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Some personal favourites, Conquered City by Victor Serge, a fictionalised account of life in Petrograd in the early days of the Russian Civil War, Serge was in the city at the time and at least one passage is taken directly from his experiences. Letters of Insurgents, by Fredy Perlman, this is another fictional story based on experiences and events. Its a series of letters between two revolutionaries, one in the West, the other in the Eastern bloc, in a world where the radicalism of 68 continued and escalated, virtually every type of political ideology and tactic has its advocates in the story, and they are all tested, poked and argued with to see how they'd react in an actual revolutionary situation, but its written in a way that's exciting and engaging. The Kaiser Goes, the Generals Remain, German novel about the revolution of 1918, its limits, the factions, the workers, the mutinying sailors, the SPD leadership. Vivid descriptions of street fighting and almost comic scenes of anarchic camaraderie and the surreallness of the situation. The End of Anarchism? By Luigi Galleani, a powerful rebuttal to criticisms of anarchism with well thought out and reasoned examples of the practicality of the anarchist philosophy and movement. Captain Jack White, Imperialism, Anarchism and the Citizen Army, biography of Captain Jack White, a Christian Anarchist, and one of the most overlooked of the Irish socialist movement, despite being one of its most tireless and interesting in charting the development of his ideas and views.
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Aug 24, 2020 04:45
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TrixRabbi posted:Anyone have recommendations for books (in English) about May 1968 in France? May 68 and all that by Stuart Christie Paris: May 1968 - by Maurice Brinton Obsolete Communism: by the Cohn-Bendit brothers. The Situationists also wrote a lot about it
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Aug 26, 2020 18:26
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On the other hand, this is the result of Harvey's readings of Marx https://twitter.com/Louis_Allday/status/1274716400351948802?s=20 He seems to have completely bought into the bizarre premise that capital flow = production and that we cannot afford to halt the very processes that are already killing us and causing mass starvation.
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Aug 29, 2020 05:15
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David Graeber died, He's best known work is Debt the first 5,000 years, but his essay Bullshit Jobs is very informative too. I also enjoyed his work on bullying and how society supports and promotes it at every turn
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Sep 3, 2020 16:57
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I was part of a book club that last year went through Hobsbawm's series, we were pretty disappointed with them, I don't remember anyone in the group having much positive to say about any of the books. Personally speaking I don't think they've aged particularly well, they're supposed to be general overviews of periods, but if you're already familiar with the periods being covered they don't offer much, and thanks to the internet and later work it is quite easy for a novice to be well read on say the 1848 revolutions, or industrial revolution, and you can really see Hobsbawm's tendency to refer to events, movements, people's that don't fit his overall thesis as curious anomalies and just ignore them. His shorter essays on say Gramsci are better. I think he's one of those marxist historians who used history as a way to prove his politics. I prefer the liberal AJP Taylor out of the two British historians, since he was more of a "let's see where the evidence takes me" historian. He managed to make a book on the history of the Habsburg Empire both pretty clear to understand and interesting to read.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:40
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Xander77 posted:Anything good on Troskyist thought? I'm currently reading "My Life" and it's kinda terrible as an autobiography of a political figure and in terms of explaining what he was all about. I think this Trotsky fellow protests too much https://youtu.be/hTIh_J75B3c And no, there despite being over represented in the arts and academics, there isn't much writing by Trots that holds up, its not an exaggeration that the majority of the stuff writing by them is aimed at their own party membership. I think Nigel Harris's work on the Chinese Revolution Mandate of Heaven holds up, but the explicitly Trotskyist parts, which all boil down to variations on "Mao sucks when compared to the Bolsheviks before Stalin" are still the weakest parts. Well, I'd also recommend CLR James work on the Haitian revolution, the famous Black Jacobins, its worth reading, but CLR James was only briefly associated with Trotskyism before moving away from it.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:38
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An excellent book to read on the history of the communist parties of South East Asia and why they very quickly fell into vicious infighting is Red Brotherhood At War: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos since 1975, by Grant Evans and Kevin Rowley (latest edition preferred). It looks at the histories of the three communist parties, and also the PRC and Thai Communist party, examines their nationalism and power plays and the response from the wider region and global community. When it was published it was denounced as pro-Vietnam propaganda by supporters of Pol Pot and the People's Republic, and denounced by supporters of Vietnam for being pro Cambodian and pro Chinese, to give an idea of how hard hitting its information was.
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Sep 16, 2020 17:25
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Mate its an audiobook and was the first thing that came up when I searched the title. Lenin didn't have a "golden boy" and the Bolsheviks were not an "Iron disciplined" collective either those are two common myths. Virtually every leading Bolshevik had very open and quite severe disagreements with Lenin, except for Stalin, because once Lenin had made his views clear Stalin usually switched sides. Trotsky was no exception and he hadn't openly joined the Bolsheviks until August 1917 either. I don't believe I've ever come across someone claiming he was a great propagandist before; Trots lauding him as an excellent theorist sure, but never a great speaker to the masses. Besides looking at how few supporters he had during the fight for the leadership after Lenin died I don't think its particularly credible. Even the army and the secret police didn't lift a finger to save him, even though most of the officers owed their jobs to him. Usually its Bukharin that gets the credit for being their greatest spinner. Yugoslav Communist(at the time) Ante Ciliga's account of his time in the Soviet prison system involves him meeting genuine Trotsky supporters in the gulags, they were always few in number, dwarfed by every other current of left wing prisoner population and many seemed to believe they would soon be released once the pro Trotsky NKVD launched a coup, and put them back in charge, so they could treat the Stalinites and the rest of the deviationists just like they had been treated. https://libcom.org/library/russian-enigma-ante-ciliga
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Sep 17, 2020 18:00
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Malkina_ posted:I forgot to add Marx’s Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which is considered one of his most fundamental texts by all Marxists, and the first to elaborate on social alienation induced by capitalism. It is less than a hundred pages. Its an interesting work but its a stretch to say its a fundamental text for all Marxists. It was first published in 1932(marx died in 1883) so many of the really influential Marxist thinkers lived and died before it saw the light of day. And the Marxists have get more fractured and heterodox every year. Anyway, I've been reading Luigi Fabbri's account of the early days of the Italian Fascist movement. He was a very influential Italian Anarchist whose unknown outside of Italy despite writing some very important accounts. Preventative Counter Revolution was written in October-December 1921 and is a very honest account of how Italy went in a matter of months from a potential workers revolution to a Fascist Dictatorship in league with a Conservative Monarchy. It gets to the heart of what fascism really is, a small core of ideological die-hards that remains small and fringe until it A) the established order is convinced revolution is imminent or at least inevitable if the workers and the socialists et al continue to grow in strength and militancy and B) The fascist movement is able to demonstrate it can be an effective bludgeon and counter force to this growing threat and its more than willing to cooperate with mainstream conservative and nationalist opinion and "apolitical" big business. Despite being written in 1921 passages in it not only do a very good job of explaining the composition and thinking behind the original fascist movements in Europe, but many of the modern new right groups that a lot of left wing thinkers and bloggers spent so many years arguing about whether its right to call them fascists or not. It should be a classic text on fascism and its dangers but its very obscure despite it being translated years ago. http://libcom.org/library/preventative-counter-revolution-luigi-fabbri
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Nov 4, 2020 00:34
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TrixRabbi posted:What are some good non-fiction books about China? Particularly hoping to learn more about the revolution and Mao, but also leading up to modern day. Two books come to mind, Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic by Maurice Meisner, its a very informative work from the 1911 revolution period up to the early 1990s. Does a very good job of explaining the ideological goal post shifting and political factionalism of the CPC and combines it with an analysis of the economy and political situation of the PRC as it actually existed and the gulf of this with the official versions. China's New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong by Jude Blanchette. This one is an investigation into current PRC and its political climate, focussing on relationship between the CPC and its officially tolerated (mostly) sometimes opposition sometimes auxiliary movements on the nationalist and "maoist" currents and what's been going on since the early 2000s to Xi's premiership. Ends just as the Jasic unionisation campaign was just starting.
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Apr 14, 2021 02:58
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The North Tower posted:Any recs on the Gang of Four or Lin Bao? Yeah, Mao's China and after covers both pretty solidly, as do most books that focus on the Cultural revolution. There are books out there that focus exclusively on one or the other but honestly I don't think you'd get much from the focus and would lose a lot of context that are given by the more general books. Neither Lin Bao nor Mao's wife and her cronies had much to do that separated them from Mao's orbit until he turned on them at the very end, so to understand what they were doing you really need to know what he and the rest of CPC power structure was up to at the same time. I suppose some histories of the PLA might have more to say on Lin. The North Tower posted:
Daniel Guerin's No Gods No Masters anthology is a very good cross section introduction, Clifford Harper's Anarchy a graphic guide is also a solid and accessible intro that has beautiful woodcut illustrations. For Anarcho-syndicalism I recommend Fighting for Ourselves by the Solidarity Federation is a compact explanation and development of the history of revolutionary unionism and the current anarcho-syndicalist movement.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:30
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