my summer reading list- suggestions

2 and 3 are quite specific political tracts from particular contexts which are worth a read but maybe try and read articles about their context, both supportive and critical, as well. I say this because I personally didn't get much from them until reading them again knowing the context. Not to say I agreed with them, but they are interesting, informative, important texts from that period. The others you mention are, I think, pretty possible to read by themselves just fine.

If you watch a lot of tv during holiday periods, try every now and then replacing a film or tv episode, with a video lecture on a chapter of Capital. If you get a notebook then you can notes as you go. It's boring TV that instead of making you stupid, will make you smart.

That is certainly a good idea, but it would still help to have a grasp of the overarching nature of the different parts of the text before starting to read it - of course its up to you what you wish to do with your summer.

Its obviously a difficult text, and without a guided reading many people give up, even as part of a reading group.

I have a quite expansive reading list, but having really got the time to really start. I'm in school again for the whole summer.

I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520251768

The Long Haul: An Autobiography by Myles Horton

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Haul-Autobiography-Myles-Horton/dp/0807737003/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370713222&sr=1-1&keywords=the+long+haul+myles+horton

If you're interested in the Civil War, W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America is definitely a must-read.

I would also highly recommend Punching Out and Other Writings by Martin Glaberman. Good luck!

I have two reading guides. One is basically adapted from libcom's reading guides, which in turn, was adapted from chris wright's revolutionary guide. A bit shorter but still long. The second one is a bit interesting in that its not a list of book titles, but a list of important thinkers within the historical socialist movement that I think is important to read. Its comprised of the different tendencies, but mostly libertarian communist. Its suppose to guide one's perspective in that direction. I'm always adding from the past and present. So you'll have council communism to class-struggle anarchism; a bit of the leninist ilks (know thy enemy); aside from movement tendencies, people from the Frankfurt school, Marxian economists, world-system analysis, eco-socialism to social ecology. There are some names there that aren't important, but who have a book or two that I just want to read, so I em on.

Karl Marx
Frederick Engels
Karl Kautsky
Antonio Labriola
Georgi Plekhanov
Rudolph Hilferding
Eugene Debs
Henryk Grossman
Vladimir Lenin
Leon Trotsky
Nikolai Bukharin
Tony Cliff
Hal Draper
Max Shachtman
George Novack
Ted Grant
Ernest Mandel
Harry Braverman
Duncan Hallas
Peter Sedgewick
Paul Foot
Bob Gould
Mike Kidron
Alex Callinicos
Chris Harman
Rosa Luxemburg
Amadeo Bordiga
Herman Gorter
Antonie Pannekoek
Sylvia Pankhurst
Otto Ruhle
John Keracher
Jacque Camatte
Franz Pfemfert
Cajo Brendal
Paul Mattick
Grandizo Munis
Jan Appel
Antonio Negri
Cornelius Castoriadis
Maurice Brinton
Guy Debord
Daniel Guerin
Raoul Vaneigem
Karl Korsch
James Connolly
Maximilien Rubel
Daniel De Leon
Gilles Dauve
Isaak Illich Rubin
John Holloway
Harry Cleaver
Fredric Jameson
Nicos Poulantzas
Mario Tronti
Sergio Bolognia
Mariarosa Dalla
Nick Dyer-Witheford
Raniero Panzieri
Franco Berardi
George Caffentzis
Steve Wright
G. A. Cohen
John Elster
Erik Olin Wright
Louis Althusser
Gyorgy Lukacs
Antonio Gramsci
C. L. R. James
Walter Benjamin
Henri Lefebvre
Herbert Marcuse
Max Horkheimer
Theodor Adorno
Erich Fromm
Ernst Bloch
Raya Dunayevskyaya
Frantz Fanon
Martin Glaberman
Claude Lefort
Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Peter Kropotkin
Joseph Dejacque
Mikhail Bakunin
Carlo Cafiero
Johann Most
William Morris
Errico Malatesta
Emma Goldman
Volin
Sebastian Faure
Alexander Berkman
Nestor Makhno
Gregori Maximov
Gustav Landauer
Rudolph Rocker
Sam Dolgoff
Fredy Perlman
Murray Bookchin
Albert Meltzer
Stuart Christie
Noam Chomsky
Robert Kurz
Giovanni Arrighi
Samir Amin
Paul A. Baran
Andre Gunder Frank
Fernand Braudel
Paul Sweezy
Immanuel Wallerstein
Terry Eagleton
Istvan Meszaros
Perry Anderson
Ralph Miliband
Benedict Anderson
Mike Davis
Ellen Wood
Robin Blackburn
Andy Merrifield
Andrew Glyn
Andrew Kliman
Harry Magdoff
Alfredo Saad-Filho
David Harvey
Javier Sethness-Castro
Janet Biehl
Andrew Light
John Bellamy Foster
Joel Kovel
Ian Angus
David Pepper
Derek Wall
Barry Commoner
Michael Lowy
Ariel Salleh
Paul Burkett
James O’Conner
Ted Benton
Fred Magdoff
Brian Tokar

