The Socialist Book Club meets regularly to consider a book decided on at the previous meeting. Our discussions are enjoyable, allowing us to examine what we mean by socialism and to share the insights gained. All are welcome, whether you have read the book or not.
NEXT MEETING
New members are welcome, and indeed you do not have to be a member – just come and join in the discussion!
The next book to discuss is to be agreed. We hope to next meet in late May 2023.
The club is committed to developing members’ knowledge of socialism, not just reading for pleasure, but recognises that ‘a good read’, followed by a lively discussion, would help.
The club first met on 25th October 2015 and talked about the books people had suggested, sharing reading interests and the purpose of the club. It was interesting to note the re-establishment of the Left Book Club.
Contact Susan Kortlandt if you are interested in joining us.
Books we have already discussed and links to our reviews:
- November 2015 – The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wild
- January 2016 – The Establishment: and How They Get Away with It by Owen Jones
- July 2016 – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
- October 2016 – This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
- November 2017 – The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy
- January 2017 – The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- April 2017 – Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett
- July 2017 – Break the Chains of Poverty Pay, Casual Labour and Exploitation by Richie Venton
- August 2017 – Active Hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
- October 2017 – And the Weak Suffer What They Must by Yanis Varoufakis
- December 2017 – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee by John Bew
- February 2018 – Prosperity Without Growth by Timothy Jackson
- March 2018 – No is Not enough by Naomi Klein
- May 2018 – Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe
- July 2018 – Postcapitalism – A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason
- September 2018 – Animal Farm by George Orwell
- December 2018 – Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky
- February 2019 – The rise of the Right : English nationalism and the transformation of working-class politics by Simon Winlow
- June 2019 – The New Working Class: How to win hearts, minds and votes by Claire Ainsley
- May 2020 – Hard Times by Charles Dickens
- November 2020 – Brit(ish): on Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch
- December 2020 – Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?’ by Mark Fisher
These are books suggested by members at meetings, but not discussed yet:
| Title | Author | Year | Pages | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silent Spring | Rachel Carson | 1962 | 400 | Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Lord Shackleton, a preface by World Wildlife Fund founder Julian Huxley, and an afterword by Carson’s biographer Linda Lear. Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Rachel Carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement. It is thanks to this book, and the help of many environmentalists, that harmful pesticides such as DDT were banned from use in the US and countries around the world. Rachel Carson (1907-64) wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, appeared in 1941. Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of the misuse of pesticides, was published in 1962. Carson’s articles on natural history appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest and Holiday. An ardent ecologist and preservationist, Carson warned against the dumping of atomic waste at sea and predicted global warming. |
| William Morris: A Life for Our Time | Fiona MacCarthy | 1994 | 600 | Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the Victorian era. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning. |
| Chavs | Owen Jones | 2012 | 320 | In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs. In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from ‘salt of the earth’ to ‘scum of the earth.’ |
| To the Finland Station | Edmund Wilson | 1940 | 544 | Presents the history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from the French Revolution through the collaboration of Marx and Engels to the arrival of Lenin at the Finlyandsky Rail Terminal in St. Petersburg in 1917. |
| The Accumulation of Capital | Rosa Luxemburg | 1913 | 496 | Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Many today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view. |
| Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister | Michael Jago | 2014 | 400 | Raised in a haven of middle-class respectability, Attlee was appalled by the squalid living conditions endured by his near neighbours in London’s East End. Seeing first-hand how poverty and insecurity dogged lives, he nourished a powerful ambition to achieve power and create a more egalitarian society in 1935, Attlee was single-minded in pursuing his goals, and in just six years from 1945 his government introduced the most significant features of post-war Britain: the National Health Service, extensive nationalisation of essential industry, and the Welfare State that Britons now take for granted. |
| Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism | Fredric Jameson | 1991 | 461 | Seeking to crystalize a definition of “postmodernism” Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high”; art to “low,” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature. |
| The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society | Jürgen Habermas | 1962 | 328 | This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere – that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. |
| Mark Weisbrot | 2015 | 293 | Why has the Eurozone ended up with an unemployment rate more than twice that of the United States more than six years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Why did the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries suffer a prolonged economic slowdown in the last two decades of the 20th century? What was the role of the International Monetary Fund in these economic failures? Why was Latin America able to achieve substantial poverty reduction in the 21st century after more than two decades without any progress? Failed analyzes these questions, explaining why these important economic developments of recent years have been widely misunderstood and in some cases almost completely ignored. | |
| The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | 1962 | 576 | |
| To Build a New Jerusalem: Labour Movement from the 1890s to the 1990s | A. J. Davies | 1996 | 578 | In August 1892, Keir Hardie took up his seat in Parliament as the first independent Labour MP. Hardie’s world was a bleak one of factories, cities, fledgling trade unions and manual work. Today, over a century on, the computer terminal has replaced the cloth cap and the party leader, Tony Blair, is on the verge of becoming the first Labour Prime Minister for nearly 20 years. This work traces the development of the Labour Party and explores the lives and careers of the individuals who shaped it. |
| The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism | Max Weber | 1905 | 320 | Max Weber’s best-known and most controversial work, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, first published in 1904, remains to this day a powerful and fascinating read. Weber’s highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ethic made possible and encouraged the development of capitalism in the West. |
| The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Attwood | 1985 | 324 | Set in the near future, in a totalitarian Christian theocracy which has overthrown the United States government, The Handmaid’s Tale explores themes of women in subjugation and the various means by which they gain agency. |
| One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society | Herbert Marcuse | 1964 | 257 | |
| Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain | Polly Toynbee | 2003 | 256 | A passionately reasoned and compelling account of the avoidable cruelties still embedded in the underside of British life – by a writer who has literally worn the clothes, lived in the flats and done the jobs of the poor. Every member of the cabinet should be required to read it, apologise and then act. |
| Karl Marx | Francis Wheen | 2010 | 450 | Karl Marx, whose influence on modern times has been compared to that of Jesus Christ, spent most of his lifetime in obscurity. Penniless, exiled in London, estranged from relations and on the run from most of the police forces of Europe, his ambitions as a revolutionary were frequently thwarted and his major writings on politics and economics remained unpublished (in some cases until after the Second World War). Wheen has an ear for juicy gossip and an eye for original detail. Marx comes over as a hell-raising bohemian, an intellectual bully and a perceptive critic of capitalist chaos, but also a family man of Victorian conformity personally vetting his daughters’ suitors, Victorian ailments (carbuncles above all) and Victorian weaknesses, notably alcohol, tobacco and, on occasion, his housekeeper. |
| Social Class in the 21st Century | Mike Savage | 2015 | 480 | A fresh take on social class from the experts behind the BBC’s ‘Great British Class Survey’. Why does social class matter more than ever in Britain today? How has the meaning of class changed? What does this mean for social mobility and inequality? In this book Mike Savage and the team of sociologists responsible for the Great British Class Survey look beyond the labels to explore how and why our society is changing and what this means for the people who find themselves in the margins as well as in the centre. Their new conceptualization of class is based on the distribution of three kinds of capital – economic (inequalities in income and wealth), social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive) – and provides incontrovertible evidence that class is as powerful and relevant today as it’s ever been. |