What are you reading?

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blindpig
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 26, 2017 6:13 pm

So I've just finished my second reading of 'What Is To Be Done', Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It ain't so bad as many critics would have it. It is also not a book 'about communism', there is room for improvement in that regard. It is very much about materialism and it handles that brilliantly. It is also got to be the most strident piece of feminist literature to that date, beautiful. Here's a pdf:

https://archive.org/details/cu31924096961036

Now I gotta re-read 'In Watermelonsugar' Richard Brautigan, which, in my possibly deranged opinion is an allegory or something like that concerned with the dictatorship of the proletariat. PDF here:

http://miscellaneousmaterial.blogspot.c ... sugar.html

With these in mind I'm gonna try to write somethin'.

Also re-working my way through Samuel Delaney's SF
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Allen17
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Allen17 » Thu Jan 11, 2018 6:09 pm

Currently working through The German Ideology. Incredibly useful and entirely relevant material, especially to a relative novice like myself :P

From Part I (bolding mine):
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more below) and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as “self-generation of the species” (“society as the subject”), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.

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blindpig
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 13, 2018 6:19 pm

I have been reading 'Biology As Ideology' by R.C. Lewontin and I should have read it 20 years ago. As someone who has understood the world thru Biology it's a wonder that I got anything right though the previous decade of exposure to Marxist literature has helped a lot. This book is so materialist, a tour de force of dialectical reasoning that it makes me smile stupidly. Marxist will spot this from page one. This is required reading.
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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:51 pm

blindpig wrote:
Mon Aug 13, 2018 6:19 pm
I have been reading 'Biology As Ideology' by R.C. Lewontin and I should have read it 20 years ago. As someone who has understood the world thru Biology it's a wonder that I got anything right though the previous decade of exposure to Marxist literature has helped a lot. This book is so materialist, a tour de force of dialectical reasoning that it makes me smile stupidly. Marxist will spot this from page one. This is required reading.
I'm going to get to this one shortly myself.

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:19 pm

What I will not be reading....

***********************

Miéville, China.October. The Story of the Russian Revolution. London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017. $26.95.
Grover Furr
First published: 15 February 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12321
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The primary requisites for any historical work are evidence and objectivity in studying that evidence. China Miéville's October has neither. There are no footnotes or endnotes. October is a partisan Trotskyist screed that ignores evidence—including that from Trotskyist historians—that threatens to complicate his simple framework: “Trotsky, good; Stalin and the post‐Trotsky Soviet Union, bad.”

During the 1930s Leon Trotsky himself was widely published in, and handsomely paid by, the capitalist press. Miéville's October is similarly celebrated and for the same reason: it is an anticommunist attack on the heroic period of the Soviet Union, the historical legacy of the revolution of 1917.

What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the twenty‐five years after Trotsky's exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world‐historical event. Like Trotsky and the whole tribe of anticommunists, Miéville slanders them.

October is a one‐sided interpretation of the insurrection of October 25/November 7, 1917 in Petrograd and the events leading up to it. At the end Miéville outlines an explicitly Trotskyist, and completely inaccurate, interpretation of the subsequent development of the history of the Soviet Union. The flagrant incompetence, even dishonesty, of this false thumbnail sketch of Soviet history naturally raises the question: How historically accurate is the main part of the book?

Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (HRR) likewise contains no footnotes. It is a frankly anti‐Stalin polemic published after his exile from the USSR. Beyond the Trotsky cult no one takes it to be a reliable account. At almost 900 pages only dedicated scholars or Trotsky cultists read it.

Miéville's text is much shorter. And Miéville is a skilled story‐teller. But how much of it is accurate?

Miéville:

…the embrace of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis of the Bolsheviks … (314)

This is Trotskyist dogma. In fact, Lenin had repeatedly said that Russia had “all that is necessary and sufficient” for building a socialist society. (“On Cooperation”, 1922). Miéville also claims that building socialism in the USSR was a wish for “autarchic socialism” and a “bad hope” (sic). Better that the Soviet Union fail than that it attempt to build socialism! Hitler, Winston Churchill, and in short the capitalists and imperialists of the world, would certainly have agreed.

Miéville:

[Lenin] grows suspicious of Stalin's personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary. His advice is not followed. (313)

Valentin Sakharov's detailed study of Lenin's supposed “Testament” was published in 2003. Sakharov concludes these documents are forgeries, not by Lenin. Stephen Kotkin agrees.1 Miéville ignores Sakharov's study.

