Archive of Fire and Blood
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Fuck Trump Reading List
The outrage, fear and depression after Trump’s inauguration is palpable everywhere. Trump’s first acts in office, moving to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, signing an anti-abortion Global Gag Rule, and reviving plans to build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, signal that he will be as dangerous a leader as we expected. The 2.9 million people who marched around the country as part of the Women’s March on Washington on January 21st send an inspiring message that many are galvanized to fight Trump’s hateful policies. But this is the very beginning of what will be a long and painful fight.
We must never give in to despondency and futility, rather we must learn from the revolutionary movements of history and mobilize together against Trump’s regime of oppression.
We present this reading list as a useful starting point for anyone sharing in our overwhelming sense of anger and despair at our present crisis, and anyone looking for hope and inspiration in the resistance movements of the past and the organizing strategies of the present.All books on this reading list are 40% off until Wednesday February 1st at midnight UTC. Includes free ebooks where available and free worldwide shipping. Click here to activate your discount.
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The Lucidity of the Defeated: Enzo Traverso on left melancholy
Jean Birnbaum's profile of Enzo Traverso first appeared in Le Monde. Translated by David Broder.
The leftist ferment of the 1960s–70s is unthinkable except in the context of a certain Communist "bath water." Often the generation becoming alive to politics at that moment had been radicalised in response to their Communist parents — parents that "not everyone was lucky enough" to have. Later, in 1989, the old ‘68ers who had revolted against their "Stalinist" mums and dads would see it all disappear — not only the bath water but its babies and even the babies of its babies… In the moment that they were themselves meant to take over responsibility as parents, they found themselves orphaned twice over. Both their revolt and the world they had railed against were no more.
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Verso's History Bookshelf
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History Undergraduate Reading List
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Enzo Traverso: The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century
With the recent passing of Germany's most acclaimed revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, the question of how we assess the revisionist moment has reappeared. Why did the revisionist historians gain such fame in the 1980s and '90s? What is the place of historical scholarship today? And how do we reconstruct a Marxist historical scholarship after revisionism?
In this essay by Enzo Traverso (taken from History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism), he takes aim at Nolte, Furet and a host of other revisionists who studied Communism in the twentieth century. Traverso sees that these historians placed the conflict between fascism and communism as the central conflict of the twentieth century - yet the ultimate aim of this was to remove communism as a force from the present day. How, then, do we reclaim the tradition of communism after revisionism? As Traverso says, "the Stalinist legacy, made up of a mountain of ruins and dead, did not erase the origins of communism in the tradition of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalist humanism."
