Reddit reviews Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
We found 3 Reddit comments about Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
We found 3 Reddit comments about Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Socialism/Communism
A People's History of the World
Main Currents of Marxism
The Socialist System
The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)
Marx for our Times
Essential Works of Socialism
Soviet Century
Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)
The Meaning of Marxism
The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)
Of the People, by the People
Why Not Socialism
Socialism Betrayed
Democracy at Work
Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)
The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)
The American Socialist Movement
Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)
It Didn't Happen Here
Eugene V. Debs
The Enigma of Capital
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action
Capitalism
The Conservative Nanny State
The United States Since 1980
The End of Loser Liberalism
Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)
Economics: A New Introduction (must read)
U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)
Kicking Away the Ladder
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Traders, Guns and Money
Corporation Nation
Debunking Economics
How Rich Countries Got Rich
Super Imperialism
The Bubble and Beyond
Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents
Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
America's Protectionist Takeoff
How the Economy was Lost
Labor and Monopoly Capital
We Are Better Than This
Ancap/Libertarian
Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)
Man, State and Economy
The Machinery of Freedom
Currently Reading
This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)
Well you've come to the right place, then!
For a cursory treatment of these ideas, like with many ideas, wikipedia is a good starting point.
History of capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Origins_of_capitalism
Enclosure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
History of modern policing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#Early_modern_policing
Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is kind of the go to introduction to classical anarchism. Its a good book, and it details the relationship between capitalism, the owner class, the working class, and police, as well as discussing alternatives to the our current social configuration: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm
The Conquest of Bread is also available as a free audiobook: https://librivox.org/search?title=The+Conquest+of+Bread&author=Kropotkin&reader=&keywords=&genre_id=0&status=all&project_type=either&recorded_language=&sort_order=catalog_date&search_page=1&search_form=advanced
The concepts of biopower and the spectacle are developed by the writers Michel Foucault and Guy Debord respectively. Their writing can be a little dense, but these concepts and their authors have wikipedia pages which make these ideas a little more accessible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacle_%28critical_theory%29
Also, this is a reading of Debord's Society of the Spectacle laid over a collage of contemporary footage which conveys the concepts discussed. This is a sort of remake of a film Debord himself made in the '70s. Very very cool: https://vimeo.com/60328678
Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) also happens to be an historian and has produced an excellent documentary about medieval Europe. In the first episode he discusses the lives of the peasantry which is somewhat relevant to this discussion. There are certainly aspects of medieval living that I'm not keen to revive. But there is a nugget of gold in that form of life that we've lost in our contemporary context. Anarchists want a return to that sense of autonomy and deep social bonds within communities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTWsUvT8nsw
An Anarchist FAQ is a very thorough, contemporary, and systematized introduction to anarchist ideas: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
Noam Chomsky's On Anarchism is an accessible introduction to anarchism that focuses on a modern, large-scale, industrial anarchist society that existed in Spain in the 1930s, to illustrate the concepts underpinning anarchist thought. It's a bit of hokey in parts, especially in the little chapter introductions which are just quotes from Q&A sessions with Dr. Chomsky. But if you can get past that, its good: https://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-Noam-Chomsky/dp/1595589104
Chomsky also wrote Manufacturing Consent and Profit Over People, which are much less shallow than On Anarchism, and document how the state maintains a facade of legitimacy and some of the things that the contemporary state (circa 1999... its a little out of date, but not terrible in that respect) does to sophisticate the relationship between owner and worker. Chomsky is probably best known publicly for those two texts, but he has a lot of work in a lot of different fields. He's a pretty prolific intellectual with numerous contributions to political theory, linguistics, cognitive theory, philosophy, and computer science.
