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Okay. What's some leftist reading if I only read pulpy sword and sorcery?
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Jan 16, 2020 22:15
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Wage Labor and Capital is a good intro to Marx imo- the Manifesto is more of a call to arms while Wage Labor is more analytical, though also much much shorter and easier than Capital
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Jan 16, 2020 22:16
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StashAugustine posted:Wage Labor and Capital is a good intro to Marx imo- the Manifesto is more of a call to arms while Wage Labor is more analytical, though also much much shorter and easier than Capital Which of those has elves, though?
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Jan 16, 2020 22:20
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ikanreed posted:Okay. The Expanse series
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Jan 16, 2020 22:31
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ikanreed posted:Okay. Anything by China Mieville, is usually what people recommend. The City & The City I think is considered his best novel? I've also started reading N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth as the first fantasy book I've read in probably 10-15 years and it's been great so far, although I don't know if it's explicitly leftist. Dreylad has issued a correction as of 22:42 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 22:37
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ikanreed posted:Okay. Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, particularly the fourth book. If you're OK with cyberpunk: Takeshi Kovacs books by Richard Morgan who unfortunately went full succ -- Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies If you're OK with science fiction: Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson -- Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
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Jan 16, 2020 22:52
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I was trying to be facetious, but thank you for the good suggestions. I've read some of them and should read others.
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Jan 16, 2020 22:55
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ikanreed posted:I was trying to be facetious, but thank you for the good suggestions. I wrote a story where an elf beats up Hitler with a copy of the communist manifesto does that count Dreylad posted:Anything by China Mieville, is usually what people recommend. The City & The City I think is considered his best novel? The Broken Earth series is good but not explicitly leftist, though it is implicitly so. It's got a whole heap of themes and, as with the Three Body Problem series, is just very different than most other stuff in its genre that it's worth reading for that alone I'm sure Earthsea would qualify as well but I haven't read any of them, I just blindly trust Le Guin to have created something truly excellent there
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Jan 16, 2020 23:00
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Helsing posted:I just wanted to give anyone reading this thread a heads up that I am planning to do a thread discussing the book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Tom O'Neill. It is a book that began as a magazine article that was supposed to come out in 1999 but which gradually sprawled into a multi-decade obsession for the author as he kept uncovering details that had been suppressed or forgotten and which directly contradicted the established narrative about the killings. Will this be in CSPAM or the proper book nerd subforum? Feel free to advertise it here either way. Not sure I'd be able to participate, barely enough time to read for work much less fun atm
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Jan 16, 2020 23:01
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Just finished I Married A Communist by Philip Roth and the main character is C-SPAM as hell. Not a bad read overall.
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Jan 17, 2020 00:58
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Dreylad posted:Anything by China Mieville, is usually what people recommend. The City & The City I think is considered his best novel? it's definitely anti-fascist and environmentalist. a very thorough look at how systemic oppression fucks people up. unrelated: i've been reading "Zen at War" by Brian Daizen Victoria. it's about how the institutions of Zen buddhism collaborated with the fascist Japanese government in the lead up to world war 2. some choice quotes (from leading Buddhist priests at the time:) Harada Daiun Sogaku posted:If ordered to march: tramp, tramp; or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom of Enlightenment. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war now under way. Hayashiya Tomojirō posted:Japan has no intention of sacrificing China for its own benefit. Rather Japan and China should stand on the basis of mutual equality, mutually helping each other, and thereby contributing to the enhancement of Oriental culture and the prosperity of East Asia.... Japan respects the territorial integrity of China and wants nothing more than for people of north China to reflect on their conduct and return to their innate Oriental character just as quickly as possible. Jōin Saeki posted:As expressed in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha, in his compassion, regards beings in the three worlds, of desire, form, and formlessness, as members of his family. That is to say he doesn't think of his family as composed of just blood relatives, or only the few members of his immediate family, or simply those in his local area. that last quote is particularly sneaky. it's a justification of japanese nationalism and emperor-worship: "the Buddha loves everyone, and the emperor is like the Buddha, so everyone should obey the emperor." the book talks about how the whole Buddhist institution got in on boosting the war. it also talks about a couple of small pockets of Buddhist anti-war efforts, which generally got stomped out pretty quickly. there was this one anarcho-socialist buddhist priest who wanted to liberate his local serfs from land bondage... he got executed. it's fascinating how people tied themselves into knots to use Buddhism, which is explicitly non-violent and non-hierarchical, to justify building a strictly hierarchical empire. honestly it reminds me most of stalin-era USSR propaganda, trying to justify the rigid heirarchies of the USSR with the ideals of socialism. it's also kinda funny 'cause you can see how a lot of the current weaboo fetishes (like Bushido) started out as Meiji-era nationalist propaganda. animist has issued a correction as of 01:53 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 01:47
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When I first moved to FL, I found a Buddhist meditation group I went to a couple times a month. Everyone was very chill and open and awesome. Then I did some research and found out they were some bizarre western splinter sect that was literally at war with the Dalai Lama because once you got to the higher levels you had to worship some sort of demon and noped out of there. Sectarianism is everywhere, find your own god, I guess.
