Heavily interested in politics, games, music, technology and just the world altogether.
I'm also a computer engineering student of the TU Braunschweig.
Bilingual in English and German.
Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents …
Belief that struggle is futile and that change is impossible is itself paralyzing and debilitating. This is one of the most potent elements in the naturalized common sense. That is, it rules everything in opposition to it as nonsense, quite literally. Demonstrating the fragility of this claim is the first step to change, I would say.
The manifesto is mostly just interesting as a historical piece for me, especially in terms of leftist history. Ideologically it's still pretty interesting to read, however some parts of it have naturally become a bit outdated which has even been acknowledged by Marx and Engels some 25 years later.
The edition of the manifesto I read even includes multiple prefaces by Engels throughout the years which further gave an amazing insight into history and what they felt and thought at the time. Additionally the book also included Engel's The Principles of Communism which practically functioned as an FAQ to fully illustrate what exactly Communism is and it stands for.
The manifesto is mostly just interesting as a historical piece for me, especially in terms of leftist history.
Ideologically it's still pretty interesting to read, however some parts of it have naturally become a bit outdated which has even been acknowledged by Marx and Engels some 25 years later.
The edition of the manifesto I read even includes multiple prefaces by Engels throughout the years which further gave an amazing insight into history and what they felt and thought at the time.
Additionally the book also included Engel's The Principles of Communism which practically functioned as an FAQ to fully illustrate what exactly Communism is and it stands for.
The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now …
Might even be six stars
5 stars
Really readable introduction to degrowth. Covers the current state of climate change (which is, inevitably, pretty grim, but nowhere near Wallace-Wells), mentions the Anthropocene but then makes it clear that the term is misleading as it suggests we're all equally to blame. This segues into a history of capitalism through enclosure and colonialism which I found much more understandable than my previous attempts to read up on this. There's so much great stuff in here -- not necessarily new, but just well written -- about artificial scarcity and the growth imperative and the failings of GDP and so on. Also a nice discussion of ontology and the shift from animism to dualism, and how that makes exploiting the natural world seem, well, natural. The chapter on technology includes a disquieting explanation of BECCS and how that's the basis for so many mitigation plans, and also covers the problems of just …
Really readable introduction to degrowth. Covers the current state of climate change (which is, inevitably, pretty grim, but nowhere near Wallace-Wells), mentions the Anthropocene but then makes it clear that the term is misleading as it suggests we're all equally to blame. This segues into a history of capitalism through enclosure and colonialism which I found much more understandable than my previous attempts to read up on this. There's so much great stuff in here -- not necessarily new, but just well written -- about artificial scarcity and the growth imperative and the failings of GDP and so on. Also a nice discussion of ontology and the shift from animism to dualism, and how that makes exploiting the natural world seem, well, natural. The chapter on technology includes a disquieting explanation of BECCS and how that's the basis for so many mitigation plans, and also covers the problems of just greening growth by, say, extracting huge amounts of lithium for all the batteries we'd need.
The book turns much more positive/hopeful towards the end, as it points out how little value growth, past a certain point, provides for well-being. Really, it all becomes a matter of distribution and public services at that point, and that's what's missing under neoliberalism.
It's perhaps indicative of my experience of reading this book that I borrowed the ebook from the library and then realised that I'd highlighted about half the text! That might just be a failing in my highlighting technique, but I prefer to think that it's because I kept reading paragraphs and thinking "yes! that's it!".
