There are many people who have been posting about wanting to mobilize and become more engaged in mutual aid and organizing in my local subreddit. People are starting to become more desperate and are waking up to the fact that marches and solidarity protests and voting only do so much and they want real change. But many are probably Dems/Liberals who are just coming around to this since Trump won the election. So they have hardly any political consciousness whatsoever and some may still be turned off by the words "anarchism" and "communism". Though I think more people may be sympathetic to anarchism than ML, Lenin is still bad and scary to them I'm sure. Even Marx.
The discourse has actually been kind of sympathetic to alternative politics in forms of upvotes and such, so I am compiling a list of mutual aid groups locally and nationally that are doing on the ground, tangible work besides electoralism and I want to gather very digestible reads/podcasts/etc. to put into this resource list.
I am looking for Democratic Socialism resources, Anarchism, Socialist, Communist, Trans liberation, Indigenous liberation, abolition, organizing, stories about apolitical-represented sources regarding mutual aid, analysis of how Democrats & Republics go hand in hand etc. etc. ANYTHING to push people left, regardless of how milquetoast it may be. Whatever started to de-worm your brain that's perhaps a notch left of Bernie. Extra points for resources that are more focused on examples of organizing as opposed to strictly theory based stuff.
If there are particular episodes of more radical podcasts to listen to, all the better. I think ideal texts and such would be where the author critiques their own beliefs and finds faults in them, but can argue the benefits of it as well.
A couple ideas I have as of this morning are:
- People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- Second Thought Podcast (Haven't really listened but it seems like a decent primer. Specific episode recs welcome)
- Blowback (So dense but riddled with primary sources and relatively unbiased)
- People's Guide to Capital (by Hadas Thier, quick and more focused on labor solidarity than revolution)
- Why Marx Was Right (by Terry Eagleton. Haven't read but was what pushed Breht from RevLeft to claim himself a communist)
- Possibly Dessalines' essays on github
The Alt-Right Playbook on YouTube. It's not explicitly leftist, but it's recognizably leftist. It's a great way to explain to libs why fascism takes root and why liberalism can't stop it. It will help them understand anti-fascist black bloc tactics and why violence is necessary against fascism.
Judas and the Black Messiah is a film that doesn't whitewash the FBI and doesn't ignore Fred Hampton's politics. Honestly, I'm surprised the movie even got made.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley will help liberals get some radicalism in them. Malcolm X was not a socialist, but understanding why he was the way he was will help liberals move away from civility fetishism.
And of course: Albert Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Hellen Keller's works about socialism and why they advocate for it. Libs love to canonize these three without understanding all of them were communists. Dalton Trumbo is another, who wrote many famous films including Spartacus. Lucille Ball and Robert Oppenheimer are two more whose socialism is often ignored.