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This one was a pretty quick read. Definitely was drawn to it by some descriptions I saw online which sounded like it was about a bunch of tenants facing eviction when a new owner takes over a building and organizing to counter that.

while that is loosely what the book was about, it was more a collection of short stories each telling us a bit about a different tenant who was facing eviction from this building in Harlem and the organizing was pretty unimportant and marginal.

I am happy I read it but I felt like such an outsider to the experience of these mostly black proles in Harlem living in high rises that I don't feel like i have much to say that feels thoughtful or smart about the book. The book itself is smart if at times kind of making fun of things within the left like "pedagogy of the oppressed" and community organizing presenting them as pretty cringe caricatures.

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.

This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.

being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.

I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.

I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.

I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits of both the authors through their interviews and in the characters they are interviewing.

It's really a great book, at moments touching me and making me want to cry or laugh and taking me away to a vision of the world where the commodity form, capitalism and the state have been abolished almost the world over (sorry Australia, all the reactionaries, capitalism and fascists bunkered down there).