Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.
Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.
There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you’re really interested in, in particular.
I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It’s simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.
There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.
Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson’s Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it’s the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.
If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won’t be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx’s main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich’s summary and then Michael Roberts’ commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you’ll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.
I’ve been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don’t have the foundation and context(didn’t understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.
That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It’s a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren’t like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It’s a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren’t making a lot of sense.
Are there any books that you’d recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?
For the skills I personally don’t think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven’t read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it’s a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just… not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it’s the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you’ll end up in jail or something.
Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.
Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.
There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you’re really interested in, in particular.
I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It’s simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.
There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.
Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson’s Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it’s the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.
If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won’t be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx’s main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich’s summary and then Michael Roberts’ commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you’ll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.
That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It’s a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren’t like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It’s a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren’t making a lot of sense.
For the skills I personally don’t think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven’t read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it’s a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just… not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it’s the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you’ll end up in jail or something.
Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.