So, to get more than a surface level understanding you’re going to have to either live real hard, or read a lot-and some of the words won’t be small.

That’s not to say reading archaic 19th century dialects will be necessary in all cases, but deep complex ideas and honest accounts of complex events can be difficult to portray accurately in a thirty second video.

But graeber is s good place to start. Lifelong new yorker, died of covid complications.

Debt: the first 5000 years

The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity

Revolutions in reverse

Those are the big ones, but he wrote a lot. The guy who made debt: the first 5000 years a slick read also wrote at least one volume about pirates.

I am going to go on a limb, since if you anything like me reading some dense economic theory written in dense academic language using words from 100 years ago, is not going to help you and you may well come away without your mental health.

I read a book called Damdest Radical and I suggest to all people who want an understanding, its not a theory book, and it wont try to explain anything to you.

Its a biography, about a doctor who fell in with anarchists, and what he got up to with his life. I feel its a good introduction, since you see peoples ACTIONS and how they LIVED their lives, you will pretty quickly see what Anarchism and more generally leftism is about.

You’ll see how people from 100 years ago tried to change their world, where they failed and where they succeeded. And hopefully you will think about how you might apply some of their ideas to problems in your life, and how you might avoid some of their pitfalls. Both at a personal level and at a political level.

It helps that the guys life is genuinely quite interesting and fun, and because he kind of fell into anarchism, you get a perspective of someone who isn’t down the ideological rabbit hole, and is taking what they feel is good about the whole thing and leaving the negatives.

Egads!

You mean you want to have a resource that explains these things to you in a way that would actually matter to the working class? The nerve! Have you considered what that would that do to our leftist-circlejerking credibility? Have you considered what would that mean for our precious hierarchy of leftist purity?

No, you didn’t - you only think about yourself!

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist - I’m done laying it on so thick now.

It really depends on what you mean by “simpler.” I’ve been seeing a lot of (supposedly) smart people take Einstein to task for his whole “if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old you don’t understand it yourself” thing - and that just makes me suspect that they don’t understand anything as well as they assume themselves to do.

Have you tried The Anarchist FAQ?. It’s good - but it’s nowhere near what I would call “simple.”

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/

I mean, the best understanding is still probably going to come from some Russian guy. Also, he isn’t random, he is literally the guy responsible for general awareness of the fundamental workings of economics.

I want you to go read Value, Price, and Profit. It’s short, like 50 pages long, and written for the masses. This book explains what money is better than any singular resource out there.

Socialism is when the profits go to the people, communism is when profits go to the government, and capitalism is when the profit goes to an individual.

Anarchy means society dictates its rules as an autonomous collective more than anything. It’s doesn’t mean “no rules” it means “no rulers”. Nobody really explains what that means because no society really does it in the modern day. It’s all theoretical what it would look like.

Economic policy and social policy aren’t necessarily related in that they don’t depend on each other. You can be a capitalist anarchist or a socialist Republic or a communist monarchy or whatever, one is money the other is people.