January 2023: Spring Cleaning

While I put aside some time around new year's to not do anything (for other people), that workload decided to balloon once the 8th rolled around. Now, I knew that would be the case and I was thinking about what I could do in the month that would accommodate my schedule and my cramming for exams. I ended up on a few minor things that I might otherwise have left unmentioned, but I could write a few paragraphs about each regardless.

Leftover Reading

I have this nasty habit of reading one book per device I read on. Currently that has me reading 4 books on my own schedule. However, considering I'm going to spend a lot of time on my commute anyway, I'll have a bunch of time to read and finish those up one by one.

First, I was most of the way through Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds which I had been enjoying, but reading on my computer, since I've been reading it on my computer. I would have read it on a different device, but I only found a slightly fucked up PDF that showed two pages at once. It was a quite informative read however and the format should not stop me from finishing it. In short, it was a detailed and impressively well sourced account of the Communist struggle in the times of fascist uprising of the 1930's, the qualitative differences between Communist and Fascist systems, along with the anti-communist propaganda and its (lack of) veracity in the years following the end of World War II. It also goes into great detail of the material changes in ex-soviet lead regimes after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Parenti's work here is impressively detailed and moreover, he's managed to stick to mostly capitalist approved sources, mainly Western newspapers operating out of either the countries he's discussing at the time, or the USA. It's also provided me with a number of interesting quotes and concepts I'm sure I'll find ample opportunity to use. In general, the book was a comfortable read, a little more modern than the dusty old scribbles from the 20th century I'm so used to now, due to my recent reading habits.

Where this work shines the most however is in the realm of application. Rebuffing anti-communist talking points is difficult to somebody who's grown up hearing them for most of their life, well before critical thinking skills had much of a chance to develop and only ever got subpar explanations of the concepts behind them. The way this is split into segments directly addressing the most common, and even some of the harder to disprove ones makes it stick in my mind as a great starter into Marxist theory, that is more oriented towards contemporary debate, and that doesn't make much use of the stuffy vocabulary either.

Then, there was a relatively short work by Zhun Xu, called From Commune to Capitalism, which I wanted to read mainly since it's somewhat difficult to find a well sourced account of the years following the PLA's successful revolution under Mao. The sources in this one are a little more difficult to get into, but I'm choosing to believe them more or less, as they are numerous and mostly based in the realm of economic studies from various universities. Zhun Xu himself is educated at an American University, which I think at least lends itself to some balancing on the ideological front. I appreciate the frequent use of tables and number graphs to retrace the arguments made from the economic position. It makes the book read a little like a long study as opposed to a book at times, and while that can be a good things in terms of clarity of language and structure of arguments, it also made reading it a little draining for me. I've never really been able to read long chunks of studies and retain any of the pertinent information without producing anything in parallel to the reading process, so often I found my brain rejecting taking in any more information and shutting down. It's in sum quite enlightening on the subject though. Without going too much into the minutiae of economic theory and arguing what should or shouldn't work, what market forces are magical and which are inexplicably tied to human psychology, Zhun Xu did what I think might be the most pragmatic thing when facing a question of this scale and followed his thesis up using mostly data about the times, often using simple, but sensible methods like comparisons before and after decollectivization. It also happened to make me finally look up the word stratification to reassure myself I've been using it correctly and it turns out, it's actually a quite useful word when talking about past revolutions.

I had started Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo at around the middle of the year, originally intended to be read alongside another person. It's not the easiest read though, as far as fiction is concerned. I'm generally not in the habit of reading fiction just because anymore, and though I know that only reading things I intend to use, makes reading more akin to work than leisure, it's just something I enjoy more these days. That being said, I was already somewhat aware of the circumstances by which Hugo penned this novel through Lindsay Ellis' excellent video essay on the topic. Along with that, I was already tangentially familiar with Hugo's writing style through the three volumes of Les Miserables I read several years back now. Keeping in mind that this was written under duress of time constraints not helped by long periods of procrastination on Hugo's part, I was ready to have a lot more patience with the first few chapters. Those in particular were a challenge to me, somebody who is not used to reading French names and minimal knowledge of non-Revolutionary French history. Hugo spends a good chunk at the beginning describing the times in which he chose to set his novel and very often mostly in terms of what people were in charge of what. The promise of a goat kept me going through the roughest of those sections. Considering the background of this work, as well as a more concise style used in Les Miserables, I suspect those chapters were Hugo figuring out what he wanted to write and never striking them from the manuscript. Further into the book, it picks up steam and I for one started finding it interesting to read, somewhere around the part Hugo got around to describing characters and places with his usual pace. I find him to be sufficiently detailed to create a well defined picture for the scene he wishes to paint. Then again, I have trouble constructing pictures in my mind using anything other than composites of imagery I'm already (intimately) familiar with, so it might possibly be a little too rigorous for the more imaginative type, even if it includes the words "god's great lightning doth not bombard a lettuce".

Hugo begins the book as bitter about the state of things as he concludes it. Les Miserables is a tale about the humans, mostly trying to live a good life, whereas Notre-Dame de Paris is one of terrible people and the forms love can take in them. There are some humorous chapters here and there, mostly where the aristocrats are concerned, but I can't help but think the humour stems from the fact that for those people, none of their actions have consequences for themselves, so we will never see them hang, not so for some of the other characters. One might want to keep the times in mind that this work was written in and be lenient with Hugo's depiction of the Romani people of Paris, but in general I think he must have at least harboured sympathies with them, as he understood them to be people first an foremost. Somewhat unfortunately, they are depicted as a treacherous and violent people, (relatively) easily manipulated by a (self-insert) poet, but they are considered more redeemable than the Parisian folk, who are shown to be just as out for blood, manipulated by the clergy and military and loyal to no-one. At least the Romani stand by their laws, and they're ready to welcome other people into their midst that have no place in Parisian society otherwise. Maybe it's my frequent contact with what I jokingly call "depression literature" (e.g. Kafka's and Dostoyevski's catalogue, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai), so I find odd closure in things settling down, even if it settles in a dark place with no clear way out. I at least take solace in the fact that the goat lives.

I don't usually read Comics. I read a bunch of Manga, but Comics sometimes have formats I'm not overly fond of. Still, I caught up with a comic book run called Blacksad on account of a few panels I saw. I thought it was interesting, so I tracked it down. It's only a handful of volumes, so it wasn't anything that took me very long, but the art style, along with the aesthetics of bygone modern times were certainly enough to keep my eye wandering while reading. The stories aren't bad either, though I sometimes wonder how they're not at all interconnected. There are recurring characters and some such, but I find it hard to believe one could shake involvements with the various groups so completely, even while remaining in the same circles. On the other hand, maybe that is just the author adhering to the Noir genre-tropes. I've always thought of myself as a fan of Noir media, but who knows, maybe my love for the aesthetic has so far been stronger than my taste's deviation from the actual content. Many of the city-scapes depicted in the comic books are very lively and energetic. However, the run isn't completed, so I won't write too much more on the matter now, just that I'll be keeping an eye out for when the next chapter comes out.

Another graphic novel I read this month was Red Rosa, a biography of Rosa Luxemburg written by Cartoonist Kate Evans. In a way, it's existence is partially responsible for my reading Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital earlier in the year, something I've sketched out in one of my essays following my conclusion of the read. Of course, most of the information contents of the graphic novel wasn't exactly new to me, but I'm not above enjoying some nice artwork. Now, I'm not that great on political cartoons in all honesty. They often seem a little simple for my taste, and I have trouble deriving much humour from them. That being said, the art-style of Red Rosa is not what I would always call "traditionally appealing". It's still striking, and the imagery chosen speaks of a labour of empathy I don't usually associate with political cartoonists. There is a section during Luxemburg's imprisonment at the time of the first world war, where the text consisted out of excerpts of her letters, which was simply beautiful though. The more poetry-minded reader might consider picking this up for sections like this alone.

Parenti's work here is impressively detailed and moreover, he's managed to stick to mostly capitalist approved sources, mainly Western newspapers operating out of either the countries he's discussing at the time, or the USA. It's also provided me with a number of interesting quotes and concepts I'm sure I'll find ample opportunity to use. In general, the book was a comfortable read, a little more modern than the dusty old scribbles from the 20th century I'm so used to now, due to my recent reading habits. I'm sure the cast was already somewhat cut down to the most important players, but my not knowing a lot of historical figures and their faces cost me a few minutes whenever there were two or three SPD men in suits in the panel, looking feverishly for somebody mentioning a name somewhere on the page. That usually resolved itself sooner or later though, even though that occasionally required the reader know first and last names.

Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism is one of those works that gets cited a lot and isn't actual that hard to read. I've read a number of these shorter works, most centrally The Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific both of which I've enjoyed more or less. Of these three, I'd probably place Lenin's work second on the reading list, just after Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Lenin spends the first half of his book explaining the data on the basis of which he then continues to do his analysis. What I think this book does well is integration of what seems to be a separate phenomenon into the greater picture of capitalism, the dependencies in both ways, and the reactionary refutation of the hypothesis of his favourite punching bag Karl Kautsky. Like his State and Revolution I found his arguments usually succinct, but not always worded the best way. Lenin's language was very direct and seemingly eager to criticize, which can come off as a little aggressive, especially when aware of his role in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Due to the structure of the book, while I would still recommend reading the entire thing to understand the factual basis of Lenin's claims as they are laid out later, one could make an argument for reading from Chapter VII onward, since that is the part where Lenin lays out his theory, and works it through prospective criticism that already existed of the hypotheses at the time. I think as far as the subject matter goes, it will of course need to be abstracted a layer or two for sensible application to the modern political climate, but it is still very much relevant. Imperialism doesn't take the form of one country invading another (or at least most of it doesn't anymore), but Lenin understood that the world would not exist in a perpetual state of war for country borders, and defined Imperialism in a way that can easily be applied to the political influence of capital through mega-corporations, debt accumulation and outside worker exploitation, that is a widely accepted cost of capitalist modes of production today.

Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread is a book I've been meaning to read for a while, since I've been having some anarcho-communist tendencies in my writing anyways, but it's somewhat difficult to find actionable anarchist literature (at least for me). After A Murder of Crows, this has been my second anarchist read, and though I think A Murder of Crows might be a decent eye-opener/motivator to read more, if finding it was easier. I've been asked whether are Marxist authors that aren't dusty old men, long dead and buried, and technically it's not difficult to find those. Maybe it's because there's more non-community (i.e. academic) sources about which books are garbage (looking at you, Fukuyama), but the list of works a principled Marxist should probably read turns out long fairly quickly. I had to have somebody that sounds like they know what they're doing explain Anarchism to me in an 1hour+ YouTube video to filter out names. This is how I landed on Kropotkin.

Conquest of Bread feels like the anarcho-communist analogue to Lenin's State and Revolution. As I had suspected, what the anarcho-communists and principled Marxists want isn't all that different from one another, most of it is highly dependent on the timeline of the Revolution. Interestingly enough, there's some (not so) subtle mud-slinging over the matter of the Paris Commune on both sides, so I'll illustrate what I mean using that as an example.

The Paris Commune was a worker/peasant in pre-revolutionary Paris, encasing not only the workers and other members of the proletariat including the National Guard. It was mainly politically composed of socialists and anarcho-communists, and they did end up governing Paris for about two months. After establishing their government, the socialists wanted to continue their march onto Versailles to depose the crown and establish a republic, while the Anarchists wanted to remain in Paris and stabilize their existing government before expanding their revolutionary endeavors. The criticisms from both sides ring true to me. Lenin argues that after a success of a revolutionary movement, it has to maintain momentum to gain more popular support. That means producing literature and documentation, and pushing onto further targets. In this way, the Anarchists were wrong. Kropotkin argues that even after establishment of the Paris Commune, the people were not sufficiently cared for, in particular, they did not have enough to eat. The socialists elements didn't sufficiently dismantle the pre-existing structures and should have focused on fixing the problems within the Commune before stretching itself too thin. Correcting this was a complicated task, considering France was still at war with Germany at the time and the people were wanting for almost everything. The Paris Commune ended when royalist military forces did what capital does with socialist projects. Though I technically think that the Commune should have done more to expropriate banks and other state structures, rather than sitting on the reserves, the Marxist criticism can't really be discounted by that argument alone. It would probably have required the Commune do both apply tools from the anarchist's arsenal, such as expropriation of banks and temporary equality of pay, while keeping the momentum of the revolutionary movement going. Dispensation of the state however would have had to wait at least until the war was settled. On the other hand, the movement would have lost momentum even with a storm on Versailles, if the basic needs of the Commune's people were to not be met for a prolonged period of time.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is arguably the root of popular dystopian fiction, cited as inspiration for works like 1984, Player Piano and Brave New World. I was pointed to the work by a colleague, who had pitched it to me as a sort of blueprint to 1984, which I can definitely see, now having read it. We, is a lot more subtle though, which, considering the author of 1984, is not much of a surprise. It's probably also more of a valid set of criticism than 1984 ever approaches. The basic setup is identical to that of 1984, though much of the internal policing happens on an individualist level. It better leverages the super-structural aspect of policing in general a little less tenuous. I would generally caution against paying the blurb on the back of the book, since while this does feel like a criticism of the Soviet Union written from within the soviet union, Yevgeny levels just as much criticism against any other state structure of its time, partially through the usage of somewhat simple archetypes and the behaviors they exhibit. The particulars especially are often more directed at highly industrialized structures. For example: the "Numbers" are specialized in their jobs, and those jobs don't seem to change around very much. The Division Theory of Labour is very much a Neoliberal concept. Similarly, the "revolution" fails is by way of Scientism, moreso than an inherent structural feature that prevents change in itself. In that way it's less of a condemnation of the system and more of the people participating in it. Considering that this was meant as a criticism of Soviet Russia among other things, I'm not necessarily surprised it was censored and only initially published outside the Soviet Union. It's biting in nature, and while it's not exclusively aimed at the Soviets, a lot of it rings true, even in hindsight, and probably especially to those experiencing the failings as they happened.

That's my reading for January. It ended up being a lot more than I usually manage to get done in a month. I kept the reading strictly to train-rides and waiting times though, so it wouldn't cut into cramming time.

Website Redesign

If this got done, you probably already noticed it happened. I wasn't unhappy with how the website was laid out exactly, but I had a few problems with clutter. It would be nice to have a search option, and at this point there's enough posts in each category to warrant them having a different URL. That way it's not as cluttered with all the math and such. If at all possible, I would also like users to be able to string posts together like pages to a book, but I'll see what I can do.

For one, correcting the page's design on mobile was done pretty easily. It turns out, those features were already added in, but overlapping with the top banner in a way as to render them inaccessible. I'm not sure how this happened, but I'm always happy to see stuff work out on its own.

I also ended up making a sort of "featured" section at the top. Originally I wanted this website to be a hub for a certain type of project, not necessarily all these different types of projects it's housing now, so my latest monthly project will sit at the top of the page. What's left now is to index this thing and finally get it out there.