By ERWIN FREED
Workers’ Voice is adding what we hope will be a regular column with recommendations of audiobooks for workers interested in general studies and occasional fiction titles. All texts are available through the App/Website Hoopla. Hoopla is a free service offered by many libraries, with a surprisingly extensive collection of audiobooks, e-books, and movies.
This column is written by a factory worker and member of Workers’ Voice who is an avid consumer of audio books and other materials throughout the workday. In many shops and industries, from assembly lines to warehouses to kitchens and everything in between, workers complete hundreds of relatively menial and repetitive tasks over thousands of hours in a year. Karl Marx pointed out in “Capital” the tendency of capitalist development to separate the “hand” from the “brain” in the labor process. This has a double-sided effect. On the one hand, it alienates workers from the production-process, but on the other hand—with the advent of portable communications technology—it also frees up our mental facilities to learn and experience a wide array of cultural products while on the clock.
Hoopla is a helpful asset in this regard and points towards the possibilities under a socialist system for synthesizing culture, education, and material production, which is currently hampered by capitalist control of the media and the work process.
One specific difficulty with Hoopla on the level of “User Interface”/”User Experience” (UI/UX) design is that finding texts is almost impossible unless you know exactly what you are looking for. Part of the purpose of this column will be to collect and highlight readings already available for free on the app that can be politically enlightening or otherwise break up the working day. For this reason, we provide short summaries motivating the selections.
Recommendations for these texts is not an endorsement of the political line of the authors or books. It is instead based on the observation that their content can prove useful for general education on various topics or fiction that our contributors find particularly engaging.
This month’s picks:
- America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton (2021, Recorded Books, Inc., read by Shayna Small).
Elizabeth Hinton delves deep into the political economy of Black rebellion and police repression from the 1960s to today. “America on Fire” explores the dialectic of underdevelopment, overpolicing, and uprisings in Black communities with a number of important concrete examples. These range from the Watts Rebellion to the impact of the 1992 ceasefire between Grape Street and PJ Watts Crips and the Bounty Hunter and Hacienda Bloods on the Rodney King uprising in their neighborhoods. The text also includes a detailed overview of Black community self-defense efforts in Pyramid Courts in Cairo, Ill.—a shamefully understudied example of collective mass defense work.
- American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, by Adam Hochschild (2022, HarperAudio, read by Jonathan Todd Ross).
Hochschild is most well known for his 1998 book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” on the genocidal rule of the Belgian monarchy in the Congo. “The Great War” looks at imperialism from a different angle, namely the domestic crisis faced by the U.S. ruling class and President Wilson during World War I. “The Great War” does an excellent job of removing the mask of “Wilsonian liberalism” and exposing the repressive apparatus that lay underneath. The book provides a trove of insights into the methods of police spying on workers’ and socialist organizations, particularly the Industrial Workers of the World, and U.S. capitalists’ reactions to the Russian Revolution in 1917. Students of the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will also be interested in Hochschild’s extensive look at the founding of its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigations. In particular, the foundational importance of the anti-worker “Palmer Raids” is also covered well in the book.
- Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by RF Kuang (2022, HarperAudio, read by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown).
In a slight departure from the previous texts, “Babel” is a book of fiction that blends history, magical realism, and anti-colonial struggle. Set primarily in the “Royal Institute of Translation” at Oxford, the book follows a small cohort of translators-in-training, most of whom come from the colonial world. “Babel” is well paced, and through the use of metaphor and real-world events and texts, provides a sharp critique of colonialism and “free trade.”
Photo: The Watts Uprising of 1965. (Bettman / Corbis / AP)