political reading ref blog

Because people are intellectually dishonest this is not saying Black Americans are a singular class with internally equal experiences of oppression. There are class divisions within every community and minorities within those communities who possess most of the wealth and power compared to their toiling brethren. Obviously you unite the most deeply oppressed of any group with one another.

But a few Black millionaires and petty property owners does not make Black Americans a majority petite and big bourgeois community, quite the opposite. The deepest poverty outside of reservations in the United States is experienced in the ghettoized and increasingly gentrified de facto segregated Black neighborhoods. Black Americans have had the most revolutionary organizations in America’s history, from slave revolts to what WEB Du Bois referred to as the “general strike of the slaves” during the Civil War to spontaneous insurgencies to radical labor unions to outright Marxist vanguard parties.

Of course there are members who are ideologically or economically tied to imperialism and do not wish to cease receiving the benefits. But there are also the deepest of the poor who have repeatedly tied the violence of the American streets to the violence of American imperialism. This is increasingly a common analysis again with a mass movement building.

I think what’s important to state right away is that the book is primarily a rebellion against the entire field of western labor research. Because of that the book has a more polemical tone than I wanted (even if I agree with him lol), but on the other hand he is working against decades of Eurocentrism, Sinophobia, and anti-communism so the focus on critics of the PRC and ACFTU (All-China Federation of Trade Unions—the primary organization focused on in the book) makes sense.

Other authors such as Yaffe, Szymanski, and Losurdo have described the overwhelming and pervasive influence of anti-communism in various academic fields in the west like “Cubanology” and “Sovietology”. The dominant ideology not only reinforces negatives narratives about the transitional states (a term I prefer over AES), but even somewhat sympathetic authors use western categories and therefore have a distorted view of these societies. As Yaffe noted at least in regards to Cuban studies:

While less overtly linked to a political regime or ideological battle, many Cubanists still carry the constraints of their own social and political values and assumptions. When scholars who accept the political-economic model of liberal democracy assess Cuba they tend to search for what they recognise. Defining Cuba in relation to their own society’s standards, as E. H. Carr warned, they find most elements of that model missing and often conclude the Cuba is deficient – because Cuban society is developing according to different precepts. Pg. 24

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are the real meat and potatoes of the book since it looks at Chinese industrialization and urbanization, digital and new economy workers, and worker subjectivity + holistic trade unions.

Chapter 6 was partly based on survey and ethnographic work that Ness and his colleagues did in China from 2023-2025. His main takeaway is to think of the ACFTU as a constant work-in progress. One big factor in regard to its unionization and mobilization drive is that grievances need to occur first before the ACFTU can start plans for addressing problems. They can’t predict problems before they happen. Ness notes that the federation still has many shortcomings and tons of workers fall through the cracks of existing orgznaition structure, but the ACFTU and the Communist party are resolved to keep working through contractions and keep improving things.

Something that I didn’t appreciate before was the massive scale of Chinese urbanization. The ACFTU has been facing huge obstacles since Reform And Opening Up started because it needed to build the capacity to absorb workers—but the rate of urbanization and migration to new cities has gone at speeds at the government has not expected. As Ness notes regarding internal migration in China:

All forms of mobility have material and social consequences for both origin regions and destinations. China's internal migration from rural to urban areas is far and away the largest distinct population shift in human history. As such, urbanization has had ongoing impacts for the capacity of the AFTU to respond to the reconstitution of labor markets from agrarian to urban, and then from industrial to new forms of employment among logistics and digital workers. Most opponents of China from left to right share a common view that the ACFTU is ineffective because it is affiliated with the CPC, but this view is based on specific moments when the Federation was researching and mobilizing to respond to labor market changes. The demographic shift which has refashioned China's labor market is monumental. In 1980, about 90 percent of China's population of nearly 1 billion lived in rural regions. Today, China's 956 million urban dwellers compose 67.5 percent of China's population, but the population of the country's rural areas still constitutes nearly 500 million. Pg. 167

Kind of amazing the CPC was able to control this huge process without losing control of the country and collapsing. Social dislocation and exploitation was big in the time of rapid urbanization (this was the sweatshop era after all), but their progress in development, wage growth, and reigning in abuses since then has been extraordinary.

