User:Miacek/Books

Essential right-wing books to read

 * Gulag Archipelago - when it was published in the West, countless Western CP members handed over their party cards and left the movement
 * Demons - about a radical left-wing terrorist cell in the Russian Empire, similar to later Bolsheviks
 * Icebreaker - while tendentious and scandalous, some of his theses are likely true. The book covers Stalin's plot to use Hitler as an "icebreaker" to cause turmoil in Europe and then strike himself to make all Europe Communist
 * The Socialist Phenomenon - criticism of all forms of socialism from the national-conservative camp (like Solzhenitsyn). The author later went crazy, but the book is still lucid.
 * Les Rougon-Macquart - while this may be surprising, given that Zola was a Socialist, he actually did a good job pointing out human beings are inherently unequal, different and that genetic determinism plays a role, not only the environment, as left-wingers normally argue, so some of it is worth reading

Know your enemy: essential left-wing books to read

 * The Manifesto of the Communist Party - ultimately, everything in it is flawed. All its forecasts have proven wrong. It offers nothing on how to really improve people's lives. Yet there are people who still believe it to be the ultimate truth.
 * The Iron Heel - I read it as a teenager, easily the most stupid fiction book I've read. It's about how the Socialist Ernest Everhard convinces with his trenchant arguments his incredibly stupid opponents such as Bishop Morehouse (whom he eventually converts to communism) that class struggle is inevitable, that the poor get incessantly poorer and rich richer (like Marx had predicted) and that ultimately private property is abolished. True enough, the capitalist exploiters don't give up without a fight so they form a bloody dictatorship - The Iron Heel - but eventually this evil oligarchy is defeated and the ages-old dreams of a paradise on earth come completely true. Extremely tedious to read but really telling.
 * Finland Between East and West - that's a really curious book. I've read the Estonian translation of it (I almost don't read Finnish) that was published in 1987, at the very last moment so to say - in 1988 no-one would have published it any more which would have been a great loss. The book depicts how Finns live in poverty, the monopoly capital is persistently concentrating and how the USSR has made mighty steps forward and how an average Soviet citizen lives much better than an average Finn (and it was written at the time when the marasmus of the socialist system must have been obvious even to the half-blind!). A highly amusing reading, I recommend.