With so much to read, people often ask us where to start. The ROC DSA Political Education Committee set out to make a list of no more than five works. We wanted to cover the basics: a critique of capitalism, including patriarchal, racial, and imperial exploitation; a vision of socialism; and the basic tools of organizing for a better world. Here is our list. Read up and let us know what you think!
1. Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
In No Shortcuts (2016), Jane McAlevey argues that meaningful social change requires a shift from shallow “mobilizing” to deep “organizing,” which centers on building high-participation unions and empowering ordinary people to exercise collective power.
McAlevey builds her argument with five case studies that outline how “whole-worker” organizing and rigorous “structure tests” build bottom-up movements that win transformational victories.
By drawing lessons as well as inspiration from recent organizing victories, we better equip ourselves for new wins.
2. Michael Löwy, “Why Socialism Must Be Internationalist”
Michael Löwy’s 2020 article, “Why Socialism Must Be Internationalist,” reflects on the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg to demonstrate how socialists might understand national divisions. Consistently throughout her life, Luxemburg advocated against colonialism and capitalist wars. She saw that all the working people of the world must unite to rid the world of capitalist exploitation.
Löwy also explains how Luxemburg’s analysis can help us differentiate between internationalism—a socialist perspective that rejects national chauvinism—and globalization—a tactic of integrating the entire world into a unified capitalist system.
3. The Combahee River Collective Statement
The Combahee River Collective Statement is a foundational text of socialist feminism and Black feminism from 1977. In it, Barbara Smith and others discuss “interlocking oppressions,” arguing that systems of race, gender, class, and sexuality are inseparable and must be challenged simultaneously. They introduce the concept of “identity politics,” noting that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.”
4. Fredrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Friedrich Engels recounts the basic theoretical development of socialist thought and theory through the throughlines of previous radical movements, protosocialists, and utopian socialists who dined at the table of an absolute and ideal Reason. He also lays out the differences between these past movements and a developed, “scientific” socialism that we find ourselves in the lineage of. Engels explicates the background of the dialectical method and the materialist mode of analysis.
5. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism
In Health Communism (2022), Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant (hosts of the Death Panel podcast), argue that capitalism creates a “surplus” class of people who are deemed unproductive to capital. Capitalists drive a wedge between the “surplus” and the workers to undermine class solidarity. At any moment, a worker can become a part of the “surplus” owing to unemployment, sickness, disability, aging, and so on.
Health Communism examines the systems that perpetuate this divide and calls for revolutionary politics to create a system that works for human beings and not just labor that can be exploited by capital.
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