The Arch-Druid—John Michael Greer, neo-pagan and primitivist—offers a surprisingly positive review of my book, Against The Vortex. We are coming from very different places—politically—so of course I don’t expect him to agree with my conclusions. Which is fine, although I’m as critical of orthodox Marxism and state socialism as I am of industrial capitalism: variant species of a ruinous productivism for me.

And the book is very much about embracing limits—natality, finitude, embodiment and its fragilities—hence the extended discussions of the “gift of death,” or the way the Western Marxist category of “utopia” is often another, thinly camouflaged, version of a perfectibilist heaven. My question is can we pursue a vision that encompasses both utopian impulse and tragic sense of life?

Poetic and critical misprisions can be productive, as our dude Bloom taught us, but—review aside—I do find that my heterodox turn, still left but eclectic, is either completely misinterpreted or ignored by leftists, trads, and the rest. An anti-statist and localist-friendly socialist increasingly open to various cultural and religious traditions, mainstream and esoteric? Huh? Just doesn’t map onto today’s political and ideological groupings. Why romanticism appeals to me.

Anyway here is a good bit from the review, which is worth reading. Someone read my book!

“We can take this further, though, because Galluzzo isn’t wrong in pointing out that the artificial existence of the Vortex has a lot in common with the transhumanist fantasies so popular with Silicon Valley tech-bros these days. What he fails to notice is that the movement he supports doesn’t differ from those fantasies in any way that matters. Central not only to Marxism but to the entire spectrum of radical political ideologies in the Western world is the conviction that human nature is entirely a product of cultural forces, and these in turn are produced by such material considerations as the ownership of the means of production.”