(Part 2) Best products from r/socialism

Okay, here is a copy/paste of a comment I made previously:

"The Principles of Communism" by Friedrich Engels was an early draft of the Manifesto that many feel is actually easier to understand. I still recommend reading the manifesto as well if you haven't yet.

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein and The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde are two short, simple, and very eloquent introductory essays that everyone should read.


"Marx for Beginners" by Rius is an illustrated book explaining the history and basics of Marx's ideas. I know it sounds absurd that it's basically like a comic book, but it seriously does a great job of concisely stating a lot of the basics. I recommend it to all beginners.

"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Engels. It outlines socialism and distinguishes the scientific socialism of Marx/Engels from the utopian socialism that preceded it.

"Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism" by Bertrand Russell analyzes several different leftist views and their origins. Russell has a simple, reasonable way of explaining things. I don't agree with him on everything, but he does his best to be fair when explaining things and it is a valuable introductory work.

"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" by Engels. This does what it says on the tin.

One of the best things to get is the Marx-Engels Reader. It contains "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" and many of the other works by Marx and Engels that I and others mention. (Here it is for free)

Everything I've listed so far, with the exception of "Principles of Scientific Socialism" and "Roads To Freedom" is a pretty short read.

Here's some slightly more advanced reading:

"Wage Labor and Capital" and "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" by Marx

"The Holy Family" by Marx and Engels

State and Revolution by Lenin

Once you're informed enough, it's definitely worth is to read through Marx's Capital with these David Harvey lectures as a guide.

Also, this guy's youtube channel has been a great help to me. I've especially found his series on the Law of Value to be very useful lately but he has tons of great videos. His videos on manufacturing consent, crisis, commodities, and credit are just a few good examples. If you go to his website you can see a list of all his videos on the right hand side. He's certainly not perfect, but he's helped me to learn a lot and helped to point me to other resources as well.


Edit: Found free copies of Marx for Beginners and Marx-Engels reader, added links. Now I link to free copies of every work I mention but one. Free education, comrades!

Edit2: I've rearranged this some and tried to order it better. I removed one book since it's hard to find and out of print but here's the description I had of it:

"Principles of Scientific Socialism" by Philip Sharnoff. I haven't been able to find this book to order online... maybe it's out of print, but I picked it up at a used book store and it's pretty great. It concisely explains all about Marxism, Leninism and modern socialist movements. I like it because he uses more or less plain English and gets straight to the point. It even goes into basic history about the Russian and Chinese Revolution, the USSR and the cold war. It's really fantastic. I'm sure there are other books that do this and if anyone knows of them, let me know. I'd love to find one to recommend that is in print.

>Sure, so long as saying that an exchange can be mutually beneficial but not necessarily without a clear "winner" and clear "loser". Even if one benefits one can do so while at the same time reaping much fewer and much more insignificant benefits as their contractual partner.

If it is mutually beneficial, it simply is beneficial for both parties. If the opportunity cost is already taken into account, there really is no loser. Thinking otherwise is basically nothing more than jealousy or envy. Even if one of the traders benefits more, it doesn't change the fact that you are better off than before, too. (Not to mention that the trader who benefits more is almost certain to face competition that will balance the exchange rates. But let's not get sidetracked.)

>If each party only ever partakes in activities where equal values are being exchanged, then where does profit come from?

"Equal values" is a tricky phrase. For a simple example, assume you are good at baking cakes, and your friend is good at fixing bicycles. You have a broken bicycle, and your friend's birthday is approaching. If you fix your own bike, and your friend bakes his own cake, it takes three hours for you both. If you exchange services, the end result is the same, but it only takes one hour. You both saved two hours, which is a net profit.

>If excess value is being extracted from the exchange by one or more parties, then where does this value come from?

In the cake/bike example, it came from the efficient use of resources. Your friend who was skilled in bike fixing got to use his skills. As I've emphasized before, life is not a zero-sum game. Value can be created.

>By "reading and book on economics" what do you mean?

