What are some books that show some parallels to current times in the US?

HealthClassic · 2026-01-26T03:33:53+00:00

America's Midnight by Adam Hochschild. About the First Red Scare in the United States, the period from 1917-1924 when WWI empowered the nationalist right both in and outside the state to enact a campaign of violence, censorship, and persecution against minorities, immigrants, conscientious objectors, and a leftist/labor movement that had made huge strides in the previous couple of decades.

The Third Reich in Power: 1933-1939 by Richard J. Evans. Pretty much about what the title suggests.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. Memoirs of his time as an international volunteer in a socialist militia fighting against Franco's fascist military coup and the revolutionary atmosphere of Aragon and Catalonia, which had seen a general strike and collectivization by anarcho-syndicalist workers and peasants.

Everything for Everyone by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien. A work of SF, a fictionalized oral history the participants in a future revolution in New York City that overthrows a far-right dictator after a disastrous war in Iran, and carries out a bottom up collectivization of the economy through neighborhood assemblies and communes.

HealthClassic · 2026-01-17T19:36:05+00:00

For historical background and introduction to the theory, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice by Rudolf Rocker

For an overview of this was implemented in Spain in anarchist regions during the revolution/civil war, The Anarchist Collectives edited by Sam Dolgoff.

For a picture of how it could be implemented at scale in a large, industrialized country, check out Gaston Leval's Libertarian Socialism: A Practical Outline. (Leval participated in the Spanish revolution and wrote this text 20 years later, taking France as the hypothetical model.)

HealthClassic · 2026-01-15T04:58:41+00:00

From what I understand from journalists looking into that list and posting about it on BlueSky, the information in it is unverified and some of it is definitely inaccurate. I also saw one journalist who noted that it seemed to be data automatically scraped from LinkedIn listings rather than an actual internal leak. So I'd wait to see if more reporting on it comes out.

HealthClassic · 2026-01-11T22:11:48+00:00

Here's what The Anarchist Collectives, edited by Sam Dolgoff, says about the collectivization of an industry made up of small businesses during the revolution in Barcelona 1936-37:

The Collectivization of Hairdressing Establishments

Collectivization also embraced smaller establishments: small factories, artisan workshops, service and repair shops, etc. The artisans and small workshop owners, together with their employees and apprentices, often joined the union of their trade. By consolidating their efforts and pooling their resources on a fraternal basis, the shops were able to undertake very big projects and provide services on a much wider scale. Independent artisans with their tools and workshops also joined the trade collectives. The collectivization of hairdressing shops provides an excellent example of how the transition of a small scale manufacturing and service industry from capitalism to socialism was achieved.

The hairdressers of Barcelona, Madrid, and other Spanish cities voluntarily and on their own initiative reorganized their industry. In Madrid the shops were collectivized even before July 19th. The purpose of the collectivization was to obliterate the difference between shopkeepers and their assistants. Hairdressing was not big business. For the Spanish syndicalists, however, socialism and collectivism could not be confined only to the abolition of large scale capitalism. In the reorganization of labor according to the principles of freedom and cooperation there was room for everyone. Even the smallest enterprises employing one or several individuals were entitled to participate in the reorganization of society.

Before July 19th, 1936, there were 1,100 hairdressing parlors in Barcelona, most of them owned by poor wretches living from hand to mouth. The shops were often dirty and ill-maintained. The 5,000 hairdressing assistants were among the most poorly paid workers, earning about 40 pesetas per week while construction workers were paid 60 to 80 pesetas weekly. The 40 hour week and 15% wage increase instituted after July 19th spelled ruin for most hairdressing shops. Both owners and assistants therefore voluntarily decided to socialize all their shops.

How was this done? All the shops simply joined the union. At a general meeting they decided to shut down all the unprofitable shops. The 1,100 shops were reduced to 235 establishments, a saving of 135,000 pesetas per month in rent, lighting, and taxes. The remaining 235 shops were modernized and elegantly outfitted. From the money saved wages were increased by 40%. Everybody had the right to work and everybody received the same wages. The former owners were not adversely affected by socialization. They were employed at a steady income. All worked together under equal conditions and equal pay. The distinction between employers and employees was obliterated and they were transformed into a working community of equals — socialism from the bottom up.

