theory

Sorry no books to recommend, but I did read this in its entirety, its extremely based and should be almost mandatory, the 2023 study Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel.

I think it is extremely good, maybe not definitive but getting this close to a scientific measure of the effects of capitalism beginning from the colonial era and debunking some extremely important myths like capitalism was beneficial or that inequality was already common. On the contrary, they get realy close IMO to proving at the very best Capitalism did not improve anything and at worst it only caused massive inequality, poverty and death.

As I said it is so good I would even say its mandatory reading and even though its not a book it should be easily adapted into one.

I plan on reading Capital Vol 1 next year. Otherwise I just read based on what's happening in the world or what I feel like. Constantly feel like I'm a step behind and trying to catch up. I wasn't all that consistent reading this year, so I'm hoping to do better next year.

Some of my favorite books this year were:

• Revolution in the Air by Max Elbaum. Marxism in the 70s was wild. So many microsects and esoteric party lines. Pretty frustrating to read knowing Reagan was on the horizon. But I enjoyed it immensely.
• Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker. I have a bit of a troubled history with my autism, so reading a book that not only provided the usual pablum about autistic people being people too, but actually started making more radical demands around neurodivergent rights affected me.
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. Thought I'd read something "lighter" for my birthday. Listened to this on audiobook at work and had a rough time. 10/10 would ruin my birthday again.
• The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad. This really changed how I see geopolitics. I enjoyed learning about the anti-colonial struggles, but the part that was really new was learning how the third world movements ran aground on developmentalism, and the national bourgeoisie pretty much took over from the revolutionaries. I hope the modern iterations can learn to solve this problem.
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. It's criminal how little African history is taught. This is probably also the most economic book I've read all year. It's a nice change of pace. Though I am a bit wary how closely Rodney subscribes to developmentalism, and in the first few chapters frequently justifies African society by pointing out how they were following in the footsteps of European development. I get the point is to illustrate how far back colonialism set Africa back, but I feel you don't need the stagist theory to justify that.
• Revolution: An Intellectual History by Enzo Traverso. Revolution means a lot of things to a lot of different people through time. I admire the aspirations of the earlier revolutionaries, and how the idea of what a revolution was changed as they kept happening. So many unexpectedly heartwarming and relatable anecdotes too.
• Everyone On the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K Jarboe. My favorite fiction book of the year. I picked this up from the massive George Floyd Itch.io bundle from a few years back. A bunch of sci-fi short stories about being queer in places you don't belong. Some of the stories I didn't fully get, but a bunch of them are really memorable and touching.

I tend to have a few books going in parallel so I can switch between them when getting through one is becoming a slog, especially because I usually make extensive notes on theory so I can remember it all better.

So what I have read and/or am reading and have finished most of:

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (lib garbage with no real takeaways but I needed an overview of the history so I had a foundation to work off for further reading; useful for me but I wouldn't recommend)

The Dawn of Everything (some questionable interpretations and lessons but a good recommendation overall)

World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (a pretty foundational text for geopolitical analysis if you use the terms "imperial core" a lot)

The Capital Order - How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (very good, absolutely recommend. really shows how western economic ideas haven't meaningfully progressed since 1920. every addition since then, like fiat currency, feel more like expansion packs on the foundation of neoclassical economics and austerity, and the language of 1920s liberal economics professors is literally indistinguishable from 2020s liberal economics professors. I had the experience of reading how austerity was implemented in Britain and Italy at the same time as Milei was starting his program up in Argentina, and was blown away by how it's literally the same shit.)

Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (meh, it's okay. vaguely interesting to see how people on the ground reacted to Libya under Gaddafi but it's only really useful if you already have a decent grasp of the history)

Late Victorian Holocausts (macabre subject matter but regardless I love the intersection of hard science and politics/history/economics. really adds a sense of concreteness to them that otherwise can seem free-floating and devoid of context)

Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (what Desai does here is kind of radical actually. It kinda feels like... you know that saying "Things seem impossible until after they happen - then they appear inevitable."? Desai's basically doing that but for the present day. Basically saying "No, actually, the US is not and has never really been a hegemon in the way that the British Empire was, their financial empire and the dollar is built on sand, and many of the reasons why we believe that the US is a hegemon is because those reasons were first stated by Americans who were trying to conjure illusions of their own importance out of nothing." It's a radical way of observing history regardless of whether you agree and I'm only a chapter in and I'm intensely curious to see where it all leads. She wrote this thing in like 2013 and was already predicting multipolarism and dedollarization, so I'm very willing to listen to her)

Might be a few others I can't currently recall. Of course, given all the goddamn articles and shit I go through on a weekly basis, I'm already imbibing a ton of information anyway, so I don't feel too bad about my relatively slow pace.

