theory

Oh boy, time to end up with even less sleep

72 trillion theory posts

Cool, another reading list for me to bookmark and forget about. But it's good to see Hexbear have something like this.

Skimming through the list, I don't see a few topics that are common in the news megathread. Since Russia entering The Donbas War spawned the news mega I'd think we'd have some books on that, recent military developments, and the developing new cold war against China to constrain multipolarity. Though we're in those processes right now and it would be hard to have good books on them.

Regardless, very good work.

Hell yeah, I'm excited to have an India reading list. The Irfan Habib volumes may be exactly what I've been looking for.

Some more recommendations:

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix deserves to be on the list, despite its density. It's the single most important Marxist analysis of the Greeks and the Romans, and is a valuable introduction into how to read pre-capitalist history Marxistly.

Fanshen, by William Hinton, on Chinese land reform.

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, written by Debord in the '80s, is just as essential as its predecessor.

Culture and Society, by Raymond Williams

We're Here Because You Were There, by Ian Sanjay Patel, on immigration and Britain post-WWII.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, by Robert Chapman

Great work. There's a ton to go through here. It'll definitely keep me occupied.

I know this is a list of theory, but it got me thinking. A list of leftist, fiction literature would also be cool. Maybe I'll start looking into that.

hell yeah, this is dope

👑

Woah, thanks for going through the effort comrade. I can recommend a few reading lists if you're interested.

This is C. Derick Varn's reading lists on patreon. Half are free to the public. https://www.patreon.com/collection/156855?view=expanded

Marxism and Revolution reading list https://spiritisabone.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/marxism-and-revolution-reading-list.pdf

Pinging @[email protected] if they have any recommendations (their posts are amazing)

Missing Blackshirts and Reds

It's a little overwhelming with how extensive it is. It is nice to have a big list like that but I wonder if it might help to have an "essentials" category at the start with a couple relatively accessible works.

Thanks for this. Especially the countries section. I often wonder what's up with Pakistan, or wherever. But I never know where to start beyond wikipedia.

It's hard to find good historical books that aren't too libby.

Thank you for this!

thank you this is really cool :)

Def a good list, would add History of the German Revolution by Pierre Broue and maybe All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History... The German/Spartacist Revolution was such an inflection point.

Another comment I had was about putting Wretched of the Earth and Pedagogy of the Oppressed in different categories. On the one hand your categories are fine and accurate, on the other WotE is probably the most misunderstood book I've ever encountered, and Paolo Friere's dialectical method is the most accessible way to navigate the positively fraught realities of national liberation that Fanon lays out in WotE. So I think those two books, while covering very different topics, should be read together

Amazing Idea, ty for putting in all this work. These are the books I've read that I thought would go well in the list. Went through your list and did my best to remove duplicates from mine, but unsure how successful I was

THEORY

Philosophy

God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria jr (1972)

Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes by Robert Brown (1983)

In the Margins: A Transgender Man’s Journey with Scripture by Shannon Kearns (2022)

The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton (1999)

Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and Juche

Karl Marx

Critique of the Gotha Programe (1875)

Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich (1881)

Other Authors

The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Marcello Musto (2020)

Indigenous Theory

Marxism and Native Americans edited by Ward Churchill (1984)

Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto by Taiaiake Alfred (1999)

Anarchism and Anarcho-Communism

Other Authors

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott (1998)

General Theory

Organizing and Discipline

Fight to Win: Inside Poor Peoples’ Organizing by A.J. Withers (2021)

Culture and Media

Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy by Janet Wasko (2020)

CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM AND ANTI-COMMUNISM

Analysis of Imperialism

World-Systems Analysis

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour by Maria Mies (1986)

The American Empire

The Globalization of NATO by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya (2012)

Settler-Colonialism and Slavery

The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire by Giordanno Nanni (2012)

HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Science

Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard Lewontin (1991)

Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature by Glen Aikenhead and Herman Michell (2012)

Local Science vs. Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development edited by Paul Sillitoe (2006)

Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital by Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante (2022)

Veganism, Animal Liberation and Farming

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? By Franz de Waal (2016)

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (2020)

Architecture and Urbanism

North America

Power Play: Professional Hockey and the Politics of Urban Development by Jay Scherer, David Mills and Linda Mcculoch (2019)

GENDER, RACE, DISABILITY AND NEURODIVERGENCE

Women

Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Womens’ Oppression by Christine Delphy (1984)

More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Cowan (1983)

LGBTQIA+

Making a Scene: Lesbians and Community Across Canada, 1964-84 by Liz Millward (2015)

Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985 by Valerie Korinek (2018)

Neurodivergence

Wandering Minds: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner (2023)

GLOBAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL HISTORIES AND POLITICS

General World History

Pre-Modern History

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline (2014)

The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Cyprian Broodbanks (2013)

Regional Histories

Europe

The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 by Alfred Crosby (1988)

Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World by David Landes (1983)

Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski (1992)

Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society by Nickie Roberts (1992)

Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft by Robin Briggs (1996)

Latin American

Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America by Elisabeth Friedman (2016)

East Asia

The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan, 1684-1945: Land Tenure, Law and Qing and Japanese Policies by Ruiping Ye (2018)

National Histories and Politics

Brazil

A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro by Brodwyn Fischer (2008)

Canada

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life by James Daschuk (2013)

Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming – in Alberta, and in Ottawa by Kevin Taft (2017)

Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works by William Carrol and J.P. Sapinski (2018)

Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State by Andrew Crosby (2018)

Reading the Entrails: An Alberta Ecohistory by Norman Conrad (1999)

Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession, Colonial Violence and Resistence among Indigenous and Racialised Women by Julie Kaye (2017)

China

Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization by Anita Chan (2009)

Negotiating Socialism in Rural China: Mao, Peasants and Local Cadres in Shanxi, 1949-1953 by Xiaojia Hou (2018)

Cuba

My Life: A Spoken Autobiography by Fidel Castro (2006)

Japan

The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 by Brett Walker (2001)

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix (2000)

The Modern Family in Japan: It’s Rise and Fall by Chizuko Ueno (2009)

Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan by Phillip Brown (2011)

A History of Discriminated Buraku Communities in Japan by Teraki Nobuaki (2019)

Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir by Shigeru Kayano (1980)

Peasants, Rebels, Women and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan by Mikiso Hane (1982)

Poland

Privatising Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labour by Elizabeth Dunn (2004)

Russia/Soviet Union

Inside Lenin’s Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State by Lara Douds (2018)

Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm by Caroline Humphrey (1983)

United Kingdom

From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Isles and Highlands by Robert Dodgshon (1998)

The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton (2021)

The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition by Alan Macfarlane (1978)

Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton (2013)

United States

The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason de Leon (2015)

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)

Vietnam

Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present by Ben Kiernan (2017)

Multi-Region

Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa edited by Dip Kapoor (2017)

Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms In the Americas and Asia edited by Dip Kapoor (2019)

I have created a 'science' and 'indigenous theory' category I felt was lacking. I'd also suggest moving Red Skin White Masks, As We Have Always Done and Kayanerenkó:wa from the United States history section to this indigenous theory section. Unsettling the Word would also likely fit better in philosophy.

Me: ctrl +f duck

How to Read Donald Duck

My favorite piece of theory

Go outside and touch grass.
Stay inside and touch trees.

Something to start off the Finland section, a book on the Finnish Civil War and failed revolution, with plenty of context on Finnish state formation:

State and Revolution in Finland by Risto Alapuro

I mean we are mostly all here because we listened to a podcast. A reading list is nice. We need more phamplit sized literature. Podcasts and YouTube essays are too ephemeral make a list of despite them working well on us but there needs to be like an apertif menu.

Bit idea: what if I stream reading theory an hour a day, so twitch viewers get communist

For us ADHD or otherwise low attention-span folk, and in the interest of an economic estimate made before deciding what to read, would it make sense to 1. indicate the length somehow and 2. have essays or shorter works included so if one cant read a book at least they (i mean myself) can get some reading done!

I've got a book to personally recommend about Venezuela. It's called "Viviremos: Venezuela Vs Hybrid War."

It goes into the history of Venezuela a little bit, but for the most part it deals with the US's sickening treatment of it from the beginning of Chavez's Bolivarian revolution through the 2000's up to the end of COVID. It's a good de-brainwormer and reference guide that can shut down just about any VUVUZELA moron.

It shows the way that the US has used military power in the past, as well as details of the internationally-criminal sanctions that the US has imposed.

It's very digestible - it takes the form of a collection of essays from different authors written especially for the book. The most prominent being Vijay Prashad of Washington Bullets.

I also talked to the book's author, Geo Cicarillo, by email - he's very kind and was willing to answer a couple of questions I had about the book. It's just a paperback, so it's also a cheap purchase.

Oh, I should show a reading list that I also worked on for the CPUSA later (in conjunction with 20 or so other CPUSA members), including a theory list that I also worked that has nothing to do with CPUSA (but that is meant to get people into Marxism-Leninism).

Hell yeah nice list comrade thank you for putting this together

PS Jane McAlevey isn't a particularly good organizer and her advice is kinda bad. Feel free to read but take a critical lens to her work.

Ideas like, "the power of a strike is your real bargaining chip" and "you want shop floor people to be high engagement" are... basic obvious stuff and not the revelation that a lot of baby lefty labor people think it is.

This is great, thanks!

Return of the king

On the topic of ecology, A People's Green New Deal by Max Ajl is quite good but I remember him being critical of Andreas Malm. And on nationalism James M. Blaut's The national question: decolonizing the theory of nationalism is also quite good. On Soviet ethnography there's Soviet but Not Russian and When The North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia, but I've only read a bit of the former. Those are the books off the top of my head and the list is already huge.

Yo it's pretty good

I've found comrades IRL benefit from contemporary philosophy of science (why don't people align materialism? what is instrumentalism?) and would suggest Theory and Reality by Godfrey-Smith. It was the text I used in my upper year Phil Sci course and I find myself referring to it frequently.

I get that the kind of science in scientific socialism is a broader concept that what is employed in the profession of science, I still think it's useful to know some of it...