this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I'm back in good health and should start posting serious theory discussions instead of talking about football all the time.

Post ideas here. Upbearing comments will be interprebeared as an expression of interest.

It would be good etiquette to mention the length of the book, as it's relevant to choosing.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (5 children)

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (352 pages) - Vincent Bevins

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've been curious about this one.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

TrueAnon and Chapo both had the author on the show to discuss the book, the trueanon ep was especially good

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (14 children)

I was going to do an Unmasking Autism (Dr. Devon Price) book club in the neurodivergent comm if anyone is interested

EDIT: Thinking of getting it going early next month. I'll need to do some prep work, re-read the book (currently finishing his prior book Laziness Does Not Exist and finding unexpected insights there too) and think up some discussion questions for each chapter. This one hit me hard and I've been trying to present it to other people in a way that does it justice. I feel like this will be a good avenue to pursue that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Library Genesis 😎🧩📖

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (4 children)

This would be amazing.

I am currently trying to get my hands on the new Empire of Normality-book myself, read it was about capitalism and neurodivergence especially. Currently writing my bachelors about neurodiversity in the context of welfare states (control, normativity etc.) and the commodification part of it all is a worrying question that I am working on forming an understanding in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

PDF

epub

Ping me or pm me if you are trying to track down a digital copy of a book and you can't find it on the major sites.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Please tag me when this happens?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

A few recommendations based on what seemed to make the earlier book clubs really cook:

After an initial post like this, choose 5 titles or so and make a poll, then give people enough time to find a copy of the text and start reading.

Sticky each post to the front page for the entire week until the next one.

@ every single user who commented on any previous book club discussion or meta-discussion like this in every post starting with the poll (or honestly this current thread). These are the users who are interested in reading and discussing, you don't want them to not know there's a new book club because they were touching grass on the wrong day.

Clearly state the reading goal a week ahead of time

Upload the text to perusal.com - I didn't use it but it seemed like other comrades really liked the interactive nature that everyone was leaving comments on the text itself? Honestly I don't exactly know how it works but that's what I gathered.

I'll try to join, I've read a few of the big texts suggested and am reading one of the others so I should be able to find some time to review my old notes

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

I've always wanted to read it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Literally started this yesterday.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Didn't we already book club this three years ago?

Edit: yeah we did

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

I'm the teacher and you're the class clown

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney (312 pages)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Ooh yeah this is on my list

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Cockshott – Towards A New Socialism (199 pages)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I found this book to be very helpful to me to understanding socially necessary labor time (abstract labor) and how central planning in a social state can work.

However, Paul Cockshott is a massive, unrepentant transphobe. Felt like that should be pointed out.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris. 100% this should be the next one trust me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

More disturbing, Harris’s radicalism leads him on more than one occasion to embrace an ends-justify-the-violent-means ethic of the sort espoused by utopian revolutionaries from Robespierre to Stalin to Mao. He characterizes the 1980 murder of the liberal politician Allard Lowenstein, who was seen as a sellout by the radical left, as “chickens who have come home to roost,” and quotes from a Workers Vanguard article whose headline read “No Tears for Allard Lowenstein!” The radical paper summed up the murder with an analysis right out of a Stalinist tract: “Sides were taken and there were victories and defeats.” Harris writes, “That’s as good a summary as I’ve found.”

Or take his assessment of the 1967 encounter in which the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton fatally shot the Oakland police officer John Frey. “In October,” Harris writes, “a car stop gone awry left one pig dead and Huey under arrest for murder.”

Once you have climbed the great mountain of scientific socialism, the murder of one liberal or one “pig” becomes a minor detail, a skirmish in the revolutionary struggle.

che-smile cry about it you fucking lib

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's such a shit "review." His critiques are almost entirely just whining about incivility or "ends justify the violent means" rhetoric (but I'm repeating myself). There's also a lot of just presenting stuff from the book and expecting the reader to share his sentiments instinctively, which many who bother reading NYT reviews probably do, to be fair.

Gary Kamiya is the author of “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco” and “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City” and writes the Portals of the Past history column for The San Francisco Examiner. He was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of Salon.com.

lenin-dont-laugh

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Lmao yeah the lib reviews off Palo Alto are funny as fuck one was just a dude complaining that it spent too much time talking about settler colonialism.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

what's this? I wanted a history of California, what the hell does settler colonialism have to do with it?

least blinkered yankee

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just realized the bastard called Stalin and Mao "utopian"

hoping for some "victories" to take place at the NYT offices...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

RIP Trevor, all time classic bit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (6 children)

There's a number of good books by Ilan Pappé on Palestine/Occupied Palestine but it's hard to pick between them and I'm not really in a place to commit to a reading club atm so I think I'll just float the idea if anyone wants to take up the charge.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (700 pages)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (205 pages)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[None: Vampire should only post about football]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I got a hold of books like Red Road to Freedom by Tom Lodge - It's about the history of the South African Communist Party. Pretty great so far. I could perhaps read it to the class.

I also have Armed and Dangerous and International Brigade against Apartheid, both by Ronnie Kasrils, though a mate at work is borrowing the latter.

There's also Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela; Why Israel? Anatomy of the Zionist Apartheid and Shattering Zionist Myths, both by Iqbal Jassat/Surya Dadoo.

Some forewarnings: The books do reference primary sources from "that time" in South African history, so there will definetely be the occasional hard-R and hard-K present. Also for the books regarding Isisrael, there is going to be quite several descriptions of death and gore.

Death to America

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Where's the list of past book clubs?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There isn't one afaik but that's a good idea. To my memory we've done Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs by graeber, How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm and there was an attempt to do The Wretched of the Earth by fanon but it didn't really seem like people knew that one was happening.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Ok we've got overlap there cool. How about The Dialectics of Dependency by Ruy Mauro Marini? The English translation is only a few years old.

https://files.catbox.moe/0tphtj.epub

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

There's only been two since I started modding this forum:

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Radhika Desai- Capitalism, Coronavirus and War (266 pages)

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