I do not want to be mean to anyone who liked this book or found value in it. The reason I picked it up is because it was getting hype on Page Bound. I understand that learning about all the aspects of life that our governments have sold away from us is deeply upsetting, and yet. And yet.

I would not recommend this book to anyone. Liberalist non-fiction like this is insidious and disempowering. It uses radical language and bends it to a neoliberalist agenda so that it appears more progressive. It always fears “sliding into socialism”. It never wants to jeopardize the free market. But at it’s core it relies on a circular logic that tells us that, while the government is bad and selling our basic survival needs away, that the government is also the only one who can save us from this. That is the TLDR, but there is so much more to it, so buckle in.

From my lefty perspective, the core concern about privatization should be that no individual, corporation or other powerful entity should control the things humans need to survive, or the basic elements of living a free and fulfilling life: that is food, water, education, housing, and healthcare should be readily available to every human being (not just citizens. I’d also argue they should all be free), and there should not be private roads, railways or militaries or other things that would act as barriers to individual freedom of movement or action. Where governments or other entities control these things, their primary concern should be ensuring the safety of the public and open access to these public assets (with as few barriers to care as possible, I’d argue there should be no barriers at all).

But that is not the concern of this book.

At the core of this book is a deeply neoliberalist ethos. That citizens pay for public services (through their taxes) and that, the government should be able to control and profit from those services, rather than corporations. While the book continually states that public goods should be for everyone and that we have a responsibility to care for each other, this is undermined by the economic framing of every single argument. Free public transit is framed, solely, as a way for people to get to their jobs, as a spark for economic growth. That is what the authors consider to be the public interest. The authors see the cost of privatization, first and foremost, as handing over of what should be government revenue to private corporations (and the resulting higher prices, lower quality, and stifling innovation). The human cost of poisoned drinking water, private prisons, or predatory charter schools that promise people a better life while drowning their “students” in debt, is briefly mentioned, but certainly not the core concern of the book. 



And this is because the book does not clearly define what it actually means by the public or the public interest. The book picks and chooses who constitutes the public at will. Frequently, the book equates the public with the government (except when the government is run by “the bad guys”, Trump, Devos, etc.), even as the authors acknowledge that “the good guys (Obama, Biden) also privatize public services, (and that state and local governments privatize public services as well). So, in this context, public means an idealized, mythologized version of the government that we can trust to protect our public services. There is a constant tension between what the government actually does, and what we imagine it should do, and the authors are disinterested in reckoning with that tension.

Core in this argument is a belief in some idyllic past when we all collectively agreed that the role of the government was to take care of everyone, and decided to create social services and libraries, etc. The authors continuously reference this imagined past. But this view of the state relies on a mythology of government that is demonstrably false. Modern western “democracies” do not have public services because “we collectively decided to take care of each other.” We have these public services because of the work of strikers and activists. We have these social services becuase of the looming “threat” of communism, and radical liberation movements both domestic and international. We have these services becuase the government co-opted the mutual aid work of communities, in order to control who has access to care. Recognizing this gives us the first clue about how to actually fight privatization: we need to start working together and taking care of each other.

But, it is important to remember that a government is not its people. Ideally, in a representative democracy, the government should represent the will of the people, but when discussing privatization, that is obviously not the case. Every act of privatization is a conscious act of the government and its representatives. The book offers a few examples where the public is represented by small groups of concerned activists pushing for change. In one case, activists fought the government for generations to get their representatives to listen to their concerns about food and drug safety and eventually create the FDA. Another example shows bereft citizens in a local city council meeting begging to avoid the privatization of their libraries. Their city council voted to privatize anyway! If this is the only recourse the book believes we have as “the public” to get the government to respond to our concerns, it’s profoundly disempowering. So much political will and effort is expended begging for scraps from disinterested politicians who do not have to listen to the public.

