George Orwell’s preference for plain-speaking over artistic experimentation, common sense over high theory, and common decency over fashionable cynicism has made him one of the twentieth-century writers who remains not only readable but worth reading.
To lose oneself in a book is a pleasure. In Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, however, one feels instead simply lost.
Mark Greif's essays in Against Everything are frequently unsettling. But unsettling can be either good or bad. It can mean the upending of our assumptions, a break from established patterns.
No matter how one feels about it, the current state of anarchism has represented something of a mystery: What was once a mass movement based mainly in working class immigrant communities is now an archipelago of subcultural scenes inhabited largely by disaffected young people from the white middle class. Andrew Cornell's Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century supplies the first convincing account of that transition.
The International Workingmen's Association -- sometimes called "The International," or "The First International," depending on your views concerning the legitimacy of its subsequent incarnations -- was formed in 1864 by representatives of numerous European socialist and workers' organizations, in order to coordinate strike activity and otherwise aid the working class in its struggle against capitalism.
George Orwell is remembered as an essayist, a novelist, a cultural critic, and a critical socialist but not, generally speaking, as a poet. Yet he did write poetry -- nonsense poetry, political poetry, romantic and lyrical verse, even the odd limerick.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019