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!
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.