Hate to say this but I think the writing on the wall (who graffiti-ed my wall?!) has been here for a while. I simply view reading each chapter as a chore and don’t enjoy taking notes. Mostly because the book isn’t as relevant to anti-work as I thought or was led to believe by the…
Wow, it’s been a while since this has happened! By my count it’s been over two years since I last did one of these but right now it’s the article idea that’s on the forefront of my mind. I’ll probably do an review of Stalin’s Peasants (chapter 11) on Wednesday but I figured I’d keep…
For anyone who has followed along with the series so far you may have noticed that some chapters are harder to relate to anti-work and a few of them I haven’t given much attempt at all. On chapter 8 which deals primarily with Culture I want to try to isolate those parts that I thnik relate…
A mix of poor sleep and other mental health related issues pushed back the release of this article by a day. But that said, despite the increased length of the chapter relative to the last one (29 pages instead of 21) I actually have significantly less to talk about within the context of anti-work. Largely…
I: Introduction Whether it comes to the fiction I write or the non-fiction that I read or the ideas I embody or even the people I tend to associate with folks who live “on the margins” are usually the most fascinating to me. The individuals who have taken a look at society and concluded something…
Here’s a chapter that looks at the work structure of the collective farms and how peasants resisted that sort of work. So there’s a bit more terms of anti-work to discuss here, let’s get into it! Early on in this chapter, Fitzpatrick mentions the use of ironic language on the part of peasants as Soviets…
I feel that a more general book review is going to be helpful for Stalin’s Peasants at this point. But I do want to make some comments about the nature of the state and its relation to the peasantry. Particularly the relation of the state wanting to take more from the peasants and the peasants…
I will admit that the book is not as relevant to anti-work struggles as I’d hoped it be. The difficulty with going off the suggestions and reviews of others (which I believe is what spurred me to buy this book) is that they may only be judging it generally instead specific chapter relevance. Given that,…
When you’re learning about the USSR in school it’s a lot different from when you’re reading about it in a book. I know that seems fairly obvious but sometimes it just hits you that schools skimp out on the smaller details…and sometimes for good reason. There was actually time when I questioned to one extent…
Just like I did with Working Stiff Manifesto I’ll divide particularly long or involved chapters into parts. This is not only so I can make digesting them a bit easier for both me and you, the reader. But also because I don’t want all of my articles on books to be 3000 words or more,…