How To Start A Socialist Book Club

Last summer, in an interview with writer and professor Jodi Dean, we explored how the humble reading group can be a major building block in political organizing. As someone long since graduated from formal education, I loved the idea of organizing politically educational discussions with friends and allies. So I set out to create a guide for AJ+ readers, and for myself, to do just that.

I called up Marian Jones (@paidmarian), a former political education coordinator for New York DSA’s Socialist Feminist Working Group and an editor at Lux, the socialist feminist glossy. As coordinator, Jones organized reading groups on topics including reproductive justice, Black feminism and prison abolition. Currently, she’s working on a reading group on Angela Davis with another Lux editor, Natalie Adler.

Education for freedom

Political education on the left is intended to be liberatory, Jones said. She invoked bell hooks' book Teaching to Transgress, which argues that education should be geared toward the critical thinking necessary for organizing work. This sort of political education addresses itself to a core question: “How do we get free?”

Jones said that socialist political education has served to educate workers of different backgrounds and help develop a collective political consciousness. People reading together can develop their philosophies, build community and develop the confidence to take on other roles in organizing.

A reading makes an argument

Jones said that every reading list makes an argument or picks an angle. The Davis reading list is designed to investigate the East Germany solidarity campaign for Davis, and explore the nuances around Davis’ alignment with East Germany. The reproductive justice reading list makes the case for reproductive politics that are about more than abortion, but also about getting the resources to care for children.

For her Davis reading list, Jones searched for well-known articles, and articles in left-wing publications, then proceeded down the rabbit hole of links, keeping an eye out for debates and controversies. “It just involves kind of searching around to see what problems we can explore within a topic,” Jones said.

Circle up

People looking to start their own political education reading group could start out by partnering with an organization, as Jones has done with the local DSA chapter. Or just grab a few friends.

Jones said that everyone’s style for group discussion is different. She spends a lot of time developing guiding questions ahead of meetings, six or so, and starts with ice breakers. Sometimes she’ll break an especially popular meeting into smaller groups.

A radical model of education

Jones contrasted this way of learning to the “banking” and “depositing” model of education, which Paulo Freire criticized in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In that model, students are seen as “empty vessels” for a teacher’s knowledge, and absent of critical thinking.

“Education should assume that the students have knowledge to share as well. So instead of viewing the students as empty and the teachers are full of knowledge, all of us are kind of half full, and we're all respected and engaged, and there shouldn't be hierarchy in a more liberatory kind of education,” Jones said. “So mutual sharing of knowledge is really important in political education [and] learning about things that can help you kind of survive being in a hostile setting, learning why that setting is hostile, coming into political consciousness.”