Hello everyone, What have you been reading?
I literally have a favorite chapter from Capital. It's awesome.
Chapter 10. I delved really deeply into it. And it almost becomes an ethnography or a journalistic reporting a la "The Jungle" by Sinclair, in some portions, on the working conditions of the proletariat in England and what they run into.
It also puts into very concrete terms, the abstractions from the previous chapter. Marx tends to do that. He abstracts the workings of capitalism and then he hits you with "malnourished children forcefully woken up at 3am are the source that surplus-value I am talking about".
The Working Day chapter is such a nice break from the rest of Capital up until then, just literally endless pages of suppose we have 3 shillings, and work 10 hours, and then supponse this is 1 1/2 shillings etc etc. Then he breaks into, like you said, a journalistic account of class warfare.
yeah, I think after Chapter 10, it becomes less about linen and coats but the general conditions in which we toil for the purpose of exchange and surplus value extraction.
it was the first book we did in the book club. I just wanna come back to it in a few months or perhaps a year after I've read more theory.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. Nearly done. Incredible book.
Rust Programming Language. reading the manual so I can work towards participating in Lemmy and Chapo Chat development.
The Silent Patient. Won most votes for Best Mystery Novel 2019 on Goodreads. What an absolutely shit book. Incredibly, breathtakingly bad writing.
Thanks for making this thread!
I'm on Chapter 3 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Chapter 25 of Revolutionary Suicide. I have some essay ideas percolating in my brian of combining the two.
That book is foundational in my teaching style. It is one of the most influential books for my entire ideology and worldview. I recommend it to everyone, but especially teachers.
Yeah, I'm in education and at some point I want to teach. It is doing a lot of numbers on my ideology, worldview, and what I look forward to making part of my own teaching style.
Honestly, I think this book really helps soften one's ideology from an arguably ML perspective. It's a really well grounded work, and points to the importance of fitting your praxis to the needs of the community, in an educational framework.
It should be on every leftist's reading list.
I definitely find myself questioning my understanding of societal needs. And I must admit, my knowledge of my community is lacking, for a variety of reasons: primarily that where I live does not feel like a community at all.
What state? Feel free to dm me with questions about getting certified. I used to be a classroom teacher and really felt I was able to make change/do good in that role.
More and more I am excited about Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This comment may have just bumped it to the very top of my reading list.
it's in the book club, and i had started annotating before i got myself a physical copy.
Bold of you to assume I can read.
(Real answer: The Communist Necessity)
Currently reading ABC of Communism by Bukharin. It’s good so far, kind of like if you turned the communist manifesto from a propaganda pamphlet into a school textbook, like literally to teach someone “what is capitalist society, how is it structured, what are the contradictions”, “what is the bourgeoisie” etc. From what I can tell it was written right after the Russian rev for expressly that purpose, to help teachers with educating the masses.
I’m not exactly learning anything new from it, but it’s an interesting read and a bit of a time capsule. I’ve been meaning to read Bukharin for a while so this seemed like a good jumping off point.
Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. So far, it's pretty decent, but definitely dated.
I'm planning on getting to capital sometime soon, but holy shit is that long - and reading theory takes me a long time as it is because of fitting it in to a busy schedule
I'm re-reading my contra war/reagan underground books. Re-read Gary Sicks October Surprise and Leslie Cockburns Out of Control, now doing Bob Woodwards Veil.
Got my verso gift basket, but before that is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism by Gerald Horne.
I'm just through the introduction, which is a quick recap of the creation of whiteness and white supremacy during the 1600s and 1700s, as well as the jockeying and slapfighting of various colonial powers in North America.
Update: the author takes the time to reinforce how being enslaved didn't propel the english to become empathetic towards their future captives. Also Queen Elizabeth I seems to have been seriously offended by the presence of black people in england, claiming that there are "already here to manie".
I just finished https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawksbill_Station, a 60 year old SF novella in which lefty political dissendents are exiled to the Cambrian era via time machine.
Reading Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm. It's a critical history of fossil fuels and the origins of anthropogenic climate change. Basically, Malm argues that the fossil fuel economy originates in 1) the mechanization of the exploding English textile industry of the early parts of the Industrial Revolution and 2) the need to free the textile factories from the geographic constraints of water power.
Both factors were driven by the need to control labor. Mechanization was implemented to suppress unionization and rising wages, while steam power was needed to bring the factories closer to the population centers in order to exploit the reserve army of labor. This counters the liberal narrative that fossil fuels were integrated into the textile industry due to power constraints or mechanical efficiency.
Recently finished re-read of Rothfuss Kingkiller books
Currently enjoying Le Guin trilogy: Gifts, Voices, Powers. It's a lot more gritty than the YA stuff of my teens.
The Souls of Black Folk defeated me in the first round, but I'm gonna go again. Just not used to the style, it's not actually hard going.
Sometimes a Great Notion. It's a long read and it seems to meander bit but I've been enjoying it.
Been reading The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering, it's a history/sociological analysis of mostly British cybernetics and then basically a 'Why it's useful for Socialism now' section at the end. Got it because a major part of it is about Stafford Beer who ran Project Cybersyn and whose ideas it was designed around. Which of course got Pinochet'ed before it could really flourish but it's interesting nonetheless. It's written well but holy fuck is it a big/dense book.
Little bit of a couple of things. I can't just read one book at a time for whatever reason.
I'm reading discord's book club book, Two Faces of American Freedom by Aziz Rana alongside The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 by Gordon Wood for a double shot of American republicanism. So far it seems like Rana nearly makes Wood obsolete, but The Creation is a classic in the field that I'm seriously thinking about delving into so I gotta get through it.
I'm also getting through Marx's Civil War in France and 18 Brumaire, which inspired me to finally get through Furet's history of Revolutionary France 1770-1880. It's slow going on all fronts, since there are so many, but it is going.
