See title, this builds up on the previous request for reading lists, but is a bit more open ended and is supposed to be a contemporary update that I would like to post twice a year.
The texts at best are accessible without too much previous knowledge. Open for videos, and other media, as well as group formats, and activities too. You have to participate in protest training and actually cook for others to see how both those things feel.
I would be more happy with fewer thick works or only excerpts from complicated stuff, than to suggest the complete collection of Marx's works. Some popular and recent books i.e. Jakarta Method, Klein, or recent organizing books would be welcome, too.
The next time I post this question (and feel free to paste your own suggested template) will be December/January 2023.
Have you read The Dawn of Everything? Would you substitute it with Debt?
With the Jakarta I agree, it is a good book to dispel the "morality" myth of the Western democracies. How to Blow Up a Pipeline I can't really assess for new readers.
Thanks for contributing :)
I only got a a few chapters into Dawn of Everything, and no I wouldn't substitute it fit Debt. There's a reason it's considered his opus. The whole premise is that when we look at the anthropological record there's really no examples of commodity exchange requiring money, and the idea that money developed as a convenient answer to bartering is a fiction that misunderstands how humans in communities actually relate to each other.
It's quite a radical text honestly.
The reason I recommend these three is that none of them are on their face super radical, they're all very seriously cited with mild registers, but each forces the reader to engage seriously with major left tenets:
Debt: this manner of commodity exchange is not human nature and never was
JM: what we call "left" is not violent, but we now live in a world where all left movements have been destroyed by fascists
HTBUAP: liberal nonviolence narratives are childish and our worship of these fictions is allowing fossil capital to destroy the Earth before our eyes
Dawn of everything hits all the key points of debt while challenging social hierarchies more thoroughly and more broadly. It's also much better-written thanks to his co-writer and the editing the fame can buy.