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umkalra's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
ultimately i feel he is the kind of communist i just don't agree with, regardless of the flair and expertise in his writing, and felt the sections about communist organisation, revolution/praxis, council-run worlds were some of the least well-substantiated and made a lot of the rest of the text weaker. his critiques of anarchism (i'm obviously biased) are shallow and under-realised, and mirror the way capitalists discuss marxism as a whole: "it has never been done successfully and therefore never will be". writing on the ontological lack of quality in capitalism and the commodification/flattening of history and time were some of the most exceptional descriptions/articulations of these ideas i've come across, and other iterations of them i've read probably owe this book their genesis. but also the book is orientalist in a really telling way, and its few uses of "real-world" examples kind of tend to make its arguments dissipate rather than make them stronger –– a kind of dissolution of meaning via unnecessary projection, revealing (or retroactively attaching) an un-tetheredness to the work.
dullegriet0's review against another edition
This is a little too dense for me, but I still want to learn the concepts, so I'm switching to something supplemental.
anandazhu's review against another edition
3.0
sorry to say this but it’s probably best the author didn’t live long enough to witness ~social media~ because it would’ve made him so upset.
kitmacneil's review against another edition
3.0
Hmmm. A good book to read when someone is traveling through the throes of rebellious youth. Not so much when one is shoveling down the political bullshit of graduate school. It goes hand-in-hand with Barthes' "Mythologies" though, with both offering a similar perspective of the Spectacle.