What in the hell …

I’ve been reading this book, Late Marx and the Russian Road, edited by Teodor Shanin. (more…)

I’ve been having a conversation with Angela in fits and starts, turning around, among other things, what the sense of ‘nonpolitical’ could mean. (more…)

“What did you do in the war dad, what did you do in the war?”

Marx and Engels in the German Ideology: “how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when by virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category.”

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Below is a piece on militant research as done by the Precarias a la Deriva. I’m under the impression they aren’t currently doing this kind of work but are instead focusing on Todas a Cien. There’s a militant research aspect to that work, though (as I argued in a sense here). The piece is translated by Maggie, a la deriva por America.

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It’s also the universal multitude. This is a long excerpt from a post by Massimo De Angelis, the editor of The Commoner. The post is worth reading in its entirety, here. (more…)

Tzuchien found a rare Badiou book recently. That got me thinking, in addition to books destroyed, what’s the best book find I’ve ever had? I got all three volumes of Capital years ago for wicked cheap, and at another place I got the Theories of Surplus Value and I’ve gotten several of the Marx/Engels complete works. I look for that stuff, though, so it doesn’t quite count. The other day I was fidgeting while in line a lefty bookstore, holding a stack of too much and too expensive. Out of the corner of my eye - solely cuz I was sort of embarassingly rolling my head around on my neck - I spotted a copy of Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices, which I’d been wanting. That’s what a find is, really, the unexpected unearthing that feels like luck’s on your side. That same trip I found a Martin Glaberman pamphlet for fifty cents. I once had a copy of Being and Event arrive free in the mail, that was pretty awesome, and I found a copy of Ranciere’s Nights of Labor. That’s probably my best find, in terms of unexpected and hard to get, and the timing (at a lefty bookstore in Chicago after some meeting, just randomly glanced at the shelves for a minute and there it was).

The other Sunday I walked to a different lefty bookstore, closer to home, where my friend Jeff volunteers. I was bringing him some old left communist and Solidarity pamphlets on Poland and Hungary. He was going through huge boxes of books. Someone had dropped them off, their parent had died and the parent was a trotskyist (judging from the quantity of James P Cannon etc in the boxes). I found a copy of a Stan Weir pamphlet, an Upton Sinclair self published thing on the Spanish Civil War which I’m giving to a friend for xmas, one of the two pamphlets composing The American Worker, and assorted labor history books. That was pretty awesome. My friend Alberto relatively recently sent me a copy of the proceedings of the founding convention of the IWW, that was a really great find and a lovely gift.

I think the factors that contribute to making a real find are:
- how hard you’re looking when you find it (the less hard, the better the find)
- how much you want it (the more, the better the find)
- how rare is the item (the more, the better the find)
- how are your circumstances at the time of the find (the worse, the better the find)

Have I missed any other factors?

I spent a chunk of this afternoon looking through bits of Marx in German. It takes forever because my German isn’t very good. I was looking up what the term “power” is in Marx’s original. (more…)

E uma filme. Tenho scrito uma composição sobre este filme, para praticar meu portugues. Comentários sobre meu portugues estão bem-vindos. (more…)