Reviews and Comments

This book has been on my list for a long time, so I'm excited to be participating in a small reading group about it. People have been gifting me Kropotkin books for a few years now which have sat side by side on a shelf at home, untouched. My first anarchist reading (that I can recall) was a zine of "The Place of Anarchism in Socailistic Evolution" by Kropotkin that I picked up as a teenager from Bound Together books on Haight St. in San Francisco. I LIKED the idea of anarchism but it's taken a long time for me to sit down and delve in the ideas of others, so I likely skimmed it and lent it to someone without expectation it would come back. With my recent efforts to dig a little deeper into ideas (I'm missing the years-gone book club friends had here that lasted about 10 years), spurred by having this microblog and some initiative, I'm hoping to hit up some more classics. My anarchism has never been based on theory but seeking out practice. Maybe it's a nice time to try to bring praxis back into my life. I'll say, having gotten 50 pages into this, I enjoyed Charles Weigel's introduction, the thoughtful engagement with the tendencies and movements Petey K engaged, an assessment of his writing style and engagement in propaganda. I wasn't impressed with AnCom Santa's short introduction, but maybe his writing will take a little warming up to. Ooooh, I think I have next year's halloween costume figured out...

This book was very informative. As I said in an earlier post, it starts off defining it's purpose as being for a better understanding from the position of US Foreign Policy development and it is quite unsympathetic to Ocalan and the PKK. The book ends without critical engagement in the US "War On Terror" rolling through Iraq at this time, which is gross. Taken with the prior note as a grain of salt, I think the book is a worthwhile read, sources it's interviews mostly from public statements, articles, memoirs and direct interviews with former PKK members and Turkish leftists. Again, the fact that it's not sourced from Turkish government or other state sources is a point in it's favor. In this book you get a critical overview of the development of Kurdish resistance, with a focus on the PKK, against the modern Turkish state up to about 2006: the stages of the party's development; the stages of guerrilla development and engagement; the party's congresses; the governments and other rebel groups it allied or fought with over a quarter of a century. The insights into purges and executions in the party, the autocratic decision-making and the repeated charge of blame-shifting by the party chief, Apo, are quite interesting. As an anarchist, I've always been uncomfortable, from my distanced view, with the adoration and idolism for Ocalan but have to admit that I haven't been there and don't have the experience of involvement in the movement. The political connections between groups and states in the region to leverage arms, training space, positions from which to attack Turkey or with whom the PKK conflicted was quite interesting. Because this was published a few years before the start of the uprisings that would lead to the Syrian Revolution and civil war (as well as the inauguration of the Rojava Revolution), there is little coverage of Syrian Kurds, only notes about the relationship between the PKK & Hafez Al-Assad (Ocalan spent much of the 16 years he lived outside of Turkey in one of two compounds in Syria with state knowledge) and puts some pieces into the puzzle for me of the foundations of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria. Similarly, there's interesting background into conflicts between the Barzani / KDP-dominated Peshmerga of KRG and how the KDP has related in the past to Iran & Turkey. Anyway, there's a lot here. It's a recommended read.

I was looking for some background to help me understand Rojava. This book is well written and appears well sourced, though the author definitely has a pro-US position (as stated clearly in the introduction). Most of the body of the book is pulled from former-PKK members, some estranged, some not, most living in exile from Turkey, as well as interviews from Apo on how to party formed and grew until the books publication in 2007 (after the rise of the AKP, Apo's incarceration with the help of the US, and before the Rojava revolution). The author does not appear sympathetic to the PKK or the Kurdish liberation struggle, but at least isn't a simp for Turkey? Aliza Marcus, the author, was actually arrested and forced out of Turkey as a journalist for publishing about Kurdish life (where recognition that there is such a thing as a Kurd, or Kurdish language still brings repression). Though, to my understanding the author The read is easy, though there is a lot to keep straight about alliances and groups (thankfully there is a small list of Turkish and Kurdish acronyms at the start). I hope to follow this up with "This fire never dies – one year with the PKK" by Frederike Geerdink, published in 2018, based on the interview she conducted with Popular Front podcast. Also, more writings from Rojava. I'm a bit greedy.

