On North American Communists (and similar)

Well. I hated history class growing up. I went to a history-focused high school and did my best to skirt around the system of forcing you to double up one year. Too many dates, too much old boring stuff. Never piqued my fancy, I didn't see the beauty in it.

2020 sure had some stuff happen though, yeah? And as lots of stuff happened, many of my prior assumptions of reality were ruptured; I saw new sights, I learned new things about how the world worked. I've always been doing that; but I started to see some of the bigger pictures as I grew up a bit. At some point near June of that year I figured "ok, I actually need to understand the past in order to figure out the present" (and I needed to figure out the present in order to know how to best work into the future).

So, here are the resources that helped me really understand American history.

American Communists (and, y'know, similar)

Some people, in places like Oakland, had been seeing this problem for a very fucking long time. Those who mostly grow up in affluent suburbs don't see the same as the black kids in the city. Material reality shapes us, we'll get there in a minute. Check out what the BPP did - look at this piece by Sundiata Acoli - A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and Its Place In the Black Liberation Movement (2008). see what Huey P. Newton wrote, see what Assata wrote and said.

But these thoughts are had worldwide. Those are just some, from black voices in Cali and Cuba. From real Amerikan political prisoners, martyrs, and asylums.

If you want the voice of the hard-working Italian-American working class, grown and raised in East Harlem, Michael Parenti was very influential for me as I started the next steps of my journey (ie. post-teargas). Blackshirts and Reds and Inventing Reality were the most influential. But even The Assassination of Julius Caesar posed thought provoking ideas about information from my old latin classes. For the quick intro on Parenti, this video - well-known in some circles as yellow parenti - is a lecture from 1986. It's a great start, it helped me when I was figuring out how to live life.

Other North American perspectives:

TODO: Malcolm X / Martin Luther King Jr

TODO: links to old speeches by Debs and Lenin letters to American workers

TODO: [Zinn](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767. A_People_s_History_of_the_United_States) -> Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz -> J. Sakai -> They Were her Property. Think about these when you think intersectionality; think about these when you understand your childhood, as you process trauma.

TODO: Steinbeck

Next: Cuba!

PS - come here later if you want, it may not make sense yet.

Eventually, I started realizing all these people who stood the ground I stand were revolutionaries in their own rites.

The abolitionists fought for change. Harriet Tubman was a guerilla of her time. The US Civil War is arguably America's greatest left-wing revolution.

Eventually I realized that George Jackson and the BPP (see above) were the modern followers in those footsteps, continuing to fight for those improperly imprisoned and born into struggle.

Reading all of these different books from different wakes of life allowed me to better understand the current time period, how life works, my role here on the pale blue dot.

Seeing these people, understanding how they lived their lives, has given me insight into how I want to live my own. Very tied in with my philosophies and values, I strive to learn from wherever possible and make the best use possible of every resource at my disposal.

So now, well, I'm a big fan of history. Still a huge fan of learning. Always looking to bring positive growth to the place I call home, always looking to make life brighter for all of the life here trying to live.

Times they are a-changin; we'll keep at it, changing with em.

TODO: decolonization TODO: abolition

index tags: Communists, Reading List, North America, America, USA, BPP, Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, Assata Shakur, Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, Inventing Reality, Howard Zinn, George Jackson, Blood in my Eye, J. Sakai, Settlers, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property, Harriet Tubman, Abolition, Decolonization, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

category tags: World History