More quotes. These next ones are a bit long since I pull from two different pages, but I like the way Ness describes the political consequences of misunderstanding China:

Practically all Western critics of the ACFTU deprecate China and the ACFTU as an abnormal and peculiar form denoted as a “party state”, a term which is intended to represent the labor federation as an appendage of the CPC and the Chinese government, lacking autonomy and effectiveness, and bending to the will of the CPC on all matters related to the working class. In fact, as Xi Jinping stated in 2023, the trade union federation must focus on the demands of the working class as they evolve over time, improving wages and working conditions, and mobilizing members into constituent unions and improving workers’ wages and living standards. For them, the term “party-state” or “party-state capitalism” is code for all the undesirable elements which are attributed to the Chinese socialist market economy. Thousands of academic books and articles use the term time and again, to the extent that it has become insincere and meaningless. A recent seven page article in Current History, the oldest US journal of current events in continuous publication, uses the term “party-state capitalism” 31 times, as if it must be inscribed in perpetuity to inculcate a doctrine which will subjugate any other perspective. (Pearson et al. 2021).

In labor relations, the term denotes: (1) the ACFTU’s lack of autonomy from the CPC and the state; (2) proscription of ACFTU officials deciding on decisive internal policies and external relations with SOEs and private sector firms; (3) exclusion of local level union leaders from bargaining with management; and (4) prohibition of workers to mobilize and participate in union decisions. This is a sweeping portrayal of an authoritarian and undemocratic system of representation, but even scholars who have articulated a more balanced perspective must, for fear of being ridiculed and excluded, adhere to the obligatory disparagement of labor–management relations in China. Consequently, the accounts by the “party-state” monolith of adherents undermine all efforts to engage in constructive criticism and dialogue which might improve conditions worldwide. The anti-China academic complex in the US and the West is a propaganda behemoth established to inhibit free thinking and independent perceptions. It is so vast that one cannot draw any other conclusion than that it is deliberately intended to target the credulity and naivety of Americans. Pg. 200

And another excerpt from the conclusion:

The scolding of China has also given rise to the dangerous rise of rhetoric which is appropriated by right wing populists and the US national security state. The main assertions are that China is a capitalist country which only claims to be socialist to mislead its working class, and that the AFTU is not a union. The shibboleth that China is capitalist is formulated by liberals, social democrats, sectarian Trotskyists and doctrinaire non-revisionists who maintain a utopian, even religious, conviction devoid of an understanding of historical materialism. Consequently, some share the position of the US State Department on China (Friedman et al. 2024).

Their bald assertion (shared by the US State Department, National Endowment for Democracy and the Central Intelligence Agency) is proffered that China is the fount of opposition to its own working class and ecological sustainability, oppresses women activists and imprisons ethnic minorities. Worse, they believe international solidarity is only advanced through opposing the Chinese imperialist enemy. Are we to believe that this diatribe is a form of balanced scholarship? This "left" position has serious repercussions which sustain military spending, support economic sanctions and economic nationalism, and contribute in Western Europe and North America to the disturbing growth of xenophobia against migrant workers there who form a significant potential demographic for unions to organize (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman 2013; Ness 2023b). Pg. 192

I will note a couple of redundancies in the writing. I think Ness should have worded things a little differently because at least in the first few couple chapters it does sound like he is repeating himself a lot lol. Some of his wording is also a little awkward. Perhaps one last proofread go by another person could have adjusted this, and also caught one instance of an accidentally double copy pasted paragraph, but for the most part I don’t think it detracts too much from the book too much.

I do wish there was a little more meat to the book, but it helps greatly that Ness has a strong theoretical framework and does a good job of offering a clear eyed and refreshing perspective about unions and the labor movement.

Given that the main content of the book ends at page 210 this actually is not too long of a read. I’m curious to check out his other books… I heard before about Migration As Economic Imperialism which he wrote so I’ll give that a look at a later date.

Final quote. Ness’ scathing words for the western/U.S model of trade unions:

Most Labor Studies scholars evaluate trade unions exclusively from the narrow Western perspective with a preconceived notion that workers’ organizations must resemble those of the US. This view fails to consider the numerous forms of labor representation present outside the West. Moreover, this defective perception does not seek to augment the power and influence of unions but maintains a constrained and inflexible notion that union democracy is synonymous with independence from political parties and the state. Paradoxically, unions with the highest rank-and-file participation are linked to parties which seek to define state policies. If one’s definition of the ideal trade union is to have weak and ineffective influence and highly circumscribed capacities to bargain and negotiate with employers and influence state policy, the US model is best. Pg. 190

Extra thing! Here is an interview Ness gave after the publication of the book:

i've been wanting to learn more about communism and socialism, i recognize that what i was taught in my grade school courses is mostly pro-capitalist propaganda. does anyone have any book/documentary/video essay recommendations?

