no doubt quickened the pulse of every one of those co-signed.

Everyone already knows the university system is broken from decades of neo-liberal reform. That it exploits both students and staff, and produces an increasingly poor quality of education while executive and managerial roles proliferate and their salaries go up. That, as teachers, we answer to people higher up the chain who we have never met and whose job descriptions are inscrutable to us. We have no idea what they do, and when we ask them for support they simply throw up their hands. Mostly they seem to be employed as public relations officers, to smooth over the cracks and present the university in a positive light — even just to the staff within it — because when you have no interest in improving the way universities are run, you end up needing to pay people to pretend everything is fine.

Until recently, we had agreed to disavow this system and tacitly accept it. This no longer feels like the prevailing sentiment. Where, in 2010, Fisher saw politically disengaged, apathetic or cynical students, in 2025 I see students who are increasingly outraged at the world they live in and the system under which they are educated, and who are eager to get involved and do something about it.

It may seem fanciful, naïve, to suggest that the genocide in Gaza and its reverberations across the western world could be the kind of event that spurs people into a confrontation with capitalist realism, but as Fisher himself puts it, ending the book on something like a stirring note of radical hope:

The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly everything is possible again.

*

Last year I re-read Annie Ernaux’s The Years, her collective memoir of a generation of French boomers, and was struck anew by the way it is structured around a lifelong reckoning with May ’68: the hope and promise of that moment — how brief it was and how anti-climactic in the end — and the failure of all other moments and movements in the following decades to deliver on its promise; Ernaux not daring to hope over and over; the palpable disappointment in her children’s political engagement and narrow aims.

Poor boomers, living forever in the shadow of the 60s and 70s — this brief time when it was not in fact easier to imagine the end of the world than it was to imagine the end of capitalism. I wrote about this in an Instagram post. I wrote that what we were witnessing in the student encampments was the defining moment of this generation’s student protest life, and then I wrote this:

I hope they, and we all, don’t look back and wonder where that went. I don’t think we will. Mainly because returning to ‘normal’ isn’t really an option for this generation as it was for boomers, but also because so many people have been changed over the last seven months.

I immediately felt embarrassed by this post because, as the cynic’s voice in my head rejoined, of course the moment will pass and life will continue as before. But I want to be unapologetic and unembarrassed by being hopeful about the radical possibilities of our current moment and future.

*

In spite of all this, at no time over the last eighteen months have I felt that writing fiction was a waste of time. I’ve never really suffered a crisis of faith — maybe because I’ve never had faith in my work’s ability to change much in the world in the first place. World events have certainly stopped me in my tracks many times. Stunned me like some kind of blunt force trauma. Gaza has taken over my days and monopolised my thoughts. It has filled me with rage. And it has felt necessary and important that I let it do this. That I don’t turn away. Sorry, but I agree with all the Instagram posts about this. I believe we must bear witness. The very least we can do is pay attention.

Maybe there is a link, a connection that can be made between these two things. As I always tell my students, paying attention is key to writing. Paying attention to the world, and to your characters once you have created them and seeing how they respond to the other characters you have created for them to rub up against. That is all my writing is about, at heart. It is about how people manage to live in the world we live in, which is to say, under a system and logic that makes life feel, at times, unbearable. It is about how people manage to live in a world filled with other people who also feel these things but don’t do much about it. How we live our lives on the unceded land of First Nations people and how this affects our experience of this land. And other things: mortality, love, loss. The usual things. Paying attention to all this never feels pointless.

I don’t want this to become self-congratulatory. I am just saying there is something about making your work in the face of all the discouragement that feels good. It feels increasingly like we persist against the odds, against the grain, against our better judgement. And something about this doggedness feels good. Mostly it’s about the labour of it. The satisfactions of the work, when it is working. Maybe writers are simply masochists. But to feel good about something feels good.