It is in the final pages of the book where we get the third definition of the public that this book offers which is “It’s all of us”. Which begs the question who these authors believe the intended audience for this book is. Who is “us”? It appears to be white, wealthy, upper middle-class people who wield considerable political influence. This book talks a lot about “governance” and how its exercised. There is a corporate tone to it. They are absolutely not talking about the poor, the disenfranchised, non-citizens, prisoners, or any other groups deliberately dispossessed by the neoliberal state.

Which is where another of this book’s core failures becomes most striking. At it’s most foundational, privatization is class warfare. It is a belief that only those who are able to pay for premium services should have access to care, while the rest of us can be left to struggle. But the authors of this book are wholly disinterested in examining the class element at the core of privatization. This ignores how privatization occurs.

Most privatization begins at the top. The wealthy and privileged create a secondary economy of services to isolate themselves from the violence of neoliberal capitalism. This usually looks like private health clinics, private schools, private roads, private neighbourhoods, private transit (like the google shuttles to ensure tech workers can make it to their jobs). This element of privatization is almost wholly ignored in the book. For this book’s authors privatization begins when, starved of resources, public services begin to struggle, which makes them ripe for exploitative privatization from below where governments will sell off these services to offload their costs onto the poor.

Which is where we bump into another core issue with this book: it does a terrible job at actually examining the web of causes that lead to privatization. There are so many reasons, beyond the simplistic math of “the government would make more money if it kept administering this service” that a government may choose to privatize public services. Foremost among these is because it creates a buffer around politicians between the harm they are causing and the public. It avoids accountability (and allows them to be re-elected despite the harm they cause). Privatization also offsets the costs of providing care onto the citizens. Politicians make money from the privatization of public services, through the sale of public assets, stocks and equity, or campaign donations. The PR rhetoric that privatization will be more efficient or affordable is just that, PR. And taking it at face value is at best, hopelessly naive.


But taking CEOs, politicians and other powerful actors at their word about their intentions is something the authors do again and again throughout this book. The book fails to explore the nuance between what a corporation, government, or individual politician states their motivations are, and what their actions reveal their motivations to be. This often leads to the authors characterizing truly bad actors like Betsy Devos as silly little goofs who don’t understand that charter schools are a scam or how businesses work. This is dangerous. Figures like Devos in particular have made fortunes from pretending they do not know the harm they cause (in institutions like Blackrock, AMWAY and charter schools), and they use those fortunes to continue to direct politics on a nearly unimaginable scale. Obscuring their intent is negligent. 


Which brings me, finally, to the altogether unsurprising, but wholly inadequate solutions that this book offers to fight privatization. Small policy changes to patent law. Other silly little policy suggestions that would absolutely be dismantled by any bad faith actors (if they managed to be adopted as actual policy in the first place). And an assertion that the best tool we have is to “believe in the government”, to avoid criticizing it (which the author’s assert lead to insurrections like January 6). And to top it all off: a public outreach campaign to show the public all the innovative technologies that the government has contributed to, to teach the uneducated public about what the government does!

Which, if I might say, is absolute horse shit. Individual people absolutely know what the government does. They know that the government has privatized their water and now rust comes out of their taps. They know that their parents have been kidnapped by ICE and are being held in private detention centres. They know that their schools are underfunded, and the only solution they are being offered is charter school vouchers. Especially the public that is being affected by these actions first-hand. No person relying on tanif cards for their food is surprised to learn that privatization is eating away at their meagre public assistance through fees. This suggestion that that a public information campaign about the role of government offers any true resistance to privatization reiterates the intended audience for this book: people who may be in favour of privatization because they have the means to afford private options. It is absolutely not average citizens.

I struggled a lot through so much of this book, but these conclusions made me catatonic with rage. Often liberalist non-fiction is gaslighting at its core. They use the word “us” so liberally. Tell us that we are the ones privatizing our own care, and muddy the waters regarding who is actually responsible for these actions (the wealthy elites that hold state power). They seek to argue that the people inflicting this harm are also the only people who are able to fix it, that we can overcome this violence by just voting for the right (benevolent wealthy) people to control every aspect of our lives. It relies on a circular logic wherein our elected officials (at every level of government) are selling off public assets, abandoning people made vulnerable by these violent systems, but the solution is to trust the government MORE. This is obviously not the solution.

