Reading

Most progressives know that the right wing has been wildly successful in enacting their agenda – the neoliberal agenda – over the past few decades. But we’ve misunderstood the secrets of their success, and taken the wrong lessons from it. Bhargava and Hardisty provide an analysis of the RIGHT lessons we should take from their success to build our own.

“Jonathan Smucker is a critical voice within an emerging political project whose aim is to move the next left generation from symbolic and often self-marginalizing strategies toward approaches that can lead to effective main-stage intervention.” - Max Elbaum, author of Revolution In The Air

A key part of this book, by two British socialist academics, is its examination of the Mont Pelerin Society, a right wing network which has played a major role in the growth and ultimate global success of neoliberalism.

“Their diagnoses of the shortcomings of what they call ‘folk politics’ [such as Occupy] are perceptive, clear, brutal, but respectful. Their prescription for the future [like supporting Universal Basic Income] can seem vertiginously sudden…Critically, they identify our urgent task: to own modernity.” - Zoe Williams, Guardian

[from the cover] [This book] weaves together theory, experience and context to help leaders deal creatively and concretely with the full range of organizational issues. [It] will help the reader:

- Turn an inactive or overly active board into a valuable resource

- Improve staff and member morale

- Supervise staff and volunteers more effectively and humanely

- Banish boring meetings

- Plan strategy more dynamically and democratically

- Turn internal conflicts into creative and productive outcomes

- And more

The book argues that Americans have been fed a “zero-sum story” that says progress for people of color will take away what white Americans already have. McGhee explains that racism actually costs all Americans, by allowing wealthy conservatives to take away resources from all of us. I believe that this is the central point we must make as we battle racism through politics.

“Their harrowing and extensively documented study lends much credibility to their supposition that COINTELPRO lives on, and efforts to organize poor and oppressed people and dissident movements will be targeted for destruction by state power.” - Noam Chomsky

This is a must read, especially for young activists who may not be aware of this history, which goes back a long way. The way the FBI foments division within and between organizations and movements is especially important for everyone to understand, when they see this happen in their own environments.

This book was released in 2000, before the advent of social media. The problems it discusses have grown exponentially, and the need to address them even more urgent. I believe the increased violence we see both online and IRL, the normalization of death threats, all that comes at least in part from the fact that too many people have lost all meaningful connection with others, and substituted it with the manufactured "facts" and emotion from social media. If we ensure that our movements are welcoming and warm places where people can find a home and a purpose, we can bring at least some of those people back.

[From the cover] Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures - be they the PTA, church, or political parties – have disintegrated…No one has so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor has anyone exalted the fundamental power of these bonds in creating a society that is happy, well educated, healthy and safe….[Putnam] has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.

Jentleson is former chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid, and blessedly, now chief of staff for Sen. John Fetterman. The book makes a compelling case that the filibuster is THE key to how progressive policies almost always die in the US Senate. “Kill Switch is a damning account of how a tool honed to maintain white supremacy has come to cost us all…You’ll understand why Obama called the filibuster a Jim Crow relic, and you’ll want to join the movement to end it, for the sake of our economy, our democracy and our planet.” - Heather McGhee

“In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best-known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished…

Wilkerson’s is essentially a two-tier [American] caste system – dominant or white, and subordinate or non-white. The signal of rank in the American hierarchy is caste’s “faithful servant,” race… Wilkerson’s choice of examining caste rather than race is a valuable one; this book is not about biology, social history or science, but about structural power… - Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian

Full disclosure: I am a sustaining donor to Our Revolution and supported Bernie for President in 2020.

“A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like.” – Politics & Prose