Mike McCarthy
@its_mccarthy
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Director of Community Studies @ucsc . Fellow @rooseveltinst . wrote Dismantling Solidarity. The Master's Tools @VersoBooks Jan 2025. editor @critsoc . Likes: 2x2s
Joined February 2014
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*I* have the
@VersoBooks
proofs! If you 1) want to understand how finance ruined democracy, 2) want a critical social/political theory of capitalism & democracy, 3) are curious about sortition and/or 4) want a concrete plan to empower the demos against the elite…could be for you
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Socialize the risk, privatize the profits; rinse and repeat.
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Robert Stolz’s translation of Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology. Jun was the most important Marxist during Japan’s fascist period (who shared a fate with Gramsci). His is a theory of ideological change that shows how liberalism becomes fascism without breaking from itself.
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My university communications office: we didn’t include your
@jacobinmag
piece in our announcement of public scholarship because it’s not high-profile and mainstream enough. Something more mainstream: that made the cut: US Lacrosse Magazine. The joys of political censorship!
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🚨 The W.E.B. Du Bois essay, “The Negro Worker in America,” is available now for the first time in English at
@CritSoc
. Early Du Bois on racial capitalism. 🚨
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Leaving aside $11bn in from Warp Speed to other cos, "Pfizer, for its part, received a $455 million grant from the German government to develop its vaccine, and then, by our count, nearly $6 billion in purchase commitments from the United States and the European Union"
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🚨my new book🚨
THE MASTER'S TOOLS will come out on
@VersoBooks
November 2024! It's going to be a month well suited for a book about democratic erosion and renewal.
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This exciting volume on state theory comes out later this year! It includes essays by
@rafkhach
, R. Hunter,
@enanopoulos
,
@n_hold
,
@alybatt
, J. Chorley Foster,
@SteveMaher18
,
@smaquanno
,
@chrisokane_nyc
,
@kmunro_econ
, and one by myself on conjunctural state theory.
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90s postmodern geography was the free jazz of social theory. From Dear & Flusty 1998.
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RIP to the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. His 1972 study "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" proved that there is no genetic basis to race. Once we lose sight of the fact that race itself is ideology, we are back on the terrain of backward race science.
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📣In a forth. paper
@SocTheory
,
@matthikaru
and I wade into the “class reductionism” debate within Marxism. We argue that the real problem is what we call “class abstractionism” and propose an alternative theory of the primacy of class (“class dynamism”). Preprint link and a🧵1/
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She can’t be a Marxist because the real ones don’t recognize the “middle class” as a legitimate class category.
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On the distinction between proletarian and wage-worker. That final line has a certain sting doesn’t it. From Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume II.
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The
#gamestonk
episode seems to have reinforced the idea, which I now see people on left the repeating, that democratizing finance is about widening the access to capital markets. That's a failure of imagination. Better is the reallocation of the capital in those markets.
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This fall I’m joining Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz as Director of Community Studies & Associate Professor. As a product of the UC and raised a few hours away its a dream to be able to think and build things there.
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From Erik Olin Wright's unpublished 1974 manuscript, Chess Perversions and Other Diversions. The "Revolution Chess" rule variant.
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In the liberal political imagination, there are only rigid unbreakable political institutions. Swings in public opinion, contentious politics, and popular forms of power all fade to the back in favor of the cold iron cage of Schoolhouse Rock's How a Bill Becomes a Law.
Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg — none of them have a plausible path to passing the agenda they’ve promised.
Enter epiphany politics, and its toxic cycle of high hopes and deep disappointments:
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It's that time when faculty begins to assemble new syllabi for their courses. Here is a list of key scholarly contributions in social & political theory to class analysis from the past 12 months or so to use. No excuse to skip class. Add what I missed if you have something! 1/17
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A humble suggestion for writers at The Atlantic to do a book club - specifically the chapter on the civil rights movement:
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Big life news. I will be joining
@USC
and the
@berggruenInst
next year as a research fellow. This gives me a year and a half to complete my democratizing finance ms for
@VersoBooks
and to focus on public scholarship. My family is thrilled about the move and adventure.
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This article at
@CritSoc
by
@yige_dong
is the first ethnography of Foxconn in Zhengzhou, the world's largest iPhone plant. By embedding social reproduction theory in an analysis of the workplace, it finds a new Chinese labor regime: "hegemonic precarity."
