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    Lazy Llama

*The Great U75 Politics Reading List Thread.

The Trouble With Guns- Malachi O'Docherty (i think its o'docherty)

Its about the IRA + PIRA + the long war employed by Gerry Adams.

Big Fellow Long Fellow - T. Ryle O'Dwyer (spelling?)

Micheal Collins and Eamonn De Valera.
Its like its written by 2 people - each biased towards one or other
but its historically accurate + a good account of the creation of the Irish Free State.

Captive State- George Monbiot (is that how its spelt?)

About privitisation in the UK.
How New Labour's PFI scam means disaster for us all- with good examples - like the Skye Bridge fiasco.
 
Read "After The Ball" by Fintan O'Toole waiting for my plane in Aldegrove last night.

A bleak analysis of the post boom Southern Irish Economy. Much loved by Yankee Neo-Cons, O'Toole has it as corrupt, inequitable, inefficient, sexist etc. Sorry I did really, one of my main grounds for optimism in Ireland was a rich South makes a reconcilliation with the Six Counties more likely.

I'd recommend 'A Traitor's Kiss' by the same author, on Sheridan.
 
Just joined . . .

and saw butchers apron recommend Negri's Marx before Marx, which I would also recommend but I'm not sure it would tell you that much about Autonomism. Negri [along with Hardt] also wrote Empire which lots of people are raving about but I can't seem to get into.

A better introduction to autonomism [which no longer exists as a movment] would be Revolution Retrieved by Red Notes IF you can get hold of it.

An overview just recently done is Steve Wright's Storming Heaven.

Lastly 'autonomy' wasn't one tendency so you might want to look at other contributors eg Sergio Bologna, Mario Tronti

Hope I've done this right

Gra
 
. . . and

I forgot Harry Cleaver's 'Reading Capital Politically' which shows there is no such as thing as 'Marxist Economics'

Just been reprinted apparently

Gra
 
Originally posted by sleaterkinney
Can't believe nobodies mentioned

Greg Palast: The Best Democracy Money can Buy
Click to expand...

I was looking at Palast's book again this morning, and it is very good indeed (I've just got it back from a friend I leant it to, y'see).

Palast is basically Michael Moore with a brain, and the investigative journalism skills to go with it. You name the ruling class crime - from Bush's theft of the 2000 election to the IMF's shafting of developing countries - and Palast has the documentation to nail them.

He's also got a website - http://www.gregpalast.com

Also worth reading is Mark Curtis' Web of Deceit - Britain's Real Role in the World. Basically an account of British imperialism since 1945, I wouldn't agree with all of its analysis, but it's well worth a look.
 
S.A.Smith, Red Petrograd. A fairly comprehensive examination of Russian workers radicalisation from February 1917. Interesting and well researched, sadly his conclusion in the end comes down to 'the workers voted for Bolsheviks, ergo they were Bolsheviks', the research is also very much centred on resolutions by the larger factory committees (principally the metalworks in the Vyborg district) and the Petrograd CCFC, rather than rank and file workers.
 
Economic Democracy by J.W. Smith.

Just found it on line and having a read it seems to me (as a newcomer to this kind of stuff) fairly interesting. It talks about how nations have gained their wealth and how the protect it through military power. It also speaks about what can be done to alter this and his preferred system to replace capitalism.

Link here to all of his book online: http://www.ied.info/books/ed/intro.html
 
God - you all make me feel so dim!

I've actually got many of the books listed here - but due to work constraints just haven't got around to reading them. I have about 4 on the go at the moment including the Palast one.

Have read 3 of Moore's and have read Pilger's New Rulers of the World.

One I am looking forward to is The Crisis of Islam (can't remember who it is by - I'll have to dig it out of the pile!)
 
Stasiland, Anna Funder:

Thriller like piece of Journalism on the the former GDR. A necessary corrective to sentimental Ostalgia. A state were grassing up your friends and neighbours was a routine of citizenship does not deserve much affection.

I hope there isn't a braile version, might give David Blunkett rather too many ideas.
 
'Green Alternatives to Globalisation' - Mike Woodin and Caroline Lucas. Just
been published, and is very interesting and incisive. Don't agree with everything in it, but certainly a thoughtful read.

'Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative' - Danny Cohn-Bendit. Absolutely brilliant book; shame he's a total cock now.

'The New Buddhism' - David Brazier.

Matt
 
Cohn-bendit 'wrote' that with his anarchist brother Gabriel, and the story goes that Gabriel actually wrote most of it - Danny was just stuck on for his 'brand-name'.
 
Time to update my suggestions as well:

Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everday Life - Detlev Peukert - great example of politicised 'social history' and the history of 'everyday life', concentrating on oppostion (and sometimes outright resistance) amongst Youth, Foreign Labour and the different classes - an absolute masterwork.

The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler - 63 days fighting with 200 000 dead whilst the Red Army stood in view...

Reluctant Revolutionary: Memoirs of A Trotskyist 1936-1960 - Harry Ratner - excellent on wartime activity and industrial work just afterwards.
 
The Anatomy Of Fascism - Robert O Praxton. Got it in response to an argument with garf about what fascism was and so far it's a really excellent book, very illuminating.
 
Two excellent books in the same vein:

An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism (1922-75): The Nazi Question - Pierre Aycorberry

The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems of Perspectives and Interpretation - Ian Kershaw
 
Seeing butchers has mentioned the social history group and Peukert, it may be worth while checking out the work of Tim Mason [now dead] who translated a lot of the German material and was an accomplihsed historian in his own [w]rite.

and

John Merrington [of Red Notes] also now dead, both of whom attempted to popularise a 'history from below' especially translating stuff from Italy - his expertise is now sadly missed.

on a quite different note, since I pormised the author I would try to get this one better known

Storming Heaven by Steve Wright

'Class Composition and the struggle of Italian Autonomist Marxism'

does justice to a very complex trend within the Italian workers movement, has a huge bibliography [better tho' if you can read Italain] and demonstrates that Negri was not the guru of the movement and that today he is a long way from the kind of politics he was advocating then. I vastly prefer the Negri of 'Marx oltre Marx' to this multitude crap that he now does with Hardt - must be getting old I suppose.

Gra
 
To understand anything that complicated: ecologies: economies, societies, wars, and not get confused by limitations of the models in traditional kinds of thought on these subjects, I think it helps to see how complex systems work.

So although it's not strictly politics, my choice if I were recommending just one book on how to think about this kind of stuff, would be W Ross Ashby's:

Introduction to Cybernetics

It is the author's belief that if the subject is founded in the commonplace and well understood, and is then built up carefully, step by step, there is no reason why the worker with only elementary mathematical knowledge should not achieve a complete understanding of its basic principles. With such an understanding he will then be able to see exactly what further techniques he will have to learn if he is to proceed further; and, what is particularly useful, he will be able to see what techniques he can safely ignore as being irrelevant to his purpose.
Click to expand...

Or if you really don't fancy tackling Ashby, there's always The Macroscope linked from the same site, which contains a more popular and less rigourous treatment, with lots of concrete examples from the real world of ecologies, economies etc.
 
talking of Italian workers. I'd recommend Tom Behan's The Long Awaited Moment: The Working Class and the Italian Communist Party in Milan, 1943-48. It's about the PCI's drift toward parliamentarianism and the disarming of the partisans after World War One.
 
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World, excellent analysis of the concept of soft coercion and propaganda as a means of ideological control, much more relevant to today's world than 1984, IMO (if not as well written) [text online here]

Colin Ward - Anarchy in Action, this might have been mentioned above, but it is well worth mentioning again, a brilliant book if you want to research non-hierarchical organisation in modern society
 
Slobodan Milosovic & The Destruction Of Yugoslavia- Louis Sell.

How We Survived Communism & Even Managed To Laugh- Slavenka Drakulic.


Does any body know of any decent books about Volislav Seselj? Might seem a bit obscure and pointless to some, but I want to find out more about Serbian nationlism.
 
The Mass Psychology Of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich

Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich (an amazing rant with amazing illustrations)

Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson

1984 by George Orwell (esp the book within the book, wish there was more of it)

50 Orwell Essays (A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook)

The Culture of Contentment by John Kenneth Galbraith
 
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