Andrew's Updates en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:24:55 -0700 60 Andrew's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9278860594 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:24:55 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew is currently reading 'Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines']]> /review/show/7467896175 Let Me Speak! by Domitila Barrios de Chungara Andrew is currently reading Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines by Domitila Barrios de Chungara
]]> Review4972762825 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:21:32 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew added 'The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America']]> /review/show/4972762825 The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne Andrew gave 2 stars to The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (Hardcover) by Gerald Horne
bookshelves: history, political-science, dnf, coulda-been-an-article
The intro was so underwhelming that it left me without much desire to read the book. I skipped ahead to the last chapter to see if a compelling argument would emerge, but it didn't. So please know that the following review is my impression based on a very cursory reading/skimming.

I don't understand why this book exists. The argument seems to be that we should consider 1776 a counter-revolution because it occurred mostly in response to London's "revolutionary" proposal to abolish slavery, but there are a few problems with this argument:

1) It's not convincing in that London's official position on abolition was obviously and purely cynical. Horne also ignores that English abolitionists were only a faction of public and official opinion on the matter... it was far from as settled and unified a front as Horne tries to portray.

2) Even if England was unanimous in wanting to abolish slavery, they never did, they just talked about it. Even if you think that would have constituted a "revolution" (still arguable from a Marxist perspective at least), it didn't happen. Therefore there was no revolution to counter, therefore calling 1776 a "counter-revolution" is just sensationalist and factually incorrect.

3) Granting the far-fetched premise that England's actions actually constitute a "revolution," Horne doesn't convince that this is the principal reason for the U.S. Revolution... he cherry-picks a lot of documents and quotes showing how upset people were by this London move, yet he artificially neglects a plethora of other well-documented reasons for the Declaration of Independence. Using the Horne methodology I could write a book saying "Actually the U.S. Revolution was all about tea taxes!" and then write 300 pages of firsthand sources complaining about the tea taxes and reacting to the Boston Tea Party, while only offhandedly mentioning any other issue. Case closed!

4) Even if we grant that the argument is correct, it's not clear what difference it makes today. We already know the Revolution was about wealthy, racist whites wanting to make more money. Nothing about this thesis alters that fact in the slightest. In the last chapter Horne quotes two other historians who called 1776 a "white settler revolt" and the "white American War of Independence." Both of those descriptions seem appropriate to me, but at no point does Horne explain why "counter-revolution" is a better way to describe it.

Basically, the whole book feels like a stretch. I'm not sure why it needs to exist in addition to American Slavery, American Freedom, or A People's History of the United States, or The Half Has Never Been Told, or probably several other books that I either can't remember or am not aware of. I'm not sure why he doesn't refer more to Britain's cynical role fomenting rebellion in Haiti as described in The Black Jacobins -- but I guess it's because it would undercut his incredible argument that England genuinely wanted to free slaves so much that it constituted a "revolution."

Honestly, this feels like a book-length version of a twitter thread dunking on America's founders for being hypocrites. "They said they wanted freedom, yet they were pro-slavery!" he nods as he strokes his beard. I mean, I know they're hypocrites, I think most intelligent people do, but we don't need another whole book about it unless you have something novel to add. There's nothing novel here... it just strikes me as a very facile argument. It also strikes me as pretentious to try to pass it off as something momentous.

Anyway I'll stop there except to corroborate what others said about the writing. It's really bad. These are the 5th and 6th sentences of the book (see if you can guess which word was the first red flag for me):
Unfortunately, this treasure trove is not organized adroitly, which may account for its relative absence in the footnotes of scholars -- and also sheds light on the nature of my references to it. Still, my research peregrination has convinced me that this collection should be better known to scholars seeking to unravel the complexities of the 1776 revolt against British rule.
Half a paragraph in and it already feels like he's trying too hard. The whole book feels like he's trying really hard to impress us. But the only thing I'm impressed with is his research (hence the 2nd star).

I wanted to like this a lot. And honestly I feel like a lot of these positive reviews are expressing similar feelings to mine, they're just kinda going easy on him, maybe cause they feel like they should like it anyway. I feel like I should like it too. But I don't, and I'm getting okay in my old age with being honest about those things. Very disappointing. ]]> Review4976862864 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:21:16 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew added 'Washington Bullets']]> /review/show/4976862864 Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad Andrew gave 2 stars to Washington Bullets (Kindle Edition) by Vijay Prashad
bookshelves: history, political-science, coulda-been-an-article
My frustration with this book is a function of how excited I was to read it. I really like and respect Vijay Prashad, and I'm always fascinated by the topic of coups and assassinations (especially those committed by the U.S.). So I was understandably looking forward to this book, but then it read like a breezier Chomsky lecture.

