Welcome to LeftTwoThree!
With this blog post, the site has been officially launched. Hooray! You can read more about why on the About page. The short version is that I find an online archive of my writing useful – for myself and, hopefully, for others, too.
I also intend to write a monthly newsletter (in the form of a blog post – so this would be the first). I stole the idea from Peter Seyferth, who sends regular updates about his writing, public speaking, and other things of interest, to a list of email subscribers. Peter proves that this can be informative and entertaining rather than mere, tiresome self-promotion. I doubt I’ll reach the standards set by Peter, but there’s no harm in trying. (Speaking of which: If you read German, live in or near Munich, and have an interest in anarchism, science fiction, and punk rock from the 1980s, you must subscribe to Peter’s list. If not, you should probably do so anyway. Send a mail to dosenfleisch[at]go-offline.de.)
As far as the technological bit is concerned, many thanks to Klandestino, your neighborhood-friendly, eco-conscious, pinball-playing IT collective. With stellar advice and hands-on demonstration, they boosted my confidence enough to start building this site. Needless to say, the responsibility for any shortcomings (and there might be many) is all mine!
In this first post, I am able to cheat a little since I don’t run the risk of repeating anything I already mentioned a month ago. In other words, I can reach back a little further than December 1 and reference a couple of podcasts I did back in October, namely for Radikaal with Cas Mudde and for Southpaw with Sam Yang; a genuine December release was the one for the German football podcast Hörfehler with Nick Kaßner. For my union, the SAC, I moderated an online panel discussion titled “Union Strategies Outside of the Box“, first shown at the Nordic Labour Film Festival in November (the discussion is in English, don’t let the intro confuse you). An interview with me in German about the current state of the SAC is included in the latest yearbook of the Institut für Syndikalismusforschung. Other than that, I did a fair bit of sports writing, also in German, mainly about Degerfors IF, the successful football club from Sweden’s “reddest municipality” (in Ballesterer and junge Welt – the latter also ran a sequel), and winter sports: Alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, and Nordic combined.
PM Press has released Bas Umali’s book Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance: Anarchism in the Philippines, which I’ve edited, and a Spanish version has been added to the translations of the essay “Revolution Is More than a Word: 23 Theses on Anarchism“.
Three books that I’ve recently read and would like to recommend are Class Power on Zero Hours by the Angry Workers collective, the anthology Solidarisch gegen Klassismus, edited by Francis Seeck and Brigitte Theißl, and Ekim Caglar’s splendid Fotboll i krig och fred: hundra år av konflikt och dialog (more about Caglar’s work here).
Two fundraisers I’d like to make readers aware of are one of the regular fundraising drives by the all important Riseup collective and the crowdfunder for the documentary film Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, produced by Sepp Brudermann, who I met in a squat in Vilnius, Lithuania, twenty years ago.
That was my very first post. How exciting! If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll return sometime!
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Update January 2, 2021: I have just posted the first original text on this blog, Ecological Leninism: Friend or Foe?, a review of two new books by Andreas Malm.