Reviving the art of the pamphlet

[bloodygranuaile]

Alright, well, I went to go reserve that little Jacobin pamphlet The ABCs of Socialism at the library so I could see if it's a decent thing to recommend to people, and discovered that actually you can just read the entire thing as a PDF online? It's not even pirated; the URL for the PDF is at jacobinmag.com. But also it turns out it's really short, it is much more of a pamphlet than a book, and I read the whole thing in like two hours -- and also did some work in the same two hours (it is, admittedly, a slow day today). The pamphlet is 148 pages, but that includes a bunch of illustrations and a few pages at the back dedicated to taking notes, which is very considerate.

 

The book is a collection of short articles by a variety of modern socialist writers, including the excellent Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, editor of How We Get Free which I read at the beginning of the year, and Nicole Aschoff, whomst I have met twice and is very cool. Also some dudes. At least some of the writers are fairly serious academics, but the book is not especially academic or theoretical; in register, in seems pitched at roughly the same educated, reasonably politically aware audience as most middlebrow news glossies.  There are moments of humor via pop culture references, including a real good dunk on the Rolling Stones' "Harlem Shuffle," which is indeed not their best effort.

 

The framing here is "rebuttals to common objections/myths about socialism," and as such seems more pitched at fence-sitters than at folks who already consider themselves socialists, but is probably also a pretty good starting point for folks who are like "I am pretty sure I am on board with this socialism thing because capitalism is terrible and I would like to do something else" but have not done much reading and are not sure where to start. The pamphlet also contains a lot of links to further reading; in this case, "further reading" means Jacobin articles, which one would probably expect given that this is a Jacobin publication. Jacobin is pretty good at giving short overview-y things that easily point people towards More Things To Read (just this morning I bought Haymarket's James Connolly Reader, largely on the strength of Jacobin's Connolly at 150 profile from the spring), and I'm generally of the opinion that given the total marginalization of socialist thought in American political discourse for my entire lifetime, brutally sacrificing depth in favor of breadth is a perfectly acceptable thing to do for the sake of bringing the scope of socialist history and socialist writing from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown" in people's minds. And ABCs of Socialism does quite well in that regard. If one is so inclined, one could fill up the Notes pages with a robust list of Interesting-Sounding Things To Check Out Further--historical writers including Marx, Trotsky, and Martin Luther King Jr.; modern writers like the authors of the articles; ecosocialism; socialist feminism; at least five separate instances of the U.S. government overthrowing democratically elected governments that we don't talk about anymore; the interconnections between racism and capitalism (especially in the U.S.). 

 

One criticism I do have is that the grand and glorious history of bitter interleftist infighting is a bit handwaved, frequently written in a way like "Democratic socialists were on [the good side] and some other blokes were on [the other side]," which definitely muddies the attempts to explain who was doing what and sometimes comes off like they're claiming certain parties/thinkers/movements were socialist when they succeeded and not socialist when they fucked up. While it is true that the history of socialism is much more complex than "Stalin did gulags and some people went along with it," this borders on No True Scotsman-ing in a way that I think deals some damage to credibility, although given the brevity of the piece in question I'm not as disturbed by it as I would be in an otherwise more in-depth work. Anyway, the CPUSA did both good things and messed-up things, and anyone whose brain cannot handle that level of complexity is probably not someone you should be relying on to teach you history anyway.

 

Anyway. Where was I? Right, driving myself nuts trying to read every Socialism 001 book published in the U.S. So, this book does pretty much what it says on the tin, which is great if that's what you're looking for. I should go read some fiction.