samdalefox's reviews
184 reviews

1. Belief in the abolition of authority, hierachy, government
2. Belief in both individuality and collectivity
3. Belief in both spontaneity and organisation

1. Educational - how we share our stories with one another
2. Economic/Political - direct action through sabotage, strike, and boycott
3. Personal/Political - anarchist affinity groups

"What is crucial here is the fact that it happened at all. May-June 1968, disproves the common belief that revolution is impossible in an advanced capitalist country. The children of the French middle and working classes, bred to passivity, mindless consumerism, and/or alienated labour, were rejecting much more than capitalism. They were questioning authority itself, demanding the right to a free and meaningful existence. The reasons for revolution in modern industrial society are tus no longer limited to hunger and material scarcityl they include the desire for human liberation from all forms of domination."

"Feminist are dealing with the male domineering attitude toward the external world, allowing only subject/object relationships. Traditional male politics reduces humans to object status and then dominates and manipulates them for abstract 'goals'. Women on the other hand, are trying to develop a conciousness of 'Other' in all areas. We see subject-to-subject relationships as not only desirable but necessary... Together we are working to expand our empathy and understanding of other loving things and identify with those entities outside of ourselves, rather than objectifying them and manipulating them. At this point , a respect for all life is a prerequisite for our very survival."

"Radical feminist theory also criticises male hierachial thought patterns...which alienate us from the continum of human experience. Women are attempting to get rid of these splits, to live in harmoney with the universe as a whole, integrated humans dedicated to the collective of our individual wounds and schisms."

"If we want to 'bring down the patriachy', we need to talk about anarchism, to know exactly what it means and to use that framework to transform ourselves and the structure of our daily lives. Feminism doesn't mean female corporate power or a woman President; it means no corporate power and no Presidents...When we say we are fighting the patriachy, it isn't always clear to all of us that means fighting all hierachy, all leadership, all government, and the very idea of authority itself."

"So what I'm talking about is a long-term process, a series of actions in which we unlearn passivity and learn to take control over our own lives. I am talking about a hollowing out of the present system through the formation of mental and physical (concrete) alternatives for the way things are.

"What we want is not the overthrow of the government, but a situation in which it gets lost in the shuffle."

"Hope is a woman's most powerful revolutionary tool; it is what we give each other every time we share our lives, our work, and our love. It pulls us forward out of self hatred, self-blame, and te fatalism which keeps us prisoners in separate cells. If we surrender to depression and despair now, we are accepting the inevitability of authoritarian politics and patriachal domination. We must not let our pain and anger fade into hopelessness or short-sighted semi-"solutions". Nothing we can do is enough, but on the other hand, those 'small changes'e make in our minds, in our lives, in one another's lives, are not totally futile and ineffectual. It takes a long time to make a revolution: it is something that one both prepares for and lives now. The transformation of the future will not be instantaneous, but it can be total."

"Truly we are rich - far richer than we think; rich in what we already possess, richer still in the possibilities of production of our actual mechanical outfit; richest of all in what we might win from our soil, from our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge, were they applied to bringing about the well-being of all."

"In our civilised societies we are rich. Why then are many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses?...The socialists have said it and the repeat it unwearingly...It is because all that is necessary for production...all have been seized by the few in a long course of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression... - Taking advantage of alleged rights aquired in the past, these few appropraite today two-thirds of the products of human labour, then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way....It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessities of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is the substance of all socialism."

"Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realisation leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and hand, toil of mind and muscle - all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say - This is mine, not yours?"

"The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be te collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to All. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth. "

"Nowadays, in te present state of industry whern everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable."

"The wage system arises out of the individual ownership of the land and the instruments of labour. It was the necessary condition from the development of capitalist production and will perish with it as 'profit-sharing'/ The common possession of the instruments fo labout must necessarily bring with it the enjoyment in common of the fruits of labour."

"The forms have changed, but the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become provate property, and he must accept, or die of hunger."

"The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets."