I removed all of the categorical headings because they weren't entirely sorted out correctly, so its just one big list.

And that's how you become a libertarian communist!

And looking over libcom''s reading guides, most of it is made up of those in that list.

For Harvey, rather than reading Rebel Cities, read A Brief History of Neo-liberalism. Its an easy read, and lays out a basic understanding of why things have changed so much in the last 30 years.

On the Spanish Revolution, I would recommend four books:

1. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell. It will give you a brief overview while telling the adventures of a Leftist who eventually had to escape from Spain because the Stalinists had put a price on his head.

2. Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, Gaston Leval. This is a book about the constructive achievements of the Anarchists in Spain. The author arrived in Spain during the Civil War, rapidly saw that the military situation was hopeless and decided his contribution was going to be to document the collectives for history, so they were not lost. The book is an inspiration.

3. Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Vernon Richards. This is the bad news about Spain. Richards sets out how the Anarchists stuffed up the war and the Revolution - how supposed Anarchists joined the Popular Front Government and, in doing so, robbed the Revolution of its chance of success. Read Leval before Richards, because you'll need the good news to help you endure the bad.

4. The Spanish Revolution, Burnett Bolloten. This is a book which documents meticulously how the so-called "Communist" Party betrayed the Revolution and crushed it. If you've ever harboured the thought that, despite their faults, the Stalinists had some good points, prepare to be cruelly disillusioned. The Stalinists engaged in stomach-churning deceptions in the course of a revolting project - drowning a workers' revolution in blood. Bolloten was there and he documents it all thoroughly. Take care, however - this work came out in three editions and the first one (The Grand Camouflage. The Communist conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War) is quite inadequate in its analysis. The second edition was the one that I read (its name is above) and sets out how there was a real workers' revolution going on there. It has a positive perspective on the role of the Anarchists in Spain, while I understand the third edition (The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution) is even better documented.

Is 'Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism' by Michael Schmidt supposed to be the follow-up to Black Flame?

http://www.akpress.org/cartography-of-revolutionary-anarchism.html

"Part history, part manifesto, Cartography of Revolution is a succinct and insightful polemic. Michael Schmidt has distilled a vast literature on anarchism to demonstrate that anarchism is a historical movement with deep roots in the working class and continuity into the present. The book is lively, with equal measures of pragmatic judgement and hope; it is plainspoken, powerful, and thoughtful. Activists and scholars interested in anarchism will find here much to contemplate and debate and take to heart."-Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: A Biography

For introductory material, I recommend Colin Ward's Anarchy in Action. Alexander Berkman's ABCs of Anarchism was the book that led me to identify as an anarchist and is also quite good and quite short, but somewhat dated in that Berkman ignores the changes in class relations brought about by the triumph of social democracy. The Communist Manifesto actually contains a lot of the rigid, deterministic elements of Marx's thought that I'm not so keen on, but Marx is a hugely important person to read. I recommend Wage-Labor and Capital, which is quite brief, and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts--also fairly short.

For theory, The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin is great, well-written, inspiring, and a very understandable explanation of anarchism in its essentials. I would actually discourage you from reading What Is To Be Done? until you're more familiar with its context. What Lenin wrote was very much influenced by the broader European socialist movement under the flag of the Second International, and you'll better understand What Is To Be Done? if you're more familiar with that and the socialists that inspired Lenin, namely Karl Kautsky and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in general.

Other than the aforementioned works by Marx, I recommend The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. It's very poetically written and an enjoyable, if occasionally cryptic, read that remains very relevant.