"Breezier Chomsky lecture" isn't a bad thing in and of itself, because Chomsky gives great lectures that are often overly-dense. The problem in this case is that I've read plenty of Chomsky lectures and I didn't need, expect or want this book to be another one of them. So again, it's a question of disappointed expectations. But also I chose the term "breezier Chomsky lecture" carefully, because that phrase encapsulates all of the problems I had with this book. It was (in descending order of problematic) unsourced, cursory, unoriginal and unstructured.

Unsourced
There are no footnotes, endnotes, or citations at all in this book. It was shocking to me when I realized. Prashad basically says at the end, in his "Sources" section, that he has read too much and spoken with too many people to be able to catalog them all for us. Which... that's not really okay with me. I don't doubt the veracity of what he's telling me, but this book is far less useful to me if I can't cite it or its sources in discussions and debates about its content. The subject matter already rings the conspiracy alarm bells to political ignorants.

My wife told me this is a problem of whiteness and white standards, and I can somewhat respect that. But that's not the stance Prashad takes, and the way he explains himself it kinda feels like he just didn't want to bother. I really wish he would have.

Cursory
The book is so short and covers so much ground that Prashad can't devote much space to anything. It feels almost stream-of-conscious. There are several passages that covered no more than a page but would have been fascinating books in themselves, or at least entire chapters. On p. 92, for example, he talks about the CIA's use of religion as a bulwark against communism. Fascinating point that I wanted to hear more about (and also see sources for...). But no. On p. 126 there's a tantalizing reference to how oil-seeking ventures in the Amazon seem to coincide with the prosecution of drug wars. Again he moves on before you can really stop and ponder.

Unoriginal
There's nothing of substance here that Chomsky (or Galeano, or many others I'm sure) hasn't already explained in more detail and with at least the same level of analysis.

Unstructured
Related to being cursory, Prashad flits from topic to topic so quickly and with apparently little rhyme or reason, so it's difficult to follow a through-line apart from the very vague "U.S. does some fucked up shit around the world." The stream-of-conscious style did not work for me at all. This was a more minor complaint than the others, but it still detracted from the reading experience.

Conclusion
I'm not sure how to say this nicely but I do not understand why this book exists. If Prashad was intending this as an update to Chomsky, then he failed by refusing to organize it better or source it at all. If he was intending this as a novel argument then he failed almost completely, because the couple of novel tangents he presented he spent very little time on. If Prashad had some other aim than these then he still failed, because I'm confused after the fact, meaning he did not communicate it effectively.

I'll stop there because the more I write the meaner I tend to get. I'll just say that I wish Prashad would have devoted more time and attention to this book. He might consider becoming less prolific. I think for someone who knows very little about the U.S.'s foreign interventions this book would be good. But then again I'd still recommend Chomsky over it (e.g. any of the essays in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky).



]]> ReadStatus5824849389 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:20:45 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew finished reading 'Washington Bullets']]> /review/show/4976862864 Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad Andrew finished reading Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad
]]> Review7448520712 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:31:43 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew added 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains']]> /review/show/7448520712 The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Andrew gave 2 stars to The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Paperback) by Nicholas Carr
bookshelves: anth-sosh, history, coulda-been-an-article
I'm going to create a new category called "Could have been an article," sorta like the literary equivalent of "This meeting could have been an email."

That's this book. Only about 1/3 of it is directly related to the title (and that third is valuable). I'm guessing that third started as an article in some magazine. The rest is basically a history of intellectual technology and the tech sector, which I neither wanted nor needed. It takes a full third of the book to even begin the titular discussion.

And ironically, this book is strangely shallow itself, spread out over a huge breadth of subject matter. It really reads like he didn't have enough material to flesh out a book on the topic at hand, so he had to pad it with extraneous background on well-trod ground like the invention of the printing press and other things.