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Jan 18, 2020 09:10
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I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood. The first point the book makes is that "capitalism" is a very specific economic system that isn't just "people trading stuff". The act of buying a good cheaply and selling it for a higher price later on, or somewhere else, is just commerce, but it isn't capitalism. The feudal system of serfs having to work for a lord, or even the Enlightenment-era absolutist system of taxation to a centralized bureaucracy are both examples of appropriation of value, but neither of those are capitalism. Under a strict definition, capitalism was an economic system that began sometime in the 16th to 17th century, and began specifically in England. The central thesis of the book lays out a case against the popular narrative that the emergence of capitalism is a deterministic conclusion of a society that manages to hoard enough "primitive accumulation" (as Marxists might put it), followed by or in conjunction with the establishment of market behavior. By such standards, the development of capitalism would be inevitable, and is bound to happen as soon as a country / region / state becomes rich enough and decides to sever the fetters of feudalism. Rather, capitalism developed in England, first and only, because of a specific confluence of factors. In no particular order: 1. The Enclosure movement, or the conversion of common land into private property, and the accompanying ideological rationale that justified it (as driven by liberal thinkers such as John Locke), followed by the enforcement of such rights by The State. 2. The dispossession of land from serfs. This would eventually lead towards the formation of a proletariat. That is, the absence of a similar movement in, say, France or Germany, meant that the peasants in those countries still owned the means of production, and did not have to resort to having to sell their labor-power (and nothing else). 3. The development of land rents based on some contemporary measure of "market value", as opposed to fixed rents as practiced in feudal societies. Under feudalism, the overlord of a feudal land-holding would extract productivity from serfs via a combination of military and economic coercion, but as long as the serfs could meet that demand (and granting that sometimes they didn't), there was not much of a need to produce more than that, and the serfs still actually owned the same land that they worked. Under absolutism, the extraction was done via taxation, and the extractors were part of a centralized bureaucracy, but the same dynamics largely applied. However, under English "agrarian capitalism": A person could now own land (i.e. become a landlord in the capitalist sense), and then rent out the land to tenants. The amount of rent could vary, and therefore there was an incentive for the landlord to adjust their rent rate to whatever could bring them the most profit, lest they be bought-out by richer landlords. The tenant could hire workers to work the land, and any difference between the value of the harvest, and rent they had to pay, was profit, and so there was an incentive to reduce costs-of-production and labor costs, improve yields and outputs, and so on. The workers did not own any land, and had to sell their labor-power to earn a wage. Since the product of the land (i.e. food) was what would be used to pay off the cost of the lease taken out by the tenant, and since there was now a market in leases, then the price of the food would itself be subject to market forces. And this would reverberate down to everything else. The end result was that the landlords and the tenants were now incentivized to engage in profit-maximization behavior, while workers had to work to survive. The value extraction had shifted from being performed by the political/economic merger of the feudal lord, to being performed by the purely economic imperatives. The author harps on this phrase a lot, and it's important, because it highlights that once the system "got going", everyone was "trapped" in it. The book later goes on to contrast this to how other countries, such as the Dutch Republic or France, did not develop capitalism, because they lacked the same conditions in one or two critical ways. Capitalism eventually spread to these other countries as capitalist-logic started applying to Britain's commercial and later imperialist ventures, but capitalism was spread TO them, rather than it developing outside of England in its own right, and never quite in the same form, or with the same effects. It's a good book, and I'd highly recommend it, in particular because it shows what recent scholarship can do to challenge and iterate on orthodox Marxism.
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Jan 22, 2020 14:41
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Suplex Liberace posted:i know this is late but https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24723229-the-devil-s-chessboard This is from pages back but thanks for finding this! This was the exact book I was thinking of!
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Jan 23, 2020 20:23
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Asked this in the Latin America thread, but it's more appropriate here: anyone know of any good histories of the Cuban revolution? I'd also be interested in historical novels about it as well.
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Jan 25, 2020 03:30
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Viktor Suvorov's "Aquarium" got recommended in another thread as a good personal account of the soviet GRU/KGB. Looking at Amazon, I think the cheapest used copy goes for something like 50+ USD? What. Meanwhile there's Suvorov's "Soviet Military Intelligence", which you can get relatively cheap. Anyone read both, is the second one just a recap? Because 50 bucks for a beat-up paperback, I mean eh.
