Reviews and Comments

People, including anarchists, often hold David Graeber up as some bright light of philosophy. He's not horrible, but he's always got a lot of glaring holes.

In this particular book, he has some really frustrating points where he applies a regional history to an entire movement or moment (e.g., applies a lens of NYC's way of doing OWS while neglecting to recognise how OWS operated in other places). This is something he always does, and it's really to the detriment of whatever he's developed to share. It's pretty ahistorical because it just neglects that many other areas have our own needs, even while stating otherwise. It also acts as if OWS was a primarily anarchist movement, which is something that I feel is very context dependent. Perhaps it was in some places, but others? Not so much. If that were true, I feel like it wouldn't have been very welcoming to US-liberals and right-libertarians, and it very much was.

It's very odd.

The beginning of this book also sets a tone that is constant throughout Graeber's work: Despite pointing to feminisms (scarcely, as he only ever seems to have referenced them when specifically engaging with feminism and never any other moment), he often plays into the same patriarchal structures and attitudes. A very clear example of this is the desire to call things "drama" or "infighting," as if there can't possibly be any other reason for there to be tension between people in a group; he points to "low numbers" of cases of reported sexual assault as being an indicator that it wasn't common, but he neglects to recognise that most people aren't reporting it because it's not taken serious (and in a movement that he claims as primarily anarchist, it's understandable that they wouldn't report to the police at all).

Even if the tensions weren't from any form of abuse, he neglects the ways in which a lot of manarchists often try to push other people out and retain the same hierarchies they're supposed to be fighting against. This isn't "drama," and it's not "infighting." It's actually holding people accountable, and that was rarely (if ever) done by people of hegemonic demographics.

It's not bad, but these are the things that annoyed me most.

This book is one of the few that I found that talk about sex workers in a nuanced light. This is largely because it's a book that's by sex workers, and that makes all the difference.

As someone reads through it, they'll start seeing the connections between a lot of different issues and sex work in particular: trans and queer issues, homelessness, misogyny and violence against women, migrant issues, race, and so on. It provides one more link in a chain that highlights the ways in which everything is connected, which is something that more people really need to be cognizant of.

There are a few parts that I take issue with, and it's largely because they try to be... more polite to people than I think they ought to be. There's a part of the text where they say something along the lines that they want to sit down and have genuine conversations with anti-prostitution feminists who they openly acknowledge they disagree with to make their positions clear, but many of those people that they list are also known TERFs (Julie Bindel). I think such additions of "wanting to talk" are really just pointless, and they most certainly were in 2018 (when the book was published). The belief that we can just talk to these people and make them change their minds... I struggle with that because a lot of time has been wasted on just talking with these people, and they haven't budged an inch. In fact, they've entrenched further.

So while everything else was great and really informative and helped build a lot of connections between issues, I really just wish they would've removed these elements of "sitting down and nicely talking" with people who have shown themselves to be openly hostile and violently aggressive to calm discourse.

The worst crime of this book is how exceptionally dull it is. It's taken so many topics and smashed them into one short novel, and it barely makes any sense or even tries to deal with anything.

The protagonist is aesthetically an anarchist, though most of their actions aren't characterised through any anarchic principles. They are characterised through the most common stereotypes of anarchist actions. They live in a squat (and the squat is stereotypically not taken care of, with the author at some point acting as if you should just mistreat a squat because it's monetarily free rather than do what you can to maintain it... which, from my conversations with people who've lived in squats? the latter is more common than just trashing it, especially as it helps to keep more attention off you... also it creates a realm of responsibility for the space, rather than just treating it like a garbage heap you sleep in). The protagonist starts off the book getting beaten by a cop at a protest. There's a lot of protest imagery. There's not a lot of direct action imagery.

It's a very superficial depiction of an anarchist, and it maintains a stereotype that doesn't encompass many anarchic values.

The queerness the protagonist exhibits is also superficial, and it would be fine if it wasn't made into a focus of their personality. There's very little exploration around their gender beyond them spending a lot of the book getting upset about how their family deadnames them (which makes sense) or how other people "refuse to understand them" while they never explain themselves. The author takes great pains to tell us that they've done it a lot outside the text, but they never really do it in the text (beyond conversations like "Giselle?" "My name is Crow." "Giz-- I mean Crow"). The same thing is true of their apparent asexuality? Which is also presented as a simultaneous internal desire for sex but an external disgust for? So all of this comes off very weird.

Like, I don't need the character to be constantly rummaging around in their brain for a conversation about being queer or how they knew or whatever, but there needs to be something if you're going to make those conversations a very key part of a person while never actually dealing with it. A character can just be queer, that's fine. The author wanted this character wanted to just be queer while also trying to explore queerness.

