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askchapo @hexbear.net
ratboy [they/them] @hexbear.net

What are your recs for beginner, liberal friendly texts/podcasts/youtube videos to introduce people to our politics?

There are many people who have been posting about wanting to mobilize and become more engaged in mutual aid and organizing in my local subreddit. People are starting to become more desperate and are waking up to the fact that marches and solidarity protests and voting only do so much and they want real change. But many are probably Dems/Liberals who are just coming around to this since Trump won the election. So they have hardly any political consciousness whatsoever and some may still be turned off by the words "anarchism" and "communism". Though I think more people may be sympathetic to anarchism than ML, Lenin is still bad and scary to them I'm sure. Even Marx.

The discourse has actually been kind of sympathetic to alternative politics in forms of upvotes and such, so I am compiling a list of mutual aid groups locally and nationally that are doing on the ground, tangible work besides electoralism and I want to gather very digestible reads/podcasts/etc. to put into this resource list.

I am looking for Democratic Socialism resources, Anarchism, Socialist, Communist, Trans liberation, Indigenous liberation, abolition, organizing, stories about apolitical-represented sources regarding mutual aid, analysis of how Democrats & Republics go hand in hand etc. etc. ANYTHING to push people left, regardless of how milquetoast it may be. Whatever started to de-worm your brain that's perhaps a notch left of Bernie. Extra points for resources that are more focused on examples of organizing as opposed to strictly theory based stuff.

If there are particular episodes of more radical podcasts to listen to, all the better. I think ideal texts and such would be where the author critiques their own beliefs and finds faults in them, but can argue the benefits of it as well.

A couple ideas I have as of this morning are:

  • People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
  • The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
  • Second Thought Podcast (Haven't really listened but it seems like a decent primer. Specific episode recs welcome)
  • Blowback (So dense but riddled with primary sources and relatively unbiased)
  • People's Guide to Capital (by Hadas Thier, quick and more focused on labor solidarity than revolution)
  • Why Marx Was Right (by Terry Eagleton. Haven't read but was what pushed Breht from RevLeft to claim himself a communist)
  • Possibly Dessalines' essays on github
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  • Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, the guy is a liberal I think, but he just lays out the facts and it paints an obviously sympathetic picture of socialists throughout US history. It's perfect for US libs who only remember the bullshit they were taught in school. I'll never forget how I felt when I read this book and it taught me about who John Brown was. I didn't even know such a guy existed!

    I was always taught "people just didn't see slavery as wrong, times were different, you can't judge past people with today's morals", etc etc. The existence of John Brown completely shatters that image. Which is precisely why they erased him from our curriculum.

  • The Alt-Right Playbook on YouTube. It's not explicitly leftist, but it's recognizably leftist. It's a great way to explain to libs why fascism takes root and why liberalism can't stop it. It will help them understand anti-fascist black bloc tactics and why violence is necessary against fascism.

    Judas and the Black Messiah is a film that doesn't whitewash the FBI and doesn't ignore Fred Hampton's politics. Honestly, I'm surprised the movie even got made.

    The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley will help liberals get some radicalism in them. Malcolm X was not a socialist, but understanding why he was the way he was will help liberals move away from civility fetishism.

    And of course: Albert Einstein, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Hellen Keller's works about socialism and why they advocate for it. Libs love to canonize these three without understanding all of them were communists. Dalton Trumbo is another, who wrote many famous films including Spartacus. Lucille Ball and Robert Oppenheimer are two more whose socialism is often ignored.

  • I like philosophy ones. Philosophise This, Why Theory, A Partially-Examined Life, Owls at Dawn. They're calm and dig at the intellectual roots of modern ideologies. Sometimes they directly tackle Marx and other left theorists at an accessible level.

    Social history ones are also a good option. Tides of History is really good at laying out a materialist analysis of some period.

    • Going at it from a philosophy standpoint sounds like a good tactic. Also from a historical lens where it's not focused on a political ideology necessarily. People can draw their own conclusions from that for sure thank you

  • Richard "Big Dick" Wolff is one of my faves. His Democracy at Work institute puts out weekly videos.

    His personal YouTube channel also has shorter, more digestible and frequent "Wolff Responds" segments where he responds to current events.

    He describes himself as "Marxian" I presume to be able to use Marxist analysis but also wash his hands of all the perceived crimes of socialist projects like USSR and China. But he's still spot on for the most part.

  • I recommend A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit as a good companion to The Shock Doctrine.

    • It shows how people are not nearly as cowed by Shock as previously presumed.
    • It reveals that the fear of people panicking is really Elite Panic - A Hobbesian world view - that guides disaster recovery and warfare.
    • It uses several major events, from war to natural disaster, to show how people come together and help each other proportional to how much of the old society was displaced.
      • It also discusses when this solidarity does not show up and why. The section on the Spanish Flu eerily mirrors the COVID experience despite being published in 2009.
    • The concept of Disaster as Revolution because it "overthrows" the old world order. It also discusses the opposite - how disaster aid is like a counter-revolution as it "restores" the old world order.
    • It might be just me, but it is a legitimate Hopepunk read, especially in the Global Warming era.

    Elsewhere was mentioned No Shortcuts by Jane F. McAlevey. Good nuts-and-bolts case studies of organizing a union as well as identifying/fixing a broken union. Reading between the lines you can apply this to other forms of organizing, and the book encourages that.

    EDIT: I've had very good luck with Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris. I have a copy circulating among my friend groups. Really effective on Millennials and some Boomers.

  • more of union organising recommendations:

    • more perfect union channel on youtube is pretty good. they are mainly pro-union and are really good at focusing on labour issues in US.
    • no shortcuts by Jane F. McAlevey is really popular in organising circles and i would recommend it too
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