History of pro-capitalist anti-communism:

I would also recommend watching the following documentaries to learn more about the history of capitalist brutality:

COINTELPRO 101 created by the Freedom Archives, which includes firsthand accounts and interviews from people who the U.S. government targeted for organizing in the Civil Rights movement, opposing the Vietnam War, and fighting for liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

The War You Don’t See directed by John Pilger, which covers the way that corporate media and governments deceive us about the actual nature of 21st century imperialist wars in Africa and Asia by misrepresenting them as fights to “make the world safe for democracy” and eliminate dictatorships.

Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War directed by Daniel Miller, which goes into the history of U.S. overseas imperialism and how it has always been misrepresented to the public as a crusade for democracy and freedom.

The Corporation directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, which goes into the history of modern corporations, how they achieved legal personhood, and how they’ve established a monopoly of control over all aspects of life under 21st century capitalism.

Capitalism: A Love Story directed by Michael Moore, which dives into the ways that 21st century capitalism directs society’s wealth towards anti-social and destructive ends. It also points out the contradictions in a lot of pro-capitalist anti-communist ideology.

What communism is:

For a basic overview of what communism is trying to accomplish, I would recommend reading these two short essays written during the biggest working class revolutionary wave in Western history in the aftermath of World War I: Rosa Luxemburg’s The Socialization of Society and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Socialism.

For a more detailed sense of what communist society would mean, I like Cornelius Castoriadis’s Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society (for some idea of post-revolution measures) and Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (for a stronger sense of a well-rounded communist society).

To learn about the history of communism in the U.S., some good books to read are Pioneers of Liberty by Rudolf Rocker, The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich, Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley, The American Revolution by James Boggs, and Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.

History of capital-C Communism:

For the history of 20th century capital-C Communism, you’re going to have to rely on a pretty wide range of sources to get a good look at the big picture. I’ll just list some books, then some documentaries.

Books:

As intros that come at the topic from radical liberal and social democratic outlooks, many people start with Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, written as a critique of 1990s anti-communist triumphalism, and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee, which points out that the personal freedom that feminists were fighting for in the 2010s had come closest to becoming a reality in 20th century socialist states.

For a fuller portrait of some 20th century socialist experiments, I would recommend reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Soviet Experiment, William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After, and Aviva Chomsky’s A History of the Cuban Revolution. These all cover the three most influential socialist revolutions in the 20th century and will give you a better sense of why so many people supported them in their day before the neoliberal anti-communist propaganda that Parenti and Ghodsee critiqued placed them behind the pale of acceptable discourse in the 1990s and 2000s.

If you’re okay with a longer book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel will give you a very comprehensive portrait of what everyday life in the Soviet Union was like. It really humanizes the experience compared to the cartoon caricatures we’re used to getting from family, school, and anti-communist media.

Documentaries:

To learn a bit about the U.S.’s own tradition of communist militancy, I would highly recommend watching The Wobblies directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer. It includes archival footage and interviews with working class veterans of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and shows how they became communist revolutionaries as a result of struggling to improve the conditions of their own lives against the power of capitalists.

Red Storm Rising: The Struggle for the American Communist Party from PBS covers the basic history of the CPUSA and how it declined under the leadership of people who wanted to liquidate into New Deal Civil Rights reformism and focus on advocating for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. However, it does neglect to cover the militants like Harry Haywood and Mary Inman who wanted to keep fighting for total liberation and world revolution. These were the people who carried on into Black Power and the New Left in the 1960s.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution goes more into the history of American communism and shows just how recent and relevant it is for regular people struggling for liberation. This is what the repression and programs of programs like COINTELPRO are designed to destroy and prevent.

The Lost World of Communism from the BBC covers the Eastern Bloc from a liberal perspective but gives a pretty detailed sense of everyday life in the socialist states. It’s definitely a much more grounded source than a lot of what we’re taught in the U.S., which is that there effectively was no society in the Eastern Bloc and it was just a totalitarian police state all the way down.

