Reviews and Comments

This was an awesome read, Heard about it from a talk hosted by Red May Seattle this year which has a bunch of people offering glowing reviews of this book. One of them said it was like if Marx's Capital Vol. 1 was written today into a story about austerity in the academy and a historical action-thriller or something.

Definitely a fun read, started off hating the footnotes but grew to love them. Took me until the second part to feel invested in the characters but after that I plowed through the book.

If you're looking for a historical drama about underworld queers, trans thief, sex workers, and the struggles against the establishment of the police in victorian England than this is a book for you.

lulz, but seriously a fun concept and amazing references to feminist, marxist, and post-colonial literature throughout. I even appreciated the consistent reveries to the erotic holiness of piss. 5/5

Read this with a Reading group this summer. Marx's own crash course to his economic arguments and theory of surplus-value made in Capital Vol.1. Seems like a good starting point to discuss Marx's ideas of how Capitalism work and the economic arguments to how workers are robbed of their worth when they sell their time to a boss.

Best read with a marxist or someone whose read Capital or one of the countless works trying to summarize Marx's economic works. This book alone is still hard to grasp the concepts without discussion or familiarity with reading theory or economic texts, though it feels like a good effort for an amateur economist like Marx to distill his ideas down for your average worker.

If you want a plain and simple introduction to these ideas, read The Housing Monster or Abolish Restaurants by Prole.info, after that this is probably the best introductory text to Marx's economic ideas directly from Marx himself.

hope you enjoy

Vicky did a fantastic job of laying out a history of riotous actions and the expropriation of property as a time honored tradition with anti-capitalism and anti-racist struggles within the US.

Each chapter laid out a fantastic list of sources and materials painting a compelling picture of the struggles in the streets and communities that labour, abolitionist, and black communities have engaged in since the establishment of the US.

I found some of the necessary chapters felt like review, specifically the origins of policing in the US to closely follow arguments made in Kristian Williams Our Enemy in Blue and Saralee Stafford & Neil Shirley's Dixie Be Damned. But if you haven't read either of those books then you'll find it a facinating look at the slave patrols to police timeline.

I really appreciated vicky's interjections laying out her critiques of racial-capitalism in the US, grounded in black liberation and feminist thought.

I wish this was a book I could offer parents, non-political friends or coworkers because her writing and train of thought throughout the book was compelling, concise, and not overtly speaking to an audience that already agrees with her. Unfortunately it still feels like it is a book having a conversation amongst the left around violence, spontaneity, and a diversity of tactics.

Therefore I would recommend it to anyone who sees themselves within a trajectory of seeking racial justice, wants to understand why the media and those in power only seem to pay attention when something in broken or burnt, or the circuits of the economy are prevented from flowing at top speed.