theory

my goodreads year in books has everything I've read this year

Some highlights:

Kapoor & Jordan eds., Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia. Collection of essays/reports from scholar-activists engaged in class struggle in South America and Asia. In addition to a lot of very concrete details as to how struggle works, what doesn't work, what methods are used, etc, there's some very good essays on what it means to do research aimed at dismantling oppressive systems rather than just doing research for the academic industry. One of the main things this entails is, rather than studying the movement the aim of the academic activist is to study the enemy. When an academic researches a social movement and publishes their findings, this simply makes strategically important information more widely available to academic and governmental spheres i.e. the enemy. Two of my favourite quotes from the book's essays:

...engaged academic research...is usually unconventional out of political necessity and given the dual (though not necessarily equivalent) political commitments (social struggles and academia) at play. This is potentially incompatable with rigorous academic analysis...as commitments to practical politics transform research methods (including use of contradictory means like using the master's tools out of strategic necessity) and at times prioritize politically-induced analytical closure...over futher complexity driven by the search for ever greater analytical complexity and sophistication...

...intellectuals should see themselves as a "conscious wolf man", rather than the leader in the movement. The "conscious wolf man" is aware of his capacity to cause harm. Therefore, before the full moon, he tries every means to prevent himself from causing fatal damage. He constantly reminds people around him that he might betray them and helps them learn all his expertise so that the people can carry on with their struggles after he eventually betrays them.

Both quotes (and all the essays in the book) do a good job of drawing attention to how the class interests of academic researchers differ from the social movements they study, and what sorta practical organizational issues this leads to.

Another of Kapoor's edited books, Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa examines similar themes.

Cyprian Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World is an amazing book. It is a broad tome, but manages to do its subject justice. Broodbank looks at every corner of the Mediterranean showing how they resemble and differ from each other. One of my biggest takeaways from the book have been a more concrete realisation of "the history of all hithertoo existing society is the history of class struggle." There's several instances in the book where class societies arise, grow, collapse (from combinations of deforestation, over-agricultureing and internal disorder) and then seem to reconstruct more egalitarian looking (from archaeological evidence anyway) and sustainable societies.

Eva Mackey's Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization looks at what makes settlers (like me) tick and what settlers can do to work against colonisation. In the final third of the work she looks at examples of settler organisations actually working to return land to control of indigenous nations. The first two thirds look deeply into the legal fuckery of settler colonialism (e.g. the basis of Canada's existence is still the discovery doctrine and terra nullius etc), the various ways (often contradictory) settlers justify colonialism, and various organisations and actions settlers have formed to continue enacting colonialism.

Kyle T. Mays' An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States is as the title suggests. Excellent and readable history book, covers a lotta aspects (particularly the intersections of black and indigenous history) that go overlooked by most.

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour is a spectuacular book that combines all the best of Amin and Arghiri's works on imperialism and Federici and Delphy's work on feminism into a much more readable work. Unequal exchange, the function of imperialist growth, the expropriation of female labour, etc is all discussed in sufficient detail to foster understanding, but not in so much detail that one desires to burn the book.

Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism brings ecology to the forefront of a marxist analysis AND makes (convincing) arguments that Marx himself had done so in his later notebooks. While the usual themes of e.g. metabolic rift are addressed, unlike in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism here the focus is more on what Marx's ecological turn meant for his conception of communism. Saito shows that Marx's view of communist abundance, of post scarcity, is also a vision of degrowth, producing less frivolities, reducing the labour time needed and all with an aim of conscious mediation of the metabolic balance of nature (which ofc includes human society).

Yves Engler's Canada in Africa - 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation and On Guard for Whom? A Peoples' History of the Canadian Military, Gordon & Webber's Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya's The Globalization of NATO are a good (albeit mostly Canada-focused) look at how horrific actually existing capitalism is. All are amazing books to read, learn, and then be on the offensive wrt liberals, accusing their governments of horrible crimes and so forth. Blood of Extraction and Canada in Africa in particular do an excellent job of showing how horrifying 'business as usual' is in the global south (for literally every living thing there). I find a lotta people in the North (including me last year) are unaware of the cost of most of our luxuries. An example quote from Blood of Extraction:

The deposit is situated close to the Río Lempa, a crucial source of water to Cabañas and San Salvador. Residents are concerned about the potential contamination of a vital water supply from mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and zinc, heightened by the fact that there has been no independent assessment of the environmental impact of El Dorado—all while Pacific Rim, under the extant mining policy, would have paid a mere 2 percent in royalties per ounce of gold mined.480 The mine would also consume, according to one scientific study, between 75 and 110 litres of water per second from the nearby San Francisco river, in a country that already is facing considerable shortages and is, according to a Human Development Report for Latin America, the third most unequal country in the region with respect to access to potable water.481

Brett L. Walker's The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion,1590-1800 is as the title says. One of the largest takeaways here is that it shows how bullshit the borders on a map are, and how implicit terra nullius is used to portray an aggressively expansionist Edo Japan as isolationist and peaceful. Japan presents an interesting case-study as a society which developed much the same style of colonialism as Europe did without direct inspiration (at first, anyway). The processes of steady encroachment, worming their way into the centre of trade networks, creation of dependence, etc very much mirror those used by the French or British in North America and the Russians in Siberia. Walker also shows how a lot of the high culture we associate with Edo period Japan (the city culture) could only exist on this colonial basis (even to the extent that the Japanese were buying herring from the Ainu for the sole purpose of fertilising their fields which were exhausted).