Hey, all!
For over a month, I've been spending a lot of my free time creating this list of theory. The impetus for this project came from two things: first, this post by @iie@hexbear.net titled "I wish we had a hexbear wiki compendium of good books on 20th and 19th century historical topics" which set the idea in motion in the background of my mind; and second, the desire to expand the currently very small geopolitical reading list in the news megathreads. Initially, I focussed only on books directly to do with imperialism and current-day politics and geopolitics. Naturally, these events required context, so I expanded the list to include more of the 20th century. Then, I realised more nation-focus works would be necessary, and more communist theory, and it kept growing into... this. I have gone through almost every post in c/literature and c/history, looked through a significant chunk of lemmygrad and prolewiki, and gone through the bibliographies and references of several significant works (such as Prashad’s The Poorer Nations and The Darker Nations).
I haven’t the time nor energy to search every nook and cranny of the internet, so it is absolutely guaranteed that I have missed a lot of books. I am certain that this list isn’t even halfway complete - it’s more of a prototype right now. But it still has hundreds of books on it, categorized into many different sections.
Ideally all these books would be written by communists, left-wingers, anti-imperialists, and so on - or at least, are written in a style sympathetic to that position. For the purpose of anti-sectarianism, the works of major ideological positions should be fully featured. This obviously means that this is not going to be a reading list where there’s a consistent ideological position which unifies it - authors on this list are going to disagree with each other, and sometimes very harshly. Personally, I also don’t want this list to devolve into shitflinging between different authors on why X left ideology/state/project is good/perfect/materialist/idealistic/bad/flawed/evil, though I think more constructive criticism should be allowed.
Unfortunately, for more obscure events and countries, non-leftists are sometimes the only ones who have written much on them, and so we must resort to them.
Books are usually listed here with their initial publication date. This is not a recommendation that you get that particular version of the book if there are newer editions - you should of course purchase the most recent one - but a) I think it’s best to know when the book was initially conceived of and written so that we know the context of when the information was being conveyed, regardless of newer editions that may add more information, and b) I don’t want to trawl for new editions of these books every so often to update the year numbers. Additionally, books are generally listed in order of publication date. If a subsection accrues many books that fit under that category but span a lot of topics or a large time period, then a new subsection will be created and the books re-categorized.
Want To Help?
Be sure to recommend any books (or, even better, entire reading lists) that I have missed. People in my life tell me that I have a profound ability to miss the obvious, so a massively important book that every communist has heard of and read not being here should not be interpreted as a sign that I’ve deemed it not worthy - I might have just forgotten it. Just as importantly, be sure to recommend that any book be dropped - a book being here should not be interpreted as a sign that I’ve necessarily deemed it worthy. I cast a very wide net.
When recommending books, I advise four criteria:
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Non-fiction books only. I might consider eventually putting in a historical fiction and alternative histories section, but not right now.
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Not written by a chud, unless the point of recommending the book is to illustrate how important chuds conceive of the world, such as pieces on American strategy written by people high-up in the state - or if there is literally no other choice (military matters tend to attract chuds, for example).
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Not too much detail, too far in the past. It would be silly to say that the Assyrians or the Romans or the Mongols haven’t had a large impact on the current world, so books on those topics are fine, but ideally they should be pretty general, and we shouldn’t have a biography for every Roman Emperor or anything like that. The period that I am most focussing on is the 21st, 20th, and 19th centuries, as that’s the best bang for your buck in terms of political understanding of the current state of affairs. This should be as efficient a reading list as possible - reading a lot is hard and life is tiring, and getting lost in the weeds of Cyrus the Great’s military campaigns isn’t helpful if you’re trying to get a grip on the current Middle East.
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Related to politics and/or history somehow. This is the loosest of the four criteria, and I don’t really want to be arguing about whether a book on how to care for succulents, or a book on pencil manufacturing, or a book on deep sea creatures, deserve to be on the reading list. If you can argue that it belongs, then, sure, I’ll put it on.
Version 1.0 (that is, the very first version):
Added, uh, the whole reading list.
A ton of thanks to @Nakoichi@hexbear.net for letting me know about the Chunka Luta reading list. Also thanks to @Alaskaball@hexbear.net for their party's book repository.
Version 1.1:
Added dozens more recommended books, spread out across the list, notably including more books for Japan.
Added an Indigenous Theory section and reorganized some books into it. Added a Science section and added some books to it. Expanded "Philosophy" into "Philosophy and Theology" and added some books to the Theology section. Added a Multi-Region section in the Regional Histories section, due to some odd books that cover multiple continents. Apparently I forgot Finland existed, so that now has a section, and a book.
I have been recommended a few reading lists, some of which will take me a long while to get through. Nonetheless, if you have more books to add, then continue to recommend them!
So much to read, there's plenty on the shelf
I'll sleep when I'm dead
If I keep learning theory I'll improve myself
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Remember: don't fall into the "required reading" trap.
