so, the reading at the socialist book club - which i've never been to - is Jane McAlevey's "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age".

it's not even 200 pages, so i should be able to give it a good read this morning. and, this is actually kind of what this blog is actually for, so i'll post some comments about it as they come up....

i haven't read this or heard about it previously, but a quick google search indicates that it's not presenting any new ideas, and i'll have to see how it's summarizing old ones. to begin with, i'm reminded of the famous response to the pharoah that there is "no royal road to geometry", something that the internet currently wants to apocryphally attribute to euclid, but that i remember being attributed to heron. there's a subtle point, here, that i should explain more fully: the point that the mathematician, be it heron or euclid, was trying to get across to the greco-egyptian pharoah, ptolemy, was that his privilege and status and wealth and power was not going to help him understand better, he has to work it out like everybody else. this is a sentiment, fwiw, that was not extended to napoleon, who was granted a theorem by the academy to demonstrate his superior abilities in the field of reason. you really can't underestimate the importance that these values of equality played in greek's indigenous democratic culture, can you?

the point that the geometer, be it euclid or heron, was getting across to the pharoah should perhaps not be lost on middle or upper class organizers that i know from experience think they are intellectually and at times even morally superior to these rank and file workers. and, it's a point that is perhaps at the center of the catastrophe that is the contemporary democratic party in the united states - everybody needs to work together, and everybody needs to work hard, if we want to get something substantive done.

but, somebody with an anarchist background isn't going to find much insight in these arguments that vertical organizing practices are at the centre of the problems the labour movement has been having, or that there seems to be a discerning lack of revolutionary potential in the union rank and file. i've been making these arguments in this space for almost a decade now, even if much of it is yet to be reposted, and i'm really just taking notes on malatesta, and to a lesser extent on gramsci. a contemporary socialist thinker that will be remembered in the future and that has been making these arguments forever is richard wolff. so, is this going to be worth reading, or is it just a summary of existing points?

we'll find out, i guess.

but, i'm more interested in the discussion, obviously. i'm a little bit apprehensive in involving myself in american party politics - i cannot vote in the united states, and do not even live there - but something like the dsa should have an internationalist character to it that transcends that kind of thing. i'm happy to be the anarchist in the room, if it comes to it.

but, let's see what the book actually says.