People also literally forget that DSA formed out of two groups merging. One kinda reformist Marxist/ some social democrats in DSOC, and the other NAM (New American Movement), which was a couple thousand communists who left CPUSA for how shit it was. The reason the demcent clause in the constitution is actually a legacy from the ex-CPUSA communists who joined, due to both their experiences of the absolute wrecking that occurred in New Communist Movement orgs and SDS, and the atrocious way democratic centralism was practiced by CPUSA in the 60s and 70s. The other founder of DSA that is always overshadowed is Dorothy Healey, who was one of the most prominent American communists in California in the 40s to 60s.

That was when it blew up, but it’s been an old sopranos meme from the Columbus day episode where furio told them he hated Columbus for being north Italian for many years.

Same, this is all based off a course I took last semester. Right now I’m doing 3-4 different reading groups lol.

Cross posted this from the post I made on /c/books since it’s about the history of socialism just as much as book recommendations.

Okay that’s everything. Some people who didn’t make the cut but I wish had include William Manning, Eugene Debs, DeLeon, Kautsky’s The Class Struggle, Lenin: On The Unity of His Thought, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and a whole bunch of others I definitely missed but it’d take a lifetime to read everything.

Some early socialists intentionally left out are Saint Simon and Fourier as I found there’s not much to get out of those readings that couldn’t be done with a quick summary in one of the secondary sources. Also note that every primary source was published. I did not use anything unpublished as the purpose was to construct a history that represented what was available to radicals by other radicals at that moment in time.

The important Marx and Engels works that were intentionally left from this syllabus that would likely be worth including on it are imo: The Communist Manifesto, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1859 Preface, Capital, Theses on Feuerbach, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Also, for people interested in studying capital, one book which takes into account the context of socialist theoy surrounding Marx is Marx’s Inferno by William Clare Roberts. His book partly served to inspire the course, although we took it a lot further than he did.

Ran out of space, continuing here with the secondary sources for week 7:

• Desanti, Dominique. A Woman in Revolt, a biography of Flora Tristan. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1976.
• Beik, Doris and Paul. Flora Tristan: Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993
• Dijkstra, Sandra. Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand. London: Pluto Press, 1992.
• Melzer, Sara E. and Rabine, Leslie W. Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Schneider, Joyce Anne. Flora Tristan: Feminist, Socialist, and Free Spirit. New York: Morrow, 1980.
• Strumingher, Laura L. The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.
• Cross, Máire. The feminism of Flora Tristan. Berg, Oxford, 1992.
• Sowerwine, Charles (1998). “Socialist, Feminism, and the Socialist Women’s Movement from the French Revolution to World War II.” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, pp. 357–388. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

Week 8

• Louis Blanc, The Organization of Work (1839)
• Chartism: TBD texts from the collection Chartism and Society. We skipped this so I have no actual readings.
• Stedman-Jones. “Rethinking Chartism,” in his Languages of Class. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Epstein, James. “Rethinking the Categories of Working-Class History.” Edited by Gareth Stedman Jones. Labour / Le Travail 18 (1986): 195–208.
• Taylor, Miles. “Rethinking the Chartists: Searching for Synthesis in the Historiography of Chartism.” The Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): 479–95.

From here some selections were ad hoc decided during class, so I’m not putting them here. Week 9

• Petr Lavrov, Historical Letters (1870)
• Pomper, Philip. The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970.
• Venturi, Franco. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia [1952]. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
• Walicki, Andrzej. The Controversy Over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
• Paperno, Irina. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford: Stanford Universitiy Press, 1988.
• Billington, James H… Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.
• Pomper, Philip. Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
• Kingston-Mann, Esther. In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.
• Berlin, Isaiah. “Russian Populism.” In Russian Thinkers. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.
• Berlin, Isaiah. “Fathers and Children.” In Russian Thinkers. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

Week 10

• Blanqui, TBD selections from The Blanqui Reader
• Bernstein, Samuel. Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
• Goff, Philippe Le. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
• Greene, Doug Enaa. Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2017.
• Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873), pp. 129-63; 168-89; 198-220 (74 pages)
• Avrich, Paul. The Russian Anarchists. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.
• Eckhardt, Wolfgang. The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
• Vincent, K. Steven. “Visions of Stateless Society.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys, 433–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Berlin, Isaiah. “Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty.” In Russian Thinkers. 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

Week 11

• Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892)
• Emma Goldman, sadly we skipped her for time

Week 12

• Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (1899)[1896-1898]
• Steger, Manfred B. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Rogers, H. Kendall. Before the Revisionist Controversy: Kautsky, Bernstein, and the Meaning of Marxism, 1895-1898. Routledge, 1992.
• Tudor, Henry, and J. M. Tudor, eds. Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896-1898. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Schorske, Carl E. German Social Democracy: The Development of the Great Schism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.
• Schaev, Brian. “Anticipating the Social Democratic Schism: Theoretical Disputes within the SPD on Capitalist Evolution and the Nature of the Imperial German State, 1891-1914.” Focus on German Studies 18 (2011): 19–52.
• Colletti, Lucio. “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International.” In From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, 45–108. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972

Week 13

• Rosa Luxemburg, Reform and Revolution (1899)
• Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (1906)
• Donald, Moira. Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists 1900–1924. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
• Salvadori, Massimo. Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution. London ; New York: Verso, 1990.
• Gronow, Jukka. On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 1986.
• Day, Richard B., and Daniel F. Gaido, eds. Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I. Reprint edition. Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2012.
• ———, eds. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Frölich, Paul. Rosa Luxemburg. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010.
• Stedman Jones, Gareth. “Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy, NLR I/79, May–June 1973.” New Left Review I, no. 79 (1973): 17–36.
• ———. “Engels and the Genesis of Marxism.” New Left Review I, no. 106 (1977): 79–104.

Week 14

• Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)
• Haimson, Leopold H. The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.
• Harding, Neil. Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009.
• Lih, Lars T. Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008.
• Harding, Neil, ed. Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906. Translated by Richard Taylor. 1 edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Krausz, Tamas. Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
• Mullin, Richard, ed. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 1899-1904. Haymarket Books, 2016.
• Donald, Moira. Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists 1900–1924. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
• Sochor, Zenovia A. Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.