Books/Theory general

Put forth an argument sometime or commit suicide, faggot.

You're aware that there's a consensus among modern psychology that a lot of Freud's general theories have worth even if many of his particular ideas and methods are stupid and unscientific right?

Also I'm currently reading:

The State and Revolution-Lenin
Democracy for the Few-Parenti
Struggle Against the State-Mahkno
A People's History of the United States (ongoing)-Zinn
Anarchy After Leftism-Black

It's interesting how similar Mahkno and Lenin were as far as theory, despite most people not seeing it. I mean obviously the differed on very important elements but they definitely both believed in creating a group to seize proletarian revolution and stir it in a particular direction so it wouldn't betray itself or be co-opted by opportunists. Also very interesting how much shit Mahkno got from other anarchist groups at the time for not being "spontaneous" enough. Both works are really making me see how naive a lot of anarchists really are.

might be interesting for some people

leftcom reading list

pastebin.com/N0RfQdnM

personally I'm currently trying to get into Kant. I've started to read Prolegomena and will after this rather short book maybe try to read the first Critique but it might be to hard for me as Idealism is a new field for me, especially Kant.

Just finish Foucault's Discipline and Punish, again. It's really good and not terribly opaque.
Side note: I wish the people on both the right and the left would stop caring about his personal sexual orientation; he doesn't even mention it in his theory, not even in tHoS, nor in interviews.

I think I'm going to read Arendt next, starting with the Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, or the Life of the Mind.

thanks for this been trying to formulate a leftcom reading list of my own for a while now so I could start studying the idea closer

When I tried to study Kant (as with Hegel) I really couldn't extract much from his actual writings cause

1. >translations

2. He's just kind of a shitty writer tbh

For beginners secondary sources are the way to go with Idealism imo, everyone involved makes an already hard to understand idea even more confusing by writing in a clusterfuck style

Currently reading: Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-nihilism

It's really good so far. I'm thinking of making a .pdf of it for The Anarchist Library so I can distribute it on the internet.

How dare you say that about Kant-sama.

He's actually got some really nice passages. My favorite part from the Critique of Pure Reason is

But I do agree that in general he's kind of an acquired taste.

I guess I shouldn't say "shitty". Maybe obtuse would be better

Also yes on the making of the .pdf. There needs to be more [good] .pdfs on the internet, even if I'll never read them

Is that some new book? I've never heard about it but it sounds pretty interesting.

Leninism and Platformism has alot in common, i think the demand for military style approach in the civil war heavily influenced Makhno his theories. Ive only read About the Platform,The Manifesto of The Makhnovists and The Anarchist Revolution. Mahkno comes off moralistic but his propaganda does has a form of appeal, especially for peasants. (Who are the people to be propagated at)

Have you read Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism yet? Also do you write down notes?

On here or in general, most people just follow the memes here without actually dedicating themselfs to Theory. Its sad tbh fam

I'm currently reading Anarchy after Leftism by Bob Black and i am at Chapter 6: Reason and Revolution. I finished Ego and his Own a week ago and i am now digitising my notes.
I've now typed down 6000 words that cover all the notes from page 1 to page 148.

Yeah, Little Black Cart just published it this year: littleblackcart.com/books/anarchy/blessed-is-the-flame/

You are a real comrade, and a real Unique One who shall not be named.

The counterrevolution of 1776.

Gerald Horne.

Quality book about how fucked up America is when it supports slavery and ignored basic human rights.

That sounds pretty engrossing. You got any quotes or passages you like from that?

Fucking typing down all my notes is hell tho, i almost put a fully filled note at every single 2/4 pages wich completely mutated my physical copy to a normal book to a fat abomination with a hernia.

Yeah, I know the feel, but it's good that you're putting in the extra effort. Taking notes is really helpful, especially for self-study where you're not in a reading group or getting lectured on the material.

I know I probably fucked up by doing this but no I haven't read Bookchin's work yet. I'm already about a third of the way through Black's book though so I'm going to finish it first.

I haven't taken any notes on Anarchy after Leftism because, and I'm not trying to sound contradicting here, it's not really priority, it's kind of a book I'm reading because it's short and I find Post-Left Anarchy interesting enough to study but not as closely as the other things I'm reading right now.

Also am I the only one who thinks there's a lot of similarities between Zizek and Bob Black?

Also
That seems pretty anti-anarchist imo tbh fam :^)

*I meant condescending not contradicting btw

Bob Black doesnt give a fuck about anything and has kidna the same social attitude of Zizek.

I've read Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism and its majority shit, the majority is about the critique on primitivism and Hakin Bay his theory, while the rest is upon blaming everything on the individualists. Bob Black his criticism on Bootchin is verry accurate for pointing out all the marxist dogma's that bootchin applies to everything.

Anyway here are my notes (Not mutch cause its on the mobile phone) So you know what to expect IF you are going to read it.

(Used this pdf i beleave, it has page numbers. libcom.org/files/Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.pdf)

Direct democracy: Dissensus is the method premoted by bookchin. Autonomy is supported in difference than freedom.
19 Bookchin explains what lifestylism is.
22 Bookchin not understanding egoism and pulling a strawman, the individual as monarch of the self
23 mental mesturbation, Hakem Bay black magic
25 ''lifestyle anarchism takes flight from all meaningful social activism and a steadfast commitment to lasting and creative projects by dissolving itself into kicks, postmodernist

nihilism, and a dizzying nietzschean sense of elitist superiority''
25 The fifth estate
27 commodity fetishism of anarchism/ Ecstasies
33 ''Marx's terminology in capital above all, the fetisgism of commondities wich has been variously and superficially embroidered by the SI into spectacles.
35 Blaming tech for missery instead of capitalism
38 on primitivism reality and fiction
45 Bookchin tearing primitivists apart
47 ''verry simple indeed. Sutch might be expected of any life form that largely adapts rather than innovates, that comforms to its pregiven habitat rather than alters it to make that

habitat comform with its own wants''
51 Bookchin calls stirnerism petite-bourgeois
'''A bourgeois reality whose economic harshness grows starker and crasser with every passing day is shrewdly mutated by lifestyle anarchism into constellations of self-indulgence,

incho­ateness, indiscipline, and incoherence. In the 1960s, the Situationists, in the name of a "theory of the spectacle," in fact produced a reified spectacle of the theory, but they

at least offered organizational correctives, such as workers' councils, that gave their aestheticism some ballast. Lifestyle anarchism, by assailing organization, programmatic

commitment, and se­rious social 'analysis, apes the worst aspects of Situationist aestheticism without adhering to the project of building a move­ment. As the detritus of the 1960s, it

wanders aimlessly within the bounds of the ego (renamed by Zerzan the "bounds of nature") and makes a virtue of bohemian incoherence. ''
52 ''The ego, identified almost fetishistically as the locus of emancipation, turns out to be identical to the ‘sovereign individual’ of laissez-faire individualism. Detached from its

social moorings, it achieves not autonomy but the heteronomous ‘selfhood’ of petty-bourgeois enterprise. ''
51 Bookchin begins on Stirner
53 on Stirner, Bookchin fucks up heavily here.
54 End of Stirner

55 '' Lifestyle anarchism must be seen in the present social context not only of demoralized black ghettoes and reactionary white suburbs but even of Indian reservations, those ostensible

centers of ‘primality,’ in which gangs of Indian youths now shoot at one another, drug dealing is rampant, and ‘gang graffiti greets visitors even at the sacred Window Rock monument,’ as

Seth Mydans reports in The New York Times (March 3, 1995).
Thus, a widespread cultural decay has followed the degeneration of the 1960s New Left into postmodernism and of its counter-culture into New Age spiritualism.''
Lifestyleism is following only desires, impluse interests,slavery of hedoism.
57 kropotkin on Stirner
58 ''In its amoralism, this elitism easily lends itself to the unfreedom of the ‘masses’ by ultimately placing them in the custody of the ‘unique ones,’ a logic that may yield a

leadership principle characteristic of fascist ideology.''
58 ''If the failure of anarchism to address this situation can be attributed to any single source, the insularity of lifestyle anarchism and its individualistic underpinnings must be

singled out for aborting the entry of a potential left-libertarian movement into an ever-contracting public sphere. ''
68 Anti-nationalism of the left
75 anti militarism
77 Revolution or Reform
81 Cultural unity shouldnt transform into a nationstate. The people should own and riect culture, all anarchists agree.
83 Nationalism of the 3rd world

In the first pages he blames everything (i am not kidding) on Individualists, then around page 22 he begins all about Hakim Bay and TAZ stuff and the sillyniss of the primitivists. At page 51 he has a rant about Stirner in the style of the German idealogy. Then he goes all about the Post Left Anarchist theory and then around page 60 he begins about the new left and how they behaved.

I consider only page 50 to 60 to be interesting while most of his criticism on primitivism can be dumbed down to it being romanticism and the rest of the new left stuff to being short therm hedonism. I agree on both things tho but dont support his solutions and think his interpretations of other post left thinkers besides Bay are tankie tier.

Damn man, thanks for all this

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Bamp

Re-reading the Proudhon anthology; this time taking critical notes as I go along. Simplifying the text to its core arguments and critiqueing them is fun, but damn is it time consuming.

Having trouble even getting past the first chapter to the parts of the book I'm actually interested in, to be honest.

Is it true that proudhon his Economic theories are a mess? I have the anthology dusting on my shelf.

I haven't finished "System of Economic Contradictions" yet, but it is heavily annotated to show that in "Poverty of Philosophy" Marx either misquotes or just plain attributes views to him that weren't even indicated in that work.

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

Julius Evola's Ride the Tiger

Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past

Patrick Buchanan's The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization

Niall Ferguson's The Greatest Degeneration

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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
Don't agree much with it, although I cant wait to read his other book where he BTFO's himself

speeches of Robespierre to the national Convention.

It showed me how robespierre was a faggot at the end.
At first, he was a pragmatic socialist, and then he became a full devot /christian/ tier politician.
He also sayed in a speech "atheism is reactionary".
What a faggot. total power corrupt everyone.

Atheism is reactionary. It's a reaction to the degeneracy of Christianity with it's pacifism and egalitarianism.

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Love thy neighbor. That's what it means.

Is it true that Kant's Prolegomena helps with the Critiques, or am I just wasting my time?

Is SatanNazi back????!!!!!

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kek this is why Wittgenstein's a badass

yeah, he says so himself. He even says that those who don't understand the Prolegomena shouldn't get into metaphysics at all. He was probably just mad at people calling out his unbelievably dull and sometimes incomprehensible style tho.

What an argument

had to laugh though, he spent a few pages ranting about how people say that the critique is sometimes incomprehensible lmao.

It's common knowledge that "Poverty of Philosophy" was a total hatchetjob. It would have gotten an F due to his inability to properly cite and understand his opponent's argument.

You can look at the annotations yourself online: anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/system-of-economic-contradictions-1

Reading a history of western philosophy and anarchism and other essays right now. The first is extremely informative. I'd reccomend it, definitely. So far I haven't gotten far enough in Emma goldmans book to formulate an opinion quite yet.

Based on a recommendation by lit/ Introduction To Philosophy, I'm reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton. I'll then read either some Plato or a book about Pre-Socratic Philosophers.

I'm not super interested in the Greeks but I thought it would be a good start because I've never studied philosophy before. Hopefully ill dive into German Idealism so I can get started on Schopenhauer. Or maybe ill just give up and have a crack at Gravity's Rainbow

I might finish Richard Wolff's Contesting Economic Theories one day. I got like ten percent of the way through because reading a poorly converted pdf on a kindle is hard work.

Anyone have a mobi file for Descartes First Mediation? Mine sucks for the same reason.

finally got around to starting zizek, so i decided to start with "Living in End Times"

Isnt first as tragedy then as farce a better intro to Zizek?

The conquest of bread.

Fine because comrade Kropotkin is easy to read.

I am too easily distracted and I don't manage my time so not great. Anybody got tips on how to stay focused? Taking notes?

That's good to hear. Why is Kant-chan always so upset?

Also, how much of Fichte and Schelling would you want to read as a prereq for Hegel? I know, I know, secondary sources and all that, but I want to get Really, Really Good at Hegel before re-reading all of Marx's stuff.

meant to quote myself

I was just memeing, as I know anarchists get pretty worked up if someone mentions the Proudhon/Marx beef.

kek m8 this was exactly my plan. I planned to semi-rush through the early idealists so I could focus a bit more on Hegel. Not necessarily to understand Marx better, but to be able to read Lukac's, Adorno's and the situationist's stuff without making my head ache.
So I'm not really sure either. Maybe another user could help us.

Why can't more Marxists be as easy to read as Kropotkin or Bakunin?

I started with Welcome to the Desert of the Real, which I personally preferred. I think best intro to Zizek though is Pervert's Guide to Ideology, captures all his language and general memery in one movie and somehow makes it fairly easy to understand if you watch it twice.

what do you think about the new gero album fam

Bump

This picture is my life.