In her book Another Day in the Colony, Chelsea Watego writes against hope. She is writing primarily to and for fellow First Nations people, and within the context of a continued struggle for civil rights for indigenous people in this country. Fuck hope, she says. Be sovereign. Look for moments of joy, not hope. I do not blame her. Can you imagine how often the idea of hope must be invoked to First Nations people for it to be squashed mercilessly in front of their eyes? Over and over again, while their kids are taken away and their teenagers incarcerated and murdered? Which is not historical, but still happening, literally right now, today?

Anyway, I don’t care what we call it, or how we frame it. I know that it can be useful to people, to give it a name, but I am not invested in defining it. I don’t need to call it radical hope. I don’t know if I feel hope. But I do feel a compulsion. Gramsci wrote of a “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which seems to capture it well.

Not to diminish all the various ways in which we can resist in our everyday lives, and which do feel “radical” in the current climate, but what would be a truly radical act, of course, would be a radical act. It would be a radical act to become radicalised and act on that radicalisation. To become involved in struggles. To join up. To do something. To care enough that it becomes a priority in your life in some way. I do feel that we owe something to the people of Palestine who we saw killed in front of us on our screens and those who have so far survived but are now starving and living in ruins. We owe it to ourselves, to our experience of witnessing that. To the attention we paid.

*

Partly why I baulk at defining why books are essential to me, why I write or read — and why I would be a terrible ambassador for any of these things — is that I never want to pin it down. I don’t want to define why I write, or why I read, in much the same way I never want to define why I like art in any form. Words struggle to do it justice, but I am also concerned with avoiding the language or logic of self-improvement, which is the language and logic of capitalism, to explain these pleasures.

There is a long-running argument among literary critics and theorists about the “use” of literature, and if it even needs one. In his summary of this debate, Terry Eagleton explains how the liberal humanist argument for the ‘use’ of studying or reading literature is that it makes us “better people”. That it deepens and enriches and extends our lives. I often hear people say that it makes us more empathetic. Marxist and feminist critics might say, well, let’s take this contention to its logical conclusion. If it did make us more empathetic surely we would see more writers and readers of literary fiction on the frontline, chaining themselves to things, standing in front of bulldozers. Or organising, striking, refusing to work under such conditions, knowing that our freedom is dependent on the oppression of others, and is therefore ”a crippled and parasitic freedom”, to quote Eagleton, that comes at too high a cost. But we don’t see this. (Which is not, of course, to diminish the efforts of people within the literary community who are showing us how solidarity and political action are done, such as the team behind the Readers and Writers Against The Genocide campaign).

Then there is the romantic or aesthetic view that argues against the usefulness of literature altogether. “The sublime uselessness of Art”, as Paul Auster puts it. And I have preferred this in the past, because it keeps reading and writing outside the logic of capitalism.

I used to think the pleasures of literature — writing and reading — should be ineffable, something done for no conceivable gain, because then it is an anti-capitalist impulse. But I am more comfortable now to conceive of literature as useful, if not in the liberal humanist conception of usefulness, which narrowly focuses on the individual, then useful in the way it might be to the Marxist and feminist critic in their desire to transform a society divided by class and gender and race. And, to be honest, I think I have always viewed it in this way. As a critic, if a novel says nothing to me that feels useful in this way, I am left feeling disappointed by the tepidness of its vision. Which is not to bring politics and ideology into literature — they are already there. Nor is it to rid it of its pleasures, but instead to deepen them.

Of course, I make no claims for the political usefulness of my own work. I like to think that by paying close attention to my characters in a particular moment in their lives, I am offering a critique in some small way of how we live under capitalism. That we struggle towards community and love and happiness but these things feel unattainable or unsatisfactory. But I am under no illusions. And no matter how radical a novel may be in content, the content isn’t really the issue anyway. It is the form of the novel, the fact of the novel. The material conditions under which it is produced. As Eagleton puts it: “Literature may protest against such conditions or it may not, but it is only possible in the first place because of them. Quite what the white western literary fiction writer does with that knowledge is an open question. One answer, which is perhaps a dodge of the question, is that you must do more in the world than write novels, when and if you can.

