Chris Wright - FINDING OUR COMPASS: Reflections on a World in Crisis

From an objective standpoint it is timely, addressing the urgent issues of our age. It takes as its starting point the coming demise of a civilization, at the hands of global warming, economic stagnation and crisis, and possible nuclear warall ultimately products of corporate capitalism in its neoliberal phase. It consists largely of reflections on how we got here, how to interpret our society and ourselves, and what ideals are worth extracting from the wreckage of the past. It eschews academic conventions in favor of getting directly to the point and not mincing words. But that is also why its untimely. Its defiance of institutional norms and political correctness, in addition to its unusual, Nietzsche-esque form, makes it very different from the kinds of books that attract traditional publishers and markets.

To its cost, it exists between academic and popular markets, drawing from scholarship but presenting ideas in an un-academic way. Indeed, the whole of Part Two consists of summaries of and commentaries on left-wing scholarship that has impressed me. Few writers dedicate themselves to collecting and summarizing scholarship, to make it more accessible to the public and bring it all together; Noam Chomsky is one. But since good, materialistic (Marxist or semi-Marxist) scholarship is so useful in explaining our world, Ive decided to compile here some of the notes Ive taken in recent years on the work of such academics as Robert Brenner, David Harvey, Harry Braverman, David Graeber, and Walden Bello. People who dont find academic writings accessible should nevertheless know of this

Superficially these sections might appear to be random and unrelated to each other, but I have organized them carefully so that thematic threads tie them together. Theyre taken from a huge collection of notes Ive accumulated in the last fifteen years, on philosophy, history, psychology, culture, music, etc. Overall, the unifying perspective is the young Marxs: For a ruthless criticism of everything existing!, including capitalism, the U.S. government, Western intellectual culture, academia, postmodernism, certain strains of feminism, even the concepts of genius and greatness that people use to exalt a few individuals and denigrate everyone else. I want to defend the integrity of reason and the individual from attacks by the bane of our age, institutional thinking and behavior. Collectivism is humanitys enemy; unfortunately its almost ubiquitous in the modern world.

But its most dangerous manifestation is corporate capitalism, which is why the books main polemic is against capitalism. This book is essentially an extension of my first, Notes of an Underground Humanist (2013), and can be read in conjunction with it. Subjects I discuss only briefly here are dealt with in more depth there, and vice versa. My second book, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (2014), is probably the most original and important of the three, containing a major revision of Marxism and clarification of its true relation to anarchism, a discussion of the past and present of the solidarity economy (focusing on cooperatives), and a case-study of the successful New Era

I think were all in for some horrific suffering and titanic upheavals. I just hope we make it through the conflagration and into a more peaceful world on the other side.