Here is a collection of self-directed reading lists for the purpose of political education. In order to build the capacity for communism and workers power, we must engage in rigorous political education from a historically materialist foundation. We must engage in discussion and debate as workers through workers newspapers and, in doing this, we can come to a more accurate understanding of the social and material conditions of capitalism in Australia and internationally. Read as much as you can and challenge yourself to build class consciousness for your own understanding and that of your fellow workers.
General Pamphlets Reading List:
J. T. Murphy – Workers Committees
Vincent St John – The IWW – It’s History, Structure and Methods
Otto Rühle – The Revolution is not a party affair
Prole.info – Autonomous Italy – Italy in the 1960s and 1970s Pamphlet
Autonomia Post-Political Politics – Pamphlet Version
Mario Tronti – The Strategy of Refusal
Antonio Negri – Capitalist Domination and Working Class Sabotage
Revolutionary Unionist Introduction – Tom Hannan – The History of the Meatworkers Union, Frank Bollins – An Insight into the NSW Railway Shop Committees, 1940s-1950s, Drew Cottle and Angela Keys – The 1971 Harco ‘Stay-Put’: Workers’ Control in One Factory?
Angry Workers – Wildcat – The Renaissance of Operaismo
Angry Workers – We want a new society – and don’t we need it!
Seasol – Building a solidarity network guide
Political Theory Reading List:
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels – Introductory reading: The Civil War in France, The German Ideology Part I, Wage Labour and Capital, Value Price and Profit
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels – Intermediate Reading: Marx: Later Political Writings, Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, II and III
Rosa Luxemburg – Socialism Or Barbarism: Selected Writings
Vladimir Lenin – What Is To Be Done,Imperialism, State And Revolution
Antonio Gramsci – The Antonio Gramsci Reader : Selected Writings 1916-1935, Selections From The Prison Notebooks
Amadeo Bordiga – The Science and Passion of Communism: Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga (1912–1965)
Anton Pannekoek – Workers Councils
Hermann Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst – Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Worker’s Councils
Paul Mattick – Anti-Bolshevik Communism
C. L. R. James – State Capitalism and World Revolution, Facing Reality
Raniero Panzieri, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Christian Palloix, Sergio Bologna and Mario Tronti – The Labour Process & Class Strategies
Mario Tronti – Workers and Capital
Antonio Negri – Books For Burning, Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, Marx beyond Marx: lessons on the Grundrisse
Romano Alquati – Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti, Struggle at Fiat, Outline of a Pamphlet on FIAT, Capital And The Working Class At FIAT: A Midpoint In The International Cycle, The Network of Struggles in Italy, Co-research and Worker’s Inquiry
Sergio Bologna – Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers’ Council Movement, Money and Crisis: Marx as Correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune 1856-57, The Tribe of Moles, The theory and history of the mass worker in Italy
Mariarosa Dalla Costa – Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader
George Caffentzis – In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Noel Ignatiev – Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity
Angry Workers – Class Power On Zero Hours, Sick of it all! Work, inquiry, & struggle in the NHS
Australian Labour History Reading List:
Brian Fitzpatrick – British Imperialism and Australia, 1783-1833 : an economic history of Australasia
Brian Fitzpatrick – The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History, 1834-1939
Raewyn Connell And Terry Irving – Class Structure in Australian History
E L Wheelwright and Ken Buckley ed. – Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism Volumes I-V
Henry Reynolds – The Other Side of the Frontier: An interpretation of the Aboriginal response to the invasion and settlement of Australia
Frank Stevens – Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry
Ian Turner – In Union Is Strength: A History Of Trade Unions 1788-1983
E H Lane – Dawn to Dusk
Gordon V Childe – How Labour Governs
Ian Turner – Industrial Labour and Politics – The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900-1921
Humphrey McQueen – A New Britannia
Frank Hardy – Power Without Glory
Jeff Rickertt – The Conscientious Communist: Ernie Lane and the Rise of Australian Socialism
Verity Burgmann – ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885-1905
Verity Burgmann – Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia
Wendy Lowenstein – Weevils In the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia
Stuart Macintyre – The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia: From Origins to Illegality
Stuart Macintyre – The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from Heyday to Reckoning
Tom O’lincoln – The Militant Minority: Organising rank and file workers in the thirties
Hal Alexander and Phil Griffiths – A Few Rough Reds : stories of rank and file organising
Jon Piccini, Evan Smith and Matthew Worley ed. The Far Left in Australia since 1945
Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann – Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation
Sam Oldham – Without Bosses: Radical Australian Trade Unionism in The 1970s
Verity Burgmann, Ray Jureidini and Meredith Burgmann – Doing without the Boss, Workers’ Control Experiments in Australia in the 1970s, Chapter inside: Immanuel Ness – New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism
Elizabeth Humphrys – How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project
Tom Bramble – Trade Unionism In Australia: A history from flood to ebb tide
General History Reading List:
Christopher Hill – The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
C. L. R. James – The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Eric Hobsbawm – The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848
Eric Hobsbawm – The Age of Capital: 1848–1875
Eric Hobsbawm – The Age of Empire: 1875–1914
Eric Hobsbawm – The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker – The Many Headed Hydra – The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Peter Linebaugh – The London Hanged
Marcus Rediker – Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750
Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Julius C Scott – The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Walter Rodney – How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Eric Williams – Capitalism and Slavery
W E Dubois – Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
Noel Ignatiev – How The Irish Became White
Jeremy Brecher – Strike!
Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States
Eduardo H Galeano – Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Vijay Prashad – The Darker Nations : A People’s History of the Third World
Maurice Meisner –Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic
Suchitra Vijayan – Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India
Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini – Ours To Master And To Own : Worker’s Control from the Commune to the Present
Revolutionary History Reading List:
Karl Marx – The Civil War in France
Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken – The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years
Joyce L Kornbluh – Rebel voices: an IWW anthology
Maurice Brinton – The Bolsheviks and workers’ control: the state and counter-revolution
Oskar Anweiler – The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921
S.A. Smith – Red Petrograd: revolution in the factories 1917-1918
David Mandel – The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution
February 1917-June 1918
Gabriel Kuhn – All power to the councils!: A documentary history of the German revolution of 1918–1919
Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier – The communist left in Germany 1918-1921 –
Philippe Bourrinet – The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–68)
Sam Dolgoff – The anarchist collectives: workers’ self-management in the Spanish revolution 1936-1939
Gaston Leval – Collectives in the Spanish revolution
Andy Anderson – Hungary ’56
Daniel Cohn-Bendit – Obsolete Communism; the Left-Wing alternative
Steve Wright – Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
Robert Lumley – States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978
Geronimo – Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement
Yiching Wu – The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis
Tony Topham and Ken Coates – The New Unionism: The Case for Workers’ Control
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin – Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, A Study in Urban Revolution
David Harvey – A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Here is a Google Drive link to some of these books as PDFs: