Resources

Everything the school draws on to run sessions: readings, films, videos, podcasts, primary sources, and the archives and shows they come from. The material itself lives inside each theme (sorted by lens); the pages here are cross-cutting views that let you find things by format, by author, or all at once.

How to use these files

There are two big-picture views and five by-format indexes. Pick by what you’re doing:

Exploring or discovering

• Sources to explore — the top-level archives, libraries, publishers, podcast shows, and channels the school draws on. Start here when you want to wander and find your own way in.
• All resources — every specific item (text, episode, film, document) in one searchable table. Start here when you want to scan the whole collection or check whether something is already used.

Planning a session (find the right kind of thing for the room)

• Readings by author — books, pamphlets, and articles, indexed alphabetically by author
• Primary sources — manifestos, speeches, documents, archives, and oral histories
• Films and documentaries — feature-length works to screen
• Videos and lectures — shorter online explainers, lecture courses, and video essays
• Podcasts — ongoing shows and single episodes worth knowing about

Every item shows which theme and lens it’s used in, so you can click from any table back to the session context where it lives.

How these pages work

The tables on these pages are generated automatically from the resources tagged in each theme’s files — so they’re always in sync and you never edit the tables by hand. If you edit a table directly, your change will be overwritten on the next build.

Adding a resource

• A specific item (one text, episode, film) → the resources: frontmatter of the theme lens it best fits.
• An item not tied to a theme yet → _extra.yaml.
• A whole source (an archive, library, publisher, show, or channel) → _sources.yaml.

The full field reference — valid format, kind, and access values, with examples — is in the contributing guide. After a change is merged, the tables regenerate on their own.

How I chose these, and what that means for you

I should tell you how this library got built, because it changes how you should use it.

I did not read everything here. I want to say that plainly rather than let the shape of the thing imply otherwise. A catalogue this size, across fifteen themes, is not the record of one person’s reading; it is the record of one person hunting. I went looking for what a study circle would need on each question: the text a tradition is built on, the person who said it first, the argument on the other side, the account from someone who lived it rather than studied it. I chased those through movement archives, university presses, oral history collections, reviews, syllabi, bibliographies, and the footnotes of things I did read. Then I checked that each one is what it says it is, that the link works, that the thing is actually reachable, and that I named where the author is standing. What I could not do, for every item, is sit with it.

So treat this as a map drawn by someone who has walked some of the territory and surveyed the rest. Maps are still worth having. But do not mistake a resource’s presence here for my endorsement of it, and do not mistake my note for a verdict. The note is my best current read, not a ruling, and some of them will be wrong.

Specifically, some of them will be wrong in these ways. Some things will not fit the theme the way I thought they did. I placed each item where the argument seemed to want it, and I have already been wrong about that more than once and moved things after the fact. If you get to the end of a reading and think this is really about something else, you are probably right, and I would rather hear it than not. Some notes will overstate or flatten what an author actually says. I have found this in my own writing here: I compressed an argument into a sentence I liked, and when I went back to the source the real claim was sharper and stranger than my summary. Where that happens, the author is right and I am not. And some of this will be hard to read. There is material here on sterilization, on lynching, on famine, on what was done to people’s bodies without their consent and often with the law’s blessing. It is here because leaving it out would be a lie about how the world was made, not because anyone owes it their attention on a given evening. Look at what a session holds before you walk into a room with it, tell people what is coming, and let them leave.

The reason I built it wide rather than narrow is that I do not know your room and you do. A short list is a claim about what matters. A long one is an invitation to choose, and choosing is the work. Take what serves the people in front of you, leave what does not, and add what I missed.

Which brings me to the part that matters most. This school asks you to read everything critically, and that has to include this school. The pedagogy here says knowledge is made rather than handed down, and a library that exempted its own curator from that would be teaching the opposite of what it says. So argue with the selections. Notice who is missing, because someone always is, and the pattern of who is missing is itself an argument I did not intend to make. Notice when a note is doing your thinking for you. Notice when a Status line says a lens is thin and ask what that thinness is hiding. If you find something wrong, tell me, and if you find something missing, bring it.

I would rather this library be argued with than trusted.

A note on access

Many of the resources the school uses are available freely online. Others require library access, purchase, or subscription. The school does not host or distribute copyrighted material. When a reading is paywalled or only available in print, the school links to a publisher page and notes the situation.

What we link, and what we do not

This is a political library and it expects scrutiny, so its sourcing rule is written down rather than left to whoever is adding the entry.

• We link a free copy when the author or the movement meant it to be free. Leslie Feinberg gave Stone Butch Blues away deliberately and worked on that edition until days before hir death. Marxists.org, the Anarchist Library, and libcom host texts whose authors and traditions intended exactly that. This is most of the library, and it is the point of the library.
• We do not link unauthorized copies of in-print commercial books, however easy they are to find. A PDF of a current Routledge or Verso title on someone’s blog is not open access; it is a copy that happens to be reachable, and pointing at it puts both the school and that host at risk for no lasting gain, since those links rot the moment anyone notices them.
• So a canonical book with no legitimate free copy is listed as paywalled, with a publisher link and a free companion where the author has given a talk, an interview, or an essay carrying the same argument. Being honest about the wall is more useful than pretending it is not there.
• “Free to borrow” means it is genuinely borrowable, which is checked