The real way to fight back against neoliberalism and privatization is pressure from below. It is to create strong networks of care. It is mutual aid. It is meeting each other’s survival needs. It is to care for each other so fiercely that it threatens the neoliberalist state. To create community resources that cannot be sold. We need to take some agency. If this interests you, I really recommend books like Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Service Berry or Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. They offer different ways to imagine worlds where we take care of each other.

If you are interested in learning more about how public goods and services (and rhetoric) are co-opted by corporations and moneyed interests, I think the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer or Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have a lot more to offer than this book. If you are interested in tracing the roots of Neoliberal Capitalism, I think David Graeber’s Debt has a lot to dig into.

But please, if you are feeling hopeless, don’t read this book. It will only make you feel more hopeless. Remember we have agency. We can take care of each other.

Chain-Gang All-stars is a dystopia rooted in a world that feels like our own, because in many ways, it is. The violence of the world of Chain-Gang All stars is violence that currently exists: things like prison fight clubs, solitary confinement, and torture are currently an integral part of the prison industrial complex and the violence of state capitalism. In Chain Gang All Stars, this connection to our current reality is further emphasized by the way that footnotes are used to interject with real-world examples and statistics regarding the harms being described. 

Despite the horrors that this book details, it is deeply rooted in care, in creating the world we want through our choices and actions, even in the worst circumstances. Where Chain-Gang All-Stars really rises above other narratives that touch on revolution (i.e. the Hunger Games) is that the book never lets us forget that every single person is a human being, fully deserving of care. Even prisoners who have committed what we might consider unforgivable acts are presented as full-characters, with backstories, motivations and moving character arcs. I contrast this with the mindless killers in Districts 1 and 2 of the Hunger Games, flat characters that are never treated as fully human. Unlike Hunger Games, there is no District 1 here, whose people we can kill without considering their humanity. In the same way, there is no single bad-guy to root against (no President Snow) no single man we can topple to end the horrors, because the horrors, while perpetrated by individuals are systemic, and that system will continue to produce horrors until it is dismantled.

Chain-Gang All-Stars unrelentingly exposes us to all the ways that the systems we live under make us all complicit in the violence that it perpetuates to maintain control. From the point of view chapters by fans of Chain-Gang All-Stars, to the backstory about the creation the technology used to torture imprisoned people, to the way that imprisoned people “consent” to participating in the games, it never shies away from the fact that these systems are systems that we create together, they cannot operate without our participation. And the book also demonstrates the opposite, what happens when we abandon our privilege and use our power to put sand in the gears of the killing machine, the ripples it creates.

This book also has a lot to say about the role of modern corporations and advertising, mainstream sports culture (and the opulent exceptionalism, harm, and obfuscation of wider community harm), reality TV (and Foucault’s ideas about the Panopticon and the modern surveillance state). It is a layered text that I’ll likely keep thinking about for a long time, and that is not even considering the powerful parallelism between the books opening and it’s ending and the questions it asks us about how we can do good in a violent system.

This narrative hit close to home. My father was imprisoned. I visited him in prison several times. I am one of the justice involved people that the novel talks about, that became interested in abolition, because it is much harder to justify or ignore these systems when you have seen them up close. I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book, and especially the audiobook, because the narration and the singing (so much powerful and beautiful singing) heighten the already stellar writing.

I really wanted to like this book. I had heard such good things about it. The characters were so kindly and carefully drawn and the world building was interesting. But unfortunately, the more I think about this book, the angrier it makes me.

To start, this is not abstract for me. I have faced my own monster, as a child, alone in the world. Everything that follows, I write from personal experience both with the criminal justice system and my own attempts at restorative justice in the aftermath.