I don't really have a preset list of books and mostly go off vibes, but I don't like to read the same kind of book consecutively, e.g. I don't read a history book after reading a history book. I also try and read at least as much stuff on more current-day matters as I do about history, due to a fear of spending too much time in the past and not enough time looking at what's going on right now. I don't wanna be one of those people who just endlessly talks about how "Oh god, I wish I could have lived in Italy in 1920, or Russia as a revolutionary, or could have helped the Germans with their revolution... god damn it, we had our chance to overthrow capitalism and we blew it... fuck..." while like, the fucking Palestinians and Yemenis are actively battering down the door of American empire and Russia is taking on NATO and China is trying to develop the world and heighten the contradictions of capitalism. Eyes on the prize.

That being said, I will definitely wanna read Desai's second Geopolitical Economy book, Coronavirus, Capitalism, and War, at some point get through Hudson's Superimperialism because shit keeps getting in the way and I still haven't fucking read it (though I've read enough of his talks and interviews that I think I already grasp quite a lot of his arguments), and intersperse this with books on African communist movements, e.g. Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics, as well as works like Dark Emu and Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region. And some works of Marxist feminism and social theory in that vein.

don't know if i read too much explicit works of theory this year, but i read a couple books on economic history that might qualify:

Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not by Prasannan Parthasarati: not as much a history of the Great Divergence as its title suggests, it's more about the causes of the industrial revolution in England. the author is an expert on Indian textiles, which were a major driver of the world economy from the 15th to the 19th C, and at times i think he can be a bit blinkered as a result of that relatively narrow focus. he argues that the industrial rev was caused by a combination of market competition from those indian textiles, ecological damage due to mismanagement, meaning that england was forced to use coal rather than wood for fuel because of the dwindling forests, and state policies that encouraged domestic production, first for dyers and then for the textiles themselves. i learned a lot but had feel like it could've benefited from a broader scope and feel like it didn't touch on the colonization of the New World enough.

I read another book that I can't for the life of me remember the title of so this might not be as useful lol. Anyway it was a collection of essays about global trade from 1492-present. some of the essays were really insightful and left me wanting more but some were banal and felt like they were just saying "isn't trade neat?". a few of the essays were about trade around the pacific and indian oceans before europeans began arriving en masse and then in the early days of european traders when they were still expected to conform to local customs more than vice versa and i thought those were the most interesting essays. there was an interesting chapter in the book that was all about the spread of drugs and other addictive substances, with chapters on coca and later cocaine, coffee, and coca-cola. there was another interesting essay in there about how it can be argued that the industrial revolution actually began in the sugar industry of haiti when it was a french slave colony. the book's conclusion took a very different tone than most of the rest of the book and it was about how global trade has fucked the world with climate change and essentially enslaved the third world, which felt like a real gut punch - even these lib authors who clearly love the notion of trade aren't blind to its terrible effects. hopefully i'll remember the title in the morning if no one else does.

someone at my job before me must have been studying economic history because these books and a couple of others were sitting around in the employee lounge. i picked up global markets transformed, 1870-1945 which was presumably left by the same person and hope to read it next year. I also hope to read Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby next year since i have an interest in invasive species and spent a lot of time studying them and working with them back in college and for a few years afterwards. i'd also like to read one of eric foner's books next year and that book on prehistoric art seems really interesting op, i'm a sucker for cave paintings.

some fiction:

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon: second pynchon after Inherent Vice. got a lot of good laughs out of me and i enjoyed it a lot, but felt like it wasn't as focused as IV. When it hit it hit hard though. will probably try to get my hands on Mason & Dixon or Gravity's Rainbow next year. in their absence i'll probably start rereading inherent vice soon. damn i love that book and movie.

White Noise by Don Delillo: first delillo. read this one around the same time as Vineland, a bit of a postmodern kick i guess. i liked it but felt like it was hitting me over the head with its themes. will still be on the lookout for other delillo books next year though, especially Libra.

started reading the passenger by cormac mccarthy but didn't finish it. i've read probably about a half dozen mccarthy books and while i've liked most of them i wasn't really feeling this one. i'll probably return to it at some point. i also picked up the violent land by jorge amado which seems interesting, haven't read any brazilian fiction before if i recall.

I just started reading Anti-Dühring, so that will be the first book I finish in 2024.

I've started reading William Blum's Rogue state. Only read the foreword he added after 9/11 and my blood is already boiling.

This is going to purify my hate

Dang I'm starring this thread there's already a bunch of good stuff here.

I read a bunch of stuff, I'll list most of the non-fiction as that seems to be what most people care about here, and a few fiction titles at the end. I rank things out of seven, where 4 is the average book I'm likely to select to read and each unit away is like a standard deviation from it, so I'll include the ratings too.

How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century - Erik Olun Wright (2/7, shit sucked)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney (5/7, good but boring in places)

Climate, Corona and Constant Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century - Andreas Malm (6/7, very good. The covid stuff ages surprisingly well despite being written in April 2020)

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Engels (5/7 very good obviously)

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State - Engels (4/7, pretty dry and outdated but it's worth it for the last chapter)

Capital in the 21st Century - Thomas Piketty (6/7, he's a lib but he's a good one and there's a bunch of good stuff in here is you can get past the obviously frustrating stuff here)

Blood in my Eye - George Jackson (6/7, very cool. Very interesting thinker and many of his thoughts and ponderings still feel vital today)

Climate Change as Class War - Matt Huber (4/7, Matt Huber is annoying and should get the wall but underneath that there is a good argument here)

The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World - Andreas Malm [5/7, there's some great stuff in here but also it's a very specific takedown of specific trends in theory and I'm not sure how useful it is outside of academic disputes (as he himself admits)]

Marx in the Anthropocene - Kohei Saito (2/7, this shit sucks. Western Marxist brained academic shit. His premise is that Marxism is good because actually if you deeply read meaning into individual sentences of Marx's unpublished work you'll learn Marx didn't really believe what we think of as Marxism he believed these other things)

Decolonial Marxism - Walter Rodney (3/7, a little dry, there are like 4 really good essays and a bunch of stuff that's very specific to time and space and felt like a bit of a waste of time for me to read as someone who isn't an academic in those areas)

As for fiction, I'll shout only a couple of titles:

Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson (3/7, starts out incredibly strong, first 12 pages are like their own perfect climate horror short story about a wet bulb in Mumbai that kills 20 million people. The first 80-100 pages are really good. The wheels come off as it continues and by the end it's just an old white guy's wet fart)

The Fever - Wallace Shawn (6/7, this is great. One-man show about being a socialist, why you kind of have to be one of the you think you're a compassionate person, and the contradictions of living in the imperial core. Very earnest, he somehow does it without being annoying. You can watch him perform it here, it comes in two 45 min parts

Watership Down - Richard Adams (6/7, this was a banger, totally cozy read. Highly recommended.)

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (7/7, this shit was wild. I've never read anything like it. My understanding of what kind of book it was continually shifted as I continued reading and it kept metastasizing into something weirder and weirder. Like reading a Rubik's cube.)

As for next year, I'm currently reading The Reconciliation Manifesto by Art Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. I think I'll try to get Piketty's Capital and Ideology under my belt too. Lathe of Heaven by Leguin, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, Less is More by Jason Hickels, Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo and Liberation Day by George Saunders all feel very realistic. And then there are the idealistic titles like Ten Crises by Wen Teijun or Superimperialism, or some Samir Amin or Immanuel Wallerstein. But I'm intimidated by those titles so we'll see haha.

The only book I've finished reading this year was the Vietnamese school book on Marxism-Leninism that Luna Oi translated: https://archive.org/details/intro-basic-princ-marx-lenin-part-1-final The book, despite being somewhat awkward in how it has so many annotations, is actually very good at breaking down how to analyze the world dialectically. It really shows the difference between living in a society that tries to educate its populace on scientific socialism and the bullshit most of us are stuck with. I've always felt that for intro text, a school book from the Soviet Union/China/Cuba/Vietnam/DPRK/Yugoslavia and so on would be vastly superior in teaching people about socialism than reading the Communist Manifesto or some writing by Stalin or Mao. Like, a school book by design is supposed to educate people who don't know anything about a subject.

I've also skimmed through my notes and highlights on Wretched of the Earth for our book club. And there's so much that's applicable to what is happening in Gaza right now. The one that sticks out in my mind right now is a clip that's circulating around resistance Twitter of an IOF goon who claimed that getting shot by RPGs has caused him to develop PTSD, which led him to beating his wife everyday, pissing on himself before going to sleep, and becoming an alcoholic. He has apparently drunk himself to bankruptcy. Fanon in the last chapter described an almost identical case of a French pig who, having tortured numerous Algerians, had become increasingly unhinged and started to visit Fanon because he kept on beating his wife and kid. There's so many cases like this where what I've read in that book is being played out in real life.

