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.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • MF_COOM [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    11 months ago

    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

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • MF_COOM [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          22·
          11 months ago

          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.

          che-smile cry about it you fucking lib

          • GinAndJuche@hexbear.netEnglish
            15·
            11 months ago

            Just realized the bastard called Stalin and Mao “utopian”

            hoping for some “victories” to take place at the NYT offices…

          • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            15·
            11 months ago

            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.

            lenin-dont-laugh

            • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              11 months ago

              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.

              • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                7·
                11 months ago

                what’s this? I wanted a history of California, what the hell does settler colonialism have to do with it?

                least blinkered yankee

                • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  5·
                  11 months ago

                  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.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    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.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        You know, it’s the darnedest thing. I’ve gone to recommend some books to people and Fanon has come up a couple of times but I feel really sheepish about suggesting his stuff under this username because it all feels a bit… gauche.

        That really wasn’t the intended outcome when I picked this username lol.

        • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          I’m reading his work right now.

          It’s stuff you’ve, err, kinda heard before (at least his first book, The Wretched of the Earth).

          I think it’s because a lot of people are already familiar with Marxist or decolonization politics that, sometimes at least, books written, say, during the 50s or 60s, like the book I mentioned was, tend to regurgitate stuff we may already know.

          But hey, I’ll be sure to move on to Fanon’s next two books that I have in queue.

    • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Okay, but in all seriousness (in contrast to my previous reply to you), Ilan Pappe is sort-of read a lot by MLs and other leftists or socialists.

      I would read someone that isn’t often read or at least read a book that isn’t often read a lot.

      Unless we’re partly introducing new leftists and socialists?

      If so, I’d almost like to do my own book club.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        I would read someone that isn’t often read or at least read a book that isn’t often read a lot.

        I’m totally with you on that.

        I just can’t think of the perfect book on Palestine for this current situation and I’m not in the right headspace to go and skim over the stuff of his that I’ve read to figure out which book I should recommend specifically so I thought I’d make a gentle suggestion about the topic of Palestine with a good first port of call so that if anyone happened to feel enthusiastic enough about it that they might pick one of his books because, as an author, I think he’s a safe choice on this front.

        I’m really half-arsing my participation here but that’s about all I’ve got in me at the moment.

        • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          I’m glad you agree because whenever I tell people to sometimes pass on “Required Reading,” I always either get “blank stares” or people telling me that it’s just too important or whatever.

          But going off the beaten path is how you find new shit.

          New info. New theory. New viewpoints.

          So I always recommend that people go off the beaten path a few times and read what they want and explore a bit more.

          But I totally get what you’re saying and, yeah, that “port of call” for topics on Palestine is, well, a good call, so to speak (sorry for the pun).

  • SexMachineStalin [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    I got a hold of books like Red Road to Freedom by Tom Lodge - It’s about the history of the South African Communist Party. Pretty great so far. I could perhaps read it to the class.

    I also have Armed and Dangerous and International Brigade against Apartheid, both by Ronnie Kasrils, though a mate at work is borrowing the latter.

    There’s also Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela; Why Israel? Anatomy of the Zionist Apartheid and Shattering Zionist Myths, both by Iqbal Jassat/Surya Dadoo.

    Some forewarnings: The books do reference primary sources from “that time” in South African history, so there will definetely be the occasional hard-R and hard-K present. Also for the books regarding Isisrael, there is going to be quite several descriptions of death and gore.

    Death to America