Look, while I know we have theory to read. I kinda want to start reading some more fictional stories. What would you lot say are the left wing versions of both Atlas Shrugged and the T****r Diaries?
Both books (ESPECIALLY the latter) are just objectively terrible stories that are just mental masturbation at best where you self-insert as the Mary Sue protagonist and just GG ez everything. Surely the left can write something better.
Please don't tell me the closest we have are YA novels.
I mean, Kim Stainly Robinson was literally on the podcast two or three times. All his work is excellent.
If you want something a bit older, consider Asamov's Foundation series. Just about the definition of historical materialism. Or pick up some short stories by Ursula LeGuin, a real master of both SciFi and fantasy. I loved "The Found and the Lost", but I've heard "The Left Hand of Darkness" is the real peak of her work.
I love how the Seldon Crises are pretty similar to all the times we have to say "I warned you dawg. I TOLD you about imperialism."
Tolkien is deeply Catholic and one of his main themes is how authority is right and you should obey.
Aragorn is literally from a race of superior humans, whose blood has been tainted and watered down by breeding with lesser beings, and that is bringing ruin to the world. The people and nobles of Gondor almost rose up in revolution because the king at the time took a wife from Rohan.
Sauron's motivation is to do good. He believes that letting people choose whatever they want means that they might choose the wrong thing. Thus, he has to step in and correct them. What's the modern political movement that is best described by this motivation?
I'm not here to say LOTR good or bad. I've never actually read the books. But one thing I do think is funny is author Michael Moorcock's enduring hatred of them. Which, Moorcock is an interesting figure, being a self-described anarchist who seems to have good politics (from the handful of interviews of his I read. Note that I've never read his work). Anyway, for your consideration, here's an essay " Epic Pooh"(PDF link) where Moorcock decries Lord of the Rings as reactionary. Also, here's an interview I skimmed where he calls Tolkien a crypto-fascist.
I have no idea if Moorcock's opinions on Tolkien or his work should be taken seriously, he might just be some weirdo contrarian or envious of LOTR's acclaim for all I know.
Speaking of LOTR, there’s the unofficial Russian retelling called The Last Ringbearer. It’s an alternative account of lotr from the perspective of a Democratic Mordor that fights against an imperialist Gandalf and racist elves.
Read the books. They aren't really anything politically. It's like trying to apply Marxist analysis to the Illiad, you could but you won't really get anything out of it
Moorcock's stuff is the origin of all the weirder, more D&D type fantasy and definitely has an anarchic bent to it. It's very law vs chaos over everything else. Good and evil are irrelevant.
check out The Culture series by Iain Banks, particularly Player of Games
In addition to Vonnegut I'd also recommend George Saunders. Specifically his short story collections - In Persuasion Nation is his best. He also wrote an Israel/Palestine allegory novella called The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.
He recently wrote one of his best stories called Ghoul, if you're a podcast person you can hear him read it on the New Yorker "The Writer's Voice" podcast, or you can read it in the link above.
He writes a lot about exploitation of workers, degradation of the struggling, the savagery of our world, the ratcheting up of what is asked if the desperate - except, like Vonnegut, he's really funny. He's simultaneously more serious and funny than Vonnegut I'd say. And angrier.
I definitely think Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents is radical and left-wing as hell. But you could read the original "What is to be done" which Lenin copied the title. It is a fiction story that ended up radicalizing a lot of people.
But you could read the original “What is to be done” which Lenin copied the title
Lenin would absolutely be writing 12 page effort posts titled after popular historical fiction if he was alive today.
I like how a lot of the foundational Marxist books are called ‘a little pamphlet’. I just imagine one of those restaurant menu, three fold pamphlets but with tiny text.
The Dispossessed is to me a must-read if you are into leftist fiction. Her description of a how the fictional anarchist* society operates made me cry a little it was so beautiful. Makes you all the more motivated to try and build something like it.
*-LeGuin's characters and the author herself exclusively refer to the society of Anarres as "anarchist" but functionally it's indistinguishable from communism. It's a stateless, classless, moneyless society. So it works for everyone on the left.
Kurt Vonnegut’s God bless you Mr. Rosewater leans especially left but all of his books do at least a little. And all the ones I’ve read are great.
Kurt Vonnegut is American George Orwell, he passed around a false number on the deaths in Dresden and has said a few gamer words in his books.
That isn't even remotely comparable. He believed a higher death toll for a bombing that he was in? Wow, he must totally have an agenda and not maybe not being objective cause he was there and deeply traumatized by it? And oh no, an from the sixties used slurs in his writing?
Tons of people have suggested Ursula K Le Guin already, so I'll add another suggestion: The Culture series of books by Iain M Banks. It's basically "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism: The Book Series".
The Commonweal series by Graydon Saunders is about people in an egalitarian revolutionary republic trying to survive in a hell world (time has been rewritten dozens of times (and in book 2 the locally rewrite deep time in order to obtain hardwood without transport), ducks weigh 3 tons, breath fire and are an important ecosystem restoration component) ruled by godlike Mage autocrats.
The language is odd, but deliberately so as they're translations from an evolved language (there are no genders, but there is sex, so everyone is they unless referring to childbirth for instance. They also use the French revolutionary calendar.)
Ken Macleod's Fall Revolution quartet is about Trots and Mutualists INNNNN SPAAAACCE against neolib fascists and later Libertarian tech bros gone horribly bad. Start with book 2.
The Russians have the Solar Union books starting with Hard to be a god (which is about an observation scientist on an alien world seeing Fascism develop in a Feudal society, which his slightly dogmatic comrades think is impossible)
I think there MIGHT be a city in that one, not entirely sure tho
Is that a responce to Arthur C Clarks city? Which also had comunist themes from what I recall
am i really the one recommending the culture books, yall * just* turned me onto it
but yeah the culture books got FALGSC or whatever pretty lit shit
Yanis Varoufakis, whom I love dearly, published a novel, Another Now this year. He's a much better economist than a novelist, honestly, but the book contains a fairly realistic vision, or even manual, about how capitalism can be overcome by using some of its own tools, as it were.
e: out of classics, Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle comes to mind