For history, I'd discourage you from seeking out any specifically Leninist takes on history. Particularly in the case of the Russian Revolution and the Makhnovists, any decent history book should describe the Bolshevik propaganda of the time and I can't imagine that spending long periods of time reading absurd and self-serving lies about the Makhnovists, the Kronstadt rebels, etc. would be at all enjoyable. Anyway, for the Spanish Revolution, I recommend Abel Paz's Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Despite its title, it's a pretty detailed account of the anarchist movement in Spain from the end of World War I to Durruti's death.

For the Russian Revolution, I recommend Voline's The Unknown Revolution, which gives particular attention to the Makhnovists and the Kronstadt uprising. Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist Movement focuses exclusively on the title subject and is a classic account of one of the more promising communist efforts in the territory that had made up the Russian Empire. Arshinov himself served among the Makhnovists, as did Voline, though more briefly--Voline actually draws much of the Makhnovist related material in The Unknown Revolution from Arshinov. Shorter works that I recommend are RM Jones' Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution and Ida Mett's The Kronstadt Uprising.

I'm less familiar with The Paris Commune than the topics already mentioned, but I did enjoy Marx's The Civil War in France. It's rather propagandistic, Thiers being especially villainized, but quite engaging.

For Occupy, my roommate highly recommended the recently released We Are Many from AK Press, which is a collection of accounts from participants in various encampments.

For the IWW, Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be All is somewhat dull IMO, but certainly very informative. Also informative about the broader American socialist movement of the time.

I'm not sure what good books I've read about fascism, though the excerpts I've read from The Anatomy of Fascism were promising, but When Insurrections Die by Gille Dauve and Nazism and the Working Class by Sergio Bologna are both excellent and are both on libcom (as are most of the texts I've mentioned).

You may also want to some about World War I. It was an enormously significant event, one that led to the greatest revolutionary wave in Europe of the 20th century and that very clearly exposed the weakness of the huge and influential pre-war socialist movement, something that has had very serious ramifications for communist practice ever since. I strongly recommend Rosa Luxemburg's short but excellent Junius Pamphlet, which details the relations of the various European powers prior to the war and the "betrayal" of the socialist parties that supported the war. As World War I was ended by the German Revolution, another event of great importance, you may wish to read about that as well. For that, I recommend Gille Dauve's The Communist Left in Germany 1918-1921 and also All Power to the Councils!, which is an anthology of contemporary documents (including a number of Luxemburg's articles).

great book -http://libcom.org/history/battle-spain-spanish-civil-war-1936-1939-anthony-beevor

Everything is related to everything, no historical event exists in isolation, but WW1 is an important key turning point in the history of the organised working classes, when the degeneracy of the social democratic parties was revealed by how they approached the war patriotically and the revolutionary wings of these (huge) parties broke with them. This is initially what placed Lenin, Luxembourg, Pannekoek, Ruhle etc. all in the same political camp. Bolshevik leadership essentially wanted an extremely radical form of social democracy in Russia whilst waiting for a world revolution that never came, but messed this up badly and in doing so corrupted the base nature of the main body of what was left of revolutionary marxism, laying the foundation for the recuperation of revolutionary marxism as the theory of the revolutionary (and for the most part despotic) left of capital.

The short of it is, WW1 is related to the events that determined why marxism is generally such a mess today, and why the strategy of the mainstream of marxism is incorrectly aligned. (anarchists have their own problems too, but they can mainly be traced to different historical events)

However, its really quite limited in explaining the nature of capitalism and the state of workers organisation today. For that, its necessary to study the post-WW2 period, the re-emergence of real communist organisation and mass workers struggle against capital (and how these often conflicted with the old and in some ways degenerated labour movement), and the global ruling class offensive of neo-liberalism and how it was used to solve the crises of capital in the last quarter of the 20th century, but also laid the basis for the 2008 crash which led to the sovereign debt crises and subsequent austerity and cuts that we are mobilising against today.

For the subject that Harrison mentioned (the emergence of neoliberalism and growth of finance capital over the last few decades), I highly recommend Aufheben's Return of the Crisis.

I'd recommend that as well!

Dunno if this'll be particularly helpful but we've compiled some libcom.org reading guides which cover some of the subjects which you seem to be interested in (Russian rev, Spanish civil war etc)..

Short answer: No. As far as I know, volume two looks likes its still a few years down the road.

...and has the working title, "Global Fire"

.

Seconded, it is an absolutely beautiful book. Inspirational, but oh so heartbreaking.

Its a bit long a wait, ain't it?

@iexist

You should definitely read Bakunin.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bakunin-on-anarchism.htm