Topics in Political Strategy: Readings to Consider

As we select one main text at a time to read, we can look ahead to additional readings this year, and also post good additional books for time-permitting additional study.Long Term Reading List

Next options

  • Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, Clara E. Mattei (2026)
    • Capitalism isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural—it’s a relatively young system that can be replaced.
      We live in a world where cuts to social programs are deemed necessary, unemployment is considered natural, and rising living costs are accepted as normal. We’re told that change isn’t possible—the markets know best and there’s no alternative to capitalism. But what if mainstream economics itself is the problem?
      In this groundbreaking manifesto, economist Clara E. Mattei shows us how the dogma that rules our economies is not only delusional but also detrimental to our societies and livelihoods and fundamentally hostile to working people. Pseudoscientific models are used to justify enduring problems such as poverty and inequality in order to support a system that unfairly rewards people who already have the most resources.
  • The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism, by The Zetkin Collective with Contributions by William Callison, George Edwards, Jacob McLean and Tatjana Söding (Verso, 2026, out in a couple weeks )
    • How the far right rises through climate conspiracism and pro-car politics.
      Apocalypse is in the air. And the far right knows it. Since the pandemic, it has successfully cultivated crises, conspiracy theories, and coalitions to fight a green energy transition. Mobilising online and in the streets, far-right actors cast decarbonisation measures as a ‘war on cars’ endangering individual liberty, the nuclear family, the nation, and western civilisation.
      In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective traces the evolution of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right constructs an ‘inverted crisis’ in which climate action – not climate change – represents the gravest existential threat. Rising through this shared strategy are movements and parties from anti-road-pricing saboteurs, ‘freedom’ convoys and farmers’ protests, to the Trump-led opposition to electric vehicles. Powering such actors are not only fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but an ever-expanding cycle of moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants.
  • End TImes Fascism , by Naomi Klein and Astrid Taylor (Sept 2026)
    • “End Times Fascism” is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fall-out.  Whether by retreating to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay, these new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable.  Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis that the many internal conflicts and contradictions and nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leaves these actors vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics – rooted in reverence for our shared existence, and regard for the earth we inhabit, and must protect. [Naomi’s] 10th book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, will be published in September 2026.  We wanted this book to be available before the November US midterm elections – Astra and I firmly believe in writing books that readers can use, and we dearly hope that the movements rising up against fascist violence and exploitation will find our research and analysis tangibly useful to their vital work.
  • Let This Radicalize You: : Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba (Haymarket, 2023)
    • What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.
  • We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers Book 1), Mariame Kaba (Haymarket, 2021)
    • “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”
      What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

Or…

July options

Done: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called a playbook for our new postliberal age.

It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own post-liberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.

Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper

An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives.

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues?

In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives.

Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom.

In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.

Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.”

In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.

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