Welcome! Newsletter number 49.
Another year has passed. In one year from now, LeftTwoThree will have been up and running for five years. It’s good to have goals.
The union office is closed for the holidays, and I’m making use of the time to work on a translation I’m very excited about. Too early to say more about it, though, need to wait for the publisher to announce it.
Speaking of translations, sometimes they’re a stepping stone, especially English ones. For example, there now is a Chinese translation of my English translation of Geronimo’s Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement, originally published in German. Autonomous leftists in China? Sounds fascinating.
There’s a new translation of original work of mine as well. Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomoy of Imperialism is now also available in Bulgarian.
No new review on the blog, but one (in German) in the latest issue (4/2024) of Rote Hilfe Zeitung. An antifascist activist by the name of Smily summarized five years in exile hiding from German authorities in the book Haftantritt ausgesetzt: Über Knast, Untertauchen und Solidarität. Highly recommended to all German-readers.
A book of mine has been reviewed in the magazine Tagebuch: Andreas Pavlic wrote about Indigener Widerstand in Zeiten des Klimawandels. Sápmi: Grüner Kolonialismus im Norden Europas. And, double-checking a few links, I found another review of the book, already released in October, by Henning Melber in Graswurzelrevolution.
It took a long time, but the magazine Turning Point has published an article I wrote about the Communist Party of Austria’s surprising electoral successes. I wrote it after my visit to Innsbruck during the local election campaign in April but, for different reasons, it was only published now, with a little update on the national elections in September. Better late than never.
It took considerably less time for the folks from A-ryhmä in Helsinki to upload a talk about the SAC (my union) I gave there in September. As a short introduction into the SAC in English (first half hour) it’s not bad. I shared the stage with the Helsinki-based union organizer Daniel Fernández.
In an earlier newsletter, I wrote about a pamphlet called Life Under the Death’s Head: Anarchism and Piracy. It was published a few years ago by Enemy Combatant Publications and is a reprint of my contribution to the 1997 Black Rose book Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. I only found out about the pamphlet by accident a couple of months ago, and there is no contact info for Enemy Combatant Publications in the pamphlet or online, so I will add one comment on the afterword by Damon Nomad (“My Dagger to the Academic Throat”) here: There is plenty of valid criticism in it – of post-structuralist jargon, and so forth – but one criticism does not apply: there was no “insistence on making his [that’s me] own translations directly from whatever books and articles he is citing (even when the version he has is not in the original language) rather than finding the quotations in an existing English version”, for a very simple reason: this is not my translation. Just like with the pamphlet, I never knew about the Black Rose book before it came out, and the publisher had someone else translate my text from German. In short, in this case, I’m innocent!
More next month/year. Stay safe!