Been a bit since we had a post like this
I’ve always believed that the American education system is garbage, and part of the reason why we’ve all been so easy to exploit in this ultra-capitalist dystopia, because we don’t teach students basic life needs. Such as basic troubleshooting plumbing, basic cat maintenance, cooking, bicycle upkeep, accounting, etc.
As a result I’m completely mechanically disinclined in every way, dependent on family and friends. But I can cook like a MFer.
Just started “How the US Creates “Sh*thole” Countries” edited by Cynthia McKinney (forward by Mike Gravel lmfao). Some of the essays so far have had some takes too close to “the problem with war is american troops die,” for my liking, but overall it seems good so far (only ~40 pages in).
Yesterday I read Vijay Prashad’s “The Poorer Nations.” It looks at the rise of neoliberalism from a different angle than David Harvey, explicitly criticising his work on neoliberalism for not looking at the suppression of global south led economic initiatives. Book is a history of the underdeveloped nations in their struggle against the overdeveloped nations, starting from around 1970. Looks at the struggle between the underdeveloped nations and overdeveloped ones, and how for a variety of reasons the overdeveloped ones won.
Day before yesterday I finished “Late Victorian Holocausts” by Mike Davis. Ungodly depressing (as one would expect from the title), but very good look at ‘political ecology’ of famines. Book shows, very, very strongly, that Capitalism/Colonialism/Imperialism is what leads to famine. In the famines the book covers, more than 31 to 61 million people died (many more, these numbers are ONLY for India, China and Brazil within the 1876-79 and 1896-1900 famines), their deaths were preventable if not for imperialism and its destruction of agriculture, granaries, food storage, traditional methods of redistribution and care for the poor, etc.
Before that I finished Maria Mies’s “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale.” Pretty much covers the most important points of Arghiri’s “Unequal Exchange,” Samin’s “Accumulation on a World Scale,” Delphy’s “Close to Home” and Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch”, and it’s fairly short (~200 pages) and readable. Very good attack on imperialism and it’s relation to sexism and race and colonialism (in indigenous theory sense of relationship to land), ties it all together really well. My only (very academic very pretentious) issue with it is it doesn’t cite the works by indigenous authors that were out at the time (which would have further supported her arguments.
“The African Dream” Che’s diary/report on the mission to the Congo. Super fascinating shit, and frustrating as hell to see squandered potential and wasted lives thanks to a lack of seriousness by several leaders. Troops literally running without firing a shot, leaving equipment and wounded behind. All with the petty BS of some officers who outright lie and feed their own egos.
But it makes me appreciate Pombo’s book on the war in Angola which I read first. I can see what he learned in person here and why Angola went so much better. Che called it a story of failure, but in the end it proved to end apartheid by being educational to his men who fought on
Slogging through Graeber’s final one. Which is amazing but I have to take it in bits. Staggering research and command about such an array of ancient cultures. Also, “Eating To Extinction” by Dan Saladino. Monoculture farming is literally killing us by destroying the planet. Another intensely researched book broken into short chapters around specific endangered grains and vegetables. Both books symbiotic of each other. Also, just finished a 1977 critical evaluation of James Baldwin. Written while he was still alive already getting intensely reviewed and praised as the literary giant (and activist) he was in every way. To say nothing of his oration skill; he was also one of the greatest of the 20th century in my opinion. Love him so much I picked up two more on him.
Edit: didn’t mean to reply, obviously. But guess I did want to say also that I really loved Jon Lee Anderson’s “A Revolutionary Life.” Got to admit also that it was refreshing to have picked up the children’s series “Who Was…” on Che to find it surprisingly pretty good.
Slogging through Graeber’s final one. Which is amazing but I have to take it in bits.
Do you mean Dawn of Everything or the pirate one?
Did you ever start a book, even though you were pretty sure the content would fly over your head, because you were curious about the prose style?
I just finished The Analects of Confucius, and, sure enough, my yellow “remember this pearl of wisdom” hi-liter got a hell of a lot less use while I was reading it than my orange “chop this into song lyrics” hi-liter.
Like most works of Chinese literature, an extensively annotated one that has in turn been re-annotated for an English audience is essential to get anything out of them. No one has read this stuff without footnotes in 1500 years.
