Búsquedas recientes
Opciones de búsqueda
Administrado por:
Leftists and anarchists of the #Fediverse, If you had to recommend only one #book to push a centrist right down our pipeline, which one would it be?
Update 2 (edited for clarity): You folks rock! I created a Bookwyrm list with your suggestions. https://bookwyrm.social/list/3367/s/the-leftistanarchist-pipeline
@berniethewordsmith I guess it would depend on what you imagine a "centrist" is (it's a pretty broad brush, but then so is "leftist").
@berniethewordsmith ~one~ book? That's a tall order. "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Davis maybe
@berniethewordsmith I'd tell them to read Tolstoi
@berniethewordsmith I don't know about centrists, but I do know how to turn an open minded American libertarian into a real anarchist: Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Parts don't age well, mostly at the end, but it makes a very powerful argument.
P. Kropotkin - "Mutual Aid"
@berniethewordsmith Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine is one hell of an eyeopener
@lukas @berniethewordsmith For me, No Logo had been a decisive reading.
boop David Graeber's "Debt". It really opens people's eyes as to how fucked we are as a society.
@rad @berniethewordsmith it's a tough calm between "Debt: the first 5000 years". "The deficit myth" by Stephanie Kelton, and "money: they true story of a made up thing" by Jacob Goldstein. But I think David Graeber comes out on top.
@berniethewordsmith The End of capitalism by Ulricke Herrmann. She is pretty much a fit candidate to speak with conservatives. It's pretty much low entry to start somewhere. Denying climate warming is denial of livable conditions for life.
The most centrist yet major anarchist book is "Seeing Like A State", James C. Scott.
@berniethewordsmith tools for conviviality
Prole
@left_adjoint @berniethewordsmith my uncle got me that book when I was a kid (I still haven't read it 
)
Give them fiction to enjoy, not homework to labor through.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch Witch of the West
Matera the Mad@berniethewordsmith no one book fits all
@berniethewordsmith non-fiction: bullshit jobs (more accessible than most of his other works I'd say, and very 'centrist' (i.e. self-centred) in topic). Fiction: ministry for the future (Kim Stanley Robinson) or Walkaway (Cory Doctorow). If any of these work we can move to deeper cuts (such as 'seeing like a state' as someone suggested or 'the dispossessed').
Marx's (although it is also attributed to Engels) op/eds, letters and speeches about the American Civil War as it was happening.
THE CIVIL WAR
IN THE UNITED STATES
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
edited by Andrew Zimmerman
[direct link to PDF]
https://files.libcom.org/files/marx_engels_us_civil_war.pdf
@blogdiva @berniethewordsmith This has been great! I don't think I realized how large a role Marx played in keeping the UK out of the US Civil War in the wake of the Trent Affair. I was taught that the working class was anti-war, but Queen Victoria was pretty incensed about her "sovereignty" being violated and was pretty gung-ho about declaring war on the US, and that her husband, Prince Albert, talked her down from it, right before he died.
@lerxst @blogdiva @berniethewordsmith I'd love to read more on this, can you suggest anything?
@va3prr @blogdiva @berniethewordsmith the Wikipedia article on the Trent Affair seems to be pretty good at first blush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trent_Affair
it even mentions the Marx connection.
@lerxst @blogdiva @berniethewordsmith Stellar, thanks for the suggestion!
@blogdiva @berniethewordsmith Thanks, I have added this to my reading list
@berniethewordsmith "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer, "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, and "The Great Disruption" by Paul Gilding.
@berniethewordsmith Oops, you said only one. But I would say any of those is a door-opener.
@berniethewordsmith "How Infrastructure Works" honestly. But it's a weird choice.
@aredridel @berniethewordsmith my weird choice: a pivotal book for me was “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos”. As a kid that grew up in a sometimes-conservative weakly theistic household, it really put the nail in the coffin for some lingering beliefs for me.
