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.

I just read A Wizard of Earthsea and really loved it. Plan to read the rest of the books in the series.

“Ten Crises” by Wen Tiejun. Outlines the history of the People’s Republic of China from the context of ten crisis points, how the crises arose, and how the CPC managed them. I’m not that far in but the main thesis seems to revolve around a “cost-transfer theory”-- the idea that the costs of industrialization lead to crises and these costs must be transfered outside of urban areas to lessen the severity of these crises. While every developed (first-world) country transfers these costs to underdeveloped, colonized countries; China transfers these costs internally to rural areas, eliminating the “need” to participate in neocolonialism.