Reviews and Comments

When you read a book published many years ago, you have to be prepared for some of the prejudices of the past. However, this book is bad even for the time. When I call it the most middle-class activism story that I've read, that is not a compliment. Working-class people are portrayed as either lazy and thus deserving of their poverty, or as too stupid to understand basic concepts. Intellectuals are treated as either mouthpieces for evil commies or too inexperienced with the real ways of the world. Only the upright middle-class of labor aristocracy and petit-bourgeoise, who want to assimilate to white upper-class society are worthy of praise according to this book. Critiquing that society or wanting to make a new and better one that doesn't have segregation just means that you're an evil commie who wants to monopolize any mass movement. Further, this book is for one thing, and one thing only; helping Ethiopia survive against the Italian invasion. This in itself is an admirable goal, but the book is so ardently against any and all forms of intersectionality that it ends up being self-sabotaging. Fascism, the ideology that empowers racism and imperialist militarism is treated as a wholly separate issue from that of the military conflicts brought on by fascism. There are other examples of this, but I don't care to re read this book to find the specifics. And yet, this book isn't wholly devoid of good content. Under the mountains of bad takes, one can find some lessons to learn or reaffirm. Specifically they are:

Don't monopolize race-based liberation discourse for the purposes of intersectionality Black people aren't a monolith, so you can't limit your activism to just listening to black voices, because those voices will eventually and inevitably disagree. Although certain issues might be emblematic or a result of other struggles, don't lose sight of the specific issue at hand. You're a part of "The Masses". Don't separate yourself from them in your praxis.

Overall, I like books published posthumously because they often contain content too radical or countercultural for the publishing sensibilities of the time. This book was not published during the author's lifetime because it's just bad.

First of all, this novel is set during Victorian Britain, so obviously there is period appropriate racism, homophobia, etc. present in the book. Fortunately, the novel goes to great lengths to show how stupid those things are. This is a pretty straightforward romance, with a little bit of fantasy based in a Victorian understanding of science. If that's your thing, and you just want an nice comfy historical romance, then this is for you. Further, it's got really great world building, since it consistently uses an historical geopolitical situation. With a review like this, you might be wondering why I gave this book only three stars. Well, those three stars are because I definitely recognize and appreciate the craft of the writing. However, as an asexual person, I'm just not really a fan of romance as a whole, and this book doesn't let on that it's a romance until the final quarter (or it might, I'm not great at recognizing chemistry). In any case, it's just not for me. If this sounds like your kind of book though, definitely give it a read!

Just to start off, I would have given this book 4.5 Stars if I could have. If you want a book that eloquently articulates how the discourse of human rights is used by multinational institutions to actually repress peoples in Third World countries, this is it. It begins by giving a brief history lesson on what function rights discourse served during the classical liberal period, and then contrasts them with how it is used today. It also gives a great analysis of how to organize and theorize for emancipation with consistent standards, without getting bogged down in rights discourse. If this is what you want out of a book, then I wholeheartedly recommend it, and you can probably stop reading this review now. It's a little unfair to judge a book by what it isn't, but with a name like What's Wrong With Rights I was hoping for a discussion on the justifications of rights themselves. After all, rights require some state to enforce them, so any anarchist community by definition cannot respect rights, even if such rights would have been respected if nothing was changed but adding a state. Such further analysis is absent in D'Souza's work, and I do think that it suffers a little for it. A person who didn't want to accept D'Souza's conclusion could argue against it by saying "I agree that rights are used to cause untold human suffering, but that doesn't make them wrong". Other than that little quibble, this is a fantastic read, and something that everyone interested in organizing or advocacy should give a go.