A social democrat friend who knows basically nothing about socialism and was a berniecrat is looking for book recommendations, what is a good book to recommend to him?
I sort of dived in the deep end when I first started (perhaps unproductively ) and I they're the type of person who would probably benefit a lot from nice prose and nothing SUPER heavy, but I also know a lot of intro books are full of BS that needs to be deprogrammed later(especially stuff that includes left-anticommunism) so I'm being cautious.
What would you recommend?
Blackshirts And Reds by Parenti is a good one.
chapter 3 has a fair chunk of anti-communism in it, and while the book is a really good polemic I feel like it isn't a really good FAQ for new socialists
I havent read the whole book in a little bit, but im looking at chapter 3 and it's mostly a critique of American "leftists" and them being anti-communist especially when it came to the USSR or Cuba. Chapter 4 talks about some inefficiencies in the USSR but it's far from bashing it. I only skimmed the chapters just now though, so i could have missed something.
Yeah isn’t chapter 3 largely the Left anti-communism: The Unkindest Cut chapter?
it is.
operating off of memory so I had to skim, here was the first major thing I found
from chapter 3, page 45-46
Smh Parenti was a lib
Against Empire is another good one, succinctly goes over how and why America has fucked over any socialist/communist country.
This is the book that radicalized me