ReadFanon

I'm also in favour of going ham on annotating books because what use is a book if it goes unused?

The purpose of a book is to be read and to be used as a tool for learning, so use it as it's been designed.

My caveat here would be for books which are first editions or extremely rare ones but that aside, use it as you will.

If you still don't feel comfortable with that then you can use a pencil so that your annotations are erasable or you can buy sticky inserts that are transparent overlays which you can use to write onto which doesn't cause any permanent impact on the book itself.

As for how you take notes, it depends on what your purpose is. I'm going to chew on this question and respond to it in another reply once I've mustered the brainpower.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That's really rough.

I'm sorry but I really can't think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

Unionise, organise, agitate, educate. Same as it has always been.

We are helpless alone but together we are strong.

You might consider learning a second language and getting tf out of the dumpsterfire that is the US preemptively though. Vietnam pays good cash for people who do english tutoring for businesspeople. Maybe you can do that "digital nomad" (*shudders*) thing too.

I'm really white so I don't have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It's an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It's no self-help book and it won't be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you're experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

Add "no bosses" to that list too.

Y'all think that any sort of construction or manufacturing is going to run in a self-organised fashion without foremen? Lol, good luck.

If you've never worked in a factory before, that's cool but there are much better ways of announcing this fact and I think that it's important to remember the old "No investigation, no right to speak" or, in their terms "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker".

I try not to focus too much on these types because I'm convinced that a couple of years of touching grass, working for a living, and spending time doing on the ground organising will bring these infantile urges in people to a conclusion in all but the most stubborn-minded. Although you can cut through these naive ideological positions by tracing out how there was (vulgar) vanguardism in their favourite historical socialist projects and how leadership was crucial to their functioning. That being said I have more important things to do with my time than engaging people with discussions on that stuff tbh.

Yeah, more broadly the western left is in shambles but to see how (comparatively) rapidly it's shaping up gives me hope.

This could be representative of the circles I've moved in with my own political journey but MLism wasn't even on the table. Heck, being a revolutionary wasn't really either. If you look at, say, the anti-globalisation protests and the anti-war movement(s) around the bush era the left was mostly what I'd characterise as being extremely progressive. There was a time when Naomi Klein was extremely influential on this cohort.

Nowadays Klein isn't a name I see brought up in the left except for the very rare mention of her underrated documentary The Take because the left is much more radical now than she is.

There was a time where the compatible left was the left and it didn't have to go around proclaiming that Marxism-Leninism is a "dead ideology" which, if you look at it from the perspective of Implicature or you're a bit Hegelian about it, it's pretty obvious that if Marxism-Leninism really was dead then nobody would need to proclaim this fact because:

a) It would be self-evident; nobody needs to proclaim that Manichaeism is dead because it's already true

b) It would be irrelevant to say as much since it is already dead; I'd venture that most people haven't got a clue what Manichaeism even is because Manichaeism truly is dead

The opposite is true for Marxism-Leninism.

Nowadays there's a couple of major splits within the radical and circa-radical left, as I see it:

1. There's the essentially silent movement where people log off, touch grass, and are dedicated to organising in their communities. This isn't really seen unless you're embedded in an org or an online circle where you know people in it and you see them check out of their online presence in favour of on the ground work. But it's certainly happening although because this shift is predicated upon not announcing it online and not constantly touting it on social media it is largely invisible.

2. There's the radical left vs the compatible left split. This is where you see one side sheepdogging everyone to vote for the Dems and denouncing tankies as "ruining the left for everyone else" etc. vs the people who are capable of critiquing the progressive left and doing self-crit on the actual left who engage in materialist analysis and serve as the spectre haunting the internet because they are more organised, generally much better informed and more well-versed in theory etc.

The fact that Marxism-Leninism is on the rise is no accident. People have seen the failures of movements like Occupy and the CHAZ and they've learned from them. The material conditions have rapidly changed over the past two decades and I'd argue that this has a significant impact on people's ideological positions. Your political development arc mirrors that of a lot of people who are now communist too.

If you take PatSocs, as an example, this was essentially a line struggle that developed in the broader western left. I'd say that it's pretty much dead in the water now, thankfully. But there was a split in the ideological positions and the western left hashed out its position on regressive nationalism extremely rapidly. This is characteristic of a vital movement that is thriving and honing itself and that alone is worth celebrating because it means that not only is there enough people in a movement to cause a split(!!) but the movement is developing and it will continue to do so with future splits too.

To go from "Oh no, we must be conscious consumers and stop supporting sweatshops with our hard earned cash!!" to "Let's set up camp outside Wall Street and... idk but we'll figure out the rest later lol" to "We are going to read Marx and Lenin and we're going to seize the state by force" is a very promising development arc.

You are going to keep on encountering this as you read up on theory and history.

Try not to be too down on yourself when it happens because you shouldn't expect yourself to be completely across the most important topics of political debate in Europe from nearly two centuries ago.

Imagine a person in a century from now reading articles from, say, The Guardian and coming across something which references "Trumpism" or "the MAGA movement" to critique it; that person almost certainly isn't going to understand what the MAGA movement refers to but the Guardian article is going to treat it as if everyone grasps what they're referring to because the Guardian is part of a contemporary discussion right in this very moment where it's topical and relevant and so of course everyone grasps what it means today but this will not be the case in a hundred year's time.

I'd recommend one of two approaches here:

Either skip over these sorts of terms because the fact that they don't mean anything to you may be indicative of the fact that they are no longer relevant to contemporary politics (for example, you don't hear people talking about Manichaeism or Fabianism today because it bears no relevance to today's politics) or to put a little note next to the name with a shorthand version of what that person's thought represents (for example, when reading Lenin lambast Bernstein you might put a little note saying "incremental reformism under bourgeois democracy to achieve socialism" so that whenever you encounter Lenin striking out against Bernsteinism then you can know what he's really criticising when he does it.)

It will make more sense as you read more theory. Good luck with it!

I'd recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it's quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It's very nutritious too.

Basically, if you're going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won't even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you've adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It's prole af.

When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.

Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.

In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.

In anarchism it's much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I've mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you're more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.

Lol this ain't reddit, you don't need to couch requests for sources like that. I'm not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There's this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

So American-centric you'd think there's barely any other country besides the US

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.