Whew! This book was dense at 400 pages. Wetzel spent a decade writing this introduction to his vision of modern anarcho-syndicalism, which he calls Libertarian Syndlicalism (apparently as a grab-back at the term "Libertarian" in the US context). Wetzel's book is a thorough introduction to anti-capitalism, with a focus on worker control, democratic council administration of everyday life, a broad definition of class as a relation of shared interest and alienation with room for nuance and difference within, and detailed visions of not only how the world might look without the state and capital but also how to get there. Wetzel's book gives good critique of political representation, of the mythologized New Deal, it's step-child the Green New Deal, the failures of Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy the Leninist counter-revolution and the faults of Democratic Centralism in the unions that survive today in this country. While he notes that the US is soaked in racialized capitalism, he notes that anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism were birthed of the colonial project, pre-date capitalism and the related oppressions are distinct of (but complicate) broad working class oppression. The last chapter is really rich with imagining, though pretty careful to not be prescriptive, in speaking of ways that workers can manage their workplaces, how neighborhood and regional councils with directly recall-able delegates could contribute a to Libertarian Eco-Socialist, discussing price fixing based on the social and ecological costs of goods, engaging with ParEcon concepts and more. The author draws heavily from writings on the Spanish Revolution and the activities of the CNT & FAI in Andalucia and Catalunya up to and through the 1930's. There is just so much here to discuss. I definitely think this'd be a good book club book for anyone wanting to engage in particulars of workers control, economics and anarcho-syndlicalist theory. I'm excited to speak with Tom next week and hope to air the chat on the show on January 15th.

I've earlier tried a stab a this book, but only got 45 pages in. There's a lot to fit in a 391pp paperback on anarcho-syndicalist perspectives on modern capitalism, class composition, organizing methods, the pitfalls of Leninism and such. I'm about 55 pages in and making a go at it. So far, I've really appreciated Wetzel's compact style: not a lot of flourish, a few examples to illustrate a point. From an interview on Coffee With Comrades, I got that Wetzel's been working on this book off and on for decades, so it shows a lot of thought, revision and concision in the layout and arguments. And I find the introduction of jargon to be minimal and clear when it does show up, a useful thing when introducing someone to a topic and leading them down a string of arguments to the conclusion you hope them to agree with. It also makes disagreement and critique way easier. For being a bit dry, I'm excited to keep moving through this title and maybe get to pick the author's brain in an interview.

This book was quite entertaining and really brought together the racial animus of Anglo settlers on the Mexican border, the history of the Mexican political development, US impositions, struggles against primitive accumulation of Indigenous lands and bodies, rebellion against the Diaz regime and particularly the Flores Magón brothers' organizing with the PLM to tell a good story. Dr. Lytle Hernandez does not appear to have a sympathetic view of anarchists from the description of Ricardo (I don't say that because of criticisms of his relationships or petty, written attacks by him, anarchists shouldn't have idols, but because his anarchist views didn't appear weighed in the book). Also, the book felt a little like it was quickly tied together like the publishing schedule forced her pen a bit. But the insights into US manipulation of the political landscape in Mexico, the legal wrangling in the USA against RFM & the Junta, and the scandalous undermining of the integrity of the postal system to weaken the PLM's organizing was laid out quite well by the author. I paired this with a reread of the biography at the start of Mitchell C Verter's "Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader", as Magón died in a US prison 100 years ago this month.

This book was a FUCKING trip! Dennis King did great research and exhaustively covered LaRouche's upbringing, his shifts from conservative Quaker to Trotskyist with the SWP, to the: creation of an anti-Semitic cult building dual power intelligence services, attempts to defend aging nazi war criminals, promoted science & scifi around directed-energy weapons, links to mafia-adjacent Teamster bosses, scammed conservative elders out of millions of dollars, ran politicians as Democrats and himself as president 8 times, had connections to the Reagan admin, and even bullied Roy Cohn into a corner. And this was just the up until 1988 when the book was published and LaRouche went to prison! He got out after like 5 years and his international structures continued to function to various degrees, with chapters in Germany, Sweden, Mexico and other places. What a ride! LaRouche died in 2019, but his widow (Helga) and others continue organizations like The Schiller Institute and adherents have continued to harass "green" progressive democrats and exist in similar ecosystems as PatSoc, RedBrown, National Bolshevist and third positionist weirdos. I'm hoping, some day, to dig into the 1,000 + page tome by Kevin Coogan (former LaRouchite himself, written under a psuedonym, Hylozoic Hedgehog), "Smiling Man From a Dying Planet", but sadly it was never printed so there's only online editions.