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.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (352 pages) - Vincent Bevins
It’s good.
I’ve been curious about this one.
TrueAnon and Chapo both had the author on the show to discuss the book, the ep was especially good
I will check em out, thank you
Next on my list already
This one
Would you be willing to emcee the bookclub @LiberalSoCalist@lemm.ee ??
It got the most upvotes but I personally just don’t plan on reading it, so someone else would have to take the baton.
Instructions on how to run a bookclub here: https://hexbear.net/comment/4390868
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.
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.
Thank you so much, the local “amazon” we have was asking an arm and a leg for this one.
How do I get in on this.
Library Genesis 😎🧩📖
Please tag me when this happens?
please tag me for this
will do
Interested
I am also interested in this, please ping me when it happens.
got it
Tag me in this too but no promises yet as I don’t know what my next few months look like yet.
I mean it’s just reading a chapter every week or two and posting your hot takes on it, but yeah I’ll keep you in mind
I can probs do 2 chapters a week lol. I got it downloaded. I’m taking a break from theory and reading horror fic now until I figure out what I want to dive into next. This seems like an interesting side street. I’ve been wanting to add something to my list about autism since I got diagnosed anyway.
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
This is useful
please include me in the ping list
Yeah perusal was sooooo nice a couple years back. I read everything as a back catalogue when we were reading bookchin
Should that be perusall.com? I think your autocorrect dropped the second L
Yeah it should
I’ve always wanted to read it
Literally started this yesterday.
Didn’t we already book club this three years ago?
Edit: yeah we did
I really enjoyed Bullshit Jobs by Graeber. I’ll have to re-read it since its been 2 or 3 years since I read it.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
I’m the teacher and you’re the class clown
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney (312 pages)
Ooh yeah this is on my list
Cockshott – Towards A New Socialism (199 pages)
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.
The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South 320 pages
im so glad to hear you are in good health vampire!
Thanks comrade
Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris. 100% this should be the next one trust me.
What is it
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.
cry about it you fucking lib
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.
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.
what’s this? I wanted a history of California, what the hell does settler colonialism have to do with it?
least blinkered yankee
worse still the person said they were interested in it because it was a marxist analysis of California history but they were mad it didn’t spend more time on biotech, ai, and other bazinga brain shit.
Just realized the bastard called Stalin and Mao “utopian”
hoping for some “victories” to take place at the NYT offices…
RIP Trevor, all time classic bit.
Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (700 pages)
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (205 pages)
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.
Where’s the list of past book clubs?
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 , How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm and there was an attempt to do The Wretched of the Earth by but it didn’t really seem like people knew that one was happening.
there was an attempt to do The Wretched of the Earth by but it didn’t really seem like people knew that one was happening.
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.
This sounds cool
Also a lot of Samir Amin’s later stuff if you all like it
Yeah I’ve got him on my list but haven’t made it to him yet
Lot of articles of his on MR to start you off:
@Vampire@hexbear.net highly recommended for the poll
There’s only been two since I started modding this forum:
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https://hexbear.net/post/278793?scrollToComments=false – How to be a good communist by Liu Shaoqi
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https://hexbear.net/post/336116?scrollToComments=false – The Wretched of the earth
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https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudal-reason.pdf
38 pages, for varoufakis vaccination
Does this site offer epub versions?