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
  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    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.