My uncle asked me for a primer on socialism. I was thinking maybe Socialism Made Easy or Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Anything that might be better?
For context my whole family are through and through vote blue liberals. It’s sad to say but most of them didn’t even like/vote for Bernie during the primary cycles. They aren’t really hardcore anticommunists though and have always been good on unions and labor generally, moreso the problem is really anti-Trump/pro-Dem brainworms. Maybe there’s something more modern to share that I don’t know of.
You might try the “Why women had better sex under socialism” article. It’s shows very concrete examples of how socialist economics improved the lives of women in the relatively recent past and does rely on dense theory in the explanation. I think it could be a way to say “before I ask you to read the theory, let me show you an example of the outcomes of the theory so you know that the theory works and is valuable.”
A really great article actually, was it only ever the article and not a book? However, I got to say that there still seems to be a lot of anticommunist priming in nearly every sentence. And calling women in communist state positions advocating for liberation “cultural imperialists” is a little over the top. I forgot what it’s like to be in the weird in-between zone where you recognize socialism as a successful system that has already achieved great success for worker libration but still have to do the anticommunist song and dance to be “taken seriously”, maybe even from your own perspective yourself.
Ghodsee is kinda weird like that. She’s gotten better over the years (I think) but she had a vein of anti-stalinism that kinda tinted how she wrote about the USSR imo.
She did expand the article into a full book.
Oof. It’s been a while since I’ve read it.
Link