Wages of Rebellion

It’s time to eradicate “the pestilence of corporate totalitarianism,” according to this lurid anticapitalist manifesto. Likening global capitalism to the Beast of the book of Revelation, Pulitzer Prize–winning ex-New York Times correspondent Hedges (War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) anticipates a nigh-apocalyptic future of deepening poverty and exploitation, ecological destruction, omnipresent surveillance, “looting, pillaging, and killing,” and perhaps even a reprise of the Black Death. Our only hope, he maintains, is to revive a revolutionary tradition that he omnidirectionally yokes to such diverse figures as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and Julian Assange. The latter-day rebels that he profiles are a tamer collection of Occupiers and hacktivists who mainly espouse Hedges’ own preference for non-violence. Hedges’s usual acute (if one-sided) reportage is on display—lengthy sections on unfairly prosecuted activists and the harshness of America’s penal system hit hard—but is ill-served by his lack of perspective and exaggeration of every injustice into unreformable tyranny. He suggests no substantive alternative beyond an undefined “socialism,” nor any coherent politics besides a “sublime madness” of imaginative zealotry. Hedges’s jeremiad will please left-wing romantics, but other readers may find it less inspiring. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM Partners. (May)