The chapter is huge. Its fascinating and Davis is a great writer but jesus dude, give us a break lol.

I'm still working my way through the first chapter so I haven't really got anything to discuss for chapters 2 and 3 but I'll hopefully read them tomorrow and post something then.

I will say that the section in chapter 1 on proletarian culture has stood out to me. The kinds of social groups and societies Davis goes over I think are one of the things the left needs to be looking into more, reviving and updating as sites through which new comrades can be radicalised and trained.

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Still with Old Gods, New Enigmas for the book club, second discussion post will be up tomorrow.

Also started reading a new book called Microverses by Dylan Riley, its essentially a collection of very short essays (mostly only a page or two long) on various topics that the author scribbled down during the pandemic. Its not the usual kind of thing I read but the short writings are alright bedtime reading.

"Its not my fault if reality is Marxist" - Che

I've had Detroit on my reading list for quite some time, sounds awesome

Yeah, I wouldn't have thought using the preface to immediately savage your own audience was a winning strategy but what do I know.

So this chapter is gigantic and covers a lot of stuff. I really feel like this should've been split up into separate chapters and released as a book in its own right. The main point of the chapter is to look into works from Marx and Engels on a range of different topics, alongside a wealth of historical examples too, to hopefully present ideas and solutions to some of the problems the left is grappling with today.

Davis first gives an overview of how Marx and Engels’ ideas of the working class and why they would be the revolutionary group in society developed over their lifetimes, and also gives a brief overview of several periods of working class struggle up to the 1920s. Davis then gets into the meat of the chapter in which he proposes several theses on a range of topics developed from the writings of Marx and Engels and a look at some historical struggles relevant to the topics at hand. So far these have been:

• 1. “Radical chains” – Why the working class has “radical chains” i.e. why the emancipation of the working class will necessarily require the abolition of private property and therefore classes.
• 2. “Factories and unions” – how both industrial workplaces and unions can be means through which solidarity and collective action between working class people can be developed, and the necessarily political nature of this action. He offers criticisms here too, such as these sites not always being able to address racism or sexism.
• 3. “Mass strikes and workers control” – looks at the ideas of different leftists on the roll of the mass/general strike as well as how different kinds of workers have approached self-management. There's also a particular focus here on the shop stewards movement.
• 4. “The industrial city” – Davis looks at how the organisation of cities had allowed for solidarity between workers to permeate throughout neighbourhoods and how they have played a big part in some previous working class movements, particularly for women.

This is as far as I have read for now, I believe there are another four topics Davis covers in this chapter.

There is a lot of information in this chapter. The book is really packed to the brim with sources and references that I have no idea how Davis managed to find the time to read, although I read a recent interview with him where he said he reads around 500 pages a day, which is just insane. There are so many inspiring stories through the chapter too: from women organising a rent strike in Glasgow, backed up by thousands of striking workers, and forcing the government into imposing a national rent freeze; to workers at a railway company in Pittsburgh going on strike and - with the help of the IWW and a group of immigrant veteran organisers who’d moved to the US from Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Russia – managed to overcome the violence from armed strikebreakers, state police, and militias to win their demands. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of messed up if still interesting stuff in here, Henry Ford’s personal secret police force is an example that stands out.

All in all this has been a very insightful read so far, although I do still think the chapter would have been much better off as its own book. It would've allowed Davis to explore each of the theses in greater depth too, as at times it does feel a little like he's trying to cram as much information as he can into a short space.

I believe the next few chapters are more stand-alone essays rather than expansions on what has been said here, so if anybody hasn't been able to read this chapter, you should be alright to jump into the next ones which seem to be of a much more reasonable and manageable length.

A quote I liked:

"even the most elementary forms of solidarity must be consciously constructed"

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Just Old Gods, New Enigmas for the book club, first discussion post for it will be up tomorrow.

Reading Old Gods, New Enigmas, its very good but I'm finding reading it pretty slow going. First discussion post will be up next Sunday.

The looking back at early and proto-socialists in Davis' book has also got me considering restarting GDH Cole's A History of Socialist Thought, which I started before but didn't get vey far. I'd like to use Cole's series as a jumping off point to then dive into the works of the people he mentions and look into the movements he talks about as I go along but I think that would take forever.

I found the problem, for some reason Perusall cuts it into two sections. The first section goes until a table with a list of general strikes since 1890, then the rest gets cut. Below the table there's a button that says "next section" and then you can see the rest of the chapter. The chapter is actually like twice as long as it first appears on Perusall, which is what fooled me initially.

Oh damn, didn't realise one chapter was half the book. I've changed it, 2 weeks for chapter 1.

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Didn't we have a Marx/Engels fanfic as a reading a couple of prides ago?

I also read Soledad Brother which I liked but the bits where he was wanting to slide his tongue between Angela Davis' tooth gap didn't really need to be in there.

Fine, but I reserve my right to shit on Vladimir "the only way I know how to make an argument is by misquoting Marx and Engels and calling everybody a philistine" Lenin.

Its terrible, he's such a brilliant writer.