Just read what you want; you'll know what to read and when to read it.
Don't "force" yourself to do "required" reading.
Cool, another reading list for me to bookmark and forget about. But it's good to see Hexbear have something like this.
Skimming through the list, I don't see a few topics that are common in the news megathread. Since Russia entering The Donbas War spawned the news mega I'd think we'd have some books on that, recent military developments, and the developing new cold war against China to constrain multipolarity. Though we're in those processes right now and it would be hard to have good books on them.
Regardless, very good work.
I have my own reading list (well, one I worked on with 20 or 30 other people).
It's on CryptPad instead of Google Docs or whatever so you won't be tracked.
I think one of closest things we have right now is Desai's book written in 2022. Personally I think it'll be interesting to see the history of the Ukraine War told when it's over, hopefully from an author that isn't pro-Ukraine. There's something strange/interesting about reading a recounting of events that you've actually experienced in some way, rather than being told about it for the first time.
Hell yeah, I'm excited to have an India reading list. The Irfan Habib volumes may be exactly what I've been looking for.
Some more recommendations:
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix deserves to be on the list, despite its density. It's the single most important Marxist analysis of the Greeks and the Romans, and is a valuable introduction into how to read pre-capitalist history Marxistly.
Fanshen, by William Hinton, on Chinese land reform.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, written by Debord in the '80s, is just as essential as its predecessor.
Culture and Society, by Raymond Williams
We're Here Because You Were There, by Ian Sanjay Patel, on immigration and Britain post-WWII.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, by Robert Chapman
Great work. There's a ton to go through here. It'll definitely keep me occupied.
I know this is a list of theory, but it got me thinking. A list of leftist, fiction literature would also be cool. Maybe I'll start looking into that.
Some previous threads to start from:
Leftist or anti-capitalist hardboiled/noir/crime fiction?
Lots of good shit in @PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net 's legendary Ask me to recommend a book thread
https://archive.org/details/@ismail_badiou
I know the person that made this archive.
Woah, thanks for going through the effort comrade. I can recommend a few reading lists if you're interested.
This is C. Derick Varn's reading lists on patreon. Half are free to the public. https://www.patreon.com/collection/156855?view=expanded
Marxism and Revolution reading list https://spiritisabone.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/marxism-and-revolution-reading-list.pdf
I have a reading list that I worked on with almost 30 or so comrades, definitely somewhere above 20.
It was one for CPUSA members and one for people new to Marxism-Leninism.
Pinging @ComradeRat@hexbear.net if they have any recommendations (their posts are amazing)
I have tons and got started on the list today, but haven't finished it. Should be done tomorrow
Here's part of a copy-pasta of a friend's work whom I know:
Copy-pasta:
Check out Ismail archive's (which has saved over out-of-print and rare 1,200 books from obscurity):
https://archive.org/details/@ismail_badiou
Copy-pasta:
CPUSA Reading List - 2022
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/VJlD0b3eh4gMJovaypGkuW4m3Au-aksj+6oNDi50UFI/embed/
Communism Reading Guide
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/eAFqVc1JC8v8T5AEEWSPQ9YD4FR8tK6E97XEy+v78KQ/embed/
Made by an anonymous team of CPUSA members as a collaborative project.
Heads up to anyone reading: at least one of the links on the CPUSA reading list is to a Zlibrary domain that was seized by the FBI, so you may want to search for those ones yourself
I'll go through these and take what I think is useful, thank you! I'll probably shave off the more sectarian pieces unless I think they're constructive criticism.
Missing Blackshirts and Reds
It's a little overwhelming with how extensive it is. It is nice to have a big list like that but I wonder if it might help to have an "essentials" category at the start with a couple relatively accessible works.
Yeah. Actually, while doing it, I imagined ways that this could be done - like putting critical works in bold. The problem obviously is that I just don't know what the critical works are most of time because I'd have to read so much to get a good gist of what is and isn't important.
It's not something I can realistically do alone, I guess, unless you gave me a couple decades to get through all this.
Def a good list, would add History of the German Revolution by Pierre Broue and maybe All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History... The German/Spartacist Revolution was such an inflection point.
Another comment I had was about putting Wretched of the Earth and Pedagogy of the Oppressed in different categories. On the one hand your categories are fine and accurate, on the other WotE is probably the most misunderstood book I've ever encountered, and Paolo Friere's dialectical method is the most accessible way to navigate the positively fraught realities of national liberation that Fanon lays out in WotE. So I think those two books, while covering very different topics, should be read together
"History of the German Revolution"
Is that the book about the fight against the Nazis by the German communists?
No this is the period just before. At the very end of HotGR Hitler makes an appearance, but its more the struggle between German communists and the Social Democrats after the split in 1917 between the SPD and the more left-wing USPD, which included Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
Oh interesting!
A friend once recommended a book on how the German communists fought the Nazi Germany all the way to 1945...
But alas, they were kinda getting winnowed down over time too.
It was a book written, I think, in the 1980s or 1990s, and unfortunately, I can't find it. Definitely written sometime in the 20th century and by a Westerner, I think.
Amazing Idea, ty for putting in all this work. These are the books I've read that I thought would go well in the list. Went through your list and did my best to remove duplicates from mine, but unsure how successful I was
THEORY
Philosophy
God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria jr (1972)
Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes by Robert Brown (1983)
In the Margins: A Transgender Man’s Journey with Scripture by Shannon Kearns (2022)
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton (1999)
Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and Juche
Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Programe (1875)
Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich (1881)
Other Authors
The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Marcello Musto (2020)
Indigenous Theory
Marxism and Native Americans edited by Ward Churchill (1984)
Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto by Taiaiake Alfred (1999)
Anarchism and Anarcho-Communism
Other Authors
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott (1998)
General Theory
Organizing and Discipline
Fight to Win: Inside Poor Peoples’ Organizing by A.J. Withers (2021)
Culture and Media
Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy by Janet Wasko (2020)
CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM AND ANTI-COMMUNISM
Analysis of Imperialism
World-Systems Analysis
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour by Maria Mies (1986)
The American Empire
The Globalization of NATO by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya (2012)
Settler-Colonialism and Slavery
The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire by Giordanno Nanni (2012)
HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Science
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard Lewontin (1991)
Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature by Glen Aikenhead and Herman Michell (2012)
Local Science vs. Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development edited by Paul Sillitoe (2006)
Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital by Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante (2022)
Veganism, Animal Liberation and Farming
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? By Franz de Waal (2016)
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
Architecture and Urbanism
North America
Power Play: Professional Hockey and the Politics of Urban Development by Jay Scherer, David Mills and Linda Mcculoch (2019)
GENDER, RACE, DISABILITY AND NEURODIVERGENCE
Women
Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Womens’ Oppression by Christine Delphy (1984)
More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Cowan (1983)
LGBTQIA+
Making a Scene: Lesbians and Community Across Canada, 1964-84 by Liz Millward (2015)
Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985 by Valerie Korinek (2018)
Neurodivergence
Wandering Minds: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner (2023)
GLOBAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL HISTORIES AND POLITICS
General World History
Pre-Modern History
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline (2014)
The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Cyprian Broodbanks (2013)
Regional Histories
Europe
The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 by Alfred Crosby (1988)
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World by David Landes (1983)
Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski (1992)
Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society by Nickie Roberts (1992)
Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft by Robin Briggs (1996)
Latin American
Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America by Elisabeth Friedman (2016)
East Asia
The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan, 1684-1945: Land Tenure, Law and Qing and Japanese Policies by Ruiping Ye (2018)
National Histories and Politics
Brazil
A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro by Brodwyn Fischer (2008)
Canada
Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life by James Daschuk (2013)
Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming – in Alberta, and in Ottawa by Kevin Taft (2017)
Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works by William Carrol and J.P. Sapinski (2018)
Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State by Andrew Crosby (2018)
Reading the Entrails: An Alberta Ecohistory by Norman Conrad (1999)
Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession, Colonial Violence and Resistence among Indigenous and Racialised Women by Julie Kaye (2017)
China
Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization by Anita Chan (2009)
Negotiating Socialism in Rural China: Mao, Peasants and Local Cadres in Shanxi, 1949-1953 by Xiaojia Hou (2018)
Cuba
My Life: A Spoken Autobiography by Fidel Castro (2006)
Japan
The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 by Brett Walker (2001)
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix (2000)
The Modern Family in Japan: It’s Rise and Fall by Chizuko Ueno (2009)
Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan by Phillip Brown (2011)
A History of Discriminated Buraku Communities in Japan by Teraki Nobuaki (2019)
Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir by Shigeru Kayano (1980)
Peasants, Rebels, Women and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan by Mikiso Hane (1982)
Poland
Privatising Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labour by Elizabeth Dunn (2004)
Russia/Soviet Union
Inside Lenin’s Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State by Lara Douds (2018)
Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm by Caroline Humphrey (1983)
United Kingdom
From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Isles and Highlands by Robert Dodgshon (1998)
The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton (2021)
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition by Alan Macfarlane (1978)
Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton (2013)
United States
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason de Leon (2015)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)
Vietnam
Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present by Ben Kiernan (2017)
Multi-Region
Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa edited by Dip Kapoor (2017)
Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms In the Americas and Asia edited by Dip Kapoor (2019)
I have created a 'science' and 'indigenous theory' category I felt was lacking. I'd also suggest moving Red Skin White Masks, As We Have Always Done and Kayanerenkó:wa from the United States history section to this indigenous theory section. Unsettling the Word would also likely fit better in philosophy.
