Mine
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Vonnegut, specifically “Cat’s Cradle” (I know he’s a comrade, but I didn’t find that out until a decade after I read any of his work)
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Ursula LeGuin
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Kafka
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Camus
I don’t think anything not explicitly socialist really pushed me to socialism.
I think some writers like Nietzsche and Pratchett made more critical of liberalism and the status-quo, but didn’t really offer a plausible alternative vision.
What really tipped me over the edge was reading colonial history (including Fanon) and realizing virtually every national liberation movement was Marxist which led me to investigating why that was true.
Thank you for bringing up Nietzsche! I just finished a psych class with a professor who learned German so he could translate Nietzsche. Before this semester I hated Nietzsche so much, but this professor went on a tirade over how fascists had co-opted him. I can’t say I enjoy Nietzsche now, but I tolerate him.
Nietzsche is great, read up on eternal recurrence if you want to stop thinking about him as a nihilist.
Isn’t the whole thing with nihilism that it’s not about being an edgy mcedgelord, but recognizing that there are no authentic external sources of wisdom and you ultimately have to decide for yourself what your beliefs and convictions are?
check out this article contrasting Marx and Nietzsche, I think it really gets to the heart of Nietzsche’s worldview
To me it seems like fascists and liberals compete to co-opt him.
He’s reactionary through-and-through but he is a compelling writer; whether he would have aligned with fascism or not, most non-aligned people who read him have good odds of having their anti-communist indoctrination cemented.
I think that since Nietzsche is dialectical there’s always this interplay between his reactionary fascist side and the humanist side. I also had a prof argue for the centrality of The Birth of Tragedy to Nietzsche, that the Apollonian and Dionysian is really the core dialectic of his thinking.
Can’t deny he’s got his reactionary elements but a lot of that was also basically fury at the bourgeoise libs of his day.
genuinely think pratchett had more of an effect on my understanding of the world than anyone but my mam and dad. like I’ve never really come to a satisfying conclusion as the what his politics even were, but the amount of ideas and his way of expressing them, and most of all the humanism in his books, hitting me as a kid who basically never read or thought about anything critically before was such a big thing.
good lad, terry