October: Ten Days That Shook the World directed by Sergei Eisenstein is the first documentary about the 1917 Russian Revolution and includes reenactments of its events from the regular people who lived through it and participated in making it. If watching a silent movie is not so much your speed, surprisingly Lucasfilm made a pretty good documentary about the Revolution called The Russian Revolution: All Power to the Soviets, although it comes with all the one-sided pitfalls of a 21st century liberal perspective.

China: A Century of Revolution directed by Sue Williams covers the rise of the People’s Republic of China and demonstrates how it was very much an indigenous product of China’s revolutionary process. It goes into the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the Republican period and wars of the 1920s-1940s, the rise of the PRC’s New Democracy in 1949, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and finally the Reform and Opening Up in the 1980s and 1990s.

Morning Sun directed by Carma Hinton, daughter of William Hinton, covers the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the perspective of everyday participants and victims. It gives a much more grounded sense of what the era was like than some of the cartoonish and racist caricatures that conventional U.S. narratives offer.

For the Cuban Revolution, you can get the most comprehensive coverage by watching Fidel: The Untold Story directed by Estela Bravo and Che Guevara: Beyond the Myth directed by Tancrede Ramonet. The pro-capitalist anti-communist lies that we’re told about this Revolution are the most straightforward for us to debunk because of how closely the participants were linked with the rest of the Americas, including the U.S.

The Death of Yugoslavia from the BBC is one of the better documentaries for seeing just how chaotic and horrific the collapse of 20th century Communism was for the people who lived it. Although it’s from a liberal perspective, it’s ultimately right that the collapse stemmed from inner rot as much as enemy encirclement. It avoids the pitfalls of the dumbest and most simplistic anti-communist narratives about corruption and inefficiency in the socialist states.

Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul from REDFIST Media covers DPRKorean citizens living in the Republic of Korea. It shows how difficult the conditions of their lives are once they go to the south, how these horrific conditions incentivize them into agreeing to produce propaganda for the capitalist dictatorship of the South against the North (as if the North were the only dictatorship in the peninsula), and how many of them seek to return to the North where they at least have families, jobs, and social assistance.

Conclusion:

The big picture problem with the pro-capitalist anti-communist perspective is that they a priori rule out thinking about anything from a global perspective. They ask you to ignore the overwhelming violence and sabotage that it took to destroy 20th century communism in spite of its massive appeal for regular people. At the same time, they expect you to believe that the brutality and misery of capitalism is justified by its successes, and by the “greater” threat of communism. Then they point to the agonies of overwork, industrialization, and state-directed capital accumulation in socialist countries, as if these can be objected to without implying our very own objections against capitalist exploitation and corporate tyranny.

capitalist competition makes each company defend its position against the others. sometimes that means lowering prices, or it can mean cutting staff, holding down wages, squeezing farmers and suppliers, reducing the quality or size of goods, or abandoning places where shops aren’t profitable enough. it produces different results depending on what's most profitable. it doesn't guarantee cheap food and other necessities, and it certainly doesn't guarantee them at a price everyone can afford

Doctors had probably anticipated a brisk business in bleaching the skins of Blacks with radiation, but the publication of its side effects squelched Blacks' interest. Physicians were more successful with non Anglo-Saxon European immigrants, to whom they offered radiation as the cure for another badge of ethnic inferiority- dark and coarse excess hair. Physicians charged enormous fees when they opened X-Ray hair removal clinics with names such as "Hirsutic Laboratories" in the 1920s.

...Historian Rebecca Herzig has described how for Mediterranean and Eastern European women, radiation was held out as a technology that would ease their entree into the impeccably "white" identity they desired by removing telltale dark hair from their upper lips, chins, and lower arms. But instead of hairless white skin, they develop radiation burns, cancers, and horrible disfigurement before suffering painful deaths. The resulting lawsuits spawned legal bans that eventually closed the clinics, and by 1970, researchers calculated that 35 percent of all women's cancers were traceable to X-ray hair removal."

“The relationship between Blackness and disability is especially important to investigate, because it explains so much about how we ended up where we are. Just like prisons and policing are related to slavery, so is the way we think about disability…(Dustin) Gibson discusses the 1840 census, which was the first time there were questions about both disability and race

That census says that the majority of free Black people were “insane” and “idiotic”, to use their language, while saying that the majority of people that were still enslaved were sane. So it’s creating this idea that to be free and Black, and to have the urge to want to be free and Black, is deemed to be a mental illness.

There was even a medical diagnosis for slaves who had the overwhelming urge to run away: drapetomania. This shows that medicallization has always been a tool of white supremacy in the United States.

