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What Are You Reading? IV
Let us continue anew...
Camus' The Rebel, which I've only just started. I'm also casually reading through a textbook on philosophy. If anyone can recommend other good introductions to philosophy and philosophers, it would be appreciated.
I'm the Laird of the land, I'm hot like Pol Pot.'A true white liberal.' - Sword and Shield (on me)
'i am a communism fer a long years.' - twenty percent tip
FKA Mahmoud Ahmerdinnerjacket
SWAG1
Close to finishing "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice" by Rudolf Rocker...then it's on to "China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy" by Gurley.
"Socialist ideas become significant only to the extent that they become rooted in the working class."
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . .Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
SocialistWorker.org
International Socialist Review
Marxists Internet Archive
"on blue's waters" by gene wolfe
recently finished "snow crash" by some guy and also a book about darby crash and the germs, finished up the "song of ice and fire" books before that
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
"nikolai bukharin - abc of communism" - interesting read so far.
also a short story collection of algernon blackwood, good stories really good creepy atmosphere, just what i like about horror stories, just his stories tend to end really abruptly.
classstruggle and resistance in africa - also a good book.
sometimes i reread some stories from lovecraft just for fun.
All i want is a Marxist Hunk.
It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.
Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!
Currently on Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I'm about 110 pages in, and it's stomach-turning stuff, and makes the case that the drug war has essentially created a racial caste system not dissimilar from old Jim Crow. Should be read widely.
In terms of reading that isn't directly political, I recently finished George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones and have moved on to A Clash of Kings. It's solid political fantasy, very good and heady stuff. The last sustained fantasy reading I did was the Wheel of Time series, but after 5 1/2 books, I realized I couldn't sit there reading this crap.
'The Character of Class Struggle', a book on Canadian class struggle from 1850 to 1985. It's a collection of essays.
Found it in Value Village for $4 yesterday. I just started it, I hope it's good.
Political Compass: Economic Left/Right: -10.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -10.00
"Our aims are full communism with “lulz” as a transitional demand."
-DSG
Yesterday I read "Pyongyang - A Journey in North Korea" By Guy Delisle.
It's written in the form of a newspaper type comic strip. Its a brilliant insight into what it's like to visit the DPRK....very totalitarian, Grey, bland, fake-orchestrated, expensive and just a bloody horrible, albeit interesting, place.
A very interesting read.
I got it online in PDF so if anyone is interested PM me and I'll upload it for you.
"War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."
毛澤東.
Guerilla Warfare
if you dont live for something youll die for nothing
something inside so strong
Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa".
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
William Blum's 'Rogue State', documenting the disgusting nature of US imperialism.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Bill's a great guy, he's more or less a Trot although his main activity is putting forward the anti-empire report. I was introduced to him after my first protest. Rogue State and Killing Hope are both must-reads. It's a shame he didn't have time to do another book when Osama bin Laden mentioned Rogue State in a message he put out about 5 years ago.
The Mass Strike - Rosa Luxemburg
Just finished The New Jim Crow. It makes a very strong case, although Alexander doesn't call for the end of capitalism or anything she comes to a very strong position against gradualism and partial moves, and for the total end of the War on Drugs. It's an important book and should be read because it makes the complete case, that it's not just some individual racists or what have you, but a system that is inevitably racist.
Moving on to a short collection by Lenin that I picked up a while back, Letters on Tactics. It's a number of writings from 1917.
hungary '56 by andy anderson, pretty good so far. just ordered strike! - jeremy brecher as well.
By all accounts Strike is meant to be a classic.
You probably know this if you have read any of the various threads on libcom.org that touch on this but the earlier and especially the original version is a lot better politically then the current edition.
Jeremy Brecher was a member of the council communist group Root & Branch in the 70s when the original version was published. He is now part of the ParEcon current around Albert and Co.
The difference in the content between original / earlier and the latest edition is that the council communist influenced stuff on autonomous class struggle in the conclusion is gone and I think I remember someone saying that his critique of the unions was watered down as well.
Killing Hope is a great book and I highly recommend it, but some of what he writes in his anti-Empire report makes my eyes shifty a little bit, especially his fascination with the Israel lobby.
In other words, paraphrasing Marx, reciting that capitalism has lived through a progressive phase and is today decadent, that it is a transitory economic form like all those that have preceded it, and that it enters the decadent phase when it is no longer able to develop the material productive forces which come into conflict with the existing relations of production, is absolutely not sufficient, neither from a political nor an analytical point of view.
- Fabio Damen
damn i bought the updated version.
You Are Going To Prison by Jim Hogshire
I read a fair deal of this kind of on a whim, mostly because I'm interested in different cultures, and prison to most is definitely an alien culture, although I've known a good number of people who've served significant amounts of time there. It's kind of an interesting book...it kind of positions itself as a "how to" guide to navigating the legal system and surviving jail, although this really isn't accurate, as 1) all jails and legal scenarios are different in their own ways, and 2) the book mostly is just a bunch of horror stories regarding the legal system and prison, combined with a coal-black sense of humor. I don't know much about the author, but rumors are that the name "Jim Hogshire" was just used as a pseudonym for a group of actual inmates who worked on the book, which would certainly explain the hatred for law enforcement expressed in the book.
The descriptions in the book are pretty graphic and disturbing, but it doesn't sugercoat anything. America has one of the worst prison systems in the developed world, and I don't think it's changed that much since the mid-90's, when the book was written. And when you stand for the overthrow of existing power relationships, as all people on this site do, chances are you'll probably see the inside of a prison cell at least once. Especially if left-wing ideas are seen as being a threat to power again.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
