Fantastic book. Kaneko Fumiko lived a tragic life and was a remarkable writer considering her informal education. Her views on Anarchism (IMO) were vastly ahead of her time.
She is just an incredible human being. Somehow I doubt that free spirits like herself are compatible with any of the former or existing Governments though.
"Socialism did not have anything particularly new to teach me; however, it provided me with the theory to verify what I already knew emotionally from my own past. I was poor then; I am poor now. Because of this I have been overworked, mistreated, tormented, oppressed, deprived of my freedom, exploited, and ruled by people with money. I had always harbored a deep antagonism toward people with that kind of power and a deep sympathy for people from backgrounds like mine. The sympathy I felt for Kō, the menial at my grandmother’s in Korea; the feeling, almost as for a comrade, toward the poor dog they kept; and the boundless sympathy I felt for all the oppressed, maltreated, exploited Koreans I have not written about here but whom I saw while at my grandmother’s—all were expressions of this. Socialist ideology merely provided the flame that ignited this antagonism and this sympathy, long smoldering in my heart.
Oh how I want to… to give my life, to give everything, in the struggle for this wretched class of mine!"
Adam Curtis, in his movie HyperNormalisation, talked of a theory that this kind of activism disappeared around the 70s and 80s. It's the kind that requires banding into groups, to a significant extent giving up individuality. According to the theory this is also the death of politics: the hyper individuality took away politic's power and left only spectacle and populism. The way he told it was that the hippy revolution back-fired: the look-within insight turned into consumerism and heightened individuality. My retelling is a bit scattered. The movie is well worth a watch.
to be fair, it's on the anarchist library, which is very much leftist in and of itself - this looks to be, largely, and exploration of the role of natural hierarchy in anarchism. so saying it's compatible with modern leftism as an attack makes ... no sense ... but saying it's compatible with modern leftism insofar as it's an exploration does seem pretty accurate.
did you read the memoir? I think her positions are far more interesting in context and are hard to abstract away to be independent of where they came from
one of the rare times I got instantly hooked by an online reccomendation. It might be the saddest story I ever read, seems like everywhere she went there was only misery. thanks for this