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Jan 28, 2020 13:35
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it's called piracy b*tch
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Jan 29, 2020 08:44
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Helsing posted:I just wanted to give anyone reading this thread a heads up that I am planning to do a thread discussing the book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Tom O'Neill. It is a book that began as a magazine article that was supposed to come out in 1999 but which gradually sprawled into a multi-decade obsession for the author as he kept uncovering details that had been suppressed or forgotten and which directly contradicted the established narrative about the killings. In case anyone is interested, the thread is now live.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:44
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is there any value to be gained from reading francis fukuyama's the end of history?
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Jan 31, 2020 00:40
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God Hole posted:is there any value to be gained from reading francis fukuyama's the end of history? Eventually you reach the end of it
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Feb 1, 2020 16:21
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i guess i meant like in a "here's a time capsule of how hopelessly optimistic the liberal brain was in the 90's" kind of way
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Feb 1, 2020 19:18
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God Hole posted:i guess i meant like in a "here's a time capsule of how hopelessly optimistic the liberal brain was in the 90's" kind of way Ehhhhhhhh. It's an awful high summarizing enlightenment philosophers to making predictions ratio.
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Feb 2, 2020 00:12
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I'm sure you would get something out of reading it but unless you're very specifically interested in the nuances of intellectual history or are planning to write about that era then I'm not sure the opportunity cost of reading the book is really worth it.
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Feb 2, 2020 00:23
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Speaking of mieville, my new book came in~
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Feb 4, 2020 12:37
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 peter watts rules lmao
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Feb 6, 2020 04:08
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StashAugustine posted:
Only a white person could write this. “Yes, what indeed does happen when black people try to fight back?”
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Feb 6, 2020 04:16
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Peter Watts is really goodAntifa Turkeesian posted:Only a white person could write this. “Yes, what indeed does happen when black people try to fight back?” The problem is the black people are outnumbered because most white people just stand by. There's a reason for that one quote of MLK's.
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Feb 6, 2020 04:39
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Also police are given the benefit of the doubt to a comical degree and can murder blm leaders without consequence because they’re the ones investigating the mysterious rash of suicides where activists shoot themselves in their cars and then set their cars on fire. If you’re ever curious about why black people can’t organize against police, look up every time that has ever been tried. Cathartic spectacular violence is a white man’s fantasy because only white men can reach adulthood so coddled and deluded that they think it’s a possibility.
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Feb 6, 2020 04:47
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It's dumb in a lot of ways but I'm just happy he's taken dumb edgy white guy energy into the game theory of killing cops instead of Richard K Morgan land
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Feb 6, 2020 05:49
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StashAugustine posted:It's dumb in a lot of ways but I'm just happy he's taken dumb edgy white guy energy into the game theory of killing cops instead of Richard K Morgan land Make the political personal.
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Feb 6, 2020 05:55
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And then get personally offended by Bernie bros and trans people 
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Feb 6, 2020 06:01
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*clutching my edgy white guy energy* Molon Labe
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Feb 6, 2020 09:13
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Does anyone know of a good history that either (a) puts Locke in the context of Enclosure or (b) writes about how Enclosure affected the character of English then British colonialism?
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Feb 10, 2020 02:37
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Hand Knit posted:Does anyone know of a good history that either (a) puts Locke in the context of Enclosure or (b) writes about how Enclosure affected the character of English then British colonialism? The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood talks about both of these
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Feb 10, 2020 02:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood talks about both of these Kick rear end, I'll check it out.
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Feb 14, 2020 12:23
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just getting into the Culture novels, starting with The Player of Games, and boy I really hope the Marxist contempt of all things not communism keeps up.
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Feb 20, 2020 16:56
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Hand Knit posted:Kick rear end, I'll check it out. Her more recent book Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment also touches on that subject matter iirc
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Feb 21, 2020 02:08
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I've been reading Winner Take All by Anand Giridharadas. I'm enjoying it overall and he makes a good case for why "win-win" is code for "more money for me, gently caress you." It also has some insanely awful quotes by SV douchebags so that rules too.
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Feb 21, 2020 02:19
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Epic High Five posted:just getting into the Culture novels, starting with The Player of Games, and boy I really hope the Marxist contempt of all things not communism keeps up. I just re-read the entire series. The only problem is that it’s heteronormative space communism instead of gay space communism. Jeff Bezos is such a fan that he’s funding a giant series with no expectation of a financial return. I do not understand this at all.
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Feb 21, 2020 05:18
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At least one of the books has some gender switching where a couple both change sex so the other person can become pregnant. Still not gay though. TBH I can't recall any gay relationships in the books, but it's been awhile for most of them.
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Feb 21, 2020 05:47
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