Revolutionary Reading List
A [non-exhaustive] list of further readings, split up by topic.
(Note: This is a living page, and will be updated over time with additional readings and topics!)
INDIGENOUS HISTORY & STRUGGLES
The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Red Power and Self-Determination - Troy R. Johnson
The occupation of Alcatraz Island was a historic event that helped bring Red Power activism to the world's attention. Due to the unrest in the Bay Area Native American population, the indigenous population organized a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, the former prison. This book goes through the occupation itself, the events that led to it, and describes the revolutionaries who took part in it. A must-read for those interested in contemporary North American indigenous peoples' civil rights issues.
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (The Lamar Series in Western History) - Benjamin Madley
A detailed account of the Native American genocide in the state of California that was committed by the US government. Between 1946 and 1873, the native population of California shrank from 150,000 to 30,000 due to the slaughter committed by state and federal officials. The book examines how taxpayer dollars were used to support the violence, how Native Americans resisted the violence, and who committed the genocide and how they did it.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend - Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Red Cloud, a Sioux warrior-statesman, was the only Indigenous American to defeat the US Army in a war, forcing the US government to sue for peace on his terms during Red Cloud’s War. At the peak of his powers, the Sioux claimed control of one-fifth of the continental United States by uniting many angry tribes under a powerful leader. “The white man lies and steals.” “My lodges were many, now they are few. The white man wants all. They must fight for it.” – Red Cloud
Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism - Noenoe K. Silva
This book describes the mostly unknown history of native Hawaiian resistance to the annexation of Hawaii in 1897. As the pro-American, and mostly white, landowning oligarchs made plans to allow the US government to annex the islands, the native population organized a massive petition that 95% of the population signed. This caused the annexation treaty to fail in the United States Senate, a massive victory against American colonialism. The Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in a coup d'état against Queen Liliʻuokalani the following year by foreign residents who allowed the US to annex the islands. Despite these tragic events, the petition drive of 1897 was still a temporary victory for native resistance to colonialism.
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto - Vine Deloria Jr.
A landmark of Indigenous activism, Deloria’s manifesto dismantles stereotypes and exposes the hypocrisy of US Indigenous policy. Written at the height of the Red Power movement, it fuses sharp wit with political critique, calling for Native sovereignty, self determination, and a radical rethinking of America’s relationship to its first peoples.
Marxism and Native Americans - Ward Churchill
This collection brings Indigenous and Marxist thinkers into dialogue, interrogating class struggle, colonialism, and the limits of leftist analysis when applied to Native realities. The essays challenge settler left frameworks and insist on Indigenous nations as distinct political entities in the fight against capitalism and empire.
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock - Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Gilio-Whitaker traces centuries of Indigenous resistance to environmental destruction, linking traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary movements for climate and land justice. From treaty violations to the frontlines at Standing Rock, she shows how environmentalism and decolonization are inseparable struggles.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown
A sweeping narrative that recenters the history of the American West through Native eyes, Brown’s classic chronicles the systematic betrayal, displacement, and massacres that accompanied US expansion. Through eyewitness accounts and historical documentation, it exposes the human cost of Manifest Destiny culminating in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children were slaughtered by US troops.
More than half a century after its publication, the book’s relevance endures: the US government has still not revoked the Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the killings, a refusal reaffirmed under the Trump administration. Brown’s work continues to demand moral reckoning, insisting that historical truth and accountability are prerequisites for justice.
The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians - Mary Stockwell
Mary Stockwell’s The Other Trail of Tears sheds light on a forgotten chapter of American history, the forced removal of the Shawnee, Wyandot, Ottawa, and other Native peoples from the Ohio Valley. Drawing on rich archival sources, Stockwell tells the story of how settlers’ hunger for land and the federal government’s policies combined to push Indigenous communities out of the region they had called home for generations. Rather than treating removal as a single tragic event, she reveals it as a long and painful process that unfolded over many years, reshaping both Native and settler worlds. The book offers a compelling look at how greed, politics, and survival intertwined on the early American frontier, reminding readers that the legacy of removal extended far beyond the better-known Trail of Tears.
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present - Ward Churchill
Churchill delivers a fierce, meticulously documented indictment of genocide denial in the Americas. He argues that the destruction of Indigenous nations from 1492 onwards constitutes a clear case of genocide under international law, challenging the hypocrisy of Western narratives that mourn some genocides while erasing others.
In one of the book’s most provocative analyses, Churchill traces how Nazi racial policies were influenced by US precedents: the reservation system, forced removals, and extermination campaigns against Native peoples. By revealing these connections, he exposes the deep roots of racialized violence in the structures of empire and modernity, demanding a recognition of genocide not as an anomaly, but as a foundational feature of the Americas.
DISABILITY EXPLOITATION
Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment - James Charlton
Disability oppression, experienced in some form by 500 million people throughout the world, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness. This book provides a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism.
A Very Capitalist Condition: A History and Politics of Disability - Roddy Slorach
This book analyzes various aspects of disability history and politics through a Marxist framework focused on how disabled people have, at different times and in various ways, been exploited by and excluded because of the profit-maximizing imperative of capitalism. It also gives examples of how disabled people have organized to resist such trends.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism - Robert Chapman
Neurodivergent liberation is possible, but only by challenging the deepest logics of capitalism. Empire of Normality is an essential guide to understanding the capitalist system that shapes our bodies, minds, and deepest selves – and how we can dismantle it.
Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto - Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
This book examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a "surplus" class. We will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital and develop new politics of solidarity built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive.
Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell - Marta Russell
A collection of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism that provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations.
