Tim’s Comments (group member since Jan 22, 2022)

Tim’s comments from the Reading with Comrades group.

Hmmm. Well perhaps I should probably take this opportunity to finally read Francis Fannon's Wretched of the Earth, which has been sitting on my shelf forever. I have not read much on decolonization per se, but have read lots of critical books on development economics that touch on colonialism. From among those, people might like James Blaut's The Colonizer's Model of the World (which deals with the various myth making about European exceptionalism), L.S. Stavrianos' Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, and Amiya Kumar Bagchi's Political Economy of Underdevelopment.

I'm Tim. He/him. Was invited here by my comrade Al. I live in the US and am almost 40. I guess I would identify as an ecocommunist now, but considered myself an anarcho-syndicalist for many years. My Marxist education has been mostly influenced by the World System Analysis and Monthly Review traditions/schools, but have more recently been learning a lot from the anthropologist Marvin Harris and his Cultural Materialism. I try to be ecumenical in my approach to theory, but admittedly have a certain intolerance for the Political Marxism school and "falling rate of profit" fundamentalists.

I am a big fan of the work of Gar Alperovitz and his DemocracyCollaborative/Next System Project, as they provide a lot of practical models for socialist change/decommodification that informs my work as a local activist (e.g. (re)municipalizing essential utilities, community land trusts, public banks, worker cooperatives).

I think it probably started for me when I was a sophomore in college and a prof assigned us David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World. That was a pretty eye opening book for me, even if Korten was not taking an explicitly anti-capitalist position. Then in my senior year, we read Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient, which ironically was a repudiation of all of his earlier work on underdevelopment and his comrades' work in the World-Systems Analysis school. His mention of those books/authors, albeit dismissive, planted a seed that led me to revisit his previous works (e.g. World Accumulation 1492-1789, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment) a few years after college, which in turn led me to Eric R. Wolff's Europe and the People Without History (probably one of my favorite works of history), and Wallerstein's The Modern World System "trilogy". Then I subscribed to Monthly Review and started reading that cannon (e.g. Monopoly Capital, Political Economy of Growth), and it was all over. I think what I found most valuable about those particular schools of thought was that they showed me that this is and always has been a global system predicated on a global division of labor.