It's a shame because it's an argument that has only become more important in the 15 years since this was published. I'd be interested to see a true 2nd edition that added more data from recent years, since we have been firmly in the Age of the Smartphone for a good decade at this point. And yes, the data here absolutely supports my feeling of shorter attention span and memory these days, as well as things like GPS eroding our innate capability of wayfinding. It's alarming that we as a society don't seem to care all that much, but I guess that's far from the most alarming thing about our society these days...

I can only really recommend this to people who have never spent any time thinking about this topic before. If you're already a choir member you will not need what preaching this book offers.

]]> Comment289028717 Wed, 02 Apr 2025 06:50:44 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew commented on isaac's review of On Revolution]]> /review/show/6737091980 isaac's review of On Revolution
by Hannah Arendt

... by being a western chauvinist and anti-communist ]]> Comment289028609 Wed, 02 Apr 2025 06:47:21 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew commented on Blake's review of On Revolution]]> /review/show/3386828900 Blake's review of On Revolution
by Hannah Arendt

idk for me when your analysis is so clouded by reflexive anti-communism you can probably no longer be considered a "great thinker" ]]> Review73412075 Wed, 02 Apr 2025 06:27:28 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew added 'On Revolution']]> /review/show/73412075 On Revolution by Hannah Arendt Andrew gave 1 star to On Revolution (Paperback) by Hannah Arendt
bookshelves: political-science
***Update 4/2/25***

I re-read this after reading Domenico Losurdo's scathing Western Marxism, and yeah I'm downgrading my rating significantly. Folks be warned, this is what anti-communism does to your analysis.

Because Arendt basically scoffs off Marx without any critical engagement whatsoever, she's left with a ridiculous comparison between the American and French Revolutions, where she somehow decides, contrary to virtually every other historian ever, that the American version was the far more important and true revolution to world history.

Much of her analysis hinges on a tedious and pedantic distinction between "liberation" and "freedom," which can as shorthand be read as negative/positive versions of freedom, or "freedom from" v. "freedom to"... she also distinguishes them by their motivations: necessity (bad!) and happiness (good!). Yep that's right folks, take it from her, revolutions aren't actually that good when they're liberating people from oppression, they're only true revolutions when the people who do them were already free of poverty.

Basically this is a distinction that she has had to invent in order to justify her loathing of the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Korean communist revolutions. These weren't "true" revolutions for her because they had liberation (freedom from necessity) as their main motivation.

So you can probably see how weird of an argument this is, and pretty useless even. On p.155 she even says that the most obvious and decisive distinction between the American/French Revolutions was that the reigning regime at the time of revolution was a limited v. absolute monarchy. This is apparently the most important factor for her. Funny how that's not as obvious/decisive a distinction to me as the fact that one "revolution" was led by the ruling class and the other by the impoverished masses.

And then you have her continuous claims that America was "free of poverty" at the time of revolution, ignoring that a full 25% of the population of the colony was enslaved, and that as many before that had been literally exterminated.

Anyway, that's enough time on this very unserious analysis. What an overrated political thinker Arendt was.

***Original Review***
As difficult as The Human Condition (see my review), and it takes longer to pick up steam. Luckily though, Arendt keeps the momentum building until the end, starting around Chapter 3. Overall, Arendt spends too long discussing abstract philosophical ideas and linguistic origins and not enough time discussing the practical distinctions among revolutions, and what makes them work or fail. When she does this, the book becomes much more interesting, although any enjoyment is still hampered by the almost unbearably long sentences, each filled with as many as five different ideas punctuated by hyphens, colons, commas and parentheses.

Some sentences take several re-readings just to wrap your mind around everything she is trying to say. It is obvious the woman is brilliant (I've already used adjectives like "astounding" and "staggering" to describe her intellect in other reviews), but it's equally obvious that she either doesn't give a darn about bringing her ideas to a wider (read: "stupider") audience, or she's just not capable of adopting a more accessible writing style. I'm tempted to cite the former, just because Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil did not suffer from the same shortcoming.

As far as content, I can only give a partial rundown since the entire book is so dense. Her discussion of the differences between the American and French Revolutions was illuminating and persuasive. She posits that the success of a revolution depends on 1) it being free of the misery surrounding an impoverished populace and 2) its success in finding a sufficient authority to replace the deposed one. America got lucky, starting from scratch, and the success of their and any revolution was dependent upon a foundation -- in the American case, the foundation of a constitution and new form of government, which is something the French and most subsequent revolutions failed to do.

