T.H. Ponders

Lewis, Lewis, my sweet summer child- is not the sanctity of space safe from your allegorical demands and treacherous parablism?

A lot of really interesting ideas here which other have noted, and a really interesting proposal in his idea for WSDE. Still, I think I want to read the book that ends up citing this booklet in it's chapter on WSDE's as one mode of anti-capitalist labor arrangement. 

I also want to add that some have noted that the references to the Occupy movement feel dated, but I feel like they really helped root this document in it's historical place, namely pre-Trump. And to that end, some of his explanations of conservative neo-liberal exploitation seem down right prophetic, but probably inevitable to those who, unlike 16 year old me, were actually paying attention at the time.

It's an ok start.

Really only using Nazism as its main source of historical reflection, and cherry picking a few small stories from other parts of the world, means that he gets to largely ignore the role the US has played in preventing democracy and installing authoritarian dictatorships in the rest of the world. In doing so, he also never has to meaningfully grapple with contemporary attempts at socialism.

This combined with trying to stay slightly closer to center, only ever referring to Trump as “he who must not be named”, and it only being 120 pages leaves his arguments a little hollow. I might find more in a larger work, but I get the sense that a larger version of this would only more clearly reveal the parts where the answer is leftism unspoken.

An essential read. I've been making an Art History podcast for years now that falls perfectly in line with Berger's Marxist and feminist theories of art and I had never read it! One of those books that will forever change the way you see the world after reading it. I will be recommending this to everyone always sorry not sorry.

It's the rampant fatphobia and misogyny for me. There's a really interesting idea for a book here, but the execution is god awful. I got swept up in the entertaining bits, but even the slightest reflection on this books take on incarceration or justice will find it quite hollow.