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Available from LeftWingBooks.net Good political writing is incendiary. It strikes a balance between the historian and the propagandist, while also (ideally) not coming off as the ravings of a complete crank. Northwest writer Don Hamerquist never wrote for a mass audience; he mostly organized behind the scenes of the American revolutionary left. A "Red Diaper Baby,” born to communist parents, Hamerquist joined the party during the red scare of the '50s, and later the influential leftist collective Sojourner Truth Organization in the '60s and '70s. A Brilliant Red Thread is a collection of Don’s work that could have easily disappeared in...

[This review was originally posted to The Brotherwise Dispatch on Dec. 1, 2024.]  Devin Z. Shaw, Genealogies of Antifascism: Militancy, Critique and the Three Way Fight, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb, 2024).   by A. Shahid Stover Devin Z. Shaw’s Genealogies of Antifascism insightfully works towards demarcating[1] a fundamental redefinition of fascism itself – for social activists – whose hope in the capacity of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society to prevent the rise of fascism is waning, – and for radical intellectuals – whose impatience with challenging fascism on terms conducive to reinforcing advanced neoliberal capitalist hegemony is at an all-time high. ...

[Originally posted to SpectreJournal.com on September 1, 2022] Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi Common Notions 2022 Review by Phil Kaplan Unless you’re rich, it’s fairly hard living your life in today’s world. It’s hard to go out and live your life knowing that the only way to get food and shelter is through the cruelties of the market, through work, waged labor, making someone else richer. It’s hard living with violent police and unjust courts and dehumanizing state institutions at every level. Our so-called democracy seems quite...

[Mirrored from lareviewofbooks.org, where it was posted May 12, 2023.] A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist (Kersplebedeb, 2023) “TODAY WE FACE a bewildering conundrum,” writes Luis Brennan. “[M]illions of people are ready to engage in active combat with the ruling capitalist order, but we have not seen the emergence of a viable social force that articulates a promising alternative to that order.” Faith in capitalist governments, whether liberal-democratic or outright authoritarian, is eroding worldwide as crises proliferate, and even the wealthiest and most plunderous nation-states are proving incapable of sustaining the quality of life that ensures their...

[Originally posted to LeftTwoThree.org] A review of J Sakai, The Shape of Things to Come (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2023). Last month, we looked at the Kersplebedeb release A Brilliant Red Thread, an anthology of writings by Don Hamerquist. This month, we’re looking at a somewhat similar release by Kersplebedeb, The Shape of Things to Come, an anthology of writings by J. Sakai. The main difference is that most of Hamerquist’s book consisted of emails and online forum contributions unavailable to a broader public before, while most texts in The Shape of Things to Come were previously published, so avid Sakai fans...