Flint's comments (member since May 24, 2007)

Flint's comments from the "Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck" group.

Red Emmas is a worker cooperative radical bookstore and coffee house in Baltimore, Maryland. Here is a list of their best sellers:

People's History of the United States : 1492 to Present (P.S.) by Howard Zinn

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire by Arundhati Roy

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal

Living My Life, Vol. 1 by Emma Goldman

Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

The Left Hand of Darkness (Remembering Tomorrow) by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68 by Rene Vienet

50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know : Reclaiming American Patriotism by Mickey Z

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings by Marquis De Sade

50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know by Russ Kick

Against Nature: (A Rebours) (Oxford World's Classics) by J. K Huysmans, Margaret Mauldon, Nicholas White, and J. K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

http://www.redemmas.org/inventory/

The Hidden Marxist Tradition

Marxism and Philosophy - Karl Korsch
Three Essays on Marxism - Korsch
Revolutionary Theory - Korsch/Kellner
Karl Korsch: A study in Western Marxism - Patrick Goode
Anti-Bolshevik Communism - Paul Mattick
Marx and Keynes - Paul Mattick
Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory - Paul Mattick
Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation - Paul Mattick
Karl Marx: His life and Work - Otto Ruhle
Open letter to comrade Lenin - Herman Gorter
Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism - ed. D.A Smart
Workers’ Councils - Anton Pannekoek
Lenin as Philosopher - Pannekoek
The Radical Tradition: A study in Modern Revolutionary Thought - Richard Gombin
The Origins of Modern leftism - Richard Gombin
Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements - Root and Branch Collective
Come Dungeons Dark: The Life and Times of Guy Aldred - John Taylor Caldwell
Severely Dealt With & With Fate Conspire: Memoirs of a Glasgow Seafarer and Anarchist - John Taylor Caldwell (Two volumes of this libertarian communists and comrade of Guy Aldreds autobiography - recommended)
Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, 1917-45 - Mark Shipway
The Dutch and German Communist left - Phillip Bourrinett
The Italian Communist Left 1926-45 - Phillip Bourrinett
The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement - Gilles Dauve (Jean Barrot) and Francois Martin (Very strongly recommended)
Murdering the Dead: Amadeo Bordiga on Capitalism and other Disasters - Antagonism Press
Bordiga versus Pannekoek - Antagonism Press
Political and Social Writings in Three Volumes - Cornelius Castrates (Highly recommended - from the blinged up main theorist of the highly influential French Socialisme ou Barbarie group)
The Imaginary Institution of Society - Castoriadis
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis, and New Social Subjects 1967-83 - Toni Negri (Essential - and before all the post-modern wank that’s plagued his later work)
Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse - Toni Negri (Again - essential)
Empire - Negri & Hardt (Still worth reading despite its may flaws - light years ahead of the leftists)
Labor of Dionysus - Negri & Hardt
Insurgencies - Negri
Time for Revolution - Negri
Communist Like Us - Negri & Felix Guattari
Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism - Steve Wright (Recommended)
Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Forth World War - Midnight Notes
Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992 - Midnight Notes
Strange Victories - Midnight Notes
The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution and Capital - Leopoldina Fortunati
The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community
Reading Capital Politically - Harry Cleaver
What is to be Done: Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of revolution Today - ed Werner Bonefeld & Sergio Tischler
Revolutionary Writing - Ed. Bonefeld (Useful collection of articles from the old Edinburgh based autonomist journal Common Sense)
Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today - John Holloway
Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money: ed. By Bonefeld and Holloway
State and Capital: A Marxist Debate - ed by Holloway and Sol Picciotto
Open Marxism, Three Volumes: Dialectics and History; Theory and Practice; Emancipating Marx - ed. By Bonefeld, Holloway, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Physchopedis
In and Against the State - London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (Basically the same bods as above and the Common Sense lot)
Bolo’Bolo - P.M
Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg
The Mass Strike - Rosa Luxemburg
The Russian revolution - Rosa Luxemburg
Leninism or Marxism? - Rosa Luxemburg
The Accumulation of Capital - Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks - ed. Mat-Alice Waters
Rosa Luxemburg (Two Volumes) - Peter Nettl
State Capitalism and World Revolution - C.L.R James
The Black Jacobins - C.L.R James
Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Though of C.L.R James - ed. Anthony Bogues
C.L.R James: His life and Work - ed. Paul Buhle
Marxism For Our Times: C.L.R James on Revolutionary Organisation - ed, Marty Glaberman
Rethinking C.L.R James - ed. Grant Farred
The C.L.R James Reader - ed. Anna Grimshaw
Philosophy and Revolution - Raya Dunayevskaya
The Power of Negativity: Selcted Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx - - Raya Dunayevskaya
Marxism and Freedom - - Raya Dunayevskaya
Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Libertation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution - Raya Dunayevskaya
Law and Marxism - E.B Pashunkanis
Late Marxism and the Russian Road - Teodor Shanin
Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value - I.I Rubin
Marx at the Millennium - Cyril Smith (Though he now seems to be backtracking as fast as he can from the implications of his book)
Marx Without Myth - Maximillien Rubel & Margaret Manale
Obsolete Communism - Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit
This World We Must leave - Jacques Cammatte

The Guillotine at Work - Gregory Maximoff
The Bolshevik Myth - Alexander Berkman
The Unknown Revolution -Voline
1917- Voline (about 1/3 of the above work concentrating just on 1917)
The Russian Anarchists - Paul Avrich (worth getting hold of his Russian Rebels for an account of earlier events)
The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution - Paul Avrich (Collection of contemporary anarchist leaflets and articles)
History of the Maknovist Movement - P. Arshinov
The Struggle Against the State and other Essays - Nestor Makhno
The Russian Enigma - Ante Ciliga
The Bolsheviks and Workers Control - Maurice Brinton
Kronstadt 1917-21: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy - Israel Getzler
Kronstadt 1921 - Paul Avrich
Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 - F.F Raskolinikov (Bolshevik account - doesn‘t cover the uprising though)
Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising - Alexander Rabinbowitch (dispels most of the Bolsheviks lies about the ‘July days’ and gives a very favourable impression of anarchist activity)
The Civil War in Russia - David Footman
The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political opposition in the Soviet State in the First Phase 1917-22 - Leonard Schapiro
The Conscience of the Revolution : Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia - R.V Daniels
A Documentary History of Communism Volume 1: Communism in Russia - ed. R.V Daniels
My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia - Emma Goldman
The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils 1905-1921 - Oskar Anweiler
Class Struggles in the USSR Volume 1, 1917-23 and Volume 2, 1923-30 - Charles Bethlehem (Maoist influenced account, but provides masses of evidence for the anarchists criticisms of the USSR)
Russia Twenty Years after - Victor Serge (written when he was starting the break from Trotskyism)
Year One of the Bolshevik Revolution - Victor Serge (written when he’d just broke from anarchism and was a full on lying Bolshevik , so beware - but he’ such a good writer it’s worth reading)
Revolution in Danger - Victor Serge (Ditto)
From Lenin to Stalin - Victor Serge
Memoirs of a Revolutionary - Victor Serge (Beware! Serge finds himself being correct in his estimation of nearly every situation he finds himself in, so take with a pinch of salt!)
Stalin - Boris Souvarine
History of the Russian Revolution, 3 Volumes - Trotsky (worth reading to see what a bare-faced liar he is)
The Bolshevik Revolution , 3 Volumes - E.H Carr (Well worth reading, and using as a reference to check facts from).
The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars - Ed. By Vladimir Brovkin (Good collection of articles that highlight opposition to the Bolsheviks)
Voices of Revolution, 1917 - Mark D. Steinberg (collection of original material from 1917, not party publications but letters, self-taught poetry and similar stuff from ‘the people’)
Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories - S.A. Smith
Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-1922 - M. McAuley
Soviet Communists in Power. A Study of Moscow During the Civil War, 1918-1921 - R. Sakwa
Workers against Lenin: Labour Protest and the Bolshevik Dictatorship - J.Aves
Before Stalinism; The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy - Samuel Farber
Workers Control and Socialist Democracy - C. Sirianni
The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917 - ed. D. Kaiser

Anarchist Ideology and The Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898 - George R. Esenwein
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years,1868-1936 - Murray Bookchin
To Remember Spain - M Bookchin
The Anarchists of Casas Viejas - Jerome R Mintz
The Anarchists In the Spanish Civil War, Two volumes - Robert Alexander
Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution ( & appendix) - Jose Peirats
Vision On Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution
Blood of Spain - Ronald Fraser
The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain - Pierre Broue & Emile Temime (trots but worthwhile)
Anarchist Organization: The History of the F.A.I. - Juan Gomez Casas
The Anarchist Collectives: Workers Management and the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 - Ed. Sam Dolgoff
Collectives in the Spanish Revolution - Gaston Leval
With the Peasants of Aragon - Augustin Souchy Bauer
The Friends of Durruti Group:1937-39 - Agustin Guillamon
Franco’s Prisoner - Miguel Garcia
Durruti: the People Armed - Abel Paz
Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary - Antonio Tellez
The May Days: Barcelona 1937 - Various, Freedom Press
Spain and the World: Social Revolution and Counter Revolution (collection of contemporary anarchist material) - Freedom Press
Lessons of the Spanish Revolution - Vernon Richards
A New World in our Hearts: The Faces of Spanish Anarchism - ed. Albert Meltzer
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
The Shallow Grave: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War - Walter Gregory
The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain - Felix Morrow (trot crap bible on Spain - very dishonest)
The Spanish Civil War: 1936-39 - Paul Preston (Passable/fair mainstream history, hostile to anarchism though)
The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain 1936-39 - ed. Paul Preston & Ann L. Mackenzie (some useful material)
Comrades! Portraits From the Spanish Civil War - Paul Preston (only concentrates on the big name politicians, including favourable look at the Stalinist la Pasionara!)
The Spanish Tragedy: The Civil War in Perspective - Raymond Carr
The Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War - Franz Borkenau
The Spanish Civil War - Antony Beevor - (Surprisingly good account, and very well informed on the anarchist side of things - recommended as an introduction)
The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War - Gerald Brenan
The Spanish Civil War - Hugh Thomas (much revised and still not very good - much loved by clueless academics and journos)
Homage to the Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish Civil War - Nancy Macdonald (account of the post-war refugees)
The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left - Revolutionary History Volume 4, nos ½ - Various (important book sized edition of trotskyist journal, much very rare info and contemporary material - see also the slighter Vol 1 No 2, The hidden history of the Spanish Civil War)
Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War - ed. Ronald Radosh, Mary R Habeck & Grigory Sevostianov (collection of Soviet Documents that conclusively demonstrate the sabotage of the revolution by the Stalinists and their Spanish comrades - recommended)
The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution - Manuel Grossi
The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement - 1st May Group
Cockburn in Spain - ed. James Pettier (Without a doubt the worst book ever written - a collection of Articles from the Eton educated Stalinist reporter for the CPGB’s Daily Worker - the biggest tissue of lies ever to be published - would be funny if it weren’t so tragic)
The Signal was Spain: The Aid Spain Movement in Britain 1936-1939 - Jim Fyrth

http://www.afed.org.uk/

German Revolution 1918-23

Revolution in central Europe - F.L Carsten
Hamburg At the Barricades - Larissa Reissner
Revolutionary Hamburg - Richard A. Comfort
The German Revolution of 1918 - A.J Ryder
Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-19 - Sebastian Haffner
Failure of a Revolution - Rudolf Coper (Different book)
Levine, The Life of a Revolutionary - Rosa Levine-Meyer
Red Rising in Bavaria - Richard Grunburger
Witness to the German Revolution - Victor Serge
The Lost Revolution - Chris Harman
German Revolution 1917-1923- Pierre Broue
Revolutionary History Volume 5, numbers 1 and 2 - Germany 1918-23 & Eyewitness to Disaster
The Dutch and German Communist Left - Phillipe Bourrinet
Anti-Bolshevik Communism - Paul Mattick
Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? - Paul Mattick
The Origins of the Movement for Workers Councils in Germany -Henk Canne Meijer
The Wilhelmshaven Revolt: A Chapter of the Revolutionary Movement in the German Navy, 1918-1919 - Ikarus ( Ernst Schneider)
Left Communism in Germany from 1914 to 1923: An Introduction - Dave Graham
The Radical Tradition - Richard Gombin
Council Communism - Jeremy Brecher
Hammer or Anvil - Evelyn Anderson
A History Of the German Republic - Arthur Rosenberg
The Weimar Republic - Detlev Peukert
Britain and The Weimar Republic - F.L Carsten
The Revolution is not a Party Affair - Otto Ruhle
Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement - Jean Barrot and Francois Martin
Out of the Night - Jan Valtin (Beware! much of this book is pure fiction!)
Councils and State in Weimar Germany - Guido De Masi and Giacomo Marramao

I believe anyone in the group can add a book to the book list.

Try it.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Savage attack on hypocrisy and cant that never dilutes its fantasy with its satire: the two elements feed off each other perfectly.

Alexei Tolstoy -- Aelita (1922; trans. 1957)
Distant relative of the other Tolstoy. The "revised" version is less good, written in the stern environment of Stalinism. A Red Army officer goes to Mars and foments a rebellion of native Martians. Good rousing stuff, but also interesting in terms of "exporting" revolution. See also the superb avant-garde film version from 1924.

Ian Watson -- Slow Birds (1985)
Left-wing author whose short story collection above includes a cold demolition of Thatcher and Thatcherism. His take on oppression -- cognitive and political -- informs all his rather austere, cerebral writing.

H.G. Wells -- The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
Like a lot of Wells's work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time. A fraught examination of colonialism, science, eugenics, repression, and religion: a kind of fantasy echo of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

E. L. White -- "Lukundoo" (1927)
One of the most utterly extraordinary (and almost certainly unconscious) expressions of colonial anxiety and guilt in the history of literature.

Oscar Wilde -- The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888)
Children's fantasies by this romantic, socialist author. Marked by a sharp lack of sentimentality, a deeply subversive cynicism, which doesn't blunt their ability to be intensely moving.

Gene Wolfe -- The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)
Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.

Evgeny Zamyatin -- We (1920; trans. 1924)
A Bolshevik, who earned semi-official unease in the USSR even in the early 1920s, with this unsettling dystopian view of absolute totalitarianism. These days often retrospectively, ahistorically, and misleadingly judged to be a critique of Stalinism.

With many thanks to Mark Bould, Brian Stableford, and the members of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts email list (IAFA-L) for their suggestions. I take full responsibility for the final selection…

Philip Pullman -- Northern Lights (1995)
Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn't patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume… and then in book three, The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there's sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well. Northern Lights is still a masterpiece.

Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged (1957)
Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential -- though vile and ponderous -- novel.

Mack Reynolds -- Lagrange Five (1979)
Reynolds was, for 25 years, an activist for the U.S. Socialist Labor Party. His radical perspective on political issues is reflected throughout his work. This book -- examining a quasi-utopia without sentimentalism -- is only one suggestion. Also of huge interest are Tomorrow Might Be Different (1960) and The Rival Rigelians (1960), which explicitly examine the relation between capitalism and Stalinism.

Keith Roberts -- Pavane (1968)
These linked stories take place in a present day where Elizabeth I was assassinated and Spain took over Britain. This examines life in a world where a militant feudal Catholicism acts as a fetter on social and productive functions. Though Roberts was no lefty at all, and you could probably power France on the energy from his spinning grave at being included in this list.

Kim Stanley Robinson -- The Mars Trilogy (1992-96)
Probably the most powerful center of gravity for Leftist SF in the 1990s. A sprawling and thoughtful examination of the variety of social relations feeding into and leading up to revolutionary change. (It's also got some Gramsci jokes in it.)

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Not a warning "not to mess with things that should be let alone" (which would be a reactionary anti-rationalist message) but an insistence on the necessity of grappling with forces one unleashes and the fact that there is no "innate" nature to people, but a socially-constructed one.

Lucius Shepard -- Life During Wartime (1987)
Horrific vision of a future (thinly disguised Vietnam) war. Within the savage examinations of the truth of war and U.S. foreign policy, Shepard also investigates the relation between SF, fantasy, and "magic realism", and uses their shared mode to look back at reality with passion.

Norman Spinrad -- The Iron Dream (1972)
A SF novel by Adolf Hitler…Spinrad's funny, disturbing and savage indictment of the fascist aesthetics in much genre SF and fantasy. What if Hitler had become a pulp SF writer in New York? Not a book about that possibility but a book from it. "By the same author: Triumph of the Will and Lord of the Swastika." Brave and nasty.

Eugene Sue -- The Wandering Jew (1845)
Huge book by radical socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is the dispossessed laborer and his partner is downtrodden woman. Marx hated Sue as a writer (not without reason -- less, for Sue, is not in more) but hell, it's an important book.

Michael Swanwick -- The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre -- fairies, elves, and all -- Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.

Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
The most overtly political of this anarchist writer's excellent works. An examination of the relations between a rich, exploitive capitalist world and a poor, nearly barren (though high-tech) communist one.

Jack London -- The Iron Heel (1907)
London's masterpiece: scholars from a 27th Century socialist world find documents depicting a fascist oligarchy in the US and the revolt of the proletariat. Elsewhere, London's undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism.

Ken MacLeod -- The Star Fraction (1996)
British Trotskyist (of strongly libertarian bent), all of whose (very good) works examine Left politics without sloganeering. The Stone Canal, for example, features arguments about distortions of Marxism. However, The Star Fraction is chosen here as it features Virtual Reality heroes of the left, by name -- a roll call of genuine revolutionaries recast in digital form.

Gregory Maguire -- Wicked (1995)
Brilliant revisionist fantasy about how the winners write history. The loser whose side is here taken is the Wicked Witch of the West, a fighter for emancipatory politics in the despotic empire of Oz.

J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) -- Gay Hunter (1934, reissued 1989)
By the Marxist writer of the classic work of vernacular Scots literature A Scots Quair, and Spartacus, the novel that proves that propaganda can be art. This is great science fiction. Bit dewy-eyed about hunter-gatherers perhaps, but superb nonetheless. As an added bonus, it also has a title that sounds amusing today. Check out his short fiction, which includes a lot of SF/Fantasy work.

Michael Moorcock -- Hawkmoon (1967-77, reprinted in one edition 1992)
Moorcock is an erudite Left-anarchist and a giant of fantasy literature. Almost everything he's written is of interest, but Hawkmoon is chosen here in honor of Moorcock having said about it: "In a spirit consciously at odds with the jingoism of the day, I chose a German for a hero and the British for villains." There are also plenty of satirical references and gags about 1960s/70s politics for the reader to decode.

William Morris -- News From Nowhere (1888)
A socialist (though naively pastoral) utopia, written in response to Bellamy (above), that unusually doesn't shy away from the hard political question of how we get the desired utopia-proletarian revolution. See also The Well at the World's End and his other fantasies.

Toni Morrison -- Beloved (1987)
It's well known that Beloved is a superb book about race and slavery and guilt, but it's less generally accepted that it's a fantasy. It is. It's a ghost story that wouldn't have half the charge without the fantastic element.

Mervyn Peake -- The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59)
An austere depiction of dead ritualism and necessary transformation. Don't believe those who say that the third book is disappointing.

Marge Piercy -- Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
A Chicano woman trapped in an asylum makes contact with a messenger from a future utopia, born after a "full feminist revolution".

Claude Farrere -- Useless Hands (1920; trans. 1926)
Bleak Social Darwinism, and a prototype of "farewell to the working class" arguments. The "useless hands" -- workers -- revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology. A cold, reactionary, interesting book.

Anatole France -- The White Stone (1905; trans. 1910)
In part, a rebuttal to the racist "yellow peril" fever of the time--a book about "white peril" and the rise of socialism. Also interesting is The Revolt of the Angels, which examines now well-worn socialist theme of Lucifer being in the right, rebelling against the despotic God.

Jane Gaskell -- Strange Evil (1957)
Written when Gaskell was 14, with the flaws that entails. Still, however, extraordinary. A savage fairytale, with fraught sexuality, meditations on Tom Paine and Marx, revolutionary upheaval depicted sympathetically, but without sentimentality; plus the most disturbing baddy in fiction.

Mary Gentle -- Rats and Gargoyles (1990)
Set in a city that undermines the "feudalism lite" of most genre fantasy. An untypical female protagonist has adventures in a cityscape complete with class struggle, corruption, and racial oppression.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)
Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in "caring" relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones. See also her feminist/socialistic utopias "Moving the Mountain" (1911) and Herland (1914).

The Dream Years -- Lisa Goldstein (1985)
A time-slip oscillating between Paris in the 1920s, during the Surrealist movement, and in 1968, during the Uprising. Uses a popular fantastic mode to examine the relation between Surrealism as the fantastic mode par excellence and revolutionary movements (if nebulously conceived).

Stefan Grabinski -- The Dark Domain (1918-22; trans. and collected 1993)
Brilliant horror by this Polish writer. Unusually locates the uncanny and threatening within the very symbols of a modernizing industrialism in Poland: trains, electricity, etc. This awareness of the instability of the everyday marks him out from traditional, "nostalgic" ghost story writers.

George Griffith -- The Angel of Revolution (1893)
Rather dated, but unusual in that its heroes are revolutionary terrorists. Very different from the devious anarchist villains of (eg.) Chesterton.

Emile Habiby -- The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974; trans. 1982)
The full title is much longer. Habiby was a member of the Palestinian Community Party, a veteran of the anti-British struggle of the 40s, and a member of the Knesset for several years. This amiable, surreal book is about the life of a Palestinian in Israel (with surreal bits, and aliens).

M. John Harrison -- Viriconium Nights (1984)
A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force. Fantasy that mercilessly uncovers the alienated nature of the longing for fantastic escape, and show how that fantasy will always remain out of reach. Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy. See also The Course of the Heart.

Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read
By China Miéville

This is not a list of the "best" fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality -- which though mostly good, is variable -- but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works -- by the same or other writers -- could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.

Iain M. Banks -- Use of Weapons (1990)
Socialist SF discussing a post-scarcity society. The Culture are "goodies" in narrative and political terms, but here issues of cross-cultural guilt and manipulation complicate the story from being a simplistic utopia.

Edward Bellamy -- Looking Backward, 2000 - 1887 (1888)
A hugely influential, rather bureaucratic egalitarian/naïve communist utopia. Deals very well with the confusion of the "modern" (19th Century) protagonist in a world he hasn't helped create (see Bogdanov).

Alexander Bogdanov -- The Red Star: A Utopia (1908; trans. 1984)
This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars. The book's been criticized (with some justification) for being proto-Stalinist, but overall it's been maligned. Deals well with the problem faced by someone trying to adjust to a new society s/he hasn't helped create (see Bellamy).

Emma Bull & Steven Brust -- Freedom & Necessity (1997)
Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer. F&N is set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It's been described as "the first Marxist steampunk" or "a fantasy for Young Hegelians."

Mikhail Bulgakov -- The Master & Margarita (1938; trans. 1967)
Astonishing fantasy set in '30s Moscow, featuring the Devil, Pontius Pilate, The Wandering Jew, and a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors. Utterly brilliant.

Katherine Burdekin (aka "Murray Constantine") -- Swastika Night (1937)
An excellent example of the "Hitler Wins" sub-genre of SF. It's unusual in that it was published by the Left Book Club and it was written while Hitler was in power, so the fear of Nazi future was immediate.

Octavia Butler -- Survivor (1978)
Black American writer, now discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the SF field. Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism.

Julio Cortázar -- "House Taken Over" (1963?)
A terrifying short story undermining the notion of the house as sanctity and refuge. A subtle destruction of the bourgeois oppositions between public/private and inside/outside.

Philip K. Dick -- A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.

Thomas Disch -- The Priest (1994)
Utterly savage work of anti-clericalism. A work of dark fantasy GBH against the Catholic Church (dedicated, among others, to the Pope…)

Gordon Eklund -- All Times Possible (1974)
Study of alternative worlds, including an examination of hypothetical Left-wing movements in alternative USAs.

Max Ernst -- Une Semaine de Bonte (1934)
The definitive Surrealist collage novel. A succession of images the reader is involved in decoding. A Whodunwhat, with characters from polite commercial catalogues engaged in a story of little deaths and high adventure.

Rethinking Crimethinc.
[http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3664]

Some good sites:


http://libcom.org/library
[http://www.zabalaza.net/zababooks/dl_anarchism01.htm]
[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/index.html]
[http://www.spunk.org/]
[http://www.struggle.ws/pdf/booklets.html]
[http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/index.htm]

[http://www.gutenberg.org]

So, what to do with this?
I know I've been part of more failed reading groups than I can count. This seems to have little to do with the difficulty of the text, and everything to do with people making time to discuss books together collectively; it's just very easy for folks to have other conflicts, or not get to the reading that week, and just stop showing up.

Would folks like to use a group like this just to keep track of other people who have similar interests, or would we like to actually have a reading list and work through it collectively?