I felt like there were some basic but important issues that you weren't aware of, which were derailing the conversation. The major issue was the non-zero-sum nature of economics. I was also distressed by the context where you mentioned inflation a few posts back, and your question about the reasons for playing poker. To me, these simply looked like the usual mistakes people make before taking a basic economics course or reading a low-level book on the subject.

I did not have any specific book in mind, as I suppose most introductory books contain similar material. McGraw-Hill Economics is a safe bet.

To begin, a great quote from an article by David Graeber on revolutions (the whole thing is well worth a read):

>Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

>This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

>The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did.

> Also, I disagree with the notion that socialism could get rid of the greed problem.

I didn't mean to say that socialism would get rid of greed.

Firstly, I think its better to think in more general terms than greed- competitiveness. Greed is really monetary competitiveness, but competitiveness takes other forms too. Peter Singer explores the competitive/cooperative dynamic and how socialism ought to confront this issue in the book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation The socialists that ignored competitiveness among humans failed, like the farm collectivization under Mao and Lenin-Stalin.

Anyways, the problem with capitalism is not that it causes people to become competitive. Every human has the inborn capacity to be both competitive and cooperative. The problem with capitalism is that profit is the institutional foundation, and humans can only use their competitive abilities to survive under capitalism so that many people's competitive urges become exaggerated, to the detriment of everyone else. On the other hand, we are denied our ability to be cooperative in capitalism. For example, your doctor uncle might have a nice personal relationship with other doctors in his field, but the capitalist market means that ultimately he and similar doctors are competing for survival on the market, that they're enemies. If they're all doing well financially, they might be able to ignore that fact, but that won't be the case if one or another begins losing customers and his business collapses to the gain of the other.

Also, socialism wouldn't necessarily mean perfectly equal incomes for everyone. Some socialists might want that, but myself and many others, including Michael Albert (a libertarian-socialist, or council-communist) don't think that should be the case. Albert's idea of Parecon would involve direct-democratic councils to determine if there should be income differentials for people with especially difficult jobs. Everything would be done to avoid differentials in labor difficulty by sharing menial and rewarding labor more equally. For example, maybe some people work as doctors for 6 out of 8 hours a day, and hospital janitors the other 2 hours. This would require more people trained as doctors, but would eliminate people whose only job is to be janitor.

If it seems unlikely that we could train so many more people as doctors, remember that 100 years ago there were no female doctors. That's because females weren't given the opportunities, material (like higher education) and social (encouragement from an early age, etc.), to be doctors. Likewise, people who are stuck in janitorial jobs today likely weren't given the opportunities, beginning at birth, to become doctors, but instead of gender, their class or families' income is what prevented them from receiving such opportunities. In a socialist society, we could bring families out of poverty and more fairly distribute wealth and therefore opportunity.

Albert also believes that it would be fair to reward people per hour, so if someone works longer because they enjoy working, or if the nature of the job necessitates longer hours (24-hour surgery, or whatever), then it would make sense to remunerate them for the time (in addition to the above mentioned differential for difficulty).

Under capitalism, and indeed under any decentralized market system, wealth isn't redistrubuted and therefore familial and class wealth differentials increase over time. This family and class wealth then perpetuates onward, providing opportunity to the children of privileged parents and depriving children of underprivileged parents. That is the foundation of how income differentials emerge in capitalism. That isn't even a meritocracy in the usual sense, because most merit is granted at birth.

I could go on longer, but this is probably my longest comment in 5 years on Reddit, so I'll leave the rest to others.

Thanks for your very sincere questions, you obviously are a thoughtful person and you certainly don't deserve any downvotes!

EDIT:

Just some information I came across today, "College-Educated Americans Less Engaged in Jobs". So maybe the old idea of the happy educated worker (doctor) versus the miserable manual worker is outdated or changing.

Also, Michael Albert talks about human nature, freedom, and the market, which I think addresses the idea that starting your own business is the meaning of freedom.

EDIT2: A really long but excellent discussion of liberty, freedom, capitalism, and socialism by Noam Chomsky, probably the best explanation I've ever heard. At the root of these questions about what is the best society and economy is the question of what is human nature, and what is human desire.

