User Profile

Ika Makimaki

pezmico@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 11 months ago

342.53 ppm Tāmaki-makau-rau, Aotearoa. Ngāti Te Ata land.

This is the place for the books I read, I half-read and even I don't read but think about.

You've been warned.

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Ika Makimaki's books

Currently Reading

George Lakey: How We Win (2018, Melville House Publishing)

Campaigns and strategies for Non Violent Direct Action

George Lakey has been involved on social and environmental struggles since the Civil Rights movement in the USA, so he has a lot of useful insights of how Non-violent campaigning works, how it doesn't and how escalating brings about victories and ultimately social change. This book is accessible and clear, it maintains a focus on intersectionality and the importance of making every campaign as inclusive and welcoming as possible so that the voices that usually get lost are able to add to the campaigns and enrich them. I liked it and will be returning to it in the future. There are plenty of references to other works and websites which will be useful to building a body of knowledge on campaigning and direct action.

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

Inspiring book about the ongoing struggles and their successes and difficulties against ecocide, colonisation, white supremacy and all the evils of capitalism. HIghly recommended reading, particularly the later chapters. I loved the imagining of an anarchist highly local future.

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

Revolutionary movements come with several key advantages. Only by fighting for revolutionary transformations that present an existential threat to the existing order -for example, a world without rich people, without police, without governors, without corporations have we ever achieved important concessions. All of the labor laws, paid vacations, limited working days, rent controls, public healthcare, unemployment benefits, and safety regulations that are being chipped away year by year are the vestiges of reforms won by revolutionary movements of anarchists and communists in the first part of the twentieth century, or since then by the organizations arising from those movements and institutionalized as a way to pacify them. In other words, when we fight for revolution, we win even when we lose.

The Solutions are Already Here by  (58%)

We win even when we lose.

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

The oppressed peoples of the world recognise each other in the first gesture of struggle and are willing to make alliances. We just have to examine our differences and work on what brings us together. There are two words of wisdom that we echo at the end of our writings and that we wanted to share here: What unites us is greater than what separates us; Peace among us, war on tyrants.

The Solutions are Already Here by  (41%)

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

It has become clear that cultures that have traditionally viewed the soil or water as living things are effective at preserving them, while the culture that treats soil and water as inert resources has created a planetary catastrophe in which most fertile soil has been destroyed and huge swathes of the globe are facing water shortages. No healthy response to the catastrophe is possible without acknowledging that Western civilisation is a failed civilisation, and that its notions should be interrogated in light of its consequences.

The Solutions are Already Here by  (22%)

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

To sum up, we cannot look at climate change alone, because the emission of greenhouse gases is directly affected by innumerable other ecological processes, and the ability of the planet and its inhabitants to adapt to the warming, desertification, and sea level rise already under way depends on the health of ecosystems, the presence or absence of specific species, and the impacts of human economic practices, knowledge systems, and legal regimes. Following this thread, every aspect of the ecological crisis is caused by certain practices of human socioeconomic systems, each of which replaced other human socioeconomic practices as part of the global process of colonialism. Some of those suppressed practices constitute effective forms of ecological stewardship that harmonize the needs of the ecosystem and the needs of its human community for health, happiness, and freedom.

The Solutions are Already Here by  (10%)

Peter Gelderloos: The Solutions are Already Here (Paperback, 2022, Pluto Press)

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues …

Those who currently hold power in our society, those who have failed us tragically, do not have our interests at heart, nor those of the planet. And in fact, our interests and the interests of the earth are one and the same. We do not know how disastrous these next decades will be. But there is one certainty that can give us hope and courage: there is not a single scenario in which taking action, in defense of ourselves, in defense of one another, in defense of all the interconnected life on this planet, will not make things better.

The Solutions are Already Here by  (5%)

Kōhei Saitō: Slow Down (2024, Astra House)

Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to …

Essential reading

It has been a while since a book so accurately responded to my deepest worries. I had heard the name of Kohei Saito but never approached his writing before. This book is amazing, clear and easy to read but also profound and dare I say it, truly revolutionary. Saito is a Marxist scholar, and in this book he approaches the climate and environmental crisis through Marxism and proposes Degrowth Communism as the solution for human civilisation to survive. His argument is cogent. He starts out by debunking the myth of green growth and argues why capitalism is ill suited to respond to the needs of our time. He then writes how Marx himself had arrived to the idea of degrowth communism (although likely never actually called it that way) as he got older and his unpublished notes and research prove this evolution in his thought. The book closes by showing …

Kōhei Saitō: Slow Down (2024, Astra House)

Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to …

But if we truly wish to challenge capitalism, we must redefine abundance in such a way that it cannot be confused with capitalistic consumerism. We should stop betting our future on the possibility that exponential growth in technological development will take care of things for us, exempting us from the need to modify our mode of living. Rather, we must change our mode of living so we can discover new forms of abundance. In short, we must break the link between economic growth and abundance and think seriously about how abundance can be linked to degrowth. We must face reality in our call for a new abundance. If we do, we'll notice something right away. The world undergoes 'structural reforms' over and over to foster growth, and yet the results are always the same: gaps widen between the rich and poor, and rates of both poverty and austerity increase. The fact is, the wealth held by the twenty-six richest capitalists in the world is equivalent to the total assets belonging to the world's poorest 3.8 billion people (nearly half the world's population). Can this be a coincidence? Surely not - we should think of it the following way. We usually think of capitalism as something that provides wealth and abundance, but the truth is quite the opposite. Capitalism is a system that functions by producing scarcity.

Slow Down by  (Page 148)

On the need to reimagine the meaning of abundance for a degrowth society.