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luxon

luxon@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 2 months ago

Looking for a place to share reviews with some of my friends. Starting by adding the mini-reviews I've emailed people in the past here.

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luxon's books

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Ideology (Paperback, 1991, Verso) 3 stars

Ideology

3 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book; I'd picked it up as it was recommended by China Miéville in "A Spectre, Haunting". The first two chapters ("What Is Ideology?" and "Ideological Strategies") were great – truly an introduction and overview, bringing to the foreground the many conflicing notions of ideology I'd encountered and linking them to political practice. I enjoyed the beginning of the third chapter "From the Enlightenment to the Second International" as helpful contextualization of the birth of the study of ideology, but then felt the book got lost in detailed intellectual history and rehashing of academic fights, so I began skipping and picked up again in the second-to-last chapter, "Discourse and Ideology", which turned out to just be a particular in-fight about semiotics with some other academics. The "Conclusion" was short and summarized the ideas of the first few chapter well. If you pick this up out …

A Spectre, Haunting (2022, Haymarket Books) 4 stars

China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: the …

We’ve seen that the Manifesto views liberation, equality and the free development of individuals as arising when the productive capacities of society have reached a certain degree of red plenty. There’s a beauty to this vision of development growing, stalling, then unfurling under mass control. There’s a poignancy, too. Because to read the Manifesto today is to have to acknowledge that after centuries of exploitation and planetary degradation, the rupture is more urgent than ever – and is unlikely to be into a realm of freedom and plenty, but of necessary slow repair.

There is a world to win: won, it must be fixed. This is ‘ruin communism’, or ‘salvage communism’. As part of such project, naive dreams of profligacy have to be set aside.

This is in no way to advocate a new utopian asceticism. But, increasingly, ecosocialists are questioning the productivity paradigm, acknowledging that we are at a pass such that, after a break from capitalism, some constraints on production may be necessary to allow the fullest development of humanity itself. If the liberation of the productive forces of humanity under democratic control means imposing these, it will be as a stage in the salvaging of the world, and for our own liberation.

A Spectre, Haunting by  (53%)

I struggle with this idea and I appreciate having it so well-articulated here. If our utopias can't even be utopian more, what have we left?

Breaking Things at Work (2021, Verso Books) 4 stars

"In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on …

Interesting for anti-automation practices

4 stars

I found the historic part of this book (first two chapters) interesting, but not particularly helpful politically; I guess it's nice to rehabilitate the Luddites (and the anarchic style of organizing is interesting), but I'm not sure there's so much to learn from. The last two chapters I found more engaging. Particularly striking was the author's finding that people (workers, consumers) already engage in anti-automation, Luddite practices (like stealing from a self-checkout, or messing with food delivery robots in a fast food restaurant) and that it's good Marxist practice to build on that. Or this finding: "A large majority (85%) said they would support restricting workforce automation to jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do." [^Pew] So as an overview of what automation currently does and how the Left can relate to it, the book was good; as a source of ancient wisdom from the Luddites, not …

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

The relation between comrades is not the same as the relation between friends. This is a crucial point today given the problems in left milieus that can seem exclusive and cliquish. People who would otherwise be on the same side may not come together because closed and unwelcoming friendship groups prevent them from feeling a sense of commonality and belonging.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

For some contemporary activists, well versed in the politics of identity, often as a result of their own experiences of sexism and racism online and in the movements, there may be some lingering suspicion that comrade isn’t formal enough or empty enough, and that no expansive account of the inclusion of positive difference can ever suffice. Attention to the negative dimension of comrade may address this concern. Comrade entails taking a side, rather than refusing to acknowledge and avow the existence of sides. Belonging on the same side lends a generic quality to comradeship: Comrades are indifferent to individual difference, and equal and solidary with respect to their belonging. Comradeship thus requires the dissolution of attachments to the fantasy of self-sufficiency, hierarchy, and individual uniqueness. There is no place for such attachments in the comrade.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

he comrade is also not the same as the neighbor understood in an ethical sense. “Love thy comrade as thyself” makes no sense: Comrades don’t love themselves as uniquely special individuals. They subordinate their individual preferences and proclivities to their political goals. Comrades’ relation to each other is outward-facing, oriented toward the project they want to realize, the future they want to bring into being. They cherish one another as shared instruments in common struggle; comrades are a necessity.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

Comrades may be friends but friendship and comradeship are not the same. We see this most clearly when friendships fray. Personal dislike does not mean that the person is not a comrade. In tight associations, comrade and friend relations blur and overlap. Maintaining the difference and the distance between them takes work, important work. Comradeship requires a degree of alienation from the needs and demands of personal life to which friends must attend.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

The distinction between the comrade and the friend also points to an inhuman dimension of the comrade: Comradeship has nothing to do with the person or personality in its specificity; it’s generic. Comradeship abstracts from the specifics of individual lives to consider how these specifics might contribute to collective goals. What matters is not the uniqueness of a skill or experience but its utility for party work. In this sense, the comrade is liberated from the determinations of specificity, freed by the common political horizon. Ellen Schrecker makes this point in her magisterial account of anticommunism in the United States. During the McCarthy period of communist persecution, there was a common assumption that “all Communists were the same.” Communists were depicted as puppets, cogs, automatons, robots, even slaves. In the words of “one of the McCarthy era’s key professional witnesses,” people who became communists were “no longer individuals but robots; they were chained in an intellectual and moral slavery that was far worse than any prison.” The truth underlying the hyperbolic claims of anticommunism is the genericity of the comrade, of comrade as a disciplined and disciplining relation that exceeds personal interests. Comradeship isn’t personal. It’s political.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

Precisely because he was engaged with others in a common purpose, the comrade experienced deep political meaning. We have to reject the bourgeois fiction that intimacy depends on personal disclosure, individual experience, or the way a singular person feels about people and events. There are other intimacies of common work and shared purpose: preparing the newspaper, making the banners, planning an action, knocking on doors.

Comrade by 

"de-individualize meaning" will be my new slogan

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

The working class demonstrates through proletarian discipline that capitalists and landlords are superfluous. We don’t need them. We can—and will—do it ourselves. In each kind of discipline, what matters is that discipline is freely accepted. For Lenin, discipline itself is revolutionary, more revolutionary than the defeat of the bourgeoisie: “for it is a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

Enthusiasm, energy, is expected of comrades because it is that extra, that surplus benefit of collectivity, which enables them to do more, even to win. What distinguishes comrades from politically minded and hardworking individuals is the energy that accrues to collective work. Because they combine forces, they generate more than each could by working alone. Enthusiasm is the surplus that collective discipline generates.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

Socialist and communist parties are expected to engage in the struggles of the oppressed, organize for revolution, and maintain a certain unity of action. Absent expectations of solidarity, comrade as term of an address is an empty signifier. Rather than figuring the political relation mediated by the truth of communism, it becomes an ironic or nostalgic gesture to a past utopian hope.

Comrade by 

Comrade (2019, Verso Books) 4 stars

very helpful in articulating my own political experience

4 stars

This book has helped me articulate a few things I’d experienced before. For one, the sense of joy of being seen as a comrade. I distinctly remember being in a very large online seminar on labour organizing when one of the Indian workers casually addressed everyone else as comrades, creating a unity where before I’d only felt the detachment of yet-another-zoom-call.

It also reminded me of when someone I’d just met said they were quite excited about knowing me now because they so rarely encounter “peers”. I understand now that the it was comradeship that happened in that moment – meeting someone else who is also trying to change the world the way you are, and whom you recognize as being on your side, and who is ready to judge you and be judged by you about the value of your activities in pursuit of that goal.

I know a …