5 Books Every Progressive Should Read

A guide for being a learned and authoritative leftist, featuring links to every work mentioned.

If you consider yourself to be sociopolitically progressive, or a leftist in general, it is not uncommon to find yourself in a position where you must be defensive. By and large, progressivism is not the norm — as such, it is important that we know how to speak boldly and authoritatively about the issues which matter to us the most, and the following five books will help you do so.

Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex

The Second Sex is not only a philosophical masterpiece in second wave feminism, but a lengthy historical analysis — making it the perfect work for both those beginning to learn about feminist issues and those who want to further their existing understanding of feminist issues. Within the introduction, de Beauvoir asserts:

The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

This relationship between the masculine and feminine is a motif throughout the text, and is a wonderful form of conceptual analysis for progressives to employ when discussing feminist issues.

W. E. B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk is a collection of essays, the importance of which within the social sciences cannot be expressed enough. Du Bois perfectly balances historiography, philosophy, and auto-ethnography to present a vivid picture of African American history and experience. Within the first chapter, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, he wrote:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois here presents the double-consciousness of the African American: the African American is forced to see oneself through the eyes of others, and to measure themselves with the measuring tape of a world that “looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This portrait of double-consciousness is a perfect conceptual tool to use, in a contemporary setting, when trying to explain to others how racism is not just a part of our past — but continues to be a force within the lived experience of people of colour.

Karl Marx — Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

Within Capital, Marx reveals the economic patterns underpinning capitalist modes of production, in contrast to the work of political economists such as Adam Smith. Marx proposes that the motivating force within capitalist modes of production is the exploitation of labour, for the sake of creating surplus value through unpaid work.

Capital exemplifies Marx’s notion of dialectical materialism, which is essential to any Marxist analysis:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

Marx, through dialectical materialism, presents a detailed picture of how the capitalist modes of production are ripe with contradiction, and thus are the precursor of the socialist modes of production which are to follow. Capital is thus a necessary tool for any progressive or leftist when criticizing capitalism, or for any progressive or leftist who wishes to develop a better understanding of Marxist analysis.

Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish, or The Birth of The Prison

Discipline and Punish is perhaps Foucault’s most popular work, and for good reason. Foucault here paints a historical picture of the development of our modern penal system, and he argues that the modern prison did not develop with humanitarian concerns in mind. On the topic of how violence within criminal justice has become less of a public spectacle than it once was, Foucault wrote:

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.

Our criminal justice system is, however, no less ‘barbaric’ than it once was — it is just less public, and the punishment-body relation has only taken on a new form. Discipline and Punish is thus a perfect tool for any progressive or leftist concerned with critiquing and reforming our current criminal justice system.

Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Jameson’s Postmodernism presents the case that postmodernism is the age in which traditional ideologies have come to an end. He clarifies:

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called Postmodernism.

Culture, according to Jameson, is formed through ‘mass media’ — or what is referred to as ‘mass culture.’ Mass culture forces us to shape our ideologies under the influence of media culture, creating hegemony — a hegemony wherein media and the capitalist ethos colonize our thoughts and ways of life. Postmodernism is thus a response to this hegemony under mass culture, and — according to Jameson — can be seen within new forms of art and aesthetic production. Postmodernism is thus a perfect tool for any progressive or leftist when attempting to critique the modernist ideology which permeates conservatism.