What are you currently reading, Holla Forums?

...

I just wouldn't know why considering there'll be no catharsis at the end, other than "at least it's not as dystopian as in the book" and that's hardly comforting

Plato's Phaedrus
I fell for the start with the Greeks meme

Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Insurrection. I finished Capitalist Realism and Against the Double Blackmail last week.

90 % through Bukarin's "ABC of Communism"
40 % through "Ode to Catalonia"
75% through "Capitalist Realism"

I'm also slowly getting my way through Capital vol. 2 piece by piece.

I like to read several things at once but I'm worried I might be spread a little thin just now. Especially with exams coming up.

"On Culture and Cultural Revolution" by Lenin
archive.org/details/OnCultureAndCulturalRevolution

Tryna find a nice physical copy of Das Kapital

Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy and Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology.

I finally started with Das Kapital. The reputarion that is has of being a hard book is true but hard things don't get easier if you don't start reading them. I had to start at some point in my life.

Freud's psychology of masses

Pic related

Honestly the hardest part is the first chapter, it is a shit ton easier after that

Just finished reading Anarchy by Errico Malatesta.

Nice, good stuff

I've got less than a hundred pages left of the Bread Book, and I'm also reading a collection of Freud's essays for school.

Seemed appropriate.

just noticed that.

...

For a school project I'm doing.

The first volume of Bataille's Summa Atheologica, Inner Experience. So far it has been a fun ride, weird as fuck but fun nevertheless and it is much more readable than Erotism.
Before Bataille it was Lenin's book on Imperialism, fun read, it was nice to see ranting against banks and the fictitious capital.
I still have a nice stack to go, not sure on where to go next after finishing Summa Atheologica.

reading is opportunist

What said is true but try seeking out the 1992 translation if the original 1880's english translation is too tough. Not an insult just tryna help.

Capital volume 3

Starting with the Greeks isn't even a bad idea since they were the foundation of western philosophy in general. Well, unless you believe Karatani, but I haven't read his new book yet. Anyway if you want a quick(ish) Greek syllabus I'd read

That's already a lot and it's not even close to all the good shit, but I think it gives you a good idea of Greek political thought specifically which can be helpful onwards in Theory.

What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement by Vladimir Ilyich motherfucking Ulyanov.

I briefly remember Chomsky or someone saying that this is the book where Lenin shows his true colours and reveals himself to be an aspiring totalitarian dictator who wants to enslave the entire planet, unlike in The State and Revolution where he pretends to be almost an anarchist in order to trick the workers into supporting him. I'm about 100 pages in and this shit is extremely good. Fuck Chomsky, tbh.

Thanks user

Reading an Emily Dickinson anthology, Alice in Wonderland, Harvey's a Brief History of Neoliberalism (pretty fuckin good so far tbh), Kafka on the Shore, and really, really, really slowly working through The Phenomenology of Spirit.

The Green Book by Muammar al-Qaddafi

The Ben Fowkes translation published by Penguin Classics is a good one.

Seems like I don't have to choose. Got this on the mail yesterday a couple of hours after I've the post. Most of the Lenin texts aren't new to me. I think I read them in another collection made by José Paulo Netto which was an exciting read as he took the texts made in the heat of the hour right before the October revolution and after when all the problems of administrating a country came up. A quick glance on the Zizek text makes me believe this is not a collection of self-plagiarized paragraphs(as it was the case with Revolution at the Gates) which is great.

100 Years of Solitude. It is quite good.

Just finished this one. I'm probably going to start working on Stalin next.

Just started Ice by Anna Kavan and Revolution in Rojava.

Also, Betting on the Muse by Bukowski. (Not his best.)

Last book read: The Death Instinct by Jacques Mesrine. (pretty good)

Got it on library loan and have to return it in a couple days unfinished. Wish I could find an electronic copy somewhere.

"Looking at Philosophy" by Donald Palmer.
I couldn't find "Does the Center Hold?" that /ourguy/ Doug Lain recommended for an introduction to philosophy on the internet, so I went for this one, and it is pretty nice so far to get a basic summary of what each philosopher thought and how they relate to each other.
I plan to read Hume's enquiries and Kant's Prolegomena after that.

...

Misanthropy by Andrew Gibson
Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche by Elliot Jurist
Just finished Ego and its Own by Max Stirner

Reading history of the revolution by Trot

bookdepository.com/Capital--Volume-One-and-Two/9781840226997
cheapest copy you're gonna find.

it was literally the first piece of socialist theory I read besides besides the manifesto. It was pretty fucking hard to make out what he was saying half the time and the other half of the time I'd be bored dead but you end up learning quite a bit.

oh shit look at this guy, how deep is your ass in the armchair?

It's kinda tough and you would be taking a lot of Debord's views on history (which aren't too shabby). His views on time are crucial and fucking ignored always. What's important in SotS is the drive for an ANTI-STATE dictatorship of the proletariat in an era where the representations dominate reality and the representations of the workers' movement are against the workers themselves. It's not anarchism, it's not Bolshevism. In another Situationist document "The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical heirs, because all they have inherited is its failure."

bopsecrets.org/SI/Pariscommune.htm

very good text user, although the situationists mentioned above ^ do not agree entirely and Debord has plenty of theses on the nature of ideology in his Society of the Spectacle. In fact for him the spectacle is materialized ideology (as well as capital, that's a tough one to sort out)

Ulysses was maybe the most important book I've ever read. By the way Bloom has been elaborated on by a French journal Tiqqun in a brilliant essay called Theory of Bloom where they mix him in with Being and Time. I'm not a real literati either. Never read anything else by Joyce but I intend to tackle FW before I die.

it's a meme but it's a good meme

Read Tiqqun and see my post above about Bloom. Tiqqun became the Invisible Committee. A sort of condensed account of their (IC) views exist in To Our Friends.

What Lenin was was committed and I highly admire him even though my sympathies have strayed from Bolshevism (not for his time in power, but the long hard road to it)

I myself am finishing Being and Time, and working through Crowds and Power. Just breezed through Slaughterhouse-Five for fun, it was only so-so.

Just started: Warren Montag - Althusser and His Contemporaries - Philosophy's Perpetual War. The latter chapters seem near incomprehensible so it'll be a drudge, but I have a Spinoza course this semester and I though it would go well with the primer text (Ethics).

I'll take a mental note of that.

*tip*

welcome to the dark side

See this recent talk to get his case for the Master a lot better: youtube.com/watch?v=EQPDlSH3tjs

Give Johnson's Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations - The Cadence of Change a chance.

I recommend moving on to Lars T. Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context after that.

What do you mean user?

I've already read this when I was very young but I'm currently writing a paper on the First Crusade and while I'm not required to use this book, it certainly is an entertaining read.

Tell me about your mother user.

Kite Runner for school, it's historically revisionist but otherwise a somewhat neat tale about a slave who loves his master so much he gets raped for him, despite being abused by his master, and the master feeling guilty for it.
Les Mis for pleasure, the book is actually really different from the play, who knew?

I killed my dad, then felt bad. Good quick book. Glad I read it. The first part concerning the oceanic religious experience influenced my perception of my first psychedelic trip.

I will, thanks!

Slavoj Zizek has a bad habit of self plagiarizing, that is he takes large chunks of his owns writings, mix them, and then present it as a new text. Revolution at the Gates had that awful feeling that he was recycling other texts. I might be wrong, but that was the feeling I had when reading the book.

>See this recent talk to get his case for the Master a lot better: youtube.com/watch?v=EQPDlSH3tjs
Thanks, i'll take a look on it during the weekend.

I still don't fully get the whole transformation thing.

not exactly leftist (i guess it IS free knowledge)but im reading my grandpa's PEON books

bordiga tbqh

If you like the idea of the oceanic experience you should try reading the Bhagavad Gita, it deals with similar themes in a pretty emotionally moving and poetic way.

...

Not reading theory at the moment but reading this

First as tragedy, then as farce.

How's that first one? I think more leftists need to be discussing UBI (not avocating it ofc). Also bump this shmexy thread.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

It's amusing how the book has so many sentences that can be used very well to piss of anarkiddies and fascists, and the book has a really bizarre coincidence that I never thought I would ever see in my life.

Yell hea negro. Skimmed it, skimmed the Upanishads too (aren't they included in the former?). They had shit shit figured out metaphysically. Also some of Buddha's discourses and Zen folks.

Brave New World, I just finished philosophy of history and I need to take a break from dense philosophy and just enjoy some good old fiction. I'll get back to reading theory after

...

Declassified CIA documents.

Just finished Capitalist Realism, great book, lucid and readable and I like the suggestion to boycott bureaucracy.

Brave New World isn't complete without Island.

Naw I'm halfway through 2017, and he doesn't pull that shit beyond once or twice. He does ironically quote Wikipedia which is pretty funny, but it build on his point of how lenin was bastardized even worse by corn man than mustache man.

Currently reading Norbert Wiener Cybernetics, on and off since being too busy with work and working overtime. The book has a lot of formulas which might scare those who have phobia of integral sign.

When it stops, I'm gonna dive in to more books.

Yeah, I've figured that out reading. Nice read, Zizek is always great. Although some of his arguments and readings seems to be bit too close to a liberal one(specially on Stalin, Erik Van Ree made a great book on Stalin's personal thought, pdf related). I'm a bit skeptical of his need for a new master as it seems to me putting the symbolic leader as the analyst and the masses as the analysed in which the dynamics of transference would steer the revolution and the events. I should read more Freud, might help on understanding Zizek's point.
Might need to re-read Zizek as afterwards I started reading the second volume of Bataille's Summa Atheologica and it is just as fucking weird as I expected, his sort of hegelian nihilism is as much weird as it is fun. The lack that creates desire and the makes the existence or not of God, futility of action and guilt, not being able to know and grasp knowledge. Fucking great. Next is On Nietzsche.