The revolution in the rest of Russia is entirely missing—even the ten‐day armed struggle in Moscow, which was not a coup against minimal opposition as in Petrograd, but a hard‐fought Bolshevik victory with hundreds of casualties. Yet Miéville discusses only Petrograd.

Following his hero Trotsky Miéville can say nothing but lies about Stalin. A few examples:

There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party's Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him’. Would that the rest of Sukhanov's description had been accurate: that Stalin had remained no more than glimpsed, ‘looming up now and then dimly and without leaving any trace’. (97)

The words highlighted here are accurate. The rest is a “cheap shot.” Trotsky himself wrote that “Sukhanov obviously underestimates Stalin” here. (HRR, 2092) But Miéville cannot resist insulting Stalin.

These words are from the minutes of the Russian Buro of March 12, 1917 published in 1962 after Khrushchev's lie‐filled attack on Stalin at the XXII Party Congress and the same year Khrushchev expelled Viacheslav Molotov from the Party.

Molotov was one of the three members of the Russian Buro already in Petrograd in March 1917 along with Aleksandr Shliapnikov and Piotr Zalutskii.3 And Molotov says this never happened! He wrote: “The transcript of March 12 is completely inaccurate as regards the factual situation.4

Shliapnikov published three volumes of memoirs on the year 1917. He discusses the arrival of Kamenev and Stalin from Siberian exile5 but mentions nothing about Stalin's being given less than full membership in the Buro. Even Trotsky, who misses no opportunity to attack and belittle Stalin, does not mention it.

In fact, it cannot be true because Stalin was already a member of the Russian Buro! He had been appointed to it and to the Central Committee in 1912 by the All‐Russian Conference of the Bolshevik party.6

Miéville claims:

…the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks … (104)

This is a lie. Miéville copied it straight from Trotsky, who cites no evidence (HRR, 721–2). Trotsky also lied when he wrote that Stalin admitted this error in 1924. In reality, what Stalin in 1924 acknowledged as “profoundly mistaken” was the policy of “pressure on the Provisional Government through the Soviets.”7

Melville:

… his [Trotsky's] supporters are … driven to suicide. (314)

Also false. Adol'f Ioffe, the only Trotskyist suicide of the 1920s about whom we know anything, cited illness as his reason. Ioffe's letter was published in the official Party journal Bol'shevik in 1927.

Miéville calls collectivization “brutal.” In reality collectivization was a real reform that modernized Soviet agriculture and stopped the 1,000‐year cycle of killer famines, four of which had struck Russia and Ukraine in the 1920s alone.

Miéville on the Moscow Trials:

Party activists are … forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations. (315)

False again. We have had strong evidence of the guilt of the Moscow Trials defendants for decades. Beginning in 1980 the discoveries of Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué proved that Trotsky had consistently lied about the Moscow Trials and his own conspiracies in all his writings, including in “The Red Book on the Moscow Trials” (1936) and to the Dewey Commission in 1937. The clandestine bloc of Rights, Trotskyites, and other former oppositionists, did indeed exist. Broué's discovery dismantles Trotsky's claims that he and the defendants were “framed.”8 Trotskyist writers do not mention it.

Stalin, however, did not lie about Trotsky. In a Pravda article of November 6, 1918 Stalin acknowledged Trotsky's leading role in winning over the Petrograd garrison. Stalin retained this passage in his book The October Revolution, published in 1934, when Trotsky had been slandering Stalin for years.

According to Molotov Stalin complained that Trotsky's contribution to the revolution was being suppressed.

In 1939 Stalin looked through the second volume of the “History of the Civil War” and asked me:

But where is Trotsky's picture?

But he is an enemy of the people!

He was People's Commissar of the Army and Navy!—said Stalin.9

At the second and third Moscow Trials Trotsky was charged with conspiring with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan against the USSR and with plotting assassination and sabotage in the USSR. There is a great deal of evidence to support these charges.10 Miéville ignores it.

In 1961 Robert McNeal wrote:

Rarely has the historical image of a major leader been shaped as much by his arch‐enemy as the generally accepted conception of Stalin has been shaped by the writings of Trotsky. … To the end of his life [Trotsky] could not believe that so vulgar a person as Stalin was capable of the most staggering social and economic undertakings or that “history” could continue to suffer such a creature.11

Miéville's October perpetuates this historical falsification.

The accomplishments of the socialist Soviet Union: collectivization, industrialization, a panoply of social welfare benefits for workers, the defeat of the Nazi hordes, the feats of the Communist International under Soviet leadership—these were the pivot on which the history of the world in the twentieth century turned. If we are to learn the lessons of 1917 we must discard biased, subjective, and anticommunist accounts like Miéville's and face the evidence squarely, no matter how disillusioning this will be to some of us. The new and better world for which the communists of the last century fought can only be built on a foundation of historical truth.

Notes
1 Stalin. Volume I. Paradoxes of Power (New York: Penguin, 2014), 498–501.
2 Haymarket Press, 2008.
3 Sovetskaia Istoricheskaia Entsiklopedia, at http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/sie/15125/РУССКОЕ; Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 32.
4 Vladimir Nikonov, Molotov. Molodost’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 234–5
5 A. Shliapnikov, Kanun Semnadtsatogo Goda. Semnadtsatyi God. 2 (Moscow: Izd. ‘Respublika’, 1992), 444–5.
6 P. V. Volobuev, ed. Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1917. Biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Nauchno Izdatel'stvo ‘Bol'shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia’, 1993) 303 col. 3.
7 J. V. Stalin. Works. Volume 6. 1924. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 348.
8 A thorough discussion of this evidence is in Grover Furr, Trotsky's ‘Amalgams’. Trotsky's Lies, the Moscow Trials as Evidence, The Dewey Commission (Kettering, OH: Erythrós Press & Media, LLC, 2015).
9 Feliks Chuev, Molotov. Poluderzhavnyi Vlastelin (Moscow: Olma‐Press, 2002), 300. This is the expanded version of the Russian edition of Conversations with Molotov.
10 Grover Furr, Leon Trotsky's Collaboration with Germany and Japan. Trotsky's Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume Two. (Kettering, UK: Erythros Press & Media, LLC, 2017).
11 Robert McNeal, “Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalin.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 3 (1961), 97.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... wusa.12321

Too bad, I much enjoyed Miéville's early work.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:50 pm

Like Anax used to say, read anything you can get your eyeballs on. I agree that the text's lack of sourcing is a problem but I have this book and have read portions of it.

I don't disagree with any of Furr's criticisms except to say that some of them seem a bit overstated.
Rarely has the historical image of a major leader been shaped as much by his arch‐enemy as the generally accepted conception of Stalin has been shaped by the writings of Trotsky. … To the end of his life [Trotsky] could not believe that so vulgar a person as Stalin was capable of the most staggering social and economic undertakings or that “history” could continue to suffer such a creature.11
Co-shaped by Trotsky and Hitler to be honest. Many of Hitler's claims continue to be repeated verbatim (Stalin gutted the Red Army, left the SU wide open to invasion and so on). This despite the fact that the historical record proves the Nazi's sonsofbitches violently wrong.

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:57 am

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:50 pm
Like Anax used to say, read anything you can get your eyeballs on. I agree that the text's lack of sourcing is a problem but I have this book and have read portions of it.

I don't disagree with any of Furr's criticisms except to say that some of them seem a bit overstated.
Rarely has the historical image of a major leader been shaped as much by his arch‐enemy as the generally accepted conception of Stalin has been shaped by the writings of Trotsky. … To the end of his life [Trotsky] could not believe that so vulgar a person as Stalin was capable of the most staggering social and economic undertakings or that “history” could continue to suffer such a creature.11
Co-shaped by Trotsky and Hitler to be honest. Many of Hitler's claims continue to be repeated verbatim (Stalin gutted the Red Army, left the SU wide open to invasion and so on). This despite the fact that the historical record proves the Nazi's sonsofbitches violently wrong.
That particular claim I just heard from my old war-gaming buddy a few weeks ago. It's pernicious. That only Nazi sources are references in the 'suggested reading' of these games got something to do with it, I think.The war criminal Friedrich von Mellenthin's 'Panzer Battles' being chief among these. It's got it all: anti-communism, Orientalism, Feld Grau, a compendium of whining cause the noble Wehrmacht was defeated by human wave attacks and Slavic cunning and those stupid Nazis mucking things up, doncha know?

Overstatement is Furr's weakness, I'm afraid. Recently read' Khrushchev Lied', it ain't really necessary, the 'case' is solid enough.

For my part I'd like to see Melville return to Bas-Lag, all I want from him is a little entertainment. Although I found little objectionable in 'Iron Council' I found it a little heavy handed.
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 27, 2018 2:47 pm

I have been re-reading 'A Forest of Kings ' by David Freidel & Linda Schele in preparation for trip to said forest. I really enjoyed this book when I first read it 25 years ago but on this reading I find that though the work of interpretation is superb the conclusion about the nature of ancient Mayan civilization ain't got a materialist bone in it's flabby-ass body. Suffice to say, I find the contention that the Mayan people built these cities entirely out of voluntary religious conviction, without any material considerations, lacking.

I promise I will not try to pick fights with the tour guides...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 25, 2018 1:46 pm

Image

A Marxist History of Capitalism
Posted Oct 19, 2018 by Ian Angus

Originally published: Climate and Capitalism (October 16, 2018) |

Since the 1970s, Marxist discussion of how and when capitalism was born has been dominated by two competing academic currents. World-System Theory, first enunciated by Immanuel Wallerstein, locates the origin of capitalism in the expansion of world trade and the plunder of the new world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Political Marxism, developed by Robert Brenner, says the transition took place somewhat earlier, and only in rural England, where feudal lords converted themselves into capitalist landlords.

While each school has produced important and worthwhile historical studies, both are ultimately one-sided and mechanical, arguing either that there is no capitalism unless wage-labor has replaced all other relations of production, or that the presence of any capitalism at all overrides all other modes, including slavery and hunter-gatherer. The Marxist view that capitalism developed dialectically, incorporating and exploiting pre-capitalist societies, and that it was not fully formed until the rise of factory production, plays little or no role in either approach.

Though very different in analysis and implication, both approaches hold that capitalism was fully formed by the 1500s, either as a ‘world-system’ or as a new rural economy in England. As a result, they deny that the Dutch, English and French revolutions and the U.S. Civil War can be viewed in any sense as “bourgeois revolutions,” and they have little to say about what Marx and Engels said is the motive force of history, class struggle.

By contrast, for some time historian Henry Heller has been deepening the class struggle interpretation of capitalist history, building on the work of earlier Marxists while incorporating the latest historical research. In The Bourgeois Revolution in France (Berghahn Press, 2006) and The French Revolution and Historical Materialism (Brill, 2017) he reasserted the Marxist view that what happened in France between 1789 and 1815 was indeed a bourgeois and capitalist revolution, driven by class conflict and the intervention of the masses. In The Birth of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2011) he offered a critique of and alternative to both World-System theory and Political Marxism, making four central arguments:

“that capitalist development was drawn out over a long period, three centuries and counting;
“that class struggle and changes in the relations of production were historically decisive in their emergence and evolution;
“that home and world markets developed simultaneously; and
“that the territorial state was, and remains, an integral component of capitalism.”
The early changes identified by the leading schools of thought were just beginnings, what Marx called capitalism’s “rosy dawn.” Centuries of primary accumulation, social upheavals, mass dispossession of small farmers, and political revolutions were required before “the Industrial Revolution [which] constitutes the climactic moment in the development of capitalism” was even possible. It was not until the 1800s that “the introduction of machinery and the reorganization of production into centralized factories released the full productive potential of social labour organized by capital.”

These books are important contributions to Marxist theory and history, but they assume some familiarity with academic debates. If you don’t have that background (even if you do!) Heller’s latest book, A Marxist History of Capitalism, is the place to start. He wrote it “for the general public and university students,” and, although he does address debates among Marxists, his main concern is to counter non-Marxist arguments that aim “somehow to recuperate capitalism in the belief that it is still reformable.”

The result is a rigorous but accessible account of five hundred years of capitalism, from merchant capitalism through industrialization and capitalism’s golden age to monopoly capitalism, neoliberalism and the possibility of revolutionary change in our time. Capitalism, he argues, has now “hit a brick wall,” and “a sense of overall crisis is manifest in the growing ecological contradictions of the system but also in its political dysfunction and its increasing illegitimacy in the eyes of the populace.”

He concludes with a chapter—unusual in a history book—that looks to the future and the challenges that will confront us in the transition from capitalism to socialism, which he says will involve “the triumph of economic and political democracy, continued belief in reason and science, the multiplication of use values as against exchange values, and an end to ecologically destructive growth.” While refusing to speculate on when and how such a transition will begin, or “what exactly a future socialism or socialisms might look like,” he presents a valuable overview of such issues as workplace democracy, economic planning, the role of markets and of socialist parties, technology, and more.

I found his extended discussion of socialist environmentalism particularly interesting. Drawing on the work of Istvan Mészáros, he argues that rather than simply rejecting growth, a socialist society must redefine growth as “the expansion of ecologically benign use values rather than an unlimited increase in merely quantifiable material outputs.”

“It is not sufficient to speak about socialist society as an ecologically minded society. Rather, as one student of the subject puts it, it is necessary to create an ecologically realized order of things. This suggests that socialism ought not to be simply an improved version of the present based on equality. Rather it should be a society in increasingly conscious symbiosis with the natural environment.”

Heller is optimistic about the possibility of “overthrowing capitalism and creating the institutions of a new democratic and socialist order.” That optimism reflects his judgement that the current system is in crisis, but more than that, it flows from his view that throughout history the direct intervention and creativity of ordinary people he masses so despised by the ruling class and ignored by many academics—has again and again played a decisive and transformative role.

“Without the intervention of the mass of peasants, craftsmen and workers the bourgeoisie by themselves could not have overthrown feudalism and established capitalism.…Likewise revolution from below by workers will of course be a prerequisite to the transition from capitalism to socialism.”

Although the book is short (148 pages) it is densely written and packed with information and insights about how capitalism arose, grew, and can eventually be overcome. Its ambition means that some parts are stronger than others, and the “Towards Socialism” chapter in particular will generate debates and disagreements even among readers (like me) who agree with Henry Heller’s overall approach. But that’s a strength, not a weakness. A Marxist History of Capitalism deserves to be widely read and discussed by all radicals, and especially by the new generation of socialists whose emergence is now unnerving the ruling class.

About Ian Angus
Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

https://mronline.org/2018/10/19/a-marxi ... apitalism/

Looks like this could be useful for the non-Marxist, I'll have to give it a look after I finish 'Not In Our Genes', Lewotin, Rose, Kamin. I've read Angus' 'Too Many People?' which is useful.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Howler
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Howler » Sat Nov 03, 2018 1:02 am

blindpig wrote:
Mon Aug 13, 2018 6:19 pm
I have been reading 'Biology As Ideology' by R.C. Lewontin and I should have read it 20 years ago. As someone who has understood the world thru Biology it's a wonder that I got anything right though the previous decade of exposure to Marxist literature has helped a lot. This book is so materialist, a tour de force of dialectical reasoning that it makes me smile stupidly. Marxist will spot this from page one. This is required reading.
Just ordered myself a copy. Boy, am I excited to read books that I can talk about in here. I read a couple books a week now, and because of work I have been reading mostly contemporary 'literary' fiction - some of it is fantastic, some of it is just so I can talk about what most people want to read. But lately I've been feeling like I need to read more of what I really want and need to read, having less patience for books that are just okay.

Some of the best fiction I've read recently:

There There by Tommy Orange - brutal and amazing
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor - same
Disoriental by Negar Djavadi - actually has a dash of Marxist revolutionary in it (Iran) but not the point of the book so I didn't critique it from that perspective
OH, and a couple years ago I read The Mersault Investigation which is sort of a retelling of Camus' The Stranger from the perspective of the brother of the Arab. Written by an Algerian guy. Bold undertaking, a post-colonialist success imho.



Some good nonfiction, mostly not commie stuff by any stretch:
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein - like most social science I read, the info is great, the conclusions should all be REVOLUTION but they never are.
Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild - learned a lot about the Spanish Civil War. I'm sure there are other books on the subject that may be better but it was a good read.
The Black Jacobins by CLR James- FINALLY! This has been on my list forever and I finally read it this year.

A couple of #BLM related memoirs and other race/racism stuff that have been pretty good.

I could go on and on about fiction but I don't know what you are into. If anyone ever needs recommendations just ask. That's what I do every fucking day.

Next on my list (unless they get bumped by something else) are books by Mark Helprin and maybe Laurent Binet's Seventh Function of Language (highly recommended to me, not sure if it will be sharp/funny/satirical or pretentious/annoying but I'm intrigued). Also been staring at copies of books by Ellen Meiskins Wood (sp?) and Maria Mies, maybe being here more will get me more serious minded so I can tackle that stuff.

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