Ratings12
Average rating4.4
I was really eager to listen to this audiobook because it's a history book written from a Marxist perspective and about an area of history I know very little about.
Unfortunately, it was really hard to follow because every character has a French name, every city or region has a French name and is phrased in a way focusing on individual action, not on groups of people. It was quite confusing as an audiobook for me.
Maybe could have been easier to follow as a regular book or if I had some basic understanding of the names and places and people from my schooling. But proletariat slave revolts don't seem important enough to mention.
The most compelling quote I found in the book was: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” This is similar to another quote I read as a tweet a few months ago: “Intersectionality without class consciousness is just Identity politics. Class consciousness without intersectionality is class reductionism. We need both. We have the same enemy.”
I would only recommend this book to someone who's got some surface-level understanding of what happened and doesn't mind listening to French names nonstop.