What’s on your summer reading list? I’ll do a summer reading list for fiction and one for nonfiction. Here’s some of the fiction I’ve been reading lately.
Category: Books (Page 21 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.
Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently published his first book, The Socialist Manifesto.
He’s trying to do a lot with the book. But here’s the main goal as I see it. Sunkara wants to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. He draws this distinction primarily in terms of the political methods people use in their pursuit. And he argues that the best political vision for our times is one that helps us move from the former to the latter. He does this via a historical project, covering everything from the feudalist roots of capitalism to German and Swedish social democracy to the Soviet Union and China to the history of leftism in the United States. Again, quite a project.
I’ll lay out some of Sunkara’s key arguments in The Socialist Manifesto. And I’ll offer some agreement and criticism along the way.
Sarah Smarsh and I both grew up in the rural Midwest. But she’s the only one of us who’s written a book about it. Good for her! Her book is called Heartland, and I’d recommend reading it.
I wrote a bit about the book in an earlier post. But here are some more detailed thoughts I had as I read along.
Source: Jacobin (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/introducing-the-abcs-of-capitalism)
So, one day, I set out to buy Jacobin’s little book, The ABCs of Socialism. Somewhere along the way, I screwed up and ordered The ABCs of Capitalism instead. That’s OK. No harm done. I read The ABCs of Capitalism, and here are my thoughts on it.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foucalt.png)
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down for a debate in the early 1970s. You can watch the whole thing here. The transcript, along with some related essays from both Chomsky and Foucault, is available to buy as a book. It’s known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate.
I wasn’t new to either Chomsky or Foucault when I watched and read the Chomsky-Foucault debate. And the short debate format has its clear limits. But I did come away with a few impressions and lessons learned.
I’ll lay those out.
