Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had a pretty big impact on my politics, at least indirectly.

Even though I was never religous I used to have this internalised belief (that I think is pretty common to liberals) that if you just hold on and suffer long enough things will eventually get better and you will be rewarded, which I was banking on eventually happening to me. It made me more aware of that belief, and that there wasn’t really any logical reason behind it, and that made me realise I’m waiting for something that will just never happen.

For there to be any justice in the world, people need to actively work to create and uphold it, and that doesn’t happen under capitalism.

my severance package when I was downsized after more than a decade of being a good drone

I read Camus as a young teenager too and he probably got me thinking about how large aspects of social cues and traditions are constructed. I also read Vonnegut and LeGuin. Octavia Butler too and a bunch of cyberpunk books, like Gibson and Melissa Scott. Honestly those just got me thinking about stuff, not really pushing me in one direction. The only author who firmly made me a socialist was Marx himself. He pushed me directly over the border.

One book that really stuck out was Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. I have no idea what his politics are and I don’t care. That book in particular kind of pushed me into thinking about how a society could collapse and replicate aspects of its former self without necessarily trying, but rather, being forced by the conditions they live in. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic future America that reverts to feudal social and cultural relations. The main character’s job is copying blueprints for electrical diagrams, which are now interpreted as religious relics. So from that I started to have the idea that maybe pure technical knowledge isn’t what drives a society, but there also needs to be some social apparatus in place to make sense of it. The book describes a pre-industrial society with all the instructions on how to industrialize right in front of them, but they can’t yet, because they haven’t yet formed the social capacity to do anything with it.

Also honestly Ayn Rand pushed me by complete accident. It was back when I didn’t fully understand her politics. All I could tell was she was describing some type of oppositional defiance to something, but I was a dumbass teenager still so couldn’t exactly tell what. She was the first overtly political author I read and I somehow thought she was on the left from the text alone. That’s how stupid I was. Then I read Marx’s books and became normal. Thank god.

Those Who Walk Aways from Omelas did it for me, so a big thank you for Ursula LeGuin.

Philip K. Dick, especially his book Ubik does a great job extrapolating what late capitalism looks like: people have to pay a fee for everything - including using your own appliances, shower and front door.