I was in the middle of reading a book about how the FBI was more or less behind Tupac's death called The FBI War on Tupac Shakur before Al-Aqsa Flood.

There's this section within a journal/anthology(?) by an East German author that documents the collaboration between Zionists and Nazis: https://archive.org/details/KlausPolkehnTheSecretContacts-ZionismAndNaziGermany1933-1941 This shit is extremely damning if accurate. We're talking about Nazis leaving Zionist orgs alone even after Hitler became Chancellor, going so far as to allow Zionist newspapers to circulate when almost every other non-Nazi newspapers have been banned. Zionists, in turn, not only refused to participate in a 1933 anti-Nazi boycott that was spearheaded by German Jewish orgs, but they went so far as to straight up oppose the boycott saying that "the boycott propaganda which they are making against [Nazi] Germany is in its very nature un-Zionist, since Zionism does not want to fight, but to persuade and to build." Zionism does not want to fight against Nazism but to persuade and to build alongside Nazism. By their words, they oppose the boycott, and by their deeds, they collaborated with the Nazis through the Haavara Agreement, which more or less broke the boycott. This shit's fucking wild, and I'm still processing what I've just read.

my goodreads year in books has everything I've read this year

Some highlights:

Kapoor & Jordan eds., Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia. Collection of essays/reports from scholar-activists engaged in class struggle in South America and Asia. In addition to a lot of very concrete details as to how struggle works, what doesn't work, what methods are used, etc, there's some very good essays on what it means to do research aimed at dismantling oppressive systems rather than just doing research for the academic industry. One of the main things this entails is, rather than studying the movement the aim of the academic activist is to study the enemy. When an academic researches a social movement and publishes their findings, this simply makes strategically important information more widely available to academic and governmental spheres i.e. the enemy. Two of my favourite quotes from the book's essays:

...engaged academic research...is usually unconventional out of political necessity and given the dual (though not necessarily equivalent) political commitments (social struggles and academia) at play. This is potentially incompatable with rigorous academic analysis...as commitments to practical politics transform research methods (including use of contradictory means like using the master's tools out of strategic necessity) and at times prioritize politically-induced analytical closure...over futher complexity driven by the search for ever greater analytical complexity and sophistication...

...intellectuals should see themselves as a "conscious wolf man", rather than the leader in the movement. The "conscious wolf man" is aware of his capacity to cause harm. Therefore, before the full moon, he tries every means to prevent himself from causing fatal damage. He constantly reminds people around him that he might betray them and helps them learn all his expertise so that the people can carry on with their struggles after he eventually betrays them.

Both quotes (and all the essays in the book) do a good job of drawing attention to how the class interests of academic researchers differ from the social movements they study, and what sorta practical organizational issues this leads to.

Another of Kapoor's edited books, Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa examines similar themes.

Cyprian Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World is an amazing book. It is a broad tome, but manages to do its subject justice. Broodbank looks at every corner of the Mediterranean showing how they resemble and differ from each other. One of my biggest takeaways from the book have been a more concrete realisation of "the history of all hithertoo existing society is the history of class struggle." There's several instances in the book where class societies arise, grow, collapse (from combinations of deforestation, over-agricultureing and internal disorder) and then seem to reconstruct more egalitarian looking (from archaeological evidence anyway) and sustainable societies.

Eva Mackey's Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization looks at what makes settlers (like me) tick and what settlers can do to work against colonisation. In the final third of the work she looks at examples of settler organisations actually working to return land to control of indigenous nations. The first two thirds look deeply into the legal fuckery of settler colonialism (e.g. the basis of Canada's existence is still the discovery doctrine and terra nullius etc), the various ways (often contradictory) settlers justify colonialism, and various organisations and actions settlers have formed to continue enacting colonialism.

Kyle T. Mays' An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States is as the title suggests. Excellent and readable history book, covers a lotta aspects (particularly the intersections of black and indigenous history) that go overlooked by most.

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour is a spectuacular book that combines all the best of Amin and Arghiri's works on imperialism and Federici and Delphy's work on feminism into a much more readable work. Unequal exchange, the function of imperialist growth, the expropriation of female labour, etc is all discussed in sufficient detail to foster understanding, but not in so much detail that one desires to burn the book.

Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism brings ecology to the forefront of a marxist analysis AND makes (convincing) arguments that Marx himself had done so in his later notebooks. While the usual themes of e.g. metabolic rift are addressed, unlike in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism here the focus is more on what Marx's ecological turn meant for his conception of communism. Saito shows that Marx's view of communist abundance, of post scarcity, is also a vision of degrowth, producing less frivolities, reducing the labour time needed and all with an aim of conscious mediation of the metabolic balance of nature (which ofc includes human society).

