I want to buy and send books to my friends to radicalize them. I already sent one to a friend when I was kind of shocked he tried to recommend me Factfulness by Hans Rosling (he is part of the “rational optimists” like Steven Pinker who basically think the neoliberal status quo is effective in solving world problems). As a reaction I send him The Divide by Jason Hickel and read Factfulness out of respect for his opinion and understanding how these writers argue for the status quo (it is a terrible book).
The issue with some of my friends is is that they start to have kneejerk reactions when too much Marxist jargon is being used. I don’t blame them because society teaches that. Are there books you would recommend for them to read which is accessible? For me it is most important they understand the global economic dynamics and how imperialism works and how capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
I was thinking about a Noam Chomsky book or Howard Zinn as starters. Are there any others?
“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein is a good fit for this purpose. Less ideological, more “here are a bunch of examples of how capitalism ruined a democracy/country/planet”
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It’s not entirely fiction; he basically stitched the narrative together based field notes of migrant farmers’ personal stories from the Depression.
From wiki:
Steinbeck was known to have borrowed from field notes taken during 1938 by Farm Security Administration worker and author Sanora Babb. While Babb collected personal stories about the lives of the displaced migrants for a novel she was developing, her supervisor, Tom Collins, shared her reports with Steinbeck, who at the time was working for the San Francisco News.[9] Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was eclipsed in 1939 by the success of The Grapes of Wrath and was shelved until it was finally published in 2004, a year before Babb’s death.
The Grapes of Wrath developed from The Harvest Gypsies, a series of seven articles that ran in the San Francisco News, from October 5 to 12, 1936. The newspaper commissioned that work on migrant workers from the Midwest in California’s agriculture industry. (It was later compiled and published separately.[10][11])
In mid-January 1939, three months before the publication of ‘‘The Grapes of Wrath’’, Steinbeck wrote a long letter to his editor at Viking Press, Pascal Covici. He wanted Covici, in particular, to understand this book, to appreciate what he was up to. And so he concluded with a statement that might serve as preface in and of itself: “Throughout I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled on his own depth and shallowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.”[12]
Edit: I mistakenly said that Steinbeck was a TVA worker and witnessed this stuff himself; I didn’t realize he got the notes from Babb.
David Graeber. “Bullshit Jobs”. You gotta start at baby steps with these folks, from the sound of things. Which means, as much I hate the phrase, “enhancing contradictions”. First, they gotta understand neoliberalism is failing before you bring them further along.
Oh the late David Graeber is a good recommendation. I never read his work because I found his lectures to be quite incoherent. So I hope his writing is much better.
Here’s the article that led to the Bullshit Jobs book, you can read it and decide for yourself (I’ve never seen a lecture of his, so I can’t really judge).
Another vote for Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. Her book about climate is a really good first step too, if your friend is concerned about the climate. Lots of ideas there about how we cannot solve climate change with our current systems, though she doesn’t take that next step to socialism
“Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank, focuses on the failures of neoliberalism by using the 90’s Clinton administration as a case study. There’s a short bit that talks about unions and workers movements at the beginning before diving into and criticizing the 90’s neoliberal uprising and its consequences.
Might be helpful or easier to digest if things were grounded in a somewhat more contemporary setting. Though this is a very USA centric book, so it might not be as relevant outside the USA.
