Trying Jekyll, and Becoming a Red Menace

Long time no post, as is the case with most blogs. I grew weary of Wordpress, so I wanted to try a new blogging system, one more accomodating to my workflow. Enter Jekyll! It seems remarkably flexible for people with a modicum of technical know-how; I can write my posts in markdown and re-build the site easy peasy for upload. I also get more fine-tuned control over the direct code generated without needing to futz around with PHP.

I’m also planning to write more of a diary on my thoughts on politics and political news, as well as updates on my activities. Not that I’d expect, of course, anyone to actually read anything I write; I don’t think this website gets very many visitors, if any.

I’ve been very active lately, and trying to get more active. I’m in my trade union at work, I’m dual-carding with the IWW, I’m in the Seattle DSA, and I joined the Communist Party. It keeps me nice and busy. Last month the DSA book club read a short interview-style Angela Davis book from 2005 called Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire, which had some very interesting analysis of the US prison industrial complex and its relationship with our exported military prisons abroad, between Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

This month we read Zoe Baker’s Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. I had a lot of thoughts on this one, from Baker’s pathological obsession with establishing that she is not trying to write an authoritate work on the subject—authority, I noted, being inherently the problem according to anarchists—to the hilarity and incompetence of insurrectionist anarchists refusing any form of organization whatsoever and thinking it would bear fruit. I suppose that in order to learn through experimentation and practice, one must fail and learn from those failures. Still, I feel like insisting that eschewing any kind of organization whatsoever on the grounds that someone might try to have some kind of minor organizational hierarchy as part of said group… is inane.

I did enjoy it, though, and I saw a lot of the lessons learned by Anarchist efforts and Communist efforts around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how those lessons influenced each other’s means of practice and implementation. I’m green as hell with anarchism, only having read theory on socialism and communism, so this was a beautiful overview. Next month we’re reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which I had bought a few months ago but never read!! So much to read, so much to learn, so much to do. I’m most excited to connect more with the local labor movement in Seattle, especially where it intersects with immigrant rights. If I do anything interesting, I’ll probably post about it here.