Race—and specifically Blackness—has been used to mark disability, while disability has inherently “Blackened” those perceived as unfit. Black people were—and continue to be—assumed intellectually disabled precisely because of race. —Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework by Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley

In other words, white supremacy means that Black bodies are seen as inherently disabled, and disability is inherently bad. Ableism and racism are often used as pretexts for each other, which is why it’s so important that we use for the intersectional approach that disability justice calls for.”

I've seen people misinterpret this concept. The misinterpretation goes: "Yes there is a social component to disability but not all disability is from social issues. People with sensory issues will still have headaches from sunlight, social policy progress alone won't make it go away."

But the theory is not "disability is made up and describes no physical qualities". A blind person would be blind no matter how accepting others are. No one is arguing with that.

The point is that a blind child has no concept of disability upon birth.

A blind child perceives herself as normal. That is the only experience available until she learns otherwise.

If humans had no eyes, the blind child would never learn that it's a disability. A blind child learns socially, from other people, that she is different. A blind child's mode of existence is then ignored and excluded in a way that would've been inconceivable in a society of blind people.

That's the social theory of disability.

A blind kid will still be blind but this can be treated as simply one of the ways we exist. We understand that other species exist and never think it's a birth defect that a jaguar is not a human. A jaguar is, and we are.

Additionally, Wikipedia incorrectly attributes this view to British and American liberal civil rights movements of the 1970s:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

But it actually existed at least as early as the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and even that was based on earlier medical works from Germany and other countries.

Here's Lev Vygotsky, a prominent Soviet researcher, writing in 1929:

Source: The Fundamental Problems of Defectology (1929) by Lev Vygotsky

Blindness deeply affects the development of personality and of social ties, in a way that cannot be reduced to numbers like IQ. A blind life is qualitatively different, not the same experience but less ("defective").

A blind person spends their entire life developing strengths to live with blindness, and it would be immediately obvious how much adaptation they have in comparison to a person minus eyes.

For example, autism often implies difficulty with switching tasks. But the life of an autistic person is different in a way that cannot be described simply by qualitative comparisons like "less task switching, more repetition". There's an irreducible quality to it.

Blind people use canes. It's not like we all use canes but they use them more. Again, it's an entirely different development:

Walking is not simply more crawling, and speech is not simply more babbling. Saying one thing is lesser than the other, requires comparing them by some metric but this whole outlook is misleading.

(Sorry for the word "imbecile", I don't know how to accurately translate this obsolete terminology. Again, this was written in the 1920s.)

More importantly, Vygotsky says a blind person's daily life revolves not around blindness but anti-blindness, around skills and tools that enable, not disable the person. Everyone from teachers to doctors to accessibility specialists, should consider these developments. Focusing only on blindness will make you ignore the person's existing habits and tools. You might accidentally work against them instead of with them.

This is not to say that disabilities are sunshine and rainbows, nor that we should be thankful for suffering. Merely that living with disability includes not only the disability but also compensations for it, which explains and describes a lot more about the person's life.

On that last screenshot, Vygotsky says the success of such adaptation depends, roughly speaking, on the severity of the defect and the wealth of compensatory reserves.

It seems to me that if we afford each other a "wealth of compensatory reserves", it will more likely lead to a life of comfort and dignity.

Again, this is the Soviets more than a century ago, and already they were talking about teachers accommodating kids the way we do now:

They even use the terminology of "special" as opposed to "common":

Vygotsky refers to earlier works when he brings us back to the fact that blindness is only a disability in our social context, and would not be considered a disability in a society exclusively of blind people:

Notice how they talk. "A special kind of people would come into being." I get such a warm feeling in my chest from reading these researchers. There is a sort of empathy in this writing despite how formal it is.

Anyway, there's a lot more in the book but let's leave it on this note: Vygotsky illustrates how disability "manifests itself as a social aberration" with a comparison:

This is colonization of the Black population and their eugenic assimilation rather than genocide although any negatively selecting biopolitical management of a population group can easily break out into organized extermination. No different than how the United States made Black Americans citizens, or the national state of Mexico organized the colonial assimilation of Indigenous peoples, or 19th century Russia integrated Asians into the urban citizenry, or Italy Romanized and industrialized the poorer southerners.

