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Don't listen to the haters, prioritize reading Marxists, they write the best stuff

This is a focused look at the post war era of industrial automation, rather than a wide ranging overview of all mechanization, just for clarity of expectations. But within that particular historical moment, Noble provides really insightful analysis of the driving factors behind the development of automation, usually focused more on control and taking away workers control than short term profit.

Excellent history from someone deeply involved in the historical events. I've learned a lot about the history of Palestine over the last few years but so far this is probably the best comprehensive history of the struggle that I've read so far. It does a great job punching through the Hasbara myths we are constantly bombarded with.

I highlighted more in the preface of this book than the 135 pages of Power and Progress by the two MIT liberal idiots. Putting that down for this was definitely the right call.

Ngl idk if I am gonna finish this one. Everyone says it's important to read non Marxists to explore broader viewpoints but if this is what they mean idk... Some extremely stupid and amateurish takes on history, including some outright fabrications. Maybe I should've expected that when one of the authors is a "professor of entrepreneurship" lmao

You don't hate landlords nearly enough. Coming into this book after years of on the ground mutual aid work with our local unhoused community and studying the issue, none of the structural problems are revelatory, but what sticks with you is the cruelty and degradation that this system forces people into.

Mao and the Chinese peasantry did absolutely nothing wrong in their righteous struggle for Landlord Removal.

Great book so far. One takeaway from the section I'm on covering the shift from the "long 1960s" to the 80s and Reaganism is that the more I learn about the downturn of the revolutionary movement in this country, the less sure I am that there was any one surefire tactical or strategic shift that could have reversed it.

Antonio Gramsci is one of history's most important political theorists, and one of his big contributions is our understanding of how "common sense" is formed through the dominant class ideology. He assigned the role of "civil society", dominated by the same class as the state and acting with it, to actively work to reproduce this ideology. Copaganda exposes in detail how the media-state apparatus works today.

Just barely starting this and already I'm ready to recommend it. Alec gets straight to the heart of the media propaganda industry around crime and keeping everyone constantly afraid. Buy this, read it, then get your mom to read it too.

The deeper I get into this the more frustrating it becomes. Gilmore is clearly a brilliant, rigorous scholar, but has also absorbed many of the worst aspects of the Western academy. Aversion to power, fetishization of spontaneity, endless description of the systemic actions of the ruling class but denial of their agency as a group, it's all here and weakens what could be a much stronger analysis.

Gilmore's political economy of California is a deeply researched, extensively sourced review of the reshaping of the California economy during the Great Stagnation crisis of the 1970s. However, her deep aversion to ascribing any kind of agency to the ruling class in their project of expansive social control through the apparatus of the state in order to maintain their power (too "conspiratorial") is frustrating.

It's crazy reading this in 2026 and seeing how basically every one of its arguments has become well understood common sense as a result of the 2020 uprisings. Thankfully following the failure of the Dems to do anything and the insane Gestapo terror facing us today, consciousness around abolition over reform seems to be growing.

"the uses to which government puts the surplus which it absorbs are narrowly circumscribed by the nature of monopoly capitalist society and as time goes on become more and more irrational and destructive."

Set this down last year to focus more reading on Palestine. Unfortunately, this book has now acquired much more immediate relevancy.

Capitalism's Invisible Army...

The 70s really do seem to be the high point for Marxist knowledge production in US academic institutions

This book is so fire and exactly what the Western Left needs in this moment. The question of the struggle against colonialism in Palestine divides the actual internationalist workers movement from the social fascist "left" who want to minimize the ongoing genocide, or isolate it as "just one issue".

Only through the first chapter and already this is a big recommend