*

Some people, of course, are switching off from current events. Becoming apolitical. The zone has been flooded and they have drowned. But we need to avoid drowning, if possible. Drowning doesn’t feel like a good option, or an option at all to me. We need to pull each other out of the depths and back into the shallows where we can feel the ground beneath our feet. Is the lifeboat Marxist analysis and BIPOC-led activism? Please let me know when I have strained this metaphor.  

If to drown — tune out, become apolitical — is one option, another is to despair. There have been plenty of much more eloquent essays written about this so I won’t labour the point, but on this I agree with British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad, who, in conversation with Sally Rooney, wrote this: “Basically, it’s easy to feel useless, and from there it’s a short leap to despair. But I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical.”

Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost is a novel about a Palestinian woman who returns from the UK to Palestine and experiences a political awakening there after joining a local theatre group. In her Edward Said lecture, subsequently published as the book Recognising the Stranger, Hammad writes of her attraction to moments of epiphany or recognition in fiction, the moment in a story where the protagonist realises something transformative about the situation they are in. But recognition is one moment, the culmination of Act Two, and there needs to be an Act Three:

In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognising. Great effort is required to ensure that such a moment marks the middle of the story, and not the finale. Another act must follow. 

She quotes Maggie Nelson: “Having a strong reaction is not the same thing as having an understanding, and neither is the same thing as taking an action.”

We are all past the stage of recognition. Arguably, our recognition moment in Australia was when we realised quite how brazenly complicit our government and media and so many of our cultural institutions were in the genocide. To know that the government, or the ALP, is morally bankrupt and complicit is one thing, even to be expected, but to see the whole western democratic (read white-supremacist settler-colonial) project at work, to see how deeply it runs through “our” ABC and our universities and cultural institutions, felt like a turning point in the narrative. But we are in Act Three now. We have rallied, we have boycotted. And the question becomes: what next?

*

A student of mine posted to our class group-chat the famous line from Auden’s “The More Loving One”:

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

She said it was her New Years’ resolution. I asked the group how this sentiment might apply to our writing lives. I suggested to them that writing a book for four or five years and giving so much care and attention to something like that while knowing at the end of it you’ll get a little party maybe and not much else, feels a bit like being the more loving one.

But how might we apply this sentiment to our activism, our engagement with the world? Maybe, by not expecting it back. By being content to be the more loving ones. Why not be the more loving ones and see what happens? Fuck around and find out? What do we have to lose?

One thing that has helped me is learning about the historical struggles of others. Like so many, I have been reading about the history of Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism. I have been listening to The Dig podcast’s sixteen-part series “Thawra”, a conversation with historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on the Arab radicalisms of the twentieth century. I have been reading more Marxist theory and criticism, and also learning about the actions and strategies of groups emerging now, such as the People’s Network for Land and Liberation in the US, which is a BIPOC-led coalition of organisations that are establishing worker-owned cooperatives across the country. And all of this has been rewarding. I have a thirst for this kind of knowledge now. I am reading more non-fiction than I have in years.

But I am back at books. And I see how I might respond now. Books are essential because you only learn so much from an Instagram reel. Books are essential because they help us orient ourselves in current liberatory struggles by giving us the historical context for these struggles. Books are essential because they teach us about the Marxist critique of capitalism, which remains the best critique of capitalism we have and our greatest tool for dismantling it. Books are essential because they are evidence of a long and rich tradition of people paying attention to the world and caring enough to write about it as best they can. Books are essential because — and yes, it seems now I dare to say it —  they give us hope. But, more precisely, they give us the energy to seek new and better ways to understand, or to recognise. To search beyond slogans for the concrete. For our recognition to be more profound, and our Act Three to be filled with more effective fighting.

Image: Lisander Yuen