Reviews for Seedtime for fascism

The average rating for Seedtime for fascism based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-11 00:00:00 Kim Janeck Trajectory of the Second Austrian Republic: (Pg.2) “Especially from a Western point of view, the outcome of the year 1955- the State Treaty and the Declaration of Neutrality- was seen as the somewhat miraculous retreat of the Red Army from occupied territory, a phenomenon almost unheard of before.” “Especially in the 1970s, during the years of social democratic dominance, Austria competed with Sweden to be the model case, to find a way to combine the best of all worlds: democracy and welfare, capitalism and union power, economic growth and full employment- but without significant inflation.” “In the 1980s, the picture darkened. Austria was seen not so much as the former empire that turned out to be an interesting, successful small nation in Europe, neutral but nevertheless a Western democracy; rather the world and academia started to remember the time between the great days of the Habsburgs and the success story of the Second Republic.” “In the 1990s… Austria began to lose much of its charm and to stop insisting on its special status.”

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-20 00:00:00 Adam Parton A good introduction to an activist, orator, and speaker who seems to be shockingly understudied/appreciated, even among the American left. In a weird way, this collection itself and its critical introduction/afterword sort of point to why. The speeches and articles of Parson's presented here are a reflection of her orientation towards action - working more to propagandize (in a good way!) and organize than theorize. While you can certainly get a taste for her steady commitment to anarchism in the period it was being most militantly repressed, it's hard to discern too much about the nuances of her political philosophy, her thoughts about splits within the left (other than her sort of endearing contempt for the early 20th c trade union tendencies exemplified by the AFL), and so on, from a series of speeches and very short articles designed more for mass appeal and mobilizing. There's some rather clunky editing here too, perhaps born of limitations in the archive/source materials, such that you get Parson's sort of "stump speech" describing the Haymarket police riot several times in roughly identical terms. I feel like a more capable historian could have addressed these "problems in the archive" in a more nuanced way than the critical commentators here, with their sort of generalized hagiographies, are able to. Maybe I've just been reading too much Hartman, though.