Riley's Commie Book Club: The Amateur

Welcome to the second installation of RCBC. Today I'm talking about yet another book off Verso, The Amateur by Andy Merrifield. While Merrifield is currently a fellow in Human Geography at Cambridge, he's spent much of his life as an independent thinker outside the system. This book serves as both a memoir of his life and an argument against "professionalism as ideology." As the market creeps in to more spheres of life, an obsession with box ticking and targets posing as hard nosed realism limited not only what could be done, but what could be thought. Life, therefore, is not made better by rigorous systematisation, but crueller and dumber. Like Psychopolitics before it, The Amateur informs a lot of how we see society on TF. Here's the link to the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2405-the-amateur  Here's the link to the Non Linear Borefare article:https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-stuplime-object-of-ideology/  Here's the link to vote for us for the British Podcast Awards, which we totally don't care about: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote/  xoxo Riley