Open Access books at Pluto Press

Pluto Press, one of the older radical anticapitalist publishers in the world, has made a selection of their published work available as Open Access books:

With the aim of accessibility and in the spirit of knowledge-sharing, a selection of our books is available to download through Open Access programmes. Here you can find links to the books on the OAPEN website, and on other platforms, where you can download electronic copies for free.

For anybody interested in leftwing, radical politics, history and theory this is a great resource.

Your Happening World (December browser tab amnesty)

Here are some interesting articles cluttering up my browser tabs:

    Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests) — The internalisation of this false binary in Western narratives risks resulting in misreading the Chinese protests by interpreting the protesters’ rejection of the authoritarian biopolitics of zero covid as a tacit demand for the necropolitics of the United States. At the same time, this type of binary thinking severely constrains our ability to comprehend the global lessons of the pandemic as we enter an age of collective crisis.
  • Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP — Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.
  • New dates suggest Oceania’s megafauna lived until 25,000 years ago, implying coexistence with people for 40,000 years — The U-series dating provides minimum age estimates, which means the fossils could be older. But since our estimates are supported by previous accelerated mass spectrometry dating, collectively the data provide a compelling case for the existence of megafauna in Sahul as recently as 25,000 years ago.
  • Thorsday Thoughts 276 – Thursday December 8, 2022 — While I tend to view Thunderstrike as a continuation of this run, it’s also its own thing. This is the final issue of Thor by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz after taking over at the end of 1987. They did two unrelated issues, one an untold story from Secret Wars focusing on Thor and the Enchantress, and one introducing Dargo, the possible Thor of the future. After a one-off by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Erik Larsen, and Vince Colletta, the run proper began and lasted for just over five years. It’s hard to sum up those five years in a simple statement, because, if there was one thing constant throughout those years, it was how willing Frenz and DeFalco were to change things up.
  • Scientists Identify 208 Natural Minerals That Formed From Human Activity — A new study has found that the incredible upsurge of new minerals around the time of the industrial revolution led to the unprecedented diversification of crystals on Earth, eclipsing even the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago as the “greatest increase in the history of the globe”.
  • ‘Murder game’ cinema: Rollerball, its precursors and influences — here’s a list of Rollerball related movies I need to watch as well. Recommended fodder for those interested in dystopian sevneties sci-fi. (Some of the less obvious movies on here are by the same director.)
  • AND WHO DO YOU HIT? Three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel — examing and screening several socialist, realistic documentary movies coming out of seventies West-Germany depicting the life in a particular apartment building. Entirely different from the glitzy Hollywood sci-fi of the above list, but you can see some continuity here, can’t you?
  • My Stepfather Became My Dad the Day He Took Me to My First Football Match — My dad, Barrie, isn’t technically my dad. He’s my stepdad, but he became my dad on 12 November 1988 when Southampton beat Aston Villa 3-1 at The Dell, the club’s dilapidated former home. My birth father had effectively disappeared by then, leaving my mum with two sons, one of whom was football mad. That was the first game of football Barrie took me to.

I especially recommend Tom Williams’ very personal account of the way football brought him and his dad together.

Should Corbyn stand as an independent?

So Jeremy Corbyn has had the whip withdrawn from him for over a year now and this weekend Labour made noises about appointing somebody else to stand in his constituency in the next elections. That of course immediately started speculation about whether or not he should run as an independent or start his own party. There’s little doubt that Corbyn could do this and very likely would win as an independent, but would he do so?

That’s the real question: would Corbyn want to stand in election again in the first place? The man’s seventytwo now, would he want to be in parliament for another five years, pushing eighty at the end of it? Or would he rather spent his time on activism outside of parliament, via his new Project for Peace and Justice? If denied to stand as a Labour candidate, would Corbyn have the will to stand as an independent against his old party? Nothing in his history suggests he has anything but a deep abiding loyalty to Labour even when the party has no loyalty to him or his ideals. He has never shown that sort of spite that could compel him to ‘wreck’ Labour like that.

The other question is what it would accomplish, other than schadenfreude when some parachuted in Starmeroid inevitably loses their deposit? Could a hypothetical left of Labour party build on a Corbyn win in the next elections, or would it be just a stunt, ala Galloway and Respect? Is it actually worthwhile to pursue a parliamentary solution or should the left’s energy be more constructively used outside it, in the unions for example? Is there the infrastructure in place to make this more than just the Corbyn show?

Your Happening World (Kingsday is bogus edition)

  • 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Fujoshi: Fujoshi, which literally means “rotten girl,” refers to a type of anime fan who is especially interested in imagining male homoerotic subtext in her favorite media. But while the term “fujoshi” was only coined in 2001, rotten girls and their male counterparts, “fudanshi,” have been around since the Edo period. In “The Forgotten History of Fujoshi,” Keith and Mari Minton—two self-professed fujoshi—shared some of the fascinating origins of a subculture that is typically somewhat misunderstood.
  • The Ostrogothic Military: Whether the Ostrogoths themselves were an army, the nature of the army’s settlement and salary in Italy, and ethnic identity’s role in the formation of the army are all discussed. The army itself has rarely been studied as a separate institution, which may be because, throughout the Ostrogothic kingdom’s short life, the military was inextricably bound up with the nature and the fate of that polity.
  • Alternate Futurescape: The Bubblegum Crisis We Never Got: Where Bubblegum Crisis’ Knight Sabers were a mercenary team that’d take any job for the right price, FutureScape’s “Night Saviors” were advertised as “Four girls who will accept no money in their never ending battle against the Boomers!“ Fans familiar with Bubblegum Crisis and the Knight Saber mercenary group that were mostly motivated by revenge would probably have been a little more than shocked to see them instead portrayed as a super-heroine team fighting for “freedom and justice” under the new name of “The Night Saviors”.
  • X-Force by Cory J Walker: Great, 90s nostalgia drawings of various X-Force characters.
  • Your audience doesn’t think you suck: To make your audience happy, you don’t need to be the most talented person. You don’t need to invest tons of cash into a project to make it watchable. You need an idea that you believe in and the enthusiasm to power through and put it out into the world.
  • The Left’s Long History Of Transphobia: Trans people generally lean left because we feel that we have to, but we’re also aware that liberalism won’t protect us when the chips are down. It’s easy to oppose an enemy that is consistently hateful, and at the end of the day trans people know where Republicans stand on whether or not we should exist.