Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Books (Page 13 of 22)

These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.

Left Foreign Policy (New Book!)

May 26, 2021 /

Left Foreign Policy An Organizer's Guide

I spent much of my Pandemic Year hard at work on a new book. And now I’m ready to announce its release! I called the book Left Foreign Policy: An Organizer’s Guide. You can buy the paperback version at the link above. Here’s a page where you can read an in-depth description.

But on this page, I’ll say a bit about the target audience. It’s a book on left foreign policy at a very 101-level. I wrote it for new leftists and for organizers holding discussions with new leftists. In the book, I lay out some general principles for foreign policy organizing, and I invite new leftists to see internationalism as a key piece of leftist strategy and work. So, from this starting point, we can do better organizing.

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anarchism and marxism

Anarchism and Marxism, Again

May 20, 2021 /

Over the course of the last few months, my partner and I did a little reading group. We read Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. It’s a joint biography of Karl and Jenny Marx by journalist Mary Gabriel. Marx was, of course, not too into anarchism. We’ll return to that.

For now, there’s much of interest in Love and Capital. The Marx family was an interesting family, and Gabriel shows the collective, whole family nature of the Marx political project. However, one topic that kept returning to me as I read is the relation between anarchism and Marxism.

That’s not a central topic for Gabriel, but she finds it important to several key moments in Karl Marx’s life. And like many commenters who focus on Marx, she comes down almost entirely on the side of Marxism in any dispute with anarchists. But several events in the book highlighted the conflict again for me. Battles between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin around the First International, in particular.

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Political Magazines New Masses

Which Political Magazines Do You Read?

May 6, 2021 /

For this post, I have a question for readers: which political magazines do you read?

For my part, back in the day I used to read a wide range of left-wing magazines. That included outlets like Dissent, In These Times, Z Magazine, etc. I’ve also read Jacobin here and there, and I subscribed to Bitch magazine, a feminist pop culture outlet, for several years.

These days, I’ve moved away from all those sources a bit. Here’s a list of current magazines and journals I subscribe to: Catalyst, Current Affairs, and n+1. As far as the niche of those respective outlets, here’s how I’d describe them: leftist and social democratic political strategy (Catalyst), smart and more ecumenical leftist takes on a wide range of social and political phenomena (Current Affairs), New York literary journal with a political essay component (n+1).

How about you?

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Work Won't Love You Back Sarah Jaffe

Work Won’t Love You Back

April 26, 2021 /

Many readers know I like to set a common theme for the year. For this year’s theme, I chose value and the corporate workplace, a topic I’ve also written about in prior years. So far, I’ve hit this theme in a number of ways. But one way I might summarize it all? Work won’t love you back.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out labor journalist Sarah Jaffe recently wrote a book called Work Won’t Love You Back.

Let’s take a look at Jaffe’s book.

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