Here's what I'm reading:
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I'm going to stop reading A Dance with Dragons and the two Star Wars books for now and wrap up Empire, Incorporated and Determined while I continue on with Das Kapital.
Bonus question:
What do you PLAN to read later on?
Enjoy!
I wouldn't do "required reading" if I were you. I think that both Settlers and Black Jacobins have been done better by this point in the 21st century.
Hell, I finished Settlers and it's not that good.
Is there some reason why you would try to discourage me from reading either of these? Telling me not to read something is a sure fire way to make sure that I read it (that's dialectics, after all). I'm familiar with criticisms of Settlers, but I've also heard good things from other people who I trust. Its such a touch stone for so many leftists, I need to know where people are coming from. I'm more from the school of "ruthless criticism of all that exists," I have a reading group and a curriculum we are working off of, and Settlers isn't on it, so it's ironic that it's considered required reading. It's literally extracurricular for me.
Also why waive me off of Black Jacobins? I just want to read CLR James, I don't even know what its about.
I'm against "required reading." I feel that too many leftist curriculums online are just repeating the same books.
I feel that one should just read what they want to read next and "go off the beaten path;" if you look at a lot of Google Docs for communist reading lists, it's the same book over and over again and generally older works than their more modern counterparts, which I feel are often more accurate and sometimes nuanced.
But if you want to read both books, go for it.
If you have other suggestions I'd love to hear them. I'd like to read an updated version of a classic. I get where you're coming from, and I've definitely encountered and felt burned by dogmatism on the left. But I also feel like by that same logic someone could incorrectly say to not read Marx or Lenin, which is basically the underlying logic of the "new left" movement, which oversaw the rise of neo liberalism and disintegration of organized labor, and all but complete dismantling of anti imperialist and socialist movements. So, that might be worth considering as well.
Yeah, yeah, I getcha.
Maybe I'm too harsh. I just feel like people read the same books over and over again and nobody's discovering anything new, you know? No new theoretical developments or info. Stuff like that.
Anyway, suggestions include Hinterland by Phil A. Neel and White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. Those are off the top of my head. Oh yeah, and An Ideological History of the Communist Party of China since that gives a lot of context to Mao Zedong's writings and the writings of his contemporaries. I guess you could also read Nikolai Bukharin's (not to be confused with Bakunin) work such as Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. He was at odds with Stalin, as you may know, but he genuinely had some good writings.
Again, the books I just gave you were off the top of my head and I can try to find you some more that I've read or know about; they're meant to be "obscure" (since I believe that people shouldn't just read "required reading" or should at least try to mix it up a bit).
Also, I hear ya with the "new left" movement of the 60s/70s and beyond; nobody talks about it, but hell, it still affects us even today and in a very negative way.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll see if I can grab copies off libgen and add them to the stack!
I def get where you're coming from. I wish more orgs actively developed critical thought, and one of my critiques of left orgs/spaces is how many things considered "theory" serve as shibboleths and in-group signalling.
Like the Refused screamed in New Noise:
Yeah, exactly, and kudos to those verses 'cause I agree with 'em.