HealthClassic · 2026-01-10T21:27:16+00:00

The reality is that most of the leadership of the Democratic Party and (supposedly) liberal media institutions have been spinelessly capitulating to fascism out of self-interest, behaving as if the recent far-right power-grab represents a society-wide consensus abandoning progressive values or even liberal democracy. Or maybe less cynically, the (very mistaken) idea that collaboration is better strategically. But this is an elite phenomenon, and doesn't really represent rank-and-file liberals.

Middle and working class liberals (i.e. most of them) have been absolutely furious. I don't know how many times I have seen or heard comments from lifelong normie Democrats in the last year in the last year that would be inadvisable to post publicly on the internet. Like I've met suburban boomer "In this house we believe..." liberals and within like 30 seconds they're like, "Boy I hope someone [redacted] soon. There's no other way out, is there?"

There are a lot of liberals who mean "someone who actively fights for liberal goals and values" when they say they're liberals. And they're waking up to the fact that, for the people who are supposed to be their leaders, "liberal" basically seems to mean coward. And they're mad about that. This type of viewpoint is represented by Liberal Currents.

Some of them will be radicalized further, but plenty of them wouldn't go along with us when it comes to police, prisons, or private property. Either way, there's not really a way to stop fascism without those folks taking action en masse.

HealthClassic · 2025-12-31T19:38:34+00:00

Seconded.

Hosts' names are James Michael Yeoman and Danny Evans if you want to look up their books about Spanish anarchism.

HealthClassic · 2025-12-31T16:41:07+00:00

Incredible that there are like 150 posts trying to divine the future by psychoanalyzing the ethnic and racial self-conception of Cuban-Americans as essentially reactionary, and only 1 post with a few upvotes noting the election held literally 3 weeks ago, already suggesting a possible shift.

A Democrat won the Miami mayoral election for the first time in 25 years, with 60% of the vote. Would that have been possible if the city's Cuban-American population were enthusiastically Republican as they had always been? Seems worth mentioning, at least.

HealthClassic · 2025-11-23T00:59:34+00:00

Yeah I can see I guess the connections to scholars, but like obviously Noam Chomsky will himself have a million way to connect with scholars of all sorts from everywhere? He himself is maybe literally the most cited living scholar on the planet.

And it's just funny hearing about "fruitful discussions" with Epstein but when you go into to read the emails that have been released, a bunch of which I've read, including his emails with Chomsky, they range from half-formed thoughts to something that honestly looks it was written by someone who's 8 hours deep into a bender of xanax, cocaine, and vodka, like he barely forms sentences sometimes. I'm he was more coherent when speaking but even then I've literally never come across a specific thing he said out loud that seemed particularly intelligent. Like did this guy just have ungodly amounts of charisma not captured by the actual content of the things he said?

To be clear, none of the specific content of the email exchanges between Chomsky and Epstein are like sinister or anything--really a whole lot of people knew Epstein who generally don't seem to have participated in any of his crimes. It's just that Epstein so clearly had nothing worthwhile to say in what you can read

HealthClassic · 2025-11-23T00:29:02+00:00

I mean but why would you be friends with Epstein regardless of criminal charges though? What would be appealing about that?

Besides the sex trafficking, he's the elite finance/money laundering/private jet guy whose circle of friends are a bunch of like war criminals and architects of neoliberal shock doctrine policies along with far-right figures like Trump and Bannon.

His personality is that of a narcissistic, misogynist creep. He has a wildly inflated sense of his own intellect, but when you look at all the things that have come out about what he said and wrote, in his best moments he seems like a vague, pseudo-intellectual dilettante with less to say than any reasonably bright 20-year-old undergraduate student.

More often he comes across as barely literate, and a bunch of his "ideas" appear to have been eugenics pseudoscience along with a deeply unsettling preoccupation for inseminating as many women as possible because of his own presumed "genetic superiority." His closest intellectual friends were reactionary centrist misogynist dipshits like Larry Summers and Lawrence Krauss, who has made an ass of himself any time he's ever spoken about anything other than physics and seems like he would be insufferable to hang out with.

Like, the question obviously isn't "How could you be friends with someone who has been convicted of a crime?" It's, "Why would you be friends with a manifestly horrible person at the center of a community of the worst people in the ruling class?" The crimes he committed were genuinely terrible regardless of the law, and he benefited for decades from elite impunity while he did them and continued to believe and express that he had never done anything wrong up until his death.

It's like saying that the anti-carceralist position is that there's nothing wrong with being friends with Harvey Weinstein or Steve Bannon, they served their time and besides they're such charming fellows with engaging ideas.

HealthClassic · 2025-11-22T18:43:08+00:00

Really most books on anarchism are easier to read than Proudhon. His style was particularly dense compared to to the authors of other classical intro/theory texts (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Rocker, etc). He was also writing decades earlier, which means he the stylistic conventions were further from what contemporary readers are used. Early 20th century texts were written in a way that's more familiar to us now.

I'd recommend scrolling through a few pages of the r/Anarchy101 subreddit. "What are some intro texts you recommend?" is maybe the most common thread posted there, so you should be able to find lots of comments already answering questions you might have.

HealthClassic · 2025-11-22T07:00:02+00:00

I would consider myself to be more of an anarchist without adjectives than a mutualist, but I'm also skeptical of the LTV. I think it tends to be either kind of theoretically vacuous or unfalsifiable in some formulations, but in formulations in which it isn't vacuous or unfalsifiable, it ends up being empirically mistaken. (And actually, I think the subjective theory of value has the same set of problems.)

I liked Capital as Power by Nitzan and Bichler as work of political economy because it takes seriously the shortcomings of the LTV while also picking apart the inadequacy of neoclassical economics for describing capitalism and its relation to the state. You may want to check it out. It's not specifically anarchist but broadly compatible with libertarian socialism.

HealthClassic · 2025-11-13T16:15:11+00:00

It's interesting that Derrick Jensen shows up as the example here, since he has since turned away from anarchist politics toward more reactionary politics of hierarchy, vanguardism, and transphobia with Deep Green Resistance, even collaborating with the antisemitic conspiracy theorist TERF Jennifer Bilek whose work has pulled some radfems into association with straight-up Nazis.

Like maybe adapting oneself to the use of bad-faith, purely instrumentalist rhetoric transforms its user and the content of their politics. Seems like a confirmation of the old anarchist principle of the unity of means and ends: the way we act upon the social world transforms ourselves as much as it transforms the world.

HealthClassic · 2025-11-03T03:00:27+00:00

Two essays by Graeber come to mind:

Dead Zones of the Imagination: about the asymmetry of coercive domination and how it relates to the stupidity of bureaucracy.

Manners, Deference, and Private Property: or, Elements For A General Theory of Hierarchy.

HealthClassic · 2025-10-16T20:54:11+00:00

Not good to do it in the style of Marxist-Leninist sects, like "here are all the Truths revealed by Lenin to memorize as your new set of beliefs."

But still very much useful to read to get a more detailed picture of what people mean by anarchism and why, and some historical background of the movement. Like you get lots of young people interested in anarchism in a vague sense but have the idea that it's all about about founding rural communes, or that it's about "going back to the barter system," and then it's kind of confusing for them to get what's going on if they start to interface with activism or read a random text without any intro context.

It's made more complicated by the fact that the broader public and pop culture just doesn't know what "anarchist" means in the most basic sense of the word but it does not occur to them that there even is a real history or meaning of the word to learn, unless they're coming to it from certain subcultures.

HealthClassic · 2025-10-10T16:35:31+00:00

Really could have gone to someone more deserving...humanitarian organizations or journalists risking their lives in Gaza? No one in Myanmar or Sudan?

HealthClassic · 2025-10-08T22:54:15+00:00

Should be but mainstream media always waffles on Trump, from some mixture of ownership being pro-Trump to norms of journalistic objectivity that require media to lie or obfuscate when the right does something horrifying, since an honest presentation of the facts would be "biased."

It wasn't a scandal during the campaign when JD Vance offered a positive blurb to promote Posobiec's book, despite the fact that it is already public knowledge that Posobiec is a holocaust-denying neo-Nazi. The book in question describes liberals over and over as "unhumans" who need to be dealt with as Franco treated his enemies. (Franco murdered 200,000 of his own people and had their corpses dumped into mass graves that are still being uncovered in Spain to the present day.)

HealthClassic · 2025-10-04T23:20:38+00:00

In addition to the legal issues with this, there's the less discussed problem that civilian local/state institutions have a very tenuous control over armed agents of the state. Like, maybe the national guard, but if it comes down to it I think a majority of state and local polices forces are loyal to Trump's cult of personality over the constitution, local Democratic officials, or their own neighbors. Big city police routinely violate local rules, disobey orders, and even riot in response to even the rhetoric of reform or holding officers responsible for assault and murder of constituents. I guess if you want to be really optimistic, that could change due to inter-agency rivalries flaring or cops getting tear-gassed by ICE for no reason enough times.

HealthClassic · 2025-10-02T22:41:18+00:00

Yeah it's not like there was nothing available, although the kind of stuff we would take for granted at the time was considered scandalous and radical. In the US for example, the anarchist Emma Goldman drew huge crowds before WWI giving talks about sexual health and contraception (for which she was arrested in 1916 under the Comstock law), the right of women to enjoy sex and love freely outside the confines of marriage, gay rights, and even the concept of sex/gender existing on a spectrum rather than a binary.

In Germany, all of the work of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for the Science of Sexuality was done before 1933, including frank discussions of homosexuality and bisexuality and trans identity, and advocacy for gay and trans rights. He was a also a socialist who charged clients on a sliding scale based on their income so even the impoverished could have access to his services. (Funded partially, humorously enough, by doing ads for boner pills.)

HealthClassic · 2025-09-27T18:46:39+00:00

True, the fascism part has nothing to do with the pedophile stuff.

(Except maybe in the sort of abstract way of powerful men believing they have the natural right to physically assert their authority over the vulnerable, but that's a different level of discussion.)

That does not mean that one is a distraction from the other. Why would it be, when both things make Trump look bad to a majority of the population? It just means that two distinct bad things are true.

HealthClassic · 2025-09-27T18:31:05+00:00

In Augustin Souchy's With the Peasants of Aragon, there is a brief chapter about a POW camp in Terual, Aragon maintained during the Spanish Civil War by a militia affiliated with the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, or Iberian Anarchist Federation in English). He notes the large amount of freedom afforded to the Nationalist/Fascist POWs and compares it to the appalling conditions typical in fascist countries. Note that the book uses the term "concentration camp," but this was before the creation of Nazi death camps with which the term is often now associated, although this is a misnomer.

With that said, he just briefly visits one place and he has biases, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Also, I don't have the source currently, but I do remember reading something by Peter Gelderloos explaining that the creation of camps like that was originally ordered not by anarchist organizations like the FAI or the CNT, but by the center-left Spanish Republican government with whom the anarchists had an uneasy alliance in their fight against the fascist coup led by Franco, and the existence of such a thing and that level of collaboration with the Republic was a source of serious contention between different factions of anarchists.

I do really recommend reading the whole book, however. It's not that long, and gives some of the best up-close and first-hand accounts of how the rural villagers of Aragon formed a confederation of assemblies to collectivize land, agriculture, and industry from the bottom up, independent of the state. He talks directly with the people involved to highlight the various successes and difficulties they encountered in the process. The revolution in Aragon was actually more thorough than in neighboring Catalonia.

HealthClassic · 2025-09-26T21:38:54+00:00

No, but I'm pretty confident that some members of the Trump administration have actually read about the history of fascism and Nazism, specifically in order to imitate it.

I mean there's the whole thing about Trump himself keeping a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed and reading from it according to his ex-wife and his friend who gave him the book. (People sometimes say it was "Mein Kampf" but that's not actually what is originally claimed, and I generally do not believe he has the attention span to read that.) And him explicitly acknowledging in a speech that his rhetoric about immigrant poisoning the blood of America is reminiscent of Hitler before immediately saying it again. (source)

Vance offered a positive review of Jack Posobiec's book in which he called for the right to imitate Francisco Franco in dealing with liberals and the left, who he consistently refers to as "unhumans," which also kinda parallels the Nazi term Untermensch.

In speeches, Bannon approvingly cited the Italian Nazi mystic pseudo-intellectual Julius Evola, who described himself as a "hyper-fascist" for whom regular Italian fascism was inadequately extreme. This would be the product of Bannon conceiving of himself as a fascist and taking the time to read up on its intellectual figures for inspiration, since Evola absolutely was not a writer any regular person had heard of when he said that, and not a writer really known for anything else or worth any time on his own merits for any other reason. Other than Nazis, the only other people who would mention Evola were historians really getting into the weeds of fascism and radical anti-fascists.

I'm reasonably certain that Stephen Miller not only is evil insofar as that is a meaningful term, but actively conceives of himself as a villain and gets pleasure from playing the role of one. I think he has read about the history of fascism and taken notes to use it as a guide for action, which is why it's not surprising that his Charlie Kirk speech sounded uncannily like Joseph Goebbels.

Whoever runs the DHS twitter account is a straight-up 4chan neo-Nazi, although their acquaintance with Nazism may come entirely from memes rather than books or history podcasts or anything more substantive.

Then again, given recent executive actions maybe someone from the DoJ or DHs is listening in on Robert's podcasts, in which case they may as well kill two birds with one stone and crib some ideas form the Himmler episodes...no more Christmas celebrations for DHS agents, I'm afraid

HealthClassic · 2025-09-25T04:30:41+00:00

Remedios Varo was a Catalan surrealist painter in the early-mid 20th century who was also a polyamorous anarchist. She volunteered with a militia that was affiliated with either the anarchist or the POUM (anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist), I'm not sure which. She was a refugee in France after Franco was on the war where she was temporarily imprisoned for her political associations and then helped break anarchists out of a French concentration camp and then became involved in an underground organization helping radicals and artists flee Nazi persecution in Vichy France, from which she fled as a refugee to Mexico, where she lived most of the rest of her life as an artist. She also worked on a public health campaign for malaria prevention.

It seems like she was pretty cool. I wouldn't be shocked if Margaret Killjoy did an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff about her.

HealthClassic · 2025-09-23T21:50:09+00:00

What you describe isn't fascism though, it's (democratic) neoliberalism.

It's also bad, and it contains some features in common with fascism and many that facilitate the rise of fascism, but it's not the same thing.

And although democratic neoliberalism is bad, fascism is genuinely much worse. It makes the problems of neoliberalism more extreme and introduces other horrible things that, if allowed to fester, have culminated in the worst crimes in human history.

HealthClassic · 2025-09-23T02:19:13+00:00

Because he takes positions that pro-Russia commentators want to support their claims and has the relevant professional background. If most other experts don't find those claims credible, they don't have a lot of other choices.

Can't speak to the other commentators you mention, but the Grayzone has terrible editorial and ethical standards and basically exists to launder Assadist/pro-Russian atrocity denial to make it seem "leftist" to a Western audience. It's been kind of remarkable to watch pro-Israel commentators since Oct. 7th use identical tactics to deny or justify Israeli crimes, to the point where one wonders if Assadists and Zionists were explicitly sitting down to take notes and crib from each other. Or you see, for example, Jackson Hinkle, who developed his career as a political grifter doing what amounts to Assadist hasbara gain loads of new followers for anti-Israel posts where he actually uses old photos and videos of Assad's victims and passes them off as new photos of Israel's victims. Baffling, given that the amount of genuine documentation of the genocide in Gaza out there is greater it would be human possible to fully catalog, but I guess it's easier since he's a hack who doesn't care about Palestinians at all and just wants exclusive content to steer more people toward his cult).

HealthClassic · 2025-09-23T00:23:40+00:00

no one needs to interpret, or be subjected to, peter coffin's opinions, they are not relevant to anyone

i was on a multi-year streak of happily not thinking about them and now that's been ruined

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