books that made a difference

[Gabriel]

what are some books that changed your politics to some degree? id have to say that the open veins of latin america profoundly affected my politics. and more recently, blackshirts and reds by michael parenti was a turning point.

what about everyone else?

[tara]

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat is the one that immediately comes to mind. even if you come away not agreeing with all of it, the focus on the people ignored by the mainstream "left" and labour organisations of the US really changed my mind about what's important and made me start looking outside the "official" story even on the left.

[Ciro]

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, for similar reasons as Tom listing Settlers.

does anyone know of a critical assessment of the facts and sources in Settlers? I've always heard it wasn't reliable but it's pretty well sourced and I've never seen any serious writing on it...

[A]

Learning more and more about Marxism helped me pin down answers/solutions for issues that I wasn't able to as an unlabeled leftist and I think The State and Revolution cleared my mind a lot (idk what a good comparison is, maybe like putting on glasses? w/e). Also +1 for Settlers up there, reading it now and even though I don't know much US history there's a lot of things that were whitewashed or I had no clue happened

[prz]

open veins was really huge for me as well but funnily enough fiction was probably a lot more formative for me overall: off the top of my head, i read vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions' when i was 15 or 16 and it contained the first sorta-left-ish account of race in the US (or at all) i'd ever encountered; zola's 'Germinal' when i was 17; and later leslie marmon silko's 'Ceremony'.

[Jakob]

hi!
I'd say the books that changed me was
1. the communist manifesto
2. capital
3. blackshirts and reds by michael parenti
4. the battle for chinas past by mobo gao
5. is the red flag still flying/human rights in the soviet union - al szymanski
6. state and revolution - lenin
7. various texts by mao
8. what is to be done
9. socialism: utopian and scientific
10. foundations of leninism - stalin

[it is syd]

I don't actually know how good it is politically bc i read it when i was like, 20? 21? but i think barbara ehrenreich's 'smile or die' / 'brightsided' might be what first got me to actually think abt capitalism in more depth than, fuckin, banksy
idk i'd have to re-read it before i can give it a strong recommendation, most of the shit i've learned since has been thru twitter bc i'm not very well-read yet honestly :x

i'm v self-conscious about this post honestly lmao but like idk i'm Learning

[Saoirse]

Capital is probably the book that's done the most for me politically (I haven't even finished it yet! But every page is a revelation)

[Dale]

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Zizek was like my Baby's First Marxist Lit, it was assigned to me in a seminar on consumerism I took as a senior in college. I'm not really a huge Zizek fan but that book was what propelled me past liberalism and into the glittering screaming quagmire of leftism/communism/revolutionary politics. essentially, Slavoj Zizek And His Sweaty Diatribes Made Me Hate Capitalism

[John]

Western Terror: From Potosi to Baghdad is a book I would say really shook me, as well as The Politics of Heroin In Southeast Asia, mainly because they were totally non-theoretical examinations of imperialism's actual empirical effects. They really hammered home the often ignored point that there is quite a lot of blame to be placed for the crimes of imperialism, and made it much more real in my mind, which is something that I kind of struggled with conceptualizing for a while.

[Anndra]

The first one that really opened my eyes was Killing Hope by William Blum, I think. I read a bunch of left-ish books around that time but that was the most radical of them and also the one that stuck with me the most. I read it over the course of a week, getting angrier and angrier with each chapter. I still dip into it now and again because I still find it useful.

[Subashini]

The Myth of the Lazy Native by Syed Hussein Alatas, in terms of understanding colonialism beyond "theory" and learning about the material transformations (I was an English major at the time and it was good to just forget about Bhabha.) Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth and Angela Davis' Women, Race and Class in terms of taking my liberal views of racism as "bad" to a whole other level of understanding wrt to colonialism and capitalism.

The Communist Manifesto and Capital vol. 1, Federici's Caliban and the Witch and Leopoldina Fortunati's Arcane of Reproduction.

(Special mention for two works of fiction: Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers and Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners.)

[Gabriel]

VLAD wrote: "I don't actually know how good it is politically bc i read it when i was like, 20? 21? but i think barbara ehrenreich's 'smile or die' / 'brightsided' might be what first got me to actually think a..."

this is actually very interesting to me? i would consider ehrenreich a very '99%' type author, if that makes sense? but when i was a baby liberal, nickled and dimed made me so angry i cried on a few occassions. thats why i dont entirely discredit this sort of pop polisci book you know? it can really awaken a deeper consciousness.

[Ivy]

The Communist Manifesto made me interested in communism but it was The Conquest of Bread that fully convinced me! :D