What Makes a Monster?

My first and primary criticism of this book is that, for a book that wants us to be on the lookout for monsters, to never trust in a world that assures us monsters no longer exist, it is completely disinterested in examining what a monster is. It’s easier this way. To believe in a world where there are some bad people we must always be on the lookout for, rather than confronting the truth that, we will all, at various times in our lives, be both victims and victimizers. I don’t think its a mistake that this book relies on the most egregious kind of harm we can imagine as a society, sexual abuse of a child by someone they trust, because it is easy to portray someone who has taken that action as a monster, maybe not deserving of death, but flattened into that singular action. All of the monster’s acts to build community and care for people disappear, when he becomes “bad”. The fact that the “monster” committed harm in the past is a further indictment. A person does not contain multitudes, in this estimation, there are only angels and monsters, and this monster was pretending to be an angel.

Flattening humans down into “good” and “bad” is dangerous. Both, because it grants us permission to throw people away, and because it allows us to put the good people on pedestals and ignore the harm they commit from that high place. I expected this to be the core argument of this book, but it was not. The most terrifying and difficult part of my own victimization has been reckoning with the fact the the person who harmed me, who I trusted, was both kind, caring, curious and loving, and also did an incredibly awful thing that can never be undone. Those things will always coexist. It would be so much easier if he was just a monster.

But even if we do concede to this book’s core premise that some humans are monsters, how are monsters created? That is a question this book does not address.

In reality, most of the people that we see as monsters, started of as scared victimized children, just like the children in this book. People who were introduced to violence by someone they cared about or trusted. In a quote from another book I recently read (We Do This Till We Free Us by Miriame Kaba) “No one enters violence by committing it”. But that is a much more difficult kind of complexity to face.

Divine Knowing, Recognizing Harm and Believing Victims

My next criticism focuses on the mechanism of Pet, a mysterious being from another world instilled with a divine and unquestionable knowing that a child has been harmed and where it happened. How convenient! If only every harmed child had a being that could step through a painting and alert people in their community to take action! Although, instead, one might wish for divine intervention to stop the monster before he causes harm. Or a kind of divine intervention that appears to the actual victim, not some distant acquaintance who has to go on a dark treasure hunt to find the culprit. Which is the core of my criticism. Pet acts as a convenient mechanism within the book to replace having to actually notice and navigate the complexity of behaviours that might indicate a child has been harmed. These warning signs of abuse aren’t even included in the book, except in passing. Pet also replaces the challenge of determining the truth when all you have are messy, first-hand accounts of situations that often have no witnesses. The mechanism of Pet is a lazy way of dealing with this. Pet acts as proof so that the victim does not have to prove himself, he incites the search, and isolates a particular target, so that Jam knows exactly where to look and who to talk to. That is not how the world works, and offers us no framework for how to navigate these situations in community (when we will not have a literal biblical angel spouting divine truth). We will just have people we care about, standing in front of us, and narratives that aren’t always as clear as we’d hope.

The book offers very little to help us recognize abuse when it is happening, other than vague platitudes, that monsters exist and we must be on the lookout for them. Part of my own personal history, is that my victimization was not just personal, but intergenerational. My mom also had to face monsters, and when she had children she was determined that she would protect us from them. She was constantly vigilant. But constant vigilance isn’t actual protection. What signs are we looking for? Not just of harm, but of relationships that could lead to harm? What mechanisms exist to redirect behaviour before harm happens? How do we create openness and freedom from shame that will allow victims to speak openly about their experiences? None of these questions are addressed in this book.

The Role of the Victim

Which brings me to my next area of concern. For a book about a victimized child, man is that kid not a consideration at all in this narrative. He is a plot point, for the search for a monster, for the reckoning the people around him must do, for the justice system’s machinations, but he is barely a character in his own right. This sucks.