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This is a more general phenomena in contemporary capitalist countries...I’d encourage folks to read The Entrepreneurial State by
@MazzucatoM
and State of Innovation by Block and Keller if they doubt it
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I find the arguments by
@Matthuber78
in this thread untenable, not because it is "class reductionist" but because it is "abstractionist" and ahistorical. It offers at best a partial view of working class politics but we need a fuller one. Why...
Somewhat sad that my view centering the WC (what Mike Davis called Marx's "lost theory" of "proletarian agency") gets dubbed as "extremely class reductionist" or "hyper workerist". For me, it's just Marxism. Alas, such is the state of the Marxist left! 8/n
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"An antiracism without a critique of capitalism doesn't advance us." Robin D. G. Kelley on Ibram X. Kendi's podcast.
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His conduct -- the insanely long posts, the army of personal vendetta labor at his disposal, and above all the utter abundance of free time -- provides a powerful case against passive income.
A fun fact:
Our lawyers used the Wayback Machine to check
@MIT
's plagiarism policy back when Neri wrote her thesis in 2009.
It turns out that MIT's academic integrity handbook did not require citation or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her
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One of the weirdest convergences I've witnessed in the past decade is the one between class-first leftists, the cultural right and free speech liberals to anti-pmc wokism. Understanding this unholy trinity, de Boer-Carlson-Pinker for ex, would make for a great cultural analysis.
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Here is
@OlufemiOTaiwo
on the politics of racial capitalism in the first issue of
@HammerandHope
, the new
@KeeangaYamahtta
@JenParker393
project!
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Such a useful book, I return to it a lot. And love that cover image.
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Why do economic sociology when you can do political economy instead?
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And yes, revenue does not equal profit, but they are related (especially when costs are partially covered by the German state). Go read their quarterly financials if you have lingering questions.
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I’m increasingly convinced that the fragmented character of the working class in contemporary capitalist countries on the basis of lived experience is as big or bigger a barrier to class formations than pure collective action problems. Here is Wright, 2019.
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Absolutely bonkers how Blackstone was founded in 1985 and less than 40 years later it is the world’s largest real-estate owner. Even more bonkers, *all* the housing in its current portfolio was purchased since 2008.
Read Our Lives in Their Portfolios by Christophers for story
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I am just a dumb former construction worker that stumbled into the academy, but maybe "nobody understands working class interests better than me and my intellectual friends (none of whom are from the working class), not least of which the workers themselves" isn't serious.
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RIP to Mike Parker. Parker, alongside Labor Notes and the Association for Union Democracy, helped to build a perspective that argues that union democracy is the basis of labor power — and the main means to economic democracy. A huge loss, but the ideas live on.
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You wouldn’t be able to tell it from the way the interviewer asks the questions, but Shawn Fain is just articulating one of the only views that transcends the American political divide within the non-elite majority right now.
Shawn Fain, President of the
@UAW
, went on CBS.
He said that billionaires should not exist, their wealth hoarding is inhumane, and that they're engaged in class warfare on the working class.
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Interesting Political Theory essay shows from Gramsci, many paths are possible. Hall developed a politics that prioritized conjunctural analysis, while Laclau argued for hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, that wasn't conjuncture specific.
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You *can't* do sound class analysis without some methodological understanding and application of levels of abstraction. The basic tool is fundamental for critical social theory broadly and Marxism in particular...
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Ciompi Revolt of 1378: the working class in Florence rose up against the aristocracy, seized the government, held power for almost two months, and then were massacred. Machiavelli's account of a speech by one of the textile workers to rally the crowd:
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More proof that mainstream economics is basically all about making discoveries that sociologists and Marxists have known for decades.
Holy shit guys the rise in inequality and stagnation in wages apparently is due to *checks notes* declining worker power!
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Policymakers face a fundamental trade off: lives saved versus profits generated. Without greater public say in these decisions, lives will not be maximized.
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The
@nytimes
review of Du Bois's book Darkwater, Aug 8 1920. "All Lives Matter" exactly 100 years ago: "his intense concentration on one subject leads him to turn general, universal wrongs into special negro wrongs. The error runs all through his book and disfigures it."
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Check out
@mer__edith
’s razor sharp piece on “democratizing” access to AI research as tech capture. Absurd just how much concentration of power goes under the label, “democratizing.”
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Article at
@CritSoc
shows how Du Bois's position on Israel shifted from Black Zionism to viewing it as an ally of the neo-colonial powers. It shows that Palestinian solidarity in US Black politics had origins in the 1950s, in Du Bois's Pan-Africanism.
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JP Morgan now has nearly $4 trillion in assets, that’s almost 18% of total GDP. That exposure poses a systemic threat to financial stability, nationally and globally. Wrt finance, the problem of “too big to fail” has gotten substantially worse since the crisis.
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This great piece by Aziz Rana at
@DissentMag
(link below) is a clear eyed account of the variegated terrain a class politics must be built on today.
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The release of this recent Reed-Michaels collection sparked a bit of a reaction, not just because of the broad politics of the collection, class v identity etc, but more specifically because of the inclusion of an essay by Reed on trans and racial identity.
Just received a copy of Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger’s new edited volume which brings together a number of essays by Adolph Reed Jr and Walter Benn Michaels. Here’s the TOC:
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Claus Offe's democratic socialist critique of full employment (from an interview in 1983). Implications for green transition and economic democracy debates.
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As someone that dropped out of high school to work in construction who now studies finance and social theory - I have a soft spot for cases of Horatio Alger exceptionalism like
@NathanTankus
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The American left is disoriented. And the anti-idpol fixation isn't a good path forward. It's a response to the Bernie moment loss, a searching for a culprit and finding it within. But reactiveness is no basis to build socialist solidarity -- other kinds maybe, but not socialist.
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It's in the
@VersoBooks
catalog! The theory of democratic rupture was the result of dialog with so many community and labor activists. I hope that it both recasts finance as a source of democratic erosion and offers a path where investment promotes flourishing over extraction.
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We put an excellent conference together on the future of industrial policy in our "rethinking the coordination problem" series.
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Tomorrow Milwaukee can elect a socialist slate. It would be the first time in Milwaukee’s history a Black socialist has won office - let alone two. I interviewed Dana Kelley,
@AtlasspeaksMKE
&
@AlexBrowerMKE
about the movement for
@jacobinmag
.
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I got tenure. From construction worker to this. It feels nice.
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An rare mix of public policy writers, financial & democracy activists, political economists and social theorists all in one place at the
@berggruenInst
discussing a concrete problem - how can we make investment democratic?
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Critical political economy folks — I’m revising my capitalism course to spend about 1/3 of the time on alternatives to capitalist markets. Looking for readings on innovative ideas to include — can be reforms or system-level alternatives (ie market socialism). Suggestions?
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If you think that "the left should be agnostic on everything except massive economic redistribution," which I see many do, then you should really read this paper at the American Sociological Review.
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Add Good Company to your reading list!
@lenorepalladino
is today’s best critic of the myth of shareholder value.
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A powerful personal anecdote that the late Erik Olin Wright gave in one of his course lectures on transformative social change. This gets to the heart of why I have dedicated myself to critical social science. Very slightly paraphrased: 1
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What a wonderful gift. My family framed my letter of appreciation from Congresswoman
@RashidaTlaib
for work on the Public Banking Act of 2023. Kids very official here, public service to the working-class sector of our government. Thank you fam & Congresswoman!
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Translation: "I am done with people's most proximate political concerns."
That this "culture wars" framework has come to dominate left discourse is a sign that that discourse is principally driven by the concerns of left pundits and academics and not those of actual organizers.
I’m sorry but if you think this is what "moving to the right" sounds like, you've lost the plot.
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There is a strange dearth of people doing critical work on finance in the US - esp in the social sciences. One of those things that the academy here isn't much interested in despite it being the juggernaut of global capitalism. A real contrast with critical scholarship in Europe.
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Crypto worsens climate and can't fund public goods. Instead, we can usher in the green transition we need now more than ever with public finance governed deliberatively by people drawn from the public by lot. Here I wrote how at
@NoemaMag
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@TrevorVossberg
@philoso_foster
The counterfactual is that the massive role that the state plays in R&D that is socially useful not be converted principally into private financial gains, and hence inequality intensifying.
