this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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I would recommend a mix of Marxist and anarchist founfational texts, media literacy snd historical texts, and modern summaries and topic-focused books. You can start wherever you'd like, but I usually recommend media literacy and history as they are immediately and widely useful and help open the door to the rest. So maybe an order like this to start:
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti
FAIR.org, the Citations Needed podcast, and Manufacturing Consent / Inventing Reality.
The Jakarta Method
A summary text of Marx's Capital or two. Like Heinrich and then Michael Roberts' counterpoints. Eventually, read Capital itself.
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific and The Conditions of the Working Class by Engels.
Texts around the October Revolution and contemporaries. Lenin vs. Kautsky, the formation of the Bolsheviks, histories around the timeline, Kropotkin, State and Revolution, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, What is to Be Done
The basic Soviet canon, like Foundations of Leninism. Histories around the topic, like those of Losurdo.
Major works by Emma Goldman, David Graeber, Crimethinc, Bookchin.
Wretched of the Earth by Fanon.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Friere.
Fanshen and core Mao writings.
Prison writings of Gramsci.
Essential works by the French weirdos like Foucault and Debord.
That should set you up for the basics. Not joking - these are the basics that will allow you to communicate with the left and have a grasp of the analyses. There is much, much more to understand, and namely, none of what I've listed teaches how to organize or will make you sufficiently educated on the specific contexts in which we need organization. That is best done by joining an active socialist organization (not Trot and not a cult like Avakian stuff). This list is also low on topics of marginalization and combined struggle, which are important to read (e.g. Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation or du Bois on Pan Africanism), as it really is just the basics.
Replace Jakarta Method with If We Burn by the same author, it's much more relevant to political organizing at the level the left is at in the West and less of a "sins of the empire" thing.
It's a good book but the people that need to read it are those already trying to organize but stuck in an ineffective "horizontalism" rut.
Most of the French weirdos/post-WWII Western left were/are controlled opposition[1][2][3][4][5].
Yes I should have put an asterisk there for Foucault at least. I have had many fights with faux-left Foucault appreciators that use him to avoid, e.g. having an anti-imperialist stance. I was listing him just for the context: it is good to know his terms and ideas, despite his influence being negative and incorrect for practical organization, so that one can enter and participate in left discourse. I should have made that a category and added Trotsky to it.
Debord is a bit separated from them, though. His work is actually a quite gokd Marxist expansion on the analysis of capitalist society and it presents no distraction from the necessity of its removal.