Richard Wolff is an economist who has taught at Yale, UMass, City College NY, and is currently teaching at New School. He does a monthly update on global capitalism where he kind of tries to give a bird's eye view of how our global economy shifts and develops from month to month. He also does weekly updates too, but I can never manage to stay up to date on those: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdMCTlHl5RQ&t=1836s
Anthropologist David Harvey's book 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism details many of the ways in which capitalism appears to be constantly fighting against itself for survival, all the while heightening the conditions which cause capitalism to become precarious in the first place: https://www.amazon.com/Seventeen-Contradictions-Capitalism-David-Harvey/dp/0190230851
This is a film about where capitalism is headed, and what it will look like in 2030: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vApEgrLf7S4
Encirclement: Neoliberalism Ensnares Democracy is a documentary which discusses some of the ways that capitalism post-1968 has shifted so as to wrest more power away from communities. Its very similar to Noam Chomsky's Power Over People, and Chomsky is featured prominently alongside several other intellectuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh44qlii6X4
We Are All Very Anxious is a really cool and short text by anonymous writers about how the different stages of capitalism impact the psychiatric health of the individual. Its availible as a free text, or as a short audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_5NlY-4mI
This is Albert Einstien's short introductory essay on socialism called Why Socialism. Its not an advocacy of Anarchism per se, and I'm skeptical about the (admitedly vague) path to socialism that he lays out. But some of the concerns he raises at the end of the essay are problems that Anarchism aims to directly address: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
George Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) spent time living in and fighting for the Spanish Anarchist society that Chomsky focuses on in On Anarchism, and he documents his experiences in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia: https://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0156421178
The Take, by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis is a film that documents a growth of anarchist factories, offices, and communities following the 2001 financial collapse in Argentina. Today these communities still exist and control hundreds of workplaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOCsfEYqsYs
This is a short film about the anarchist nation of Rojava (northern syria, western kurdistan) which formed in 2013 in the midsts of the Syrian civil war, and is currently the primary boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p40M1WSwNk&t=8s
Since the early-mid '90s most of Chiapas, Mexico has operated as an anarchist society in direct defiance of the Mexican government and NAFTA. In addition to providing for their own communities, Chiapas is also the 8th largest producer of coffee in the world. This is a short documentary about that society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HAw8vqczJw&t=2s
This is a children's film about the same people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNuzFQW3uI&t=463s
Resistencia is a documentary about anarchist communities emerging in Honduras in the wake of the 2009 US-backed coup: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/resistencia
Marx' Capital is a foundational text in modern socialist thought. It lacks some of the cool ideas of the 20th century (a genealogy of morality, the spectacle, and biopower as examples) but is very thorough in providing an economic critique of capitalism. Capital is dense, massive (three volumes long), and incomplete, but David Harvey has a great series of lectures which go along with the texts: http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/
This is another pretty dense one, but if you watch that lecture series and/or read Capital, Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy is an interesting follow up text. Carson looks at the plethora of arguments that have developed since the publication of capital which try to recuperate economics to before Marx' critique. In it he discusses and critiques subjective value theory, marginalism, and time preference, which all ultimately argue in different ways that the the prices of goods are determined primarily by demand, rather than the cost of production, a rejection of an important conjecture in classical economics which Marx' critique incorporates. Carson's overarching critique of these responses to Marx and the Marxian approach isn't that these demand-focused understandings of value are entirely wrong or useless, but that as critiques of classical cost theory of value they kind of lose sight of what Marx and the classicals were actually saying. While demand is an important aspect of production, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, etc... are looking at the case where supply and demand have reached equilibrium. While demand may be a determining factor of price where this isn't the case, we know that competitive commodity markets tend towards a supply/demand equilibrium, so an analysis of the equilibrium case is useful for analyzing the form that markets take in the long-term. You can justify small gains through market arbitrage for example, or the way we value art and other unique works by looking at demand, but its not as useful for understanding how someone can see consistent long-term gains through investment: https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MPE.pdf
In this post I provide a summary of some of the ideas that Carson discusses thats not anywhere nearly as thorough as Carson, but isn't quite as condensed as the above paragraph (If you look closely, you'll notice I recycled some of my earlier post from this one): https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/53e0e8/socialists_from_ltv_to_exploitation/d7scmya/
(cont...)
I'd personally start with a few videos, then work your way into literature. The literature I suggest below is intentionally easy to read.
Literature by Marx and Engels:
I guess somewhere around here you can start reading Marx and Engel's other works, with Capital being your priority. Where you go after that is up to you.
Some interesting literature: