Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith235
See, I was just going to respond to the anarchist thread but since you decided to stroll by I'll ask you here. It has been brought to my attention that my literacy re; some political topics is out of date by around 100 years. Do you have any recommendations for primers for the New Left you were talking about? I have a base understanding of anarchism, existentialism, and postmodernism so it doesn't have to be super basic but I am admittedly weak in my understanding of socialism(I'm more of a modern econ wonk).
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Sorry, I just noticed I never actually responded to this.
Well, the best thing you can read right now is Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. It's the best work of modern communism I can think of.
Works from the New Left itself, I'd recommend Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, Negative Dialectics from Adorno should give you all the neo/post-hegelian background you need for revolutionary politics post-WWII but it's pretty intense and inaccessible (even I haven't read it all), and Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon is not
from the New Left but it's still extremely important to it.
Those are good starting points. You definitely will know what you're talking about in almost all situations with just those five books. Empire is seriously the most important one and also the most accessible one, and some further contemporary communist literature would be First as Tragedy Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek, and The Enigma of Capital, by David Harvey. I mention these two separate from the others because if you read them now you'll think throughout all the book "damn, this would be a lot more impacting had I read them in 2009" but still, good material.