For the history of Afro-Argentinians, I would recommend reading Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic by Erika Denise Edwards

The corollary is the formation of dynamic capitalist development with teeming working class democracy in the center and underdeveloped capitalism with anemic unions on the periphery of the world system. But, due to class polarization and the presence of revolutionary class conflict in the South, not all peripheral states surrender to the hegemony of the capitalist system.

Nation states on the periphery of the global economy are composed of three archetypes:

1. Most peripheral states are former colonies dominated by rentier economies which are stewards of Western advanced capitalist corporations and are frequent victims of International Monetary Fund austerity programs. In most instances, but not all, peripheral economies have weak or non-existent trade unions (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Yemen).

2. Semi-peripheral formations, which are subservient to Western imperialism, whose economies are not fully dependent on the imperial core and have a modicum of capital and technology but where high levels of poverty are frequently rampant. Semi-peripheral societies are polarized on the basis of class, gender and other identities. Wealth is highly stratified on the basis of class, race, religion, caste and gender. Under neoliberalism, trade unions have declined significantly and are no longer a potent societal force (Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey).

3. Transitional states which resist imperialism with vigorous anti-capitalist class conflict in response to extractive and underdeveloped capitalism. Conflict often takes the form of struggle over labor and resources. These states include socialist projects (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam) and states attempting to oppose imperialism (Burkina Faso, Mali, Nicaragua, Niger, Venezuela). Opposition to the imperialist core is intermittent and sustained. In transitional states, working class conflict ss organized through political parties which have gained power to initiate the transition to socialism, as was the case in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Socialism does not occur instantly, above all because the revolutionary struggle only occurs on the underdeveloped periphery.

Transitional projects, including the former Soviet Union, unremittingly endeavor to advance and modernize technology and the means of production, recognizing that socialism must be accompanied by technological development. Though not always successful, only transitional states on the periphery have accomplished the transition from semifeudal and capitalist modes of production to socialism; most notably China is in an inchoate form. Before socialism can be achieved, the transitional state must acquire the capacity to develop a socialist mode of production. Socialism does not just appear without delay, and China and other socialist projects must encounter the opposition of the capitalist imperialist center.

check gutenberg for list of "free" out of copyright translations so you know what to avoid (if it is from 1970 or earlier it's probably just a non-starter)

check wikipedia or an online bookstore shopfront or equivalent to find or make a list of (your language) translations

pick one that was done: (a) (mandatory) in the last 30 years (as recent as possible) (b) (optional, if you have multiple modern editions) by a woman

find it in the usual way you find cheap or free books (libraries, institutional access, thriftbooks, other options, etc)

from a classical studies perspective: unless you are specifically studying the translation and reception of these works across time there simply is no reason you should be reading translations from the 1890s (thru really the 1950s and even later in some cases), that call women whores and bitches simply for existing on the page🧍‍♀️. unrelatedly, emily wilson's excellent recent odyssey translation is currently on sale on audible for $8 even if you don't have audible i have heard tell.

obligatory statement here that some authors whose translation style is much more accessible to a broad audience are not especially beloved by academics who work in the same field for persnickety reasons (see: the way classicists get about anne carson being the trending translator on tumblr dot edu) so don't necessarily pay too much attention to THAT sort of persnicketing, but do be sure that whoever is translating the work actually knows the original language well enough to work with it (i.e. for academic translators maybe check their wikipedia page for a controversy section to make sure that, for example, the translator of rumi can actually read rumi). this is probably harder for modern publishing where translator info isn't as widely publicized and i don't have great advice for you other than finding and googling the translators' name in the hopes that they've done recent interviews or have a website etc etc etc.

This oral tradition is frequently dismissed as "old wives' tales" and "superstition" because tales of the theft of Black bodies sound fantastic to many whites- and to African Americans who pride themselves on their scientific sophistication. Many people assume that belief in the theft of Black bodies is paranoia born of a violently racist history.

But Janie Gaines and Sarah Cox know from experience that Black cadavers tend to disappear. In January 1998, the sisters frowned as they surveyed the crumbling headstones, trash, and tangled weeds strangling Greenwood, the Birmingham, Alabama cemetery in which their family had long ago laid their sister, Addie Mae Collins.

Although most Americans do not know her name, Addie Mae is a national icon of sorts. The thirteen-year-old was a martyr of the civil rights movement, one of four girls who were murdered in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church a few days after the city schools were integrated...

It was thirty years before her sisters could bear to visit her grave, and when they saw its neglected state, they immediately arranged to have Addie Mae moved to another, better-maintained cemetery. However, workers who opened the grave recoiled in shock: It was empty, devoid of casket and corpse.

