Hello comrades and friends! I’ve gotten back into reading and I’ve been buying books about fascism, because of the political climate. I’ve picked up a few books, like
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Cradles of the Reich by Jen Coburn The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
I know they aren’t strictly anarchist, but they do talk about fascism/authoritarianism. Could you recommend me some books about anarchism as well as more books on fascism? I prefer fiction, but will read non-fiction as well.
Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States by Zoe Baker is a great one.
Hmm. Maybe
- „The myth of a strong leader“ by Archie Brown
I really like this one. It reads pretty modern and might give some insight how the situation in the US might evolve:
- „Berlin Diary“ by William L. Shirer
That one is a classic:
- „How to spot a fascist“ by Umberto Eco.
Stefan Zweig talks about the rise of the nazis and the beginning of Second World War in his memoirs for a bit:
- „The world of yesterday“ by Stefan Zweig.
This is non-fiction, and Marxist, rather than Anarchist, but Blackshirts and Reds, specifically the first chapter, is an excellent overview of fascism. I recommend sticking with it, though, to the end.
If you strictly want Anarchist and fiction, The Disposessed by Ursula K Le Guin is good.
prison diaries of Antonio gramsci
With a caveat that Gramsci was a Marxist.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index
And https://www.editionslibertalia.com/ which is an awesome anarchist publisher with mostly french books and/or translations
Libertalia, an independent publishing house created in 2007, publishes around 20 books per year. Since 2018, Libertalia has also been a neighborhood bookstore, at 12 rue Marcelin-Berthelot, in Montreuil, nearby Paris. At our level, modestly, we try to build happy days.
Blackshirts and reds by michael parenti is a personal favorite. This lecture by parenti is what got me started
There is also Fascism: What is it and how to stop it by Leon Trotsky that is one of the best early analysis of fascism
I’d recommend the conquest of bread by kropotkin if you want anarchist theory.
You won’t get far in learning about politics if you only read fiction
The Parenti chapter on fascism is available onlline: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Blackshirts_and_Reds#Rational_Fascism
For fiction The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great Sci-fi story about a ‘realistic’ anarchist society
Le Guin describing the novel, to give OP a sense of it:
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost, exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.
May I give a controversial answer?
The Marxists Internet Archive has a huge amount of left/communist non-fiction. It’s very broad in its scope, so there’s Stalin and Mao on there alongside William Morris and HG Wells. You could also check out Timothy Snyder and Rebecca Solnit, who both had interesting books about resisting fascism from a more contemporary viewpoint.
In fiction, there’s The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick, which has a similar alt history concept as Roth’s The Plot Against America. And of course there’s George Orwell’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, much of which explores the nature of fascism. I’d also recommend Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, if you like magical realism.
Not books, but three contemporary articles on fascism by Gabriel Rockhill:
