"if revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of 'long-range politics', it cannot me made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow."
a raw nerve of a book, a paean to revolutionary violence, a last will & testament, &c. very few people can hope to be so outwardly turned at the hour of death. the structure is kind of all over the place so this review will be too; the first letter ("letter to a comrade") takes up half of it & then there's a bunch more of variable length. if u read nothing else pls read that.
his theory of guerrilla revolution is heavily inflected by lenin/mao & i'm not rly sure how i feel abt vanguardism (as in i literally don't feel educated enough to make a judgement) but i'm interested by his idea of cities or "city-states" constituting a single power structure or "nerve center". he's v disillusioned w/ amerika's traditional socialist & communist parties which is refreshing. it feels like he has 2 conflicting tendencies regarding revolutionary organization, (dialectics woaa) bc on the one hand he wants to say that it will be firmly directed by a vanguard party but on the other he recognizes a need for general unity around issues like political prisoners.
def a product of its time: u can especially see the influence of vietnam & the student movement on his thinking, + emergent third worldism in his description of black amerika as a "colony". it's not hard to imagine what he would say abt Current Year.
probably the book's most infamous/audacious claim is that the US has been fascist more or less since the new deal, & he has a pretty sophisticated theory of fascism to back this up. the observations i find most useful are that fascism's professed nationalism disguises an international character, which he sees as basically the mirror image of world socialism, & that it has 3 historical phases (out of power, in power but not secure, securely in power; u can guess which one he thinks amerika is in). he views it as an economic category more than anything (the latest capitalist reform enacted to maintain elite power), which i think is true in a broad sense but i worry that it could lead to overemphasis on a narrowly-defined "economy" only concerned w/ production & finance. i was surprised that race didn't rly figure deeply in his analysis of fascism since the book is addressed to a mostly black audience.
parts of it just read rly well as literature. he writes abt the various kinds of violence that will be done to fascists like a poet. also the parts of letters written by jonathan jackson are fucking incredible & i cried thinking abt him. this is one for the "just fucking do something" pile