Lessons in liberation: the top 10 books of radical history

Related: I found a really good review of a book (The ABCs of Socialism) on my “must buy” list.

Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? By Tyler Zimmer

Excerpt:

OCTOBER 26, 2016

IN THE COLD WAR era and the decade or two following it, a few cheap jabs were enough to shut down any public conversation about the merits of socialist ideas. The mention of the Gulag, Pol Pot, or Stalin was sufficient to put the entire matter to rest. This is no longer the case.

If polls are to be trusted, young people today are decidedly more positive about the idea of socialism than they are about the profit-driven system they currently inhabit. A few months ago, 43 percent of Iowa Democrats said they identify as socialists. It is anything but clear what will become of the excitement generated by the (now failed) candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, but the surprising success that his campaign enjoyed in the last year is itself significant; if nothing else, it shows that there is a large audience for the idea that we need, as Sanders put it, a “political revolution against the billionaire class.”

The reasons for this left-wing shift in political consciousness ought to be obvious. For an entire generation of people, the 2008 global economic meltdown cast profound doubt on the once hegemonic myth that the free market always knows best. The fallout from the meltdown has left millions unemployed, underemployed, heavily indebted, furloughed, and foreclosed upon — while the financiers who brought the world economy to its knees made off with bailouts and bonuses.

Corporate profitability has been restored — for now, at least — but the future prospects for the working-class majority remain grim: ever-rising income and wealth inequality, fewer and fewer decent-paying jobs, more temporary and precarious forms of employment, shrinking investment in public services, soaring costs for housing and university tuition, ecological disaster on the horizon — the list goes on and on. It’s hard to struggle through these turbulent times and not begin to question the legitimacy of a system we’ve been encouraged to revere as the best the world has ever known.

The ABCs of Socialism, then, is particularly timely — especially when we consider that the hard Right seems to grow most effectively when, in times of economic turmoil, it can position itself against a corrupt caste of establishment politicians without any serious competition from the socialist Left. With the rise of Trumpism at home and far-Right forces in Western Europe, the last thing the Left needs is a crisis of identity and legitimacy. This volume is the most recent result of a collaboration between Jacobin magazine and Verso books. Unlike the monographs that Jacobin and Verso have jointly released in the past, however, The ABCs of Socialism is a collection of 13 essays by various authors on the Left. The book self-consciously aims, as editor Bhaskar Sunkara puts it, to be “a primer for future radicals” that answers “basic definitional questions about socialism.” Accordingly, all of the essays it contains are relatively short, accessible, and to the point. Each is framed as an answer to a common objection to socialism, e.g., “Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?” or “What about racism? Don’t socialists only care about class?”

I bumped into the above over at bookforum.com. Along with their own reviews and essays, they aggregate articles from around the web, by topic, etc. etc.

One of their recent headings:

Bookforum: October 27, 2016 3:00PM

(Links to each article on the site)

James Gray Pope (Rutgers): Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Law and the Racial Divide in the American Working Class. Is socialism still a dirty word? Tyler Zimmer reviews The ABCs of Socialism by Bhaskar Sunkara. Lego Marx: What is the Left again? From Jacobin, what is the Left? Solidarity is about what you do, not who you are; liberalism’s crisis, socialism’s promise: Socialism isn’t the negation of liberalism — it’s the realization of liberal values made impossible by capitalism; and social democracy’s breaking point: We need a politics that acknowledges that the social-democratic class compromise is unsustainable. Karl Polanyi and twenty-first century socialism: Polanyi’s views were the exact opposite of his contemporary, Joseph Schumpeter, who famously defined democracy as giving people a choice over which elite group would rule over them. The snarxist temptation: Faced with socialism’s co-optation, some merely roll their eyes.

What was social democracy? Chris Cutrone on the meaning of socialism for Marxism. The introduction to Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Perspectives, ed. S.D. Chrostowska and James Ingram.