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Leaving_Marx

Leaving_Marx@wyrmsign.org

Joined 2 years, 7 months ago

Printer, anarchist, illustrator, & enthusiast of the printed word.

FediBanter: @Thundering@kolektiva.social

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I want everyone to read it and think of it often ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great book, fun, and uncomplicated ⭐⭐⭐ Good, feel complicated about if I wasted my time ⭐⭐+⬇️ I hate read this

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2025 Reading Goal

53% complete! Leaving_Marx has read 16 of 30 books.

Sidik Fofana: Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022, Scribner) 3 stars

Stories about the tenants, not organizing

3 stars

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 …

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M. E. O'brien, Eman Abdelhadi: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022) 5 stars

you can have a little bit of prefigurative politics (as a treat)

4 stars

This was super fun. I thought the oral history format was a really clever format choice, like looking into a giant construction site through little windows cut in the scaffolding and only kind of being able to grasp the depth of the pit. I kept thinking about KSR's New York 2140 and how it couldve been the same world almost, but with more grittiness and trauma and explanations about how we get from here to fully automated gay luxury space communism. I'm pretty sure I have big political differences with the authors, but I seriously enjoyed it nonetheless. I'd really appreciate seeing more of this kind of fantastic dreaming from those who want a drastically different world.

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Tom Wetzel: Overcoming Capitalism (2022, AK Press) 5 stars

The book is a twenty-first century reworking of the approach to unionism. The United States …

A US Libertarian Socialist Challenge for Today

5 stars

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 …

M. E. O'brien, Eman Abdelhadi: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022) 5 stars

Favourite book of the year for the disillusioned revolutionary Inside of me.

5 stars

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 …