Personal log:
The problem with getting more involved with organizing in the past couple of months is that I've had less time to reflect and find new sources of inspiration. These past two weeks of no school have been a nice time to sit back and recharge. I've been reading a lot more, as well as just wasting beautiful time on the computer. Which, while it sounds lame, is a great luxury to have.
This past weekend I went to the SDS Midwest Regional Convention. I'll post my "official" reportback to my chapter here when my comrade finishes editing it up. In the meantime, here's my current reading list:
1. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Daniel Taussig. An amazing reflection and analysis on anthropology, Marxism, politics, and semiotics (that's the first time I've ever been able to say, without being a pretentious Macalester student, that I vaguely understand something about semiotics). It's really redeemed the dialectic a bit for me, as it portrays the tension between precapitalist and capitalist forms of value in South America as constant and interwoven.
2. Spaces of Capital by David Harvey. I'm just starting this, but everyone tells me this cat is the foremost Marxist geographer, which is groovy. I've been thinking a lot more about urbanism, particularly in the context of post-Situationist explorations. I find myself still identifying strongly as a country boy, but the cityscape is growing on me.
3. Italy: Autonomia ed. semiotext(e). This shit is fucking sweet. Early Negri, Tronti, Debord, Guattari, Virno and a million other cool cats. How come nobody ever told me about Sergio Bologna? It's thick as hell with Marxist language, but I'm getting a lot from it. I find myself constantly evaluating relations between people in the language of the autonomists nowadays.
4. The Early Novels of Raymond Chandler. His language doesn't always jive with my serious commitment to anti-racism and anti-sexism, but Chandler is master of prose. And let's face it, who doesn't wanna be mysterious, drink a shit-ton of whiskey and periodically beat the shit out of bad guys?
Yikes, three books by Marxists and one by a former oil exec? If I'm not careful, Will will steal my anarchy club card while I'm sleeping!
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1 comment:
hey comrade,
anytime you want to talk about autonomist stuff, especially stuff written in the 60s and 70s like Bologna and Tronti and all that, please let me know (basically all the stuff which is before _Empire_ and all the stuff on postfordism and immaterial labor and all that). That stuff was HUGE for me, still is really. Maybe I'll do an exco thing on it next fall, would you be interested?
cheers,
Nate
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