#radical reading

[be-harmony]

“To be a human being is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful, yes, cheerful in spite of everything and anything, because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”

John Berger, Confabulations

[be-harmony]

“I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society, I said, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making? Do companies sell their water etc by telling us the right kind of persuasive myth? Is that why people who really don’t need to buy something that’s practically free still go out and buy bottles of it? Will they soon be thinking up a myth to sell us air?”

- Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

[be-harmony]

- Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: a ghost story

[wild-at-mind]

Flipping through books at the radical bookstore and found some that really reinforced why I don't like the radical vs liberal binary. (Radical is a fine descriptor and in fact a radical book shop is the best place to see how broad it can be- when deciding on what to stock the collective that run it are not saying 'well this seems like it might be too 'liberal', in the bad sense, that person on twitter with anarcho in their username would consider it not hard left enough so in order to keep our ethos pure we will NOT stock it!')

For example, in a book about feminism and how it is failing marginalised women I found the phrase 'liberal TERFs'.....?? You can see what is contradictory about that, right? The R in TERF stands for radical. The use of the common acronym hides this contradiction. It might have been a good opportunity to talk about how a supposedly radical movement can actually be a hiding place for reactionary ideas that align with the far right. (In fact you could even argue the R in TERF should stand for 'reactionary'.) TERFs are not the only ostensibly hard left movement that does this, I'm sure we could all think of other examples.

I find books like this one (which I won't name as I don't want to trash it or anything-it's probably overall really good and I haven't even read all of it) to have a framing which gets me down as well. When talking about movements that tried to help a broad marginalised group but ended up only helping its more privileged members, either intentionally or unconsciously due to the privilege of the people driving the movement, the original movement still did come out of a place of genuine need for people in that broad group, including the more privileged members. Sometimes in books of this kind the understanding of this is assumed in the reader, and so the movement is talked about like it was some kind of silly unnecessary thing an already privileged group of people created so they could play-act being oppressed. And as readers of radical books include people too young to remember the history of these movements you can often get across the wrong idea about what things were like a few decades ago for, say, a white woman or a white gay man. Either of those groups could perform incredibly racist acts and reinforce racist power structures to damage other people's lives but that doesn't negate the fact that they were also oppressed on the axis of gender or sexuality and treated by society far less well than they are today (which is not to say all is fine now, obvs). That's not a contradiction unless you believe on some level that suffering societal oppression makes you more moral or a better person.

[mymurderbooks]

Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit A Study in Depravity

Title: Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit. A Study in Depravity. Author: Heathcote Williams Rating: ★★★★★

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"Boris told such dreadful lies It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes" - James Landale, BBC political editor

Poet/playwright/activist/counterculture icon Heathcote Williams wrote this pamphlet in 2016, before the referendum. It illustrates Boris' obscene sense of privilege and curious lack of morality in his own words and of those who've had the (mis)fortune of interacting with him, and how perfectly positioned he is for this era of fake news, with his history of journalistic invention and disdain for 'fact-grubbing historians'. Ultimately, we're reminded that he's always been a dangerous, Machiavellian liar, a defender of the economic elite, a supporter of colonialism, and has never been harmless or amusing, even when dangling from a zipline.

If Brexit, Boris or the Tories affect you I recommend this as your book club pick - although it already seems a little too late.

[casanova-lives]

Have you read Negroes with Guns? I just finished it and found it extremely compelling

Not yet, but it's added to the list! What are your thoughts on it?

[elyserewind]

It will be said that the despot gives his subjects the assurance of civil tranquility.  Very well, but what does it profit them, if those wars against other powers which result from a despot's ambition, if his insatiable greed, and the oppressive demands of his administration, cause more desolation than civil strife would cause? What do the people gain if the very condition of civil tranquility is one of their hardships? There is peace in the dungeons, but is that enough to make  dungeons desirable?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract”