I once gave my copy of This Side of Glory to a black friend. He walks around like half a Panther these days. Any succes stories?
The Shock Doctrine It starts off by focusing on the typical GOP atrocities. Then they get to post-USSR Russia, and... surprise! Clinton made it happen!
Out of curiosity, how do you tend to start that conversation?
Both of these books are good in that fashion because they completely undermine the entire structure of the economic systems. Like in Debt, the main argument of the first part of the book is what exactly debt is, why is it that debts have to be paid off, why are social structures of debt so debilitating, why does the language of finance affect our actual language. It basically perforates the entire worldview of common liberalism, and it does so in these amazing and diverse stories from cultures around the world. Its an amazing book.
Its a fun an entertaining read, and it will occassionally make you very angry because it does center colonized people and their mistreatment quite readily. Here he talks about the State and Markets.
In that common-sense view, the State and the Market tower above all else as diametrically opposed principles. Historical reality reveals, however, that they were born together and have always been intertwined. The one thing that all these misconceptions have in common, we will find, is that they tend to reduce all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined in the same terms as a business deal. This leads to another question: If not exchange, then what? In chapter five, I will begin to answer the question by drawing on the fruits of anthropology to describe a view of the moral basis of economic life; then return to the question of the origins of money to demonstrate how the very principle of exchange emerged largely as an effect of violence--that the real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption.
I love the clear and unambiguous language. If we are to get working people on our side we need more of it.
The Grapes of Wrath is theory masquerading as high school lit.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Of Mice and Men is also great. I read it when I was still mostly lib, it made me realize a lot around intersectionality and class.
I doubt a book is what would help. What helps is a series of pictures. Making your libs watch the wreckage of a yemeni school bus, or making them see the reality behind their comfy lifestyle. Make them see the copper mines in Africa, or the polluted rivers of Bangladesh. Make them see the absolute fucking worst the world has to offer, and they will be leftists before they know it themselves. If they just shrug it off, you're losing your time. If they're genuine about wanting positive change, then make them ask themselves if it is human for these situations to exist just so some rich failsons have to pick a yatch to sail on every couple of days.
Books will never be my first go-to. I think telling people to "just read" is a very bad strategy as it comes across very elitist and smug and that's definitely not how we win people over. I do get quite e few people asking for book suggestions when I tell them about my politics, so I thought it would be good to broaden my arsenal.
Two Faces of American Freedom is good if you're focusing less on class and more on imperialism, then working with that towards a critique of capitalism and imperialism.