So much of this kind of trauma is a removal of your agency, and in this book, Moss has almost no agency at all. He is not included as a partner in the search for or quest to confront his monster, and is not a part of any justice practices that come forward afterward. He’s not even allowed to speak his truth within the book, because it is seen as too shameful. All this is presented as “protecting him”. Pet even intervenes to force the monster to the tell the truth so that Moss never has to speak aloud what happened.

I recognize that under our current criminal justice system, victims are often retraumatized through the processes of evidence collection, police interviews, and the violence of cross-examination during a trial, but having processes that are meant to address harm that completely exclude the person who was harmed is not what any vision of abolition should look like. Even in our current system, the victims of people like Larry Nassar were given a voice to be able to talk about what happened to them and the harm that it caused out in the open. There is a catharsis in this. There is a difference between not being forced to talk about what happened, and not being allowed. Not all victims want to be silent, even if that silence is protective, and even if the victim is a child.

So much of my fear as a child about disclosing my monster was the way that once I talked about what happened to me, processes would unfold without my control or input. Like a can of worms I could not close once I opened them. This lack of agency compounds the initial harm, and that is not addressed at all in the book.

What Does Restorative Justice Look Like?

Now I come to my final point, and I think it’s the thing that first sparked my rage at this book, that spurred me to look deeper. This book talks a lot about rehabilitation for the “monsters”, but never actually examines what that could look like. At one point, early in the novel Jam reflects on how there are no more “free” monsters, that all the monsters have been locked away. Her father, Aloe equates this with prison and we are literally never given any information about the restorative justice practices that might dispute this. Which also sucks. As discussed in my first point, we all live lives where we will be both victim and victimizer. We will all cause harm. A world where we separate the “monsters” from society is the nightmare world of witch hunts and cancel culture that people talk about now, where one bad action can damn you, so you can never acknowledge the harm you’ve caused for fear of punishment. I do not want to live in a world that locks people away for causing harm.

At my core I am an abolitionist. I am an abolitionist because of the harm that was done to me and the systems that did nothing to stop it from happening again. The person who harmed me was imprisoned, and it did literally nothing to stop it from happening again. I want to abolish police, prisons, every vestige of our current carceral “justice system” that deals in violence, control and punishment, and the surrounding carceral institutions like psychiatry that seek to control and not care for people.

I think that abolition is the only way that we can create a world where, when harm happens (becuase we cannot control our way into a world where harm will never happen) we are able to discuss it openly, and find ways to repair that harm, both so that the victim can find a sense of safety again, and so that the victimizer will not continue to perpetrate harm.

In this book we are given a confusing vision of what restorative justice, “rehabilitation” and repair could look like. Our first introduction to the world, is a world where harm has been eliminated through violence. They took all the bad people and killed them or locked them away, we are told. Locked them away for some unspecific kind of rehabilitation. We are presented with a world where angels are in charge, the good guys, who we cannot criticize. Even when an “angel” is revealed to cause harm, it is still the angels who get to determine what justice is. They are the authority that we must defer to. This book concludes with a trial, or a hearing, they are practically indistinguishable, and the monster is sentenced to “rehabilitation” and a few new laws are passed. What rehabilitation might include is given less consideration than a footnote. Wild when we consider that the “monster” that we are presented with is a man, who was otherwise a kind, caring and upstanding member of the community, and the only answer that is offered is unspecific banishment.

This is a liberal approach to justice/abolition that relies on maintaining most of our current structures of power and reforming them. But it does not get to the heart of how we can create a kinder world. 

I was really hoping for a book that moved beyond this limited model, that reimagined what accountability in community could look like examining indigenous societies (that had no conception of the criminal), or at least current abolitionist arguments. But that is not what was presented.

Which is all to say, I was very disappointed in this book, and I think if you are looking for a truly abolitionist vision of the world Louise Erdich’s LaRose is one of the most fascinating explorations of harm and repair that I have ever read. Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts also has a great exploration of what an abolitionist view of repair could look like. This was not it, for me.