@berniethewordsmith I think fiction is far more likely to capture them than non-fiction, which a lot of people find intimidating.
I’d recommend pretty much anything by Ursula K Leguin but especially The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
@berniethewordsmith not a book, maybe the “Bullshit Jobs” essay by Graeber? I haven’t read enough of his books to recommend an accessible one
@berniethewordsmith ok someone beat me to it, btw this is a great thread, I gotta add to my TBR!
@berniethewordsmith I may be a bit to the right of anarchists (only slightly) but Black AF History by Michael Harriot is a phenomenal book that everyone (especially every American) should read. And I think I likely would move many centrists leftward after reading it.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-harriot/black-af-history/
How Infrastructure Works by @debcha as someone else suggested is another I also suggest. Hard to read it and not feel the importance of collective actions and works
@berniethewordsmith People's History of the U.S., Howard Zinn.
@berniethewordsmith @timbray For me, that book was Capitalist Realism.
@Merovius @berniethewordsmith @timbray
Thats a good one.
@berniethewordsmith There is probably no single book, but I'd go with this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
@berniethewordsmith "The Long Orbit" by Mick Farren
@berniethewordsmith Erik Oli n Wright how to be anticapitalist
@berniethewordsmith tienes Idealistas Bajo las Balas, de Payne (creo recordar), que recoge las experiencias y testimonios de los reporteros extranjeros que vinieron a cubrir la Guerra Civil en ambos bandos
@berniethewordsmith just translated this to finnish for a zine, not really a book. still wondering if the headline should be more sneaky to attract centrists. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you
In general, when I want to introduce people to my own models of thought, I recommend Stefania Barca's synthetic and scathing little book, Forces of reproduction, Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, published in the excellent “Elements in Environmental Humanities” collection (Cambridge University Press), in 2020.
The advantage is that it allows you to embrace environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist and decolonial perspectives all at once...
(I'd also say, Volume 1 of Marx's Capital 
).
I doubt it would work with a centrist, though. 
@berniethewordsmith I wrote this for just such a purpose: https://www.red-star.ghost.io
But as far as an actual book goes, “Workers Self Control on the Railroad” by Richard “Lefty” Morgan.
If you want to build a relationship with them (which may or may not pre-exist), how about starting by showing that you understand, and lead with Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang"
@berniethewordsmith fiction, Doctorow, Radicalized
@berniethewordsmith My choice, right now, is The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh, https://search.worldcat.org/title/1081118824
Resist @berniethewordsmith Really anything by Chomsky, but in particular “Manufacturing Consent” and “On Anarchism”.
@berniethewordsmith
Fiction: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin.
Non-fiction: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
@berniethewordsmith "The grapes of wrath" is certainly a good one, as novels go. It might be a bit distant in history regarding what it describes, but still, as it’s quite a classic, it’s hard to say it’s not worth reading (it absolutely is).
@berniethewordsmith Maybe Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us. It's a good introduction to police and prison abolition. From there, other structures of harm can be analyzed.
Francis Dupuis-Deri,
Anarchy Explained to My Father
he can also draw
if the readings are too difficult for him
https://shop.stephaniemcmillan.org/
@berniethewordsmith The Divide by Jason Hickel. It fell into my hands in the local bookshop and changed nearly everything I knew about the world. I think it is powerfull because he takes you on his own journey of understanding why the poor are poor.
@berniethewordsmith “It's OK to be mad at capitalism” by Bernie Sanders
@berniethewordsmith fiction: The Dispossessed , Ursula K. LeGuinn ; facts : This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein
@berniethewordsmith I would point to The Walkaway by @pluralistic
@berniethewordsmith I didn't see A Country of Ghosts in the replies, so here it is. An anarcho-queer utopia by Margaret Killjoy.
@berniethewordsmith “A Paradise Built in Hell” - Solnit
@berniethewordsmith braiding sweetgrass, robin kimmemer