There's an interesting book The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century that notes the some of the parallels between fascism and social democracy. Here's an extended blog-post reviewing the author's argument. Relevant parts:
>In Berman’s narrative, as in Polanyi’s, there were two antidotes on offer to “economic collapse and social chaos” – social democracy and fascism. Social democracy and fascism were both the result, according to Berman, of long standing intellectual debates within the left over the relationship between economics and politics. Both were movements created by socialists who had grown weary of the passivity of traditional socialism as set out by Engels, and explicated by Kautsky. The reigning orthodoxy emphasized the primacy of economics – economic progress would ineluctably lead to the victory of socialists, who merely had to bide their time. Over time, it became clear that this passive approach was both badly wrong, and a rotten basis to boot for sustaining mass support over the medium term. However, it also proved remarkably resilient. Even if socialist orthodoxy was wrong, it was hard for socialists to get away from. Those who tried to – by advocating even temporary alliances with bourgeois parties – could expect to be vigorously denounced for their heresy. The result was a prolonged and tortuous debate, both within countries and in the International, about the extent to which socialists should participate in electoral politics. In short, those who advocated active politics had a difficult time doing it within mainstream socialism.

>On the one hand, social democrats, who wanted socialists to get involved in electoral politics and take power through non-revolutionary means such as getting involved in coalition government, weren’t able to bring other socialists along with them. Some tried to stick it out and to build compromises with more zealous colleagues, sometimes emphasizing to them the need to protect the real advances made by the liberal state by participating in democratic politics. The result was often an unhappy halfway house, as in the German SPD, which participated in elections in the Weimar Republic, but refused to fully embrace it. This cost German social democracy, and the rest of us, dearly over the longer term. Where social democrats were willing fully to embrace existing democratic forms and to extend their appeal beyond the working classes, as in Sweden, they created the basis for a long-standing, and largely successful political compromise. This compromise didn’t seek to eliminate the market (although perhaps the Meidner plan came close), but instead to manage and subordinate it.

>On the other, some socialists embraced a more radical notion of politics and of revolution that had little time for bourgeois democracy. Georges Sorel and other syndicalists began with demands that socialists foment massive general strikes, and ended by drifting away from socialism altogether, in favour of other ‘myths’ that might help inspire large scale political action, most prominently nationalism. This helped create the conditions for a synthesis between the nationalist movement and elements of the socialist movement in Italy and Germany. National Socialists retained many of the aspirations of social democrats, and made many of the same promises. Like social democrats, their main appeal was that they offered economic stability and security to the masses.

>Hence the first part of Berman’s argument – that fascism was, in a sense, social democracy’s dark twin. They shared common ancestry in internal debates among socialists. There was crossover between the two, as erstwhile social democrats became fascists. Finally, there were substantial similarities in their economic policies, and in the ways that they tried to appeal to mass publics. Both represented revolts against a kind of ideational orthodoxy, in which the economic base determined the limits of politics. Both, indeed, sought to use political means to tame the market and to bring it under control. The political forms that they took were very different. Social democrats accepted democratic principles, even as they hoped that they might subordinate the free market to collective needs. Fascists, very clearly, did not. Even so, they had more in common than either might have liked to admit. Both moved away from an emphasis on the historical role of the proletariat towards a kind of communitarian politics, in which the national home replaced the working class as the relevant community of solidarity. While Fascist and Nazi ideology obviously appealed directly to nationalism, so too did Swedish social democracy, with its emphasis on the folkhemmet or ‘people’s home.’

She's pretty hard on traditional Marxist viewpoints throughout the book. I haven't read it in quite sometime, but I get the feeling that if I did I wouldn't find her analysis as persuasive as I once did. So don't take this post to be an endorsement of her arguments against Marxism. Thought OP might be interested in this though.

It looks like you have quite a bit of reading to do:

> You mean like free-market capitalism that could work if only there were less regulation? And when that regulation is reduced then the problem shifts to some form of market-intervention elsewhere?