And the shamanism as a solution to understanding abuse? Just. I can't. This book is tragic about appropriation and handling discussions of abuse... It all just feels so incomplete, unexplored... Confused? Just... incoherent.

I can't tell if it's because of the translation or if it's just... not great. Or maybe it's both? But either way, it really is quite tedious for something that you think would be engaging and interesting. It really was a struggle for it to hold my attention, which was... weird considering expropriation is a topic that I'm rather interested in.

There's also little real commentary about expropriation and the ways of doing it. It's more like a bit of a story of individual events that all were, to some extent connected. Which is fine, but that wasn't really what I was sold. And it comes off as being a bit... obnoxious because it refuses to really acknowledge that there is a place for expropriation, though we need to have less of a masculinist tendency behind it (which would've been an interesting point to engage with, since it was also hyper-focused on such tendencies).

Just... felt lacking. Not horrible, not great.... Disappointing? To an extent.

I love the concept: Some huge event practically (but not really) wipes humanity out for years by petrifying them. One day, thousands of years later, a handful of teens start ... de-petrifying? Effectively putting them back at 'square one' for the Modern Stone Age.

My biggest issue is that the characters feel a bit flimsy throughout the first volume. They immediately take on specific roles without growing into them. Senku's probably the most fleshed out, being given a bit more characterisation prior to the petrification of humanity. However, because they focus the most on making him a know-it-all rather than building a lot of his personality or his relationships with others? He's not really that engaging as a character. Taiju is a bit more interesting, but he also slips into just being stereotypically daft.

The same thing happens with Tsukasa who has about five seconds of being really interesting! Until he then decides he wants to genocide the adults and smash all the petrified adults while de-petrifying the youth. Also, he has some of the best logic about the world! But because he then ties his frustration with the world into genocide? The reader is, as always seems to be the case, not allowed to engage the anti-capitalist ideas because they're put into the villain and used in a way to justify atrocities, meaning that the other characters and the audience won't really engage with them.

It's so shallow.

The book details a lot of the author's growing discomfort working in the UN and with international diplomacy through formal organisations. Each essay focuses on slightly different topics, though most of them are interconnected and refer back to each other.

A lot of it is pretty interesting from an 'insider' perspective, but it also doesn't really go far enough. Perhaps it was because I was introduced to Carne Ross through It's Going Down, but I was expecting something... more.

It completes with an essay about their Independent Diplomat organisation, which is... I guess useful. But I don't think it does what the author's pointing out is the problem. Just because Ross helps the government of Kosovo in the UN, it doesn't mean that they're helping Kosovars in the world. Perhaps it's making it slightly easier, but it's also still maintaining the hierarchies that people still suffer under. Maybe the context is slightly different, maybe sometimes there are 'good' people in power, but... It doesn't stop to deal with the consideration of what happens when someone manipulates the goodwill they've built through seemingly generous acts? What happens when, if that person was 'good', the next person takes over and their work is for naught because it's so easy to destroy things under hierarchical power structures?

Certainly those were considerations?

I'm baffled by this text and how often it floats around spaces filled with "radical pedagogues," how often it's cited as something that has shown people what they didn't know. That's fine. I'm not against texts that make people aware of something, nor am I against people finding something in places where I do not.

But this book is baffling. Its construction is confusing, and much of it feels apocryphal while told as fact. It swims between multiple perspectives without really claiming any beyond seeking to reform the school system, and that's the part I take most issue with. It is a reformist text, seeking to make it clear that what we're doing is wrong but not so completely wrong that we can't salvage it. At best, I think it was misguided when it was published, and its philosophical discussions have been outdated since before then.

I also cannot figure out for whom this book is written. Who is the audience? What is its purpose? Either I struggle to ascertain that or it has done little to be clear. Is it the fault of the translation? I'll never know, as my French is poor.

What I do know is that all of the chapters could be boiled down to a paragraph. This could have been a pamphlet rather than a book, and it probably would've made more sense than building things as they had been done. I like thinking about what I'm reading and building connections, but this was constructed to be intentionally obtuse in nature.

In short, it feels and reads like academic wankery.

Edit: Also, as someone who as routinely worked with children with whom I share no common verbal language, the fact that I've seen so many people cling to this idea that Jacotot's students were able to achieve fluency "in mere months" is beyond me because that is a lot of work. Nowhere does Rancière even engage with the possibility that these Flemish guys who didn't speak a word of French... could have spoken at least some French and had some basic linguistic capability or possibly had another similar language to pull from! Or an interest prior to meeting Jacotot. None of this is addressed or considered, while Rancière simply claims this as fact (which we cannot really prove or disprove).

It's this constant focus on one person to be the one hero, which Jacotot is not. Learning is a community practice where people bring in ranges of knowledge, and these sorts of philosophy books perpetually hyper-individualise them even when they don't intend to.