I’m actually currently reading through Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party.

Admittedly I haven’t read nearly enough theory to be able to engage with the text as critically as I would like, and I haven’t done enough research into the Black Panther Party, but reading theory is something I want to properly begin doing.

What I’m really enjoying so far in the book is how… personable and relatable Huey sounds in the sense that, if I put myself in his shoes I can see how I would turn towards the beliefs he would have.

1. When he recognises the problems he and other Black people face, he independently comes up with solutions that sound like “scary woke communism”.

2. Instead of being put off by the socialism label, Huey instead decides to read socialist literature out of curiosity and comes to realise that is in fact what he would like to strive towards.

3. He has a decent enough grasp on law and his rights and moreorless tests the limits of his rights which for me is a lot more relatable than a civil war military strategist like Mao Zedong or a guerrilla fighter like Kim Il Sung or Fidel Castro, who seem like such extraordinarily amazing people compared to me if that makes sense.

4. Perhaps it is because the historic conditions Huey was working under was incredibly different from any other serious body of literature, but him not being dogmatic and trying to treat Marx or Lenin as gospel and instead recognise that different historic conditions call for different strategies is also really cool to see.

First, we pulled together all the books we had been reading and dozens we had only heard about. We discussed Mao’s program, Cuba’s program, and all the others, but concluded that we could not follow any of them. Our unique situation required a unique program. Although the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is universal, forms of oppression vary. The ideas that mobilized the people of Cuba and China sprang from their own history and political structures. The practical parts of those programs could be carried out only under a certain kind of oppression. Our program had to deal with America.

Overall I’m very interested in what we can learn from its successes as well as what we can learn from its failures. We know that the Party eventually goes into decline and is dissolved but I’m curious as to what the Party itself did that accelerated or caused that decline.

Apart from all my coursebooks for my studies I recently went down a rabbithole researching the Heroic Age of Antlantic Exploration, which started in the 1890s with the goal of finding out if Antarctica even properly existed, and went on until the so called mechanical age of Atlantic exploration. This culminated in me reading Endurance by Alfred Lansing and Madhouse at the end of the Earth, which were really good reads. I highly recommend it if you like stuff like this. Sadly many of the persons who accomplished many cool things down south later joined the white army fighting the Bolsheviks, kind of an anti-climax.

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I’ve been reading this book for one of my classes called Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures. I recommend this book especially to my eco-socialist comrades. Chapter 11, which is the chapter I just read, shows wonderfully how the imperialist US and Europe have screwed over vulnerable countries in the guise of assistance. I now understand why socialists say that the Word Bank, the IMF, and USAID are another way that the imperial core uses its power to exploit the rest of the world.

i’m reading the novellization of the ps2 video game ico, title ico: caslte in the mist. also, i’m reading kowloon: city of darkness, which is a photography book with interviews with workers inside the walled city, the history, maps, and a lot of shit. really cool book. it has completely changed my perspective of what the city was, is, and how it should be viewed.

I started “The Will of the Many” by James Islington recently. It’s very long but for me quite a quicl read so far. I had little knowledge of the story going in so I expected something much different, but I find it enjoyable enough as a hyperbole of imperialism and the socio-economic pyramid of capitalism, even if it doesn’t (at least by the midway point) actually offer alternatives.

I’ve recently finished reading a scifi book called Dogs of War, it was a great time. Now I’m back to read the novelization of Attack of the Clones.