PALESTINE
The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
Classic anti-colonial piece that explores the physical and mental violence of colonialism, and why revolution is necessary; great starter piece for understanding settler colonialism as we see in Palestine.
A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine - Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
A primary revolutionary source that gives a Marxist perspective on both allies and enemies to revolutionary struggle in Palestine, the need for collective struggle, and the strategies to achieve it; good for furthering understanding of the dynamics of revolution and what it should/could look like.
The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development - Sara Roy
Specifically outlines the "extreme, almost impenetrable" complexities of the history and present conditions of imperial control in the Gaza Strip, mostly in an economic context, and further highlights the necessity of radical action to achieve solidarity in Palestine.
Control Food Control People - Rami Zurayk & Anne Gough
Examines food production in the Gaza Strip, and uses this information to show how food insecurity is a purposeful strategy of the imperialist forces in Palestine. Highlights how restricting access to food is a key tool of colonizers.
Perfect Victims - Mohammed el-Kurd
Deeply passionate and confrontational piece that exposes how Western society forces Palestinians into an impossible place: be docile to your oppressors and earn our sympathy; fight your oppressors and earn our scorn.
AMERICAN POLICING AND MASS INCARCERATION
Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis
A classic text arguing for prison abolition and outlining how prisons function to uphold racial capitalism. A clear and concise introduction to abolitionist politics.
The End of Policing - Alex Vitale
Accessible and sharply argued. Shows how police are designed to manage poverty and protect property, not to keep people safe. Aimed at dismantling reformist illusions.
We Do This 'Til We Free Us - Mariame Kaba
A practical series of essays, interviews, and organizing insights. Grounded in abolitionist feminism and community-based resistance. Extremely useful for building an organizing vision.
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Explains California's massive prison boom as a response to economic crisis, not rising crime. Gilmore shows how surplus labor, land, and capital were funneled into prison expansion to manage the fallout of racial capitalism.
Blood in my Eye - George L. Jackson
Collected writings by a revolutionary imprisoned by the state. Deeply Marxist, anti-imperialist, and infused with the rage and clarity of a man who saw the U.S. prison system as a fascist instrument of class war.
If They Come In The Morning... Voices of Resistance - Angela Y. Davis
Published while Davis was facing trial herself, this powerful collection brings together writings from Black revolutionaries and political prisoners confronting the U.S. carceral state. A searing indictment of prisons as tools of repression, and a call to collective defense and struggle.
Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime - Dylan Rodríguez
A heavier academic text analyzing how the prison regime functions to crush radical movements and quell dissent. Dense but valuable for serious study.
US IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA
The Dialectics of Dependency - Ruy Mauro Marini
Considered one of the most important intellectuals in Latin American social thought, Marini demonstrates that underdevelopment and development are the result of relations between economies in the world market, and the class relations they engender.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution - C.L.R. James
The Black Jacobins analyzes the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent - Eduardo Galeano
This classic sets the standard for historical scholarship on Latin America. Rather than charting the continent according to more traditional geographic or chronological delineations, Galeano tells the story of Latin America by uncovering the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology - Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker
José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most profound but overlooked thinkers. A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin America.
Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism - Martín Arboleda
Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism.
Power and Resistance: US Imperialism in Latin America - James Petras & Henry Veltmeyer
This book concerns the form taken today by US imperialism in Latin-America, analyzing the projection of US state power as a means of both advancing the economic interests of US capital in the region and maintaining its hegemony over the world capitalist system.
Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class - Justin Akers Chacón
Radicals in the Barrio uncovers a long and rich history of political radicalism within the Mexican and Chicano working class in the United States.
The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America - Stephen G. Rabe
Rabe he takes a look at Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala and argues that the sense of accomplishment that occurred at the end of the Cold War came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Latin American lives.
PRIDE
Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come - Leslie Feinberg
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender. Gender: self-expression, not anatomy.
Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique - Mario Mieli
This book details the way in which the liberation of homosexual desire requires the emancipation of sexuality from both patriarchal sex roles and capital. It’s an essential reading for all who seek to understand the true meaning of sexual liberation under capitalism today.
Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism - Peter Drucker
“This book shows how the successive 'same-sex formations' of the past century and a half have led both to the emergence of today's 'homonormativity' and 'homonationalism' and to ongoing queer resistance” (Haymarket Books).
Transgender Marxism - Elle O'Rourke and Jules Joanne Gleeson
Reflecting on the relations between gender and labor, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society.
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Sa’ed Atshan
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia. Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis.
Honorable Mentions
The Spiral Path - David Fernbach
Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation - Sherry Wolf
Gay Liberation in the Eighties - Jamie Gough and Mike MacNair
LABOR
Strike! - Jeremy Brechner
Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America and tells this exciting hidden history from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it.
Teamster Rebellion - Farrell Dobs
This is the story of the strikes and union organizing drive the men and women of Teamsters Local 574 carried out in Minnesota in 1934, paving the way for the continent-wide rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a fighting social movement.
A History of America in Ten Strikes - Erik Loomis
This book challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. Labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about.
Labor’s Untold Story - Richard O. Boyer
“Labor’s Untold Story is a history of the U.S. labor movement from the Civil War through the Eisenhower Administration. Widely regarded as a classic study since it was first published in 1955, the book documents labor-management conflict from the workers’ perspective” (Labor’s Bookstore).
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend - Priscilla Murolo
Hailed as the first comprehensive look at American history through the prism of working people, this book "[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor" (Library Journal).
Honorable Mentions
American Labor Struggles - Samuel Yellen
The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker - Theresa S. Malkiel
Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests - Erik Loomis
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution - Dan Georgakas, Marvin Surkin, Manning Marable