At the same time, The American revolution dwindled and the "revolutionary spirit" eventually died away because the founders did not do enough to protect it when enshrining the Constitution. She says they could have done this by protecting the political rights and freedom of the townships and town meetings. These small groups or "councils," she claims, are vital aspects that spring organically from any revolutionary movement and are the only outlet for true political expression by the common citizen. They therefore must be nurtured in a symbiotic relationship with the state if freedom is to be preserved.

The conclusion is particularly impressive, when she actually suggests a return to the ancient Greco-Roman political system in which not everyone votes, only those who are sufficiently interested in the political process. This government would inherently be both self-chosen and self-including. In this way, people not concerned with their public freedom are not forced to participate and can instead focus on their private lives, while people to whom politics does indeed matter will never be excluded from political decisions (as they inevitably are in our current representative system). I honestly don't know enough about political or revolutionary theory to agree or disagree with her authoritatively, and their are obvious obstacles to implementing this plan in our current climate (cough cough -- corporate money). But despite leaving herself open to charges of elitism I can say at least that her arguments are persuasive, even intuitive despite their complexity.

The ideas here are essential, but the packaging is unfortunately repellent. I would not recommend starting your exposure to Arendt with this book. Probably better to start with the far easier Eichmann, and then move onto the more important Human Condition. But this one is important nonetheless, especially for anyone interested in political theory or the concept of freedom.



]]> ReadStatus9251253562 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:08:07 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew is currently reading 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains']]> /review/show/7448520712 The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Andrew is currently reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
]]> Review7410855617 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 14:18:07 -0700 <![CDATA[Andrew added 'Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn']]> /review/show/7410855617 Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo Andrew gave 4 stars to Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn (Paperback) by Domenico Losurdo
bookshelves: history, political-science
An extremely important contribution to 21st century Marxism and political theory. Losurdo essentially and effectively asserts that so-called "western Marxism," or in other words the academic Euro-American additions to Marxist theory since the mid-20th century, is nothing more than racist, imperialist, utopian anti-communism.

It's a stinging rebuke that goes a long way toward explaining the frustration I've long experienced when trying to engage with so-called "radical" academics (and I've taken a class with one of Losurdo's principal villains here, Michael Hardt). They rarely feel like they're talking about anything materially relevant to present-day struggle, and Losurdo highlights why: they've essentially forsaken any current anti-imperialist struggles along with all actually existing socialist states. They always have reasonable sounding justifications for doing so, but they coincidentally never seem to deviate from the pattern of siding with imperialism against poor, non-white nations.

Probably the most memorable passage comes when discussing Hardt and Negri's Empire and their downright weird, anarchist claim that no state deserves any support from Marxists(p.202):
...'from India to Algeria, from Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.' Yes, the Palestinians can count on the sympathy and support of Western Marxism. But, from the moment in which 'the Palestinians are institutionalized,' one can 'no longer be at their side.' The fact is that 'as soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state, its progressive functions all but vanish.'

And so, we can be sympathetic to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Palestinians, or any other people only so long as they are oppressed, humiliated, and without any power -- that is, as long as they are in the hands of colonialism and imperialism. We can support their struggle for national liberation only as long as it continues to be defeated! The defeat or the inconclusiveness of a revolutionary movement is the precondition for certain exponents of Western Marxism to celebrate themselves and enjoy being rebels who, in any circumstance, refuse to contaminate themselves with constituted power!

Of the four Losurdo books I've started, this is probably the 3rd most engaging/important (behind Liberalism and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend). It suffers from being fairly repetitive, and I wish Losurdo had spent more time dissecting the failures of contemporary Marxists. E.g. Hardt, Negri and Zizek come off really poorly here, but they're not the only contemporary Western Marxists, and even in criticizing those three Losurdo stays pretty superficial. For me some of the most compelling arguments would be examining their positions on contemporary events - e.g. Hardt's support of the Yugoslavia bombing, and Zizek's repeated antipathy toward China. Those parts were great and I just wanted more.

In any case, this book is important to read for any Euro-American Marxists, especially white ones and especially university students. If you're studying Marxism at the undergrad or graduate level it is vital that you understand the history and failure of the ideology you're imbibing, and I doubt anyone can elucidate that for you more quickly than Losurdo in this book.

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