There's a HUGE difference between letting people decide how to regulate their lives, and enforcing strict laws at gun point. Free market doesn't only work, or not, with regulations, free market w/ regulations != free market. That's like me saying, Socialism could work, but only when there are private goods (lawls).

> Is that why it has to be called in every few decades to save Capitalism from the near-constant crises that result from its inherent and unavoidable contradictions? I wouldn't call those "solutions".

Not sure which crises you're referring to, if you're referring to the financial crisis..you mean the planned economy? Save it, the only reason why US isn't listed on there is because technically the Fed is a private company, but let's be honest here... it's pretty much the government's (or shall we say, the gov't is the Fed's? heh). A centralized planned economy is a Socialist concept, granted Marx also did say he favored decentralized, but that's cheating. He might as well said, "Oh yeah, something along the lines of Socialism and Capitalism will work." (Pick a # 1 - 10, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 did I get it?!)

> I agree — Capitalism is quite unnatural.

To an extent, I actually agree with you Socialists in terms of going back to our tribal days without computers and whatnot. Civilization is a dirty concept created by us humans. Personally I'd prefer to go bare in the jungle too, but not everyone will be on board like you and me.
The Human Zoo is an excellent book. Socialism = good if you like swinging on trees, Capitalism = good if you like internet. It all depends on what you want really :)

> Sorry, guess again. And in any case, attacking arbitrary groups of people rather than the argument itself simply does not help you.

Sure, I included arbitrary groups AFTER I attacked the main point, think of it like a "Director's Cut." And for fun, I'll take a guess at what type of person you are.. early 20s, in college, never seen a tax form in their life (besides may be a w-2 in which case even my dog has one of those.. I'd be mildly impressed if you've even seen a 1040 or a w-4).

So not really a strawman, nice try though :)

> Can you explain more?

If you believe the primary factor of wealth is hard work, then you are starting from a labor theory of value.

Economists advocate Capitalism for its efficient use of resources, but this seems a distant second to many Libertarians (not you, it seems).

> How am I taking the side of the Marxist?

Marx argued that Property restricts labor and autonomy, and is used to create a monopoly over the resources owned to restrict competition, exploit workers, and consolidate excess wealth. You seem to be agreeing with this view when it comes to IP, but ignoring it when talking about diamond mines.

If I had to bet, this is because IP impacts the "means of production" in your daily life far more than raw materials. If you were a farmer 200 years ago, you might argue that land should be available to farmers, who should be free to produce what they want without paying rent to the Government-selected "owners".

But when we shift to this Socialist position, we are now subject to all of the criticisms. How do you solve the calculation problem and determine what to build? How do you know what to create if you cannot own / sell your creation? How do you make a contract to exchange something you cannot control? Why would companies invest billions to design drugs they cannot own? Are you just going to create a labor-model and pay everyone for their hourly contributions? Are we going to use a centralized database to manage production?

> Farmland isn't naturally socialized, and it certainly isn't the same as natural resources by definition.

Farmland is the standard natural resource used in the classical debates. It was the primary means of production and prior to Capitalism, a Socialized resource local communities shared. Capitalism was usually introduced by a State coming in and granting ownership (usually by force), then converting farmers into wage-laborers while the owner dictated production.

These imaginary concepts of "ownership over land" existed only in the heads of Capitalists, but the State enforced it and it worked.

> Why would a libertarian think that state solutions would be the most efficient?

Classical Liberals like Adam Smith agreed Capitalist nations were the largest to protect property. It was usually the Socialists who disliked Government.

The Anarcho-Capitalists I've read still agree with private-property, but just feel it should be privately enforced.

The size of the State is not the distinguishing factor of Liberals and Socialists - That's where both Anarchists agree with each other. Private ownership over the means of production vs Socialized ownership is the central disagreement.

> Think about the ridiculousness of claiming that you own the idea of making a sandwich

It's ridiculous because I could make a sandwich without your idea. It was something anyone could invent themselves. IP protects things you create with your labor that other people use.

Again, if you create X and I directly need to use it, then I pay you. If I can come up with the concept myself, then I utilize my own labor. If you are copying my software, then a court will have no problem recognizing you did not create the software, but instead took my creation.

