Advanced Books

Index

  • Activism

  • Anarchism

  • Capitalism & Class

  • Communism

  • Gender & Sex

  • Government & Power

  • History

  • Imperialism

  • Race

  • Socialism

  • Queer

Activism

  • by J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, Stephen Healy
  • An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities
  • Full of exercises, thinking tools, and inspiring examples from around the world, Take Back the Economy shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create ethical economies. There is no manifesto here, no one prescribed model; rather, readers are encouraged and taught how to take back the economy in ways appropriate for their own communities and context, using what they already have at hand.
  • By Dina Gilio-Whitaker
  • The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice
  • The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism
  • Peter Kropotkin
  • Gord Hill
  • An alternative view of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans is offered in this concise history. Eurocentric studies view colonization as a mutually beneficial process, in which "civilization” was brought to the natives who in return shared their land and cultures.
  • The opposing historical camp views colonization as a form of genocide in which the native populations were passive victims overwhelmed by European military power.

Anarchism

  • by Emma Goldman
  • Audiobook Version
  • Video Summary and Review
  • Anarchism and Other Essays is a 1910 essay collection by Emma Goldman.
  • The essays outline Goldman's anarchist views on a number of subjects, most notably the oppression of women and perceived shortcomings of first wave feminism, but also prisons, political violence, sexuality, religion, nationalism and art theory.
  • by Rudolf Rocker
  • a general introduction to anarchist thought and the early history of international anarchism by one of the movement's leading figures.
  • "Anarcho-Syndicalism", the most accessible of his works, is now regarded as a classic survey of anarchism at a critical point in world politics.

Economy, Capitalism & Class

  • David Graeber
  • presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Communism

  • by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles
  • Summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism.
  • by Pyotr Kropotkin
  • Audiobook
  • Video Summary and Review
  • study of human needs and his outline of the most rational and equitable means of satisfying them. A combination of detailed historical analysis and far-reaching Utopian vision, this is a step-by-step guide to social revolution: the concrete means of achieving it, and the world that humanity’s “constructive genius” is capable of creating.
  • Aaron Bastani

Fascism and Antifascism

  • Michael Parenti

  • Audiobook Link

  • Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Anatomy of Fascism

  • by Robert O. Paxton
  • history of fascism in all its manifestations, and how and why it took hold in certain countries and not in others.What is fascism?

Feminism & Gender

  • By Judith Butler
  • Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.


  • By Bell Hooks
  • Audiobook
  • Examining the impact of sexism on black woman during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the feminist movement, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.

Government & Power

  • by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall
  • The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement
  • by Noam Chomsky
  • Using secret National Security Council planning documents and taking post-war Europe and Central America as paradigms, the author examines America's aggressive colonialist policy. It draws alarming connections between its repression of information inside the U S and its aggressive empire-building abroad.
  • By Vladimir Lenin
  • Audiobook
  • describing the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
  • Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian
  • Chomsky offers insights into the institutions that shape the public mind in the service of power and profit.
  • Whether discussing U.S. military escalation in Colombia, attacks on Social Security, or growing inequality worldwide, Chomsky shows how ordinary people, if they work together, have the power to make meaningful change.

Imperialism & Colonization

  • by Chris Hayes
  • Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights, and aggressive policing resembles occupation.
  • A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution?
  • Jason Hickel
  • describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from imperialist colonialism as the final stage of capitalist development to ensure greater profits.
  • Peter Kropotkin
  • Gord Hill
  • An alternative view of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans is offered in this concise history. Eurocentric studies view colonization as a mutually beneficial process, in which "civilization” was brought to the natives who in return shared their land and cultures.
  • The opposing historical camp views colonization as a form of genocide in which the native populations were passive victims overwhelmed by European military power.
  • Eduardo Galeano
  • an analysis of the impact that European settlement, imperialism, and slavery have had in Latin America.

Queer

  • by Joan Roughgarden
  • diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people

Queer (In)Justice

  • By Joel Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, & Kay Whitlock
  • A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences—as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, they prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.
  • By C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, & Abbey Volcano
  • “Against the austerity of straight politics, Queering Anarchism sketches the connections between gender mutiny, queer sexualities, and anti-authoritarian desires. Through embodied histories and incendiary critique, the contributors gathered here show how we must not stop at smashing the state; rather normativity itself is the enemy of all radical possibility.”—Eric A. Stanley, co-editor of Captive Genders