Welcome to my newsletter, where I’ll make semi-regular posts that contain recommendations of articles, books, videos and anything else I come across that I feel is important or worthwhile to share, along with some of my own thoughts. I do not now and won’t ever accept paid subscribers, for reasons I discuss in a bit more detail in this twitter thread.
Aside from venting my frustrations about ‘the discourse’ (whatever it happens to be) and the occasional movie/show/music recommendation, it’s a place for me to share information as a humble contribution to the ‘educate’ part of the old socialist credo: “educate, agitate, organize!”
Or, to use Chomsky’s phrasing, a contribution to help develop “courses of intellectual self-defense”:
Here is a short piece by Chomsky where he elaborates in more detail on this concept, and here is a list of essential readings I compiled that will also be useful in this respect. In fact, the main purpose of my twitter account is also to aid in this effort, to spread knowledge as best I can with the means available to me.
However, it is crucial to keep in mind Chomsky’s point that it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to develop one’s intellectual self-defense capabilities in isolation from others, and I can attest to this from personal experience. The things I learned from participating in social movements, strikes, demos, occupations, strikes, and the broader left over the years could not have been read in some book or other. And when you combine these direct, first-hand experiences of solidarity with a sophisticated, analytically robust framework of how to view the world, you can face anything and never lose heart and become disillusioned. It inscribes in you Gramsci’s apt description of the movement’s motto: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!”
I’ll leave you with an article recommendation, one of my favorite pieces of political writing that brilliantly combines such direct experience with theoretical reflection: David Graeber’s On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets (PDF).
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