Yes, Libertarian Economists popularized the concept of emission credits to utilize markets by privatizing a socialized good. As I explained previously, this allows market mechanisms to to tell businesses where to cut emissions. By owning allowances for emissions, prices allow companies to cut in the most cost-effective places.

Although you can read the history in depth in Professor Shi-Ling Hsu's book, Timothy Taylor has an introductory TTC lecture on contributions of Libertarian Economists, if that is something that interests you. Rothbard's Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto also proposes similar mechanisms of privatizing pollution limits to solve environmental issues.

> This statement is so convoluted and confusing that I'm not sure I can respond.

A lot of Socialists seem to believe Socialism will come about as the economy becomes digital. They see a world in which you can 3d print anything you want or build on existing designs created by others without limit.

Sounds like you wouldn't mind a world in which the "means of production" are completely socialized and free to all workers.

I completely agree with your dismissal of Solzhenitsyn and Kuznetsov. This sad fact about the USSR needn't be denied to be a good communist though. David L. Hoffman's book Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 has a pretty nice discussion of this, much better and more contextualized than this libcom piece. He writes:

> The Soviet government did not champion the family as a private commitment or as a means to personal fulfillment. Instead it explicitly promoted the maintenance of one's family as an obligation to society and to the state. Komsomol head Kosarev stated in 1934, "The stronger and more harmonious the family is, the better it serves the common cause.... We are for serious, stable marriages and large families. In short, we need a new generation that is healthy both physically and morally." A Soviet jurist added that "marriage receives its full value for the state only if there is progeny." Soviet propaganda also stressed that parents were to raise their children for the sake of the Soviet state. One official stated that "the education of children in the spirit of communism is a civic obligation of Soviet parents," and another commentator wrote, "Hand in hand with the state's establishments, the parents must rear the children in to conscious and active workers for socialist society.... Parents must instill in their children... readiness to lay down their life at any moment for their socialist country." (107)

>The family as an institution was central to the entire issue of social reproduction. As in many societies, the family acted as the key institution that mediated between individual desire and state or societal interests. Family values set norms of sexual behavior and social organization that determined the way Soviet society reproduced itself. The Soviet government used the traditional institution of the family to create norms of sexual and social organization, because stable marriages and large families promoted population growth. Soviet leaders also chose the family because it corresponded to their own sense of propriety. The family offered a normative model of monogamous heterosexual relationships which fit their notions of how society was to be organized.

>It was just before the campaign to strengthen the family that the Soviet government recriminalized male homosexuality. In December 1933 the head of the Soviet secret police, Genrikh Iagoda, sent Stalin a draft decree outlawing sodomy, and justified it by citing "associations of pederasts" engaged in "the recruitment and corruption of completely healthy young people." The Politburo approved the ban on male homosexuality and it was issued as law in March 1934. Dan Healey notes that the Soviet recriminalization of sodomy was preceded by Hitler's accession to power and a virulent propaganda war between fascism and communism, which included mutual accusations of homosexuality. In this atmosphere, homosexuality became associated with fascism in the eyes of Soviet officials, and in fact Maxim Gorky justified the antisodomy law with the slogan "Destroy the homosexuals - fascism will disappear."

>Healey also points out that attacks on homosexuality coincided with the Soviet government's drives in the mid-1930s to cleanse cities of "social anomalies" and promote the (heterosexual) family. In 1936 Commissar of Justice Krylenko linked homosexuality with bourgeois decadence and counterrevolution, and stated that it had no place in a socialist society founded on healthy principles. He called homosexuals "declassed rabble, either from the dregs of society or from the remnants of the exploiting classes." Employing a heteronormative discourse, Krylenko declared that homosexuals were not needed "in the environment of workers taking the point of view of normal relations between the sexes, who are building their society on healthy principles." Emphasis on the family should thus be seen as part of a larger effort by the Soviet government to make heterosexuality and procreation compulsory in the interests of the state and the larger society.