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It’s me trying to convince a room of critical sociologists that we should be writing “recipes for the cook shops of the future.”We shouldn’t just “critique” we should also “construct”! Other panelist were Greta Krippner &
@CihanTugal
(who I might not have won to the view).
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Who is getting crushed by this recession in the short term? Overwhelmingly poor working class people. They need to be the ones bailed out this time around.
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I once reached out to Charles Tilly to spark a conversation about contentious politics. IIRC we had a useful exchange. Then he sent me this nearly 40 page (funnily) annotated bibliography on political identity. Maybe of use to someone, 15+ years later:
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At
@MarquetteU
#MUnion
adjuncts and grad workers are sitting in for a union. Without admin agreement to respect their vote, admin might challenge at NLRB. If they win grad worker rights will be hit everywhere. This has happened before so critical. Please tweet to support them.
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🎉🎉🎉This is landmark legislation. Democratic public finance is a fundamental first step to tackling concentrated human deprivation, political power inequality, systemic financial risk, and climate collapse. Huge thanks to
@RepRashida
and
@AOC
for introducing it!🎉🎉🎉
Instead of our Wall Street-dominated banking system, with its predatory and discriminatory practices, we can build a democratic financial system that puts community needs above private profit. That is why
@RepAOC
and I are introducing the Public Banking Act.
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I've taken on role of senior associate editor at
@CritSoc
. We publish blind peer-reviewed research that seeks to better understand contemporary capitalist societies with the aim of transforming them. Thrilled to be a part of the project!
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Paul Volcker has died at the age of 92. I am posting this piece I wrote on his devastating impact on working people's lives during his time as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
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Great article by
@MarxinHell
at
@EJPTheory
. Those deep in the political capitalism debate should give it a read. It is a very careful examination of the concept of primitive accumulation and on the contemporary place of the state in accumulation.
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How finance capitalism works…underinvest in reversing climate change, over-extract from the increasing environmental risks.
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If you have ever wondered why there is an overlap between the anti-woke left and right, I think "class abstractionism" is principle theoretical grounds. See article here:
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Joining the Roosevelt Institute as a fellow in the Corporate Power Program! I will be working with
@NikoLusiani
and other
@rooseveltinst
fellows to make worker finance more democratic, secure, and invested in the public interest (i.e. housing, green infra, etc). Time to build!
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If someone were to say “I don’t get this whole financialization thing and everything I read is so full of jargon, I don’t know where to begin,” my response would be to hand them
@graceblakeley
’s book Stolen. Clear and incredibly accessible given its scope and subject.
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In this California housing crisis, it is shocking that the state’s public university system (which I attended) is investing in a housing privatization machine. If these funds were invested in more democratic ways rather than by CIOs, we would see a more just allocation.
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@JonahBirch
@jacobinmag
Look, had it been “Boogie Board USA Magazine” things might be different.
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I’m thinking of the times my own father had manic public episodes and wasn’t killed. Thinking of all the times I’ve rode the F train to see something identical resolve without violence. Based on the facts, that people are defending this murder is evidence of deep social sickness.
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Nearly half of the US population does not have a job.
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I’m featured in the latest
@jacobinmag
on political revolution alongside
@nataliesurely
, Jared Abbott, Dustin Gaustella, and Daniel Finn. The keyword in my title is *could,* but we need to be cleared-eyed about the pitfalls so we can best avoid them.
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Upon arriving at my new office this morning in downtown LA, I learned that it is the building in which original Blade Runner was filmed (my fav). My mind is blown.
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Gramsci nails the critique of *class abstractionism* in the Prison Notebooks. The effort to treat “authentic and worthy” movements as the ones that conform to an “abstract scheme” is “nothing but an expression of passivity.”
Big h/t to
@grundrza
for sharing with me.
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🚨My paper with
@matthikaru
, The Problem of Class Abstractionism, is up now at
@SocTheory
. We take on the static and abstract view of working class politics that is becoming increasingly popular and argue for a dynamic and conjunctural alternative. 🧵👇
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Minsky's basic financial crisis model described the life cycle of the current crypto bubble pop perfectly
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It's amazing to live in a place like Milwaukee where the activists are courageous against all odds.
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Just sent off a complete draft of my book manuscript on democracy & finance to my editor and felt a sudden drop in the belly and lightheaded vertigo.
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