I can't remember ever reading a book on politics.
*The Great U75 Politics Reading List Thread.
- Thread starter Idris2002
- Start date
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
15
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
it shows
audiotech
wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, flac
Beating the Fascists?: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933 by Eve Roenhaft.
Grim reading.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beating-Fascists-Communists-Political-1929-1933/dp/0521089387
Grim reading.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beating-Fascists-Communists-Political-1929-1933/dp/0521089387
Of course it shows. It shows just how much one's political knowledge and analysis is improved according to how many political books they've read. How they are better equipped to cast their vote wisely. So how come we still have shyte politicians?
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Have you got any constructive points or arguments to make? Because so far you've offered neither on here.
And you have??
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
That'll be a no from you then.
It'll be whatever you want it to be.
MellySingsDoom
Decimated by the shrapnel of his rhetoric
It's posts like these that make me wish I was on "holiday" again....(
, 
etc)Anyway....for those interested in this sort of thing: I've just started (again....) to read "Bad News: The Wapping Dispute" by John Lang & Graham Dodkins (Spokesman Books) - a fascinating book on the Murdoch/Wapping dispute - full of first hand accounts from people who were there on the front line of the whole thing (some genuinely shocking accounts of "state" brutality too....), and an invaluable piece of social/East London w/class history...
It's posts like these that make me wish I was on "holiday" again....(
Anyway....for those interested in this sort of thing: I've just started (again....) to read "Bad News: The Wapping Dispute" by John Lang & Graham Dodkins (Spokesman Books) - a fascinating book on the Murdoch/Wapping dispute - full of first hand accounts from people who were there on the front line of the whole thing (some genuinely shocking accounts of "state" brutality too....), and an invaluable piece of social/East London w/class history...
You should take a holiday and read your lopsided account of the Wapping dispute.
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Why not start a thread then and you can tell us your account of the Wapping dispute. I suspect you're not here to enter into any proper discussion though and instead to act the dick.
MellySingsDoom
Decimated by the shrapnel of his rhetoric
I'm NOT in the mood for snide asides, "mate" - I've leave it at that, and steph's sound and well-aimed response to you...
youngian
Well-Known Member
This is the best political book I have read in the past few years. International tax accountancy might not sound like a sexy read but Shaxson makes it very accessible (about an industry that purposely talks in exclusive jargon).
The technical ease to transfer capital is one of the biggest threats to our democracy and you no longer physically have to go there especially if you live London as we have our very own feudal Lichtenstein that is the city.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Help required - can anyone recommend me a Marxist critique of Import Substitution Industrialisation? Cheers.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Got a very cheap copy of Negri's "Time for Revolution". Worth reading?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Time is now capitalist time, we measure and constitute our time in terms of work. Which means that capital is utterly reliant on us doing this (i.e it has largely displaced the role that physical labour used to play) and we need now not only fold our arms but turn time to our own use. It's Negri's old idea of working class self-valorisation. There, i've saved you a quid.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Already bought it.
Thanks for the precis though (puts to bottom of reading pile)!!
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Basic development theory - esp stuff written after the IMF experience of the 90s should do you - Samir Amin or James Petras for a more journalisitic look.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Cheers mate.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Yes and no. He's always worth reading but this one doesn't really stand out from his usual stuff - in fact the 2nd half is yet another restatement of the ideas most well known through Empire. And it's possibly his worst written book despite the two sections being written 20 years apart and in very different contexts (the first in prison after the defeats of the late 70s and the second in the upswing in the late 90s). I think there may be something on the subject itself that brings out the worst in writers - remember E.P Thompson's long rambling essay on Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism? Similar problems. Despite this the first section is quite important as it's the only part of the Negri collection Machine Time that's yet been translated into English and which acted as a sort of pole around which much of the movement reconstituted itself (abroad and in itlay) in the 80s. SO yes to the first half and you probably don't need the second.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Yep, i may have a pdf somewhere, i'll just check.
edit: nah, out of luck.
edit: nah, out of luck.
That's really good. I'd also recommend In the Shadow of Silent Majorities by Baudrillard too, really easy to read compared to his later stuff.
I've been reading Andre Gorz - Critique of Economic Reason recently after reading his earlier book Farewell to the Working Class whilst at uni doing my dissertation (a critique of liberal theories of post-industrialism, in particular Daniel Bell's version) and there's some really exceptional thought-provoking stuff in there. Well worth a read.
Another good one I started reading a while ago and never finished is Walter Isaacson - The Wise Men, once I'm through with Gorz I'm gonna finish it off. It's a biography of 6 very prominent American policymakers and statesmen who pretty much shaped the post-WW2 American hegemony in the world.
I'm surprised Tony Benn & Chris Mullin's - Arguments for Democracy and Arguments for Socialism haven't been here yet. My parents were both Bennites who had copies of them lying around, and when I was in my early teens these were hugely important to me in helping me understand the world. Re-reading them a decade later you can pick flaws in them left right and centre, but nontheless they really helped me understand the world from a young age from a left-wing perspective.
John Golding - Hammer of the Left which is amazingly subtitled "Defeating Tony Benn, Eric Heffer and Militant in the battle for the Labour Party" is an incredible read, just if you want to see just how bad the right-wing of Labour really is. Also interesting to see how some quite prominent members of the Labour party made their careers by attacking the left.
Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society are also excellent read's too, the first is the definitive critique of Labourism that everyone on the left should read, the second is an superb left-wing take on the role of the state. Also worth reading Leo Panitch's The End of Parliamentary Socialism: from New Left to New Labour which is a good historical account of the battle for the Labour party in recent years that's a continuation and evaluation of what Miliband started. I'm also looking foward to the new one Panitch has got coming out called The Making of Global Capitalism which I've just pre-ordered off Amazon.
Robert Michels - Political Parties is an important sociological study into undemocratic tendencies within ostensibly left-wing democratic political parties, in this case the SPD in Germany, although I think it's a critque that is much more universal than just that. He was an anarcho-syndicalist who went on to be come a fascist. This is the book that introduces the concept of The Iron Law of Oligarchy that I reckon every left-winger who's concerned with undemocratic tendencies in left-wing groups should familiarise themselves with.
Phillipe Bourgois - In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is another really good sociological study that I've just started reading, after a friend recommended it to me, dealing with social marginalization in the inner cities.
David Coates - Models of Capitalism from 2001 has a good chapter on it, dunno if it counts as a critique, there's a sub-chapter called "In Defense of Corporatism" and he seems to follow the same sort of line that Will Hutton and others on the liberal left were making at the time in pronouncing German corporatist, social-consensus based capitalism superior to the neo-liberal variety on offer in the UK and USA. It's 10 years old now there's probably newer and better books on the topic, but that's the only one on my bookshelf that I could think of straight away.
Similar threads
