A high school teacher writes:
I'm a longtime reader of your blog and former philosophy student. I teach advanced high school students in English, debate, and philosophy at a public high school.
I'm curious if you or your readers have any recommendations for essays or books I could excerpt that would (i) help the kids take Marxist thought seriously and/or (ii) help them appreciate why one might see so much infighting on the left between those supporting race-based identity politics and socialists. I plan on teaching some of Reed's articles and a few other articles you've featured on your blog, but many of those pieces don't do the more basic work of unpacking capitalism's flaws. I've taught some of Chomsky's On Anarchism and a few other short essays with some success, but they are all a bit too complicated given the straightforward and relatively easy task of outlining capitalism's flaws.
Thanks for any help.
I'll open this for suggestions from others, but here are some thoughts of my own. A colleague elsewhere told me he used to good effect my opening remarks at a recent debate about capitalism, socialism, and social democracy with undergraduates in an introductory PPE-type course at his university (here is a typescript version of my remarks: Download Capitalism social democracy socialism). Less basic, but generally accessible, is Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today (Oxford, 2002)--you'd want to pick some selections. The essay by Randall Collins in Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford, 2013) is also useful, and free of Marxist jargon although making essentially Marx's point.
Suggestions from readers?
