Solidarity makes people hard to control and prevents them from being passive objects of private power. So you have to have a propaganda system that overcomes any deviations from the principle of subjugation to power systems.
There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they're any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of school does undermine solidarity and mutual support - dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.
Whenever I review a book, I try to keep two main variables in mind: form and content. Genre authors will tell you form is subjugated to content and literary authors will tell you the opposite, but as a reviewer, I believe they are equally important to your book. If you mess one of them up, your book will suffer. I don't have any major problem with the content in POWER SYSTEMS. Noam Chomsky seems like a knowledgeable enough guy about global politics and everything he claims is documented in an extensive end notes section. I got major issues with the form, though. I don't know who's responsible for putting this book together. I don't think it's Noam Chomsky or David Barsamian, but I don't think POWER SYSTEMS accomplished anything, aside from affirming that Noam Chomsky is a source of information about modern politics and lots of other stuff.
I didn't know much about Noam Chomsky coming in. I knew he was a leftist philosopher and that this book was called POWER SYSTEMS, that's all. 178 pages later, I still don't know what a power system exactly is. The book is not even trying to define that concept. The discussions between Barsamian and Chomsky are loosely based on thematic chapters and yet the discussion seems to be build as a best-of, most-elaborate questions of longer discussions. You go from global politics to U.S intern politics to geopolitical history, there is nothing that ties these questions together, except a short, enigmatic chapter title, such as: "Domestic Disturbances" and "Aristocrats and Democrats", you know? What the hell does that even mean? Terms like that only have values when they are explicated, but in POWER SYSTEMS, they are the explanation.
Like I said, the problem is not Chomsky or the nature of the questions David Barsamian asks him. Despite that I didn't know Chomsky's discourse at all prior to reading POWER SYSTEMS, I know that this presentation doesn't advantage him. David Foster Wallace, whom I'm a lot more familiar with, was often asked questions about a wide array of subject that had nothing to do with literature (his field of work) and it resulted in Wallace not going deep into any issues, because he was asked to solve one of the great issues of modern society in every questions. POWER SYSTEM was most certainly not meant to be an introduction, I just don't know what it was meant to be. An interesting detail that makes this question a lot thicker than it already is: according to other reviewers on Goodreads, a lot of the content in POWER SYSTEMS is recycled. So I repeat my question: what was that book meant to be?
Every night when I come home and start to answer the day's hundreds of e-mails, a fair number are from young people saying, "I don't like the way the world is going. In fact, I can't stand it. What should I do?" By now I receive so many that I'm almost compelled to resort to form responses. And what I point out is that you,re well on the way to answering the question yourself, because you recognize there's a problem. There is no general answer for everybody. There is no right answer for every person, in all circumstances. It depends on who you are, what your concerns are, what your options are, how much you want to devote yourself to it, what your talents are. But you're probably pretty privileged. Otherwise you wouldn't be writing me a letter on the Internet. That means you have a lot of opportunities - much more than your counterparts in other countries, or even here a generation ago. So there is a legacy that you can use. It's not going to be easy - it never is. But you can make a difference. You just have to find your own way.
Ultimately, POWER SYSTEMS is disappointing, because it doesn't help the left-wing discourse at all. It's self-important and insular in its form. In this day and age where discussing important issues has lost interest, you can't allow yourself to release a hermetic, confusing product like this. You could argue that politics are not supposed to be fun and that you need to invest yourself into these questions, but I disagree. Learning is one of the variables that trigger human enjoyment and it's possible to present heavy material in a way that will make people feel smart for enjoying. POWER SYSTEMS doesn't have any direction. It's just two very smart guys, talking about politics. It's structured in a way that you don't feel like they're speaking to you. The book makes you feel like you're eavesdropping at best and you're left trying to piece it all together. No disrespect to Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, but I don't believe you have anything to gain from reading this book in particular.
TWO STARS