Dan > Recent Status Updates

Just barely starting this and already I'm ready to recommend it. Alec gets straight to the heart of the media propaganda industry around crime and keeping everyone constantly afraid. Buy this, read it, then get your mom to read it too.

The deeper I get into this the more frustrating it becomes. Gilmore is clearly a brilliant, rigorous scholar, but has also absorbed many of the worst aspects of the Western academy. Aversion to power, fetishization of spontaneity, endless description of the systemic actions of the ruling class but denial of their agency as a group, it's all here and weakens what could be a much stronger analysis.

Gilmore's political economy of California is a deeply researched, extensively sourced review of the reshaping of the California economy during the Great Stagnation crisis of the 1970s. However, her deep aversion to ascribing any kind of agency to the ruling class in their project of expansive social control through the apparatus of the state in order to maintain their power (too "conspiratorial") is frustrating.

It's crazy reading this in 2026 and seeing how basically every one of its arguments has become well understood common sense as a result of the 2020 uprisings. Thankfully following the failure of the Dems to do anything and the insane Gestapo terror facing us today, consciousness around abolition over reform seems to be growing.

"the uses to which government puts the surplus which it absorbs are narrowly circumscribed by the nature of monopoly capitalist society and as time goes on become more and more irrational and destructive."

Set this down last year to focus more reading on Palestine. Unfortunately, this book has now acquired much more immediate relevancy.

Capitalism's Invisible Army...

The 70s really do seem to be the high point for Marxist knowledge production in US academic institutions

This book is so fire and exactly what the Western Left needs in this moment. The question of the struggle against colonialism in Palestine divides the actual internationalist workers movement from the social fascist "left" who want to minimize the ongoing genocide, or isolate it as "just one issue".

Only through the first chapter and already this is a big recommend