Addie Mae's body, like so many buried and Black cemeteries throughout the south, is missing."

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

By its very existence, the [CPC] presents by far the greatest threat to the Western capitalists’ dominance of class society. The task of the Western press is therefore twofold: first, to lionize and evoke sympathy for the Chinese capitalist, and second—far more importantly—at all costs to vilify and incite hatred for the Party. As shown in Chapter Seven, the Party has unchallenged control over the government; therefore, it too must receive the same treatment, as must Xi himself, as its chosen representative. The Western bourgeoisie had of course always been hostile to the Chinese government, but far less so until the turning point during the late 2000s, when they at last began to realize that proletarian power in China was not diminishing but increasing.

Nothing positive regarding China may therefore be printed. Any overture of friendship the Chinese government makes toward another country can only be a nefarious ruse, certain to bring the other country harm, either then and there or at some later date. The PRC’s great infrastructure projects, when they are begun, can only be doomed to failure; and when they are completed, they can only have been a colossal waste of money. Initiatives to help the poor can only be a sham; if they do have undeniably positive effects, those effects must have come at too great a cost. Every member of the Party can only be irredeemably corrupt, except for those who are actually arrested for corruption. If any Chinese people speak positively of the Party, this can only be the result of the government’s brainwashing. Those who speak critically of the Party, however, are always brave and clear-thinking truth-tellers, soon to be “disappeared” by the government; when they are seen in public thereafter, their reappearance must somehow be “staged” by the government. There can be no criminals in China, only political prisoners who have been falsely accused; neither are these political prisoners kept in prisons, for there can be no prisons in China, only prison camps.

In fact, every policy adopted by the government can only be the latest expression of its brutal totalitarianism. The Party can be the author only of evil, for the sake only of evil. Any and all reporting on China must presume the guilt, rather than the innocence, of the Party. If no evidence can be found of the Party’s sinister abuses of human rights, this can only indicate the government’s terrifyingly efficient censorship. No story casting the Chinese government in an unflattering light is too outlandish for publication, and no acknowledgement of its successes may be printed without heavy qualification. Any and all research into Chinese government policy that has a suitably critical conclusion is fit to be published, whether it is credible, peer-reviewed, and methodologically rigorous or not; any such research with positive findings is not to be trusted—especially if it is conducted by Chinese academics, even when their research is done independently of the government.

Through the hegemony of the super-empire, anti-China propaganda has become ubiquitous. The market dominance of Western information technology over the internet ensures that it is the first, and often only, narrative read by the average user. English-language news has become completely saturated with stories demonizing China, each careful to include a multitude of references to other such stories, so that the weakness of any one claim in particular cannot be evaluated without being overwhelmed by the collective. The most spurious or unverified details are typically hidden behind paywalls or multiple layers of citations, deterring skeptics by adding barriers to the formulation of any specific criticisms.

The audience is of course not just the Western public, but the entire world. The NED and other soft-power NGOs transform anti-China propaganda into pro-Western political power in regions throughout the periphery, seeking constantly to redirect toward China any existing anger over unrelated grievances. An even greater expansion of this system is being sought. In early 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to spend $500 million dollars to produce journalism for overseas audiences that was critical of China, the majority of which was to be allocated through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The Senate, in their version of the legislation, went even further, seeking a total of $1.5 billion that should be spent in order to “raise awareness of and increase transparency regarding the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road Initiative.”To maintain its control over the poor and working classes in the periphery and at home, the super-empire must at all costs keep them divided. Any local or international organization premised upon class solidarity with the Chinese worker cannot be allowed to flourish, and the Communist Party’s class character and its relationship to the people must be obscured; it may be portrayed—all 95 million members—only as a vague instrument of “authoritarianism” or “dictatorship,” a wicked and hostile antagonist to the masses, and never as a champion of their interests.

It then follows that it is of greatest importance to publish any and all information that might draw attention to the Party or the government’s shortcomings with respect to ethnic minorities, the rural poor, women’s rights, religious freedom, the treatment of those with non-conforming gender identities and sexual orientations, and other categories of marginalization. If any such shortcomings are real, they must be broadcasted again and again, even long after they have later been addressed or ameliorated by the government’s actions; if such shortcomings are mild, unforthcoming, or unverifiable, new ones must be invented or inferred.