literature

I'm reading 4 books rn.

Blood in my Eye by George Jackson (1971) is a blassic, and a total banger. Prison Essays by Black Guerrilla Family founder. He's thinking very deeply about the solutions to many problems we still face today, in some ways it's tragic that this book is still so relevant. Poetic, fiery, contemplative. Here's a bit of text I came across yesterday:

• Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive scale by the people. Most people realize that crime is simple a result of gross disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the present state of property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether. Imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outlet.

Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) is solid so far. I don't read scifi much because I often find the writing is weak, but this is pretty well-written. The first chapter is a banger standalone short story about a multi-day wetbulb in Mumbai - legitimate climate horror. The rest is about the downstream responses from different types of groups, from lib technocrats to radicals and revolutionaries. I like the approach that all the chapters have different styles, like one might be a poem, one might be a description of the biggest oil extraction corporations on Earth, another might just be a diary entry of an unnamed character we never met again. Apparently he a (democratic) socialist, which is cool.

The Progress of This Storm by Andreas Malm (2017) is an interesting project. It's an effort to take newer philosophical trends in critical theory (in opposition to dialectical materialism) and submits them to an analysis about whether they are clarifying or mystifying, activating or pacifying with respect to the climate crisis. If you're going to read some Malm I'd say this is probably his least urgent text, but he is often at his most fun when he starts swinging around his baseball bat wrecking shit, and there's a lot of that in here even though sometimes I wonder if he's strawmanning some of the philosophies he trashes.

• We should conclude...that building a new coal-fired power plant, or continuing to operate an old one, or drilling for oil, or expanding an airport, or planning for a highway is now irrational violence.

Climate Change as Class War by Matthew Huber (2022) - good title, but there's a lot of nonsense in this book.

I also just read Gabriel Rockhill's new essay in June's edition of Monthly Review: The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligensia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback. I think this guy has an interesting project and am looking forward to all of this being collected in his book so I can read it in one coherent thread. His basic push is to, bit by bit, examine all the theorists that are held up as "radical postwar thinkers" in the West and just feed them through the simple rubric of asking what actual socialist or anticolonial movements did they actually support, if any? His broader theory is that these not radical "radical theorists" play a functional role in capitalist hegemony to appeal to people open to considering an alternative to this system and redirecting them away from the actually effective project of scientific socialism.