"The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth with which they have produced, and industry seeks foreign markets among the monied classes of other nations...All nations evolve on the same lines, and wars, perpetual wars, breakout for precendence in the market. Wars for the possession of the East, wars for the empire of the sea, wars to impose duties on imports and to dictate conditions to neighbouring states; wars againist those 'blacks' that revolt! The roar of the canon never ceases in the world, whole races are massacred, the states of Europe spend a third of their budgets in armaments; and we know how heavily these taxes fall on the workers."

"Alongside the rapid development of our wealth-producing powers we have an overwhelming increase of middlemen. Instead of capital gradually concentrating itself in a few hands, so that it would only be necessary for the community to dispossess of a few millionaires and enter upon its lawful heritage...the exact reverse is coming to pass: the swarm of parasites is ever increasing."

"it is impossible to reckon in figures the extent to which wealth is restricted indirectly, the extent to which energy is squandered, while it might have been served to produce, and above all prepare the machinery necessary to production. It is enough to cite the immense sums spent by Europe in armaments, for the sole purpose of aquiring control of the markets, and so forcing her own goods on neighbouring territories, and making exploitation easier at home; the millions apid every year to officials of all sorts, whose function it is to maintain the 'rights' of minorities - the right, that is, of a few rich men - to manipulate the economic activities of the nation; the millions spent on judges, prisons, policemen, and all the paraphernalia of so-called justice - spent to no purpose, because we know that every alleviation, however slight, of the wretchedness of our great cities is always followed by a considerable diminuation of crime; lastly, the millions made by propagating pernicious doctrines by means of the press, and news 'cooked' in the interest of this or that party, of the politician or of that group of speculators." 

"If we consider on the one hand the rapidity with which civilised nations augment their powers of production, and on the other hand the limits to that production, be it directly or indirectly, by existing conditions, we cannot but conclude that an economic system and trifle more reasonable would permit them to heap up in a few years so many useful products that they would be constrained to say - Enough! We have enough coal and bread and raiment! Let us rest and consider how best to use our powers, how best to employ our leisure."

"If plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital - cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education - must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure. This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invested by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it the greatest good of all. There must be expropriation. The well-being of all - the end; expropriation - the means."

"In claiming the right to well-being, they claim the right to take possession of the wealth of the community - to take houses to dwell in according to the needs of each family; to socialise the stores of food and learn the meaning of plenty, after having known famine so well. They provide their right to all social wealth - fruit of the labour of past and present generations - and learn by its means to enjoy those high pleasures of art and science which have too long been monopolised by the rich. And while asserting their right to live in comfort, they assert, what is still more important, their right to decide for themselves what this comfort shall be, what must be produced to ensure it, and what discarded as no longer of value. The right to 'well-being' means the possibility of living like human beings, and bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the 'right to work' only means the right to always be a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future."

"At the root of this argument these is a great error. Those who propound it have never paused to enquire whence comes the fortunes of the rich. A little though weould, however, suffice to show that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any destitute, there will not longer be any rich to exploit them."

"Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor."

"Our friends often warn us, 'take care you do not go too far! Humanity cannot be changed in a day, so do not be in too great a hurry with your schemes of expropriation and anarchy, or you will be in danger of achieving no permanent result.' Now, what we fear with regard to expropriation is exactly the contrary. We are afraid of not going far enough, or carrying our expropriation on too small a scale to be lasting. We would not have the revolutionary impulse arrested in mid-career, to exhaust itself in half measures, which would content no-one, and while producing a tremendous confusion in society, and stopping its customary activities, would have no vital power - would merely spread general discontent and inevitably prepare the way for the triumph of reaction."

"All is interdependent in a civilised society; it is impossible to reform any one thing without altering the whole. Therefore, on the day a nation will strike at private property, under any one of its forms, territorial or industrial, it will be obliged to attack them all. The very success of the revolution will impose it."

"If the coming revolution is to be social revolution, it will be distinguished from all former uprisings not only be its aim, but also by its methods. To attain a new end, new means are required."

"Since all our middle-class civilisation is based upong the exploitation of inferior races and countries with less advanced industrial systems, the revolution will confer a boon at the very outset, by menacing that 'civilsation', and allowing the so-called inferor races to free themselves."

"Let the revolution only get so far, and famine is not the enemy it will have to fear. No, the danger which will menance it lies in timidity, prejudice and half measures."

• Ultimately, good as an introduction to the topic of climiate change, very simple. Reminds me a little like reading a children's encyclopedia in the first couple fo chapters.
• The inclusion of tropical and temperature diseases development
• The highlighting of disparity between the global north and global south
• The advocacy of reducing consumption, circular economy, increasing community, and how to exercise power as a consumer
• Government solutions (Chapter 8). This is arguable one of our greatest weapon against climate change and it it's a good chapter for most people who align politially centre-left/centre-right to read.

• Omits some big players in the interconnected web of the climiate crisis, for example Maslin never mentions that the success of agriculture was due to the holocene. Without this critical information what he has stated is misleading at best and misinformation at worst.
• The advocacy of using existing structures (e.g., corporate capitalism) to effect change now. This relevant, but not our strongest tactic/weapon. Corporate positive power is a little.girl boss-y, Maslin is naive as he refuses to admit this is not in capitalism's interest therefore will naturally have limited success. And critically;
• Although Maslin openly criticises capitalism, "economics must focus on human wellbeing as the primary measure of success", he refuses to explicitly name the alternative systems i.e., socialism. 
• sloph's review - "It wasn't so much, How to save our planet as much as Why, I feel like this book spent too much time on why it is important and not enough ways to actually provide a positive impact into changing things".
   
  
  
  

"Is there really no distinction between men's work and women's work?". "Well no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labour, doesn't it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength - what has the sex to do with that?"

"She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary."

"Suffering is a misunderstanding...A society can only relieve social suffering - unecessary suffering. The rest remains... all of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty year. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're born on... I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding - this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of running from it one could get through it, go beyond it... It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases... I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins in shared pain."

"It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society for it not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. "Excess is excrement," Odo wrote in the Analogy. "Excrement retained in the body is a poison"."

""Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be> When you are on the bottom, you must organise from the bottom up!" He had no intention of being administered out of the course - he had fought this kind of battle before - and because he communicated his firmness to the students they held firm."

"They were superbly trained, these students... Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distraction, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. Is appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative."

"He had not been sheltered, and had no expectations of shelter, from whaterver cares and responsiblities came to him. He had not been free from anything: only free to do anything."

"He wasn't doing what he came here to do. It was not that they had cut him off, he told himself; it was that - as always - he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stifilingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch - he felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras all these months."

"The Urrasti had taste, but it seemed to be in conflict with the impulse towards display - conspicuous expense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to won things was concealed and perverted by economic and competitive compulsions, which in turn told on the quality of the things: all they acheived was a kind of mechanical lavishness."

"These Port managers, with their special knowledge and important position, tended to aquire a bureaucratic mentality: they said No automatically."

""What makes Sabul so strong?", "Not a power structure, a government - this isn't Urras, after all!". "No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas were never controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked on hers? How would Odoniansim have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can't crush ideas by surpressing them. You can only crush ideas by ignoring them. By refusing to think - refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind."

"What drives people crazy is trying to live outside of reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain - you said that! But it's the lies, the evasion of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself."

"What's wrong with pleasure Takver? Why don't you want it?". "Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need." "What is it you need?"...."I need the bond," she said. "The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less."

"He assumed people would be helpful. He trusted them. But Chifolisk's warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his property to himself; he must keep his bargaining power."

"I am thinking like...a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!."

"But it's true, chronosophy does invovle ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between whta they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility...If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."

"Rationing was strict; labour drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all. Odo wrote "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight in the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and sociality as a whole." There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done has been done. The old tag of 'solidarity' had come alive again. There is exhiliration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, that all that tries the bond."

"It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye."

"The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him, a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and connect. It was not an easy job."

"I wonder if you fully understand why they're kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr Shevek. Why you were never allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they'll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you're gone. It's not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us."

"Justice is not acheived by force. And power is not acheived by passivity. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice. We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action."

"I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made over two hundred years ago in this city - the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutal aid between individuals. We have no government but the single single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"I don't know if it's right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?"."The second year I was in Elbow, I was a worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations - just barely enough for that kind of work. People of half time got three-quarter rations. If they were too sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten, hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve." The man's light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. "Like you said, I was to count people.". "You quit?". "Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists."

""He was too frightened". "Of what? I don't understand." "Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.""

"Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."

""Is that clear enough for you?"."Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart," said Bedap. "Clarity is a function of thought. You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.""

"What we're after is to remind ourselves that we didn't come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we all must agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with others, we must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not the subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon a revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any kind of end, it will never truly begin."

• Although we only get it in dribs and drabs, I believe McKibben is actually trying to articulate an important philosophical aspect to our relationship with nature and the changing 'character' of nature. I've provided some quotes that attempt to illustrate this below. This philosophical attempt was definitely novel for that time. To be discussing anthropocentric vs deep ecology views in 1989 was surprising to me, and also disappointing to think how little progress we've made culturally since. 
• He never says the words explicitly, but his critcisms are implicitly anti-capitalist. 
• Many of his suggestions to mitigate the worst effects of warming are still applicable today: - reduce animal agriculture, reduce car culture, rewilding over genetic and geoengineering, population control, and have been further developed. 

• The science described/explained in the book is almost entirely outdated now. We have crossed thresholds, discovered new tipping points, developed new models of understanding climate change, and even solved the ozone hole and acid rain problems! It is interesting from a historical point of view, but unecessary to read for people new to climate change science, I advise these people to read more modern works to get more up to date science. 
• The constant reference to Christian God was offputting. I did find the theology chapter genuinely interesting, though not well thought through and argued, and I believe the author would have made a stronger argument if he had kept his religious references to this chapter. Through a modern lens it screamed dated white christian male western centric. A complete 180 in tone from reading The Red Deal, 2021. 
• Often repetitive, needed a stronger editor.
• Strays into the doom-there-is-nothing-we-can-do territory a little too often for my liking. However, his views are entirely justified considering the magnitude of the dilemma. At the time of original publishing I imagine this was an attempt to try and inform people of the severity in the expectation they would take action.

"By the end of nature, I don't mean the end of the world.  The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say nature, I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it. But the death of those ideas begins with concrete changes in the reality around us. Changes that scientists can measure and enumerate. More and more frequently these changes will clash with our perceptions until finally our sense of nature as eternal and separate is washed away. And we will see all too clearly what we have done." 

"For the first time the people doing the polluting were at some remove from the pollution. In such a situation the usual environmental ideas don't work because the problem is outside our normal way of thinking" 

"So there is a sadness if losing something we have begun to fight for. And the added sadness or shame of realising how much more we could have done. A sadness that shades into self loathing. We, all of us in the first world, have participated in something of a binge. A half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have some intuition that is was a binge, and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things; biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars, we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response. Appropriate because we have marred a great profilgate work of art. Taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures." 

"The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like panes on a glass greenhouse. The analogy is accurate, but it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."

"Simply because it bears our mark, doesn't mean we can control it. This new nature may not be predictably violent. It won't be predictably anything, and therefore it will take us a very long time to work out our relationship with it, if we ever do. The salient characteristic of this new nature is it's unpredictability. Just as the salient feature of the old nature was it's utter dependability".

"The most obvious alternative action, international government action, will be almost as difficult. For any program to be a success, we must act not only as individuals and as nations, but as a community of nations. Unless all act together, the world watch institute warned, there is little reason to act separately."

"It might be a good way to describe a philosophy that is the opposite of the defiant consumptive course we've traditionally followed. What would it mean to our ways of life, our demographics, economics, our output of carbon dioxide and methane, if we began to truly and viscerally think of ourselves of just one species among many."

"Wendell Berry once argued that without a fascination at the wonder of the natural world, the engery needed for it's preservation will never be developed. That there must be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall."