I wouldn’t say that the “slog” books are bad, they’re just aiming at a different audience or historical moment. “What is to be done?” was written mostly as a critique of the political movements at the time, and it lays down a lot of the groundwork in Lenin’s Democratic Centralism and more of his party organisation philosophy. Just like Capital, it’s more the sort of book that you have to study, rather than a book that you’ll “enjoy” reading, for the lack of a better word.

Although I haven’t read his books yet, Richard D. Wolff seems to be similar to Parenti in style, so they might be good reads.

But on the thread topic, I’ll list some of the books I’ve read or listened to for the past couple months:

• Bullshit Jobs

  • Talks about the psychic harm of working a job that you know to be useless for society. A lot. Wholeheartedly recommend.

• People’s Republic of Walmart:

  • Intuitive but a bit shallow exploration of the popular myth that “planning fails, free markets succeed”, analysing cases of “planned” monopolies like Walmart, “democratic planning” like the Cybersyn Project, another corporation I can’t remember the name and even some portions of the USSR.
  • It’s a nice book, the writing style is familiar without being too weird, even if the authors do a significant amount of “Stalin Bad” in one chapter.

• Chokepoint Capitalism:

  • Basically Cory Doctorow independently discovers the concept of finance capital, in his weird socio-liberal tech enthusiast way. He is a pretty good writer, so it’s a joyful ride, and he mostly focuses on how Big Techs manage to fuck over both their workers, their consumers and their smaller corporate clients through fraud, regulatory capture, “anti-competitive practices” and more.
  • Random “China Bad” moments, but if you literally replace “China” with “The USA” while reading the sentences actually make a lot of sense. Don’t get this as an audiobook, the narrator is bad.

• The Internet Con: Cory Doctorow again, but now he focuses on actions and policies that could slow down if not push back those internet corporations.

  • First he elaborates a lot on how monopoly capitalism is not unique to Big Techs (he is learning), then he talks about how those corporations would actually incredibly fragile if not for legal frameworks like copyright, DRM Protection (not the DRM itself), and other anti-reverse-engineering legislation.
  • He talks a lot about how he believe that forcing those corporations’ services to accept being made compatible (as in, make it clearly not illegal to create stuff like invidious or nitter) will severely hamper their control in internet spaces. He also talks a bit about the fediverse, and I’ve been meaning to write a review about the book somewhere here on that front.
  • He narrates this one himself, so the audiobook is actually good.

• Debt: The First 5000 years

  • I haven’t finished this one, but David Graeber (late author of Bullshit Jobs) does a general survey on the anthropological perspective of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist economies. He talks a lot about the myth of “barter societies”, and how it’s an ahistorical economist invention, describing how multiple cultures from Europe, Asia, Africa and America (both current and in the past) organised their process of distributing their production in ways that dealt a lot with the concept of debt.
  • It’s a very long book, but worth a read if you want a more critical perspective on historical economies.
  • At one point he redefines communism as sort of a vibe, like “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, in order to show how such solidarity-based cultural practices are about as much if not more present in human cultures than competition and individuality. I don’t really like the method, but at least he’s doing it with good intentions.

• Weapons of Math Distruction:

  • It’s surprisingly a bit outdated due to being from before the “Data [Pseudo-]Science” fad, but still holds up. The author explores how mathematical models are used as ways for large organisations to wash their hands off of responsibilities, institutionalise discrimination in invisible and impossible-to-audit forms, or just generally make essential parts of society worse for profit.
  • Mostly she frames the narratives through people who have been “wrongly” negatively affected by those models, like teachers under Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act”, every single person during the 2008 crisis, black people due to discrimination through proxy variables for race, and so on.
  • The “wrongly” aspect of the book really irked me, as she often uses language to imply that the issue is just things like “denying mortgage loans” being discriminatory, not that there are people or models in charge of denying people housing or other essential material needs in the first place.
  • She sadly doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of the maths.

• Hundred Years War on Palestine

  • Didn’t actually get too far on this one yet, but so far I really “enjoyed” it. Documents the war on Palestine, often with first-hand accounts since the very beginning of the Zionist Project.

Why doesn’t lemmygrad have a “books” community? I reckon we could be having weekly or monthly threads like these.