Personally, I’m in full summer mode and ready to do some summer reading! So, here’s a list of books I’m tackling here in the middle of the summer.
What are you reading these days?
Category: Books (Page 13 of 22)
These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
Welcome to a special birthday edition of the reading list, since I celebrated my birthday yesterday! Does that change my reading habits? Eh, not really. I suppose this list includes more fiction and abstract texts. But, that’s pure coincidence.
Let’s see what we’ve got this month.
I spent much of my Pandemic Year hard at work on a new book. And now I’m ready to announce its release! I called the book Left Foreign Policy: An Organizer’s Guide. You can buy the paperback version at the link above. Here’s a page where you can read an in-depth description.
But on this page, I’ll say a bit about the target audience. It’s a book on left foreign policy at a very 101-level. I wrote it for new leftists and for organizers holding discussions with new leftists. In the book, I lay out some general principles for foreign policy organizing, and I invite new leftists to see internationalism as a key piece of leftist strategy and work. So, from this starting point, we can do better organizing.
Over the course of the last few months, my partner and I did a little reading group. We read Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. It’s a joint biography of Karl and Jenny Marx by journalist Mary Gabriel. Marx was, of course, not too into anarchism. We’ll return to that.
For now, there’s much of interest in Love and Capital. The Marx family was an interesting family, and Gabriel shows the collective, whole family nature of the Marx political project. However, one topic that kept returning to me as I read is the relation between anarchism and Marxism.
That’s not a central topic for Gabriel, but she finds it important to several key moments in Karl Marx’s life. And like many commenters who focus on Marx, she comes down almost entirely on the side of Marxism in any dispute with anarchists. But several events in the book highlighted the conflict again for me. Battles between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin around the First International, in particular.
