Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

There can be no question that Marx saw far beyond the horizon of his century and that Capital, as the Economist (which Marx read faithfully) pointed out a few years back, remains startlingly contemporary even in the age of Walmart and Google. But in other cases Marx’s vision was limited by the anomalous character of his chronological niche: arguably the most peaceful period of European history in a thousand years. Colonial interventions aside, liberal London-centered capitalism did not seem structurally to require large-scale inter-state warfare as a condition of its reproduction or as the inevitable result of its contradictions. He died, of course, before the new imperialism of the late 1880s and 1890s led to zero-sum conflicts amongst the major powers for shares of the world market. Nor could Marx, even after the massacre of the Communards, have possibly foreseen the horrific price that counter-revolution in the next century, including Thermidorean Stalinism, would exact from rank-and-file anarchists, socialists, and communists: at least 7–8 million dead.7 Since the youngest and most politically conscious tended always to be in the front lines, these repeated decimations of the vanguard entailed incalculable consequences—ones that have been almost entirely ignored by historians.

—p.xiv Preface: Marx at the Chicken Shack (ix) by Mike Davis 1 year ago