My Haphazard Summer Reading List (2021)

 

    Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

   An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad 

Conquered City by Victor Serge

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

From Lenin - Relentless Advocate of Violence

 Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws." - As quoted in "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" (1972), p. 11.

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it! "Report on the Activities of the Council of People's Commissars" (24 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61. 

"Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. You must make an example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ...Find tougher people." - Lenin's "Hanging Order for the Kulaks" (1918)

"Thousands of practical forms and methods of accounting and controlling the rich, the rogues and the idlers must be devised and put to a practical test by the communes themselves, by small units in town and country. Variety is a guarantee of effectiveness here, a pledge of success in achieving the single common aim—to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas—the rogues, of bugs—the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the manner of rowdies, the manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing-shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with "yellow tickets" after they have served their time, so that everyone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot." - From "How to Organize Competition," December, 1917

"The Council of People’s Commissars, having heard the report of the Chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Speculation and Crime about the activities of this Commission, finds: that in the present situation the safeguarding of the rear by means of terror is necessary; that it is necessary to send a greater number of responsible party comrades to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Speculation and Crime in order to strengthen its work and to introduce into it a more systematic character; that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots and rebellions are liable to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those shot and the reasons for shooting them." - "Resolution on Red Terror," September 5, 1918

Anti-Stalinist Literature

          

                                              

Varlam Shalamov 

Evgenia Ginzburg

Alexander Barmine

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski

Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - one of the most brilliant minds of all time - a true polymath...contributor to logic, mathematics, history, linguistics, ethics, politics, law, philosophy, theology and natural

science...

Leibniz gave us the following philosophical gems:  

the principle of sufficient reason - everything that exists must have a reason for existing or a cause for its being ... 

plenitude - that the existing universe must necessarily actualize all possible (i.e. viable) forms of existence...

monads - simple substances, immaterial and indivisible, without parts, akin to spiritualized atoms or atomic "souls"...

pre-established harmony - the harmony or pre-established order that regulates causal interactions between substances within Nature...

identity of indiscernibles - the principle that no two numerically distinct entities can possess absolutely identical properties - which perhaps means that there are no absolute clones or doppelgangers... 

middle knowledge - the idea that God has foreknowledge of everything in the sense of having knowledge of all contingent possibilities of what can and will occur...i.e. knowing everything that can happen without compelling everything to happen in a particular manner...

necessary being -  a.k.a.  the complete notion or the complete concept of individuals - the idea that for any given entity, all possible predicates that pertain to individual X are included in the subject, "X" - i.e. all actions, relations or events involving individual X are contained within the ontological concept of X...

intelligent souls - minds, unlike other substances in nature, are self-aware, able to reflect on themselves in relation to other entities...

the republic of minds - minds are created to be in communion with other intelligences...

the principle of continuity - the idea that "nothing [ever] happens suddenly"...or that "Nature never takes leaps"...the process of change always includes an infinity of intermediary steps....
...As Leibniz writes: "the rules of the finite also succeed for the infinite..."

little perceptions - infinite, composite, unconscious perceptions that help to "mirror" or "instantiate" the reality of the [surrounding] world within our own minds...

possible worlds or the principle of the best - the notion God is compelled by reason to choose the optimum scenario out of a set of lesser alternatives - thus making 'this' (i.e. the cosmos in aggregate) the "best of all possible worlds"...

The Debate about God and the Best of All Possible Worlds (featuring Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnauld)

Professor Stephen Nadler (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has written a very wonderful, engaging, accessible account of the debate about God and the creation of the universe - by three of the 17th century's most prescient minds of the era, namely Leibniz, Malebranche and Arnauld...Professor Nadler also includes very helpful discussions about Descartes and Spinoza....

...On Acknowledging the Shadow Within...

"We are still almost certain we know what other people think or what their true character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they live all those vices which could, of course, never be our own. We must still be exceedingly careful in order not to project our own shadows too shamelessly; we are still swamped with projected illusions. If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw these projections, all and sundry, then you get an individual conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong and they must be fought against. He lives in the "house of self-collection." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow then he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in removing an infinitesimal part at least of the unsolved gigantic, social problems of our day. These problems are unwieldy and poisoned by mutual projections. How can anyone see straight when he does not even see himself and that darkness which he himself carries unconsciously into all his dealings?" - Carl Jung, from Psychology and Religion

Civil Rights and the Justice System / Essential Reading

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

Anatomy of a Lynching: The Kill of Claude Neal by James R. McGovern

Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race and Justice Lost and Found by Gilbert King

The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder and the Search for Justice in the American South by Gilbert King

Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement by Devery S. Anderson

He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice and the Death Penalty  by S. Jonathan Bass

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising by Heather Ann Thompson

Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America by Wil Haywood

The Lynching: the Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought down the Klan by Laurence Leamer