>While the family was a traditional institution, Soviet policy should not be confused with a return to the traditional family. The family fostered by official Soviet culture of the 1930s was not the patriarchal family of Russian peasant society. Traditional patriarchalism and gender roles were rooted in village culture and based on the father's control of household property and his voice in village decisions, through the exclusive right of male elders to attend the commune gathering. Taken out of the village, patriarchy and gender roles had to be established on a new basis - in this case, legislation that strengthened marriage and child support and propaganda that promoted motherhood and paternal responsibility. That the Soviet family did not conform to traditional models was even more apparent in policy toward national minorities. In the late 1930s, Soviet authorities actually increased the prosecution of Uzbeks who followed their traditional marriage customs of bride-price and female veiling and seclusion. For this reason, it is misleading to characterize Soviet family policy as a retreat. While Soviet leaders relied on the traditional institution of the family, they denied its autonomy and stripped it of its traditional organization, using it instead as an instrument of the state to augment the population. (108-9)

There are many threads similar to this one, you might want to search for them in addition to what people are willing to post in this thread:

For a first intake of libertarian socialism:

"Basic Bakunin" by the UK Anarchist Federation

If you are interested in marxian tendencies of libertarian socialism:

"Theory and practice: an introduction to Marxian theory" by Root and Branch

To get more into moderate forms of socialism, where you seem to be at the moment if I look at your flair, read this:

"Why not Socialism?" by G.A. Cohen

or this:

"Why Marx was right" by Terry Eagleton

You might also be interested in one of the absolute classics of marxism:

"The Communist Manifesto" by Marx/Engels

You can find it online here

For a more "in depth" look at libertarian socialism, you can also look at Kropotkins main work:

"The Conquest of Bread" by Kropotkin

also available online on libcom

If you want a quick way to understand the revolutionary history of early 20th century Europe, you can also listen to this lecture series by left communist Lauren Goldner:

Goldner on: German Revolution, Luxemburg and Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky

Or you might be interested in socialist fiction to immerse yourself in the utopian ideas fleshed out by past and present comrades:

50 SciFi and Fantasy works every Socialist should read

To get a first impression of up-to-date marxian enonomic analysis of todays society, you can always listen to "Economic update" by Richard D. Wolff.

To further your understanding of socialism, you should also take a look at socialist feminism, maybe with this work (one click hoster!):

Liese Vogel: Marxism and the Oppression of Women /attention: new book hosted on a one click hoster ;)

To get further reading ideas and recs regarding problems like imperialism, fascism, biologism, critical psychology, materialist history etc. etc., you may want to check the Revolutionary Reading Guide

Knock yourself out, comrade!

History...

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."

Crisis of democracy

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Democracy-Governability-Democracies-Trilateral/dp/0814713653/

Manufacturing consent (book)

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Energy subsidies

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Democracy Inc

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/

http://www.therealnews.com

For your interest:

The Citibank memo

http://politicalgates.blogspot.ca/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two-bombshell.html

http://www.rdwolff.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

I'm currently trying to make my way through "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis" by Ludwig von Mises, and this shit is like looking into the abyss.

I can feel it's pull.

His arguments seem solid and convincing. He's very thorough as he debunks socialism. I find myself tacitly agreeing with his criticisms of capitalism (e.g.: you can't have any economic activity without economic calculation, of which there is none in socialism because socialism doesn't generally concern itself with measuring the costs of production or distribution. Therefore, it's meaningless to say socialism would do X "better" than capitalism in an economic sense). But his assertions for capitalism are just absurd on the face of it and greatly contradict my experiences with it, so, in that, I have some solace.

Still though, I find socialism and anarchism attractive because of how they empower regular people like myself. Frankly, I think that's the greatest strength of socialism/anarchism.

Idk, this is a tough book. Never really read anything quite like it.

Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary is pretty good and I haven't read it myself but Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983–87 sounds pretty good.

The best advice I can give you is to find out what Noam Chomsky believes, because that's like taking a bullet train to the truth. Or I can just tell you. He's an syndicalist, a market abolitionist, and a contractarian (I'm assuming).

I think you should read as many of his books as possible. But other than that I would suggest reading The Social Contract, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, and The Concept of Law.

Plugging Michael Honey's wonderful Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Excellent book about black and white labor in the South and how business and city government worked to divide workers to keep unions out of the city.

Check out Dr. Richard Wolff and Democracy at work

Mondragon Corporation

Pretty good book, too.

Read Empire's workshop. You can find it on Amazon, I'll put a link in my comment. We had to read this book during my Latin America history class in college. Pretty much breaks down 100 years of American imperialism in L.A. We pretty much put a pro big business dictator in every country in South America, and we took out a lot of democratic governments while doing it under the guise of "battling communism". https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Workshop-America-Imperialism-American/dp/0805083235

There have been plenty of reasons for people to arm themselves. Usually it's for protection against the police. If that's how people choose to defend themselves from genuine existing armed threats (like the police) then we need to respect that out of solidarity.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed makes a really good case for this. It wasn't just the Black Panthers, there were armed guards taking shifts outside MLK's home.

> I'm sure that the ones receiving it deserve it.

On Just-World Beliefs

On Wealth Redistribution

there's so much out there if you like this stuff.

gar alperovitz writes and lectures about democratic economics in the form of coops and democratic communities in what he calls democratization of wealth. his most recent book is called america beyond capitalism (pdf).

richard wolff also talks a lot about workplace democracy in what he calls democracy at work in the form of "worker self-directed enterprises" (WSDEs). his recent book on the matter is called democracy at work: a cure for capitalism.

both of these guys have regular podcasts, public lectures, countless videos and they write prolifically.

apart from these two contemporary examples, there are older works about what you describe such as anton pannekoek's workers' councils and rudolph rocker's anarcho-syndicalism: theory and practice.

p.s. fuck everyone who downvoted you. hope you enjoy this stuff. let me know if you have any questions or just want to rant. solidarity bruv.

I'd personally start with a few videos, then work your way into literature. The literature I suggest below is intentionally easy to read.

• Howard Zinn - Marx in Soho, as played by Brian Jones
  
  
• Richard Wolff - Crisis and Openings: Introduction to Marxism
  
  
• Marx is Back - Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Zero
  
  
• Vivek Chibber - Capitalism and the State
  
  
• David Harvey - The Crises of Capitalism
  
  
• Slavoj Zizek - short explanation of ideology from the film The Pervert's Guide to Ideology & Violence
  
  
• Debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on the topic of Human Nature
  
  
• Ranjeet Brar - Dialectical Materialism
  
  Literature by Marx and Engels:
  
  
• The Principles of Communism & Manifesto of the Communist Party
  
  
• Wage Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit
  
  
• The Paris Commune (from The Civil War in France)
  
  
• Socialism: Scientific and Utopian
  
  I guess somewhere around here you can start reading Marx and Engel's other works, with Capital being your priority. Where you go after that is up to you.
  
  Some interesting literature:
  
  
• Oscar Wilde - The Soul of Man Under Socialism
  
  
• Albert Einstein - Why Socialism?
  
  
• Eric Hobsbawm works on history - The Age of Revolution, Capital, Empire and Extremes
  
  
• Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell - Towards a New Socialism
  
  
• Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent & Hegemony or Survival
  
  
• Bertell Ollman - Dance of the Dialectic
  
  
• David Harvey - Brief History of Neoliberalism and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
  
  
• Robert Biel - The Entropy of Capitalism
  
  
• Christian Fuchs - Digital Labour and Karl Marx
  
  
• Alain Badiou - Philosophy for Militants
  
  
• Julian Assange - The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

It looks like you're Christian, so I will recommend that you read this article

I also suggest getting this book

I got a book from a yard sale called "The Marx-Engels Reader" and it has a huge amount of their works compiled.

https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Engels-Reader-Second-Karl-Marx/dp/039309040X

[Here's one covering both on Amazon, or check your library] (http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Sankara Speaks-Burkina-Revolution/dp/0873489861)

[Also refer to works and further reading in Wikipedia's article about him.] (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara)

It's on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499