Yves Engler's Canada in Africa - 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation and On Guard for Whom? A Peoples' History of the Canadian Military, Gordon & Webber's Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya's The Globalization of NATO are a good (albeit mostly Canada-focused) look at how horrific actually existing capitalism is. All are amazing books to read, learn, and then be on the offensive wrt liberals, accusing their governments of horrible crimes and so forth. Blood of Extraction and Canada in Africa in particular do an excellent job of showing how horrifying 'business as usual' is in the global south (for literally every living thing there). I find a lotta people in the North (including me last year) are unaware of the cost of most of our luxuries. An example quote from Blood of Extraction:

The deposit is situated close to the Río Lempa, a crucial source of water to Cabañas and San Salvador. Residents are concerned about the potential contamination of a vital water supply from mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and zinc, heightened by the fact that there has been no independent assessment of the environmental impact of El Dorado—all while Pacific Rim, under the extant mining policy, would have paid a mere 2 percent in royalties per ounce of gold mined.480 The mine would also consume, according to one scientific study, between 75 and 110 litres of water per second from the nearby San Francisco river, in a country that already is facing considerable shortages and is, according to a Human Development Report for Latin America, the third most unequal country in the region with respect to access to potable water.481

Brett L. Walker's The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion,1590-1800 is as the title says. One of the largest takeaways here is that it shows how bullshit the borders on a map are, and how implicit terra nullius is used to portray an aggressively expansionist Edo Japan as isolationist and peaceful. Japan presents an interesting case-study as a society which developed much the same style of colonialism as Europe did without direct inspiration (at first, anyway). The processes of steady encroachment, worming their way into the centre of trade networks, creation of dependence, etc very much mirror those used by the French or British in North America and the Russians in Siberia. Walker also shows how a lot of the high culture we associate with Edo period Japan (the city culture) could only exist on this colonial basis (even to the extent that the Japanese were buying herring from the Ainu for the sole purpose of fertilising their fields which were exhausted).

I don't read theory, I'm a leftist

I most recently read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. It was good and changed my teaching style and I'm working towards getting away from "banking" teaching in my less flexible courses.

My Wive's Uncle always gives me books whenever I see him, not for a holiday or anything just in general since he's a prolific reader and an absolute character. He gave me Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank, which I got through partially, not the most useful book but I think it can give good insight into how rad libs think. I also read part of Debt: The First 5000 Years that was good, it was a graduation gift for my little cousin and I was stuck in an airport with it and got through a few chapters.

Last year my wife bought me all of Mike Davis' books for Christmas after his death since Verso had a sale. I've been meaning to get through them, I finished the Ecology of Fear, which I wanted to read since I work in Fear Ecology, and enjoyed it. His chapter on letting Santa Monica burn was great. I'm either gonna read planet of the slums or late Victorian Holocaust next.

Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment book was a pretty light and quick read, nice supplement to Dawn of Everything if you enjoyed that.

Read a lot of birthing and baby stuff...

Highly recommend The Birth Partner as an all-in-one resource book, and Ina May's Guide to Childbirth for some context on development of midwifery, example anecdotes and scenarios

I read a lot of Bolaño, my favorite was Estrella distante

In 2024 I will finally read some Murakami

The only book that I read from start to finish this year is Roadside Picnic. I have started reading several books but haven't finished them yet. I would like to read a lot more in 2024.

One book which I am currently reading is How Not to Die by Michael Greger. It's a book about the top 10 diseases that are causing the most deaths and how a plant-based diet can help you avoid them. It's basically The Vegan Manifesto. It is very well researched (has hundreds of references at the end of the book) while at the same time being very easy to read. It has a lot of very useful nutrition info and actionable advice. I recommend it to everyone, especially to anybody who wants to improve their nutrition.

I'm hoping to read at least 12 books in 2024, split between theory, fiction and non-fiction.

I have a copy of Zionism: False Messiah that I'm supposed to be reading, and that terrible centre left tech bro book. idk, I read in chunks.

Not much of a list, and I'm still finishing some of these:

• Black Jacobins
• Blackshirts & Reds
• Debt
• Why Nations Fail
• Work (Crimethinc)

The aspirational list for next year:

• Palo Alto
• Super Imperialism
• Settlers
• Jakarta Method
• City of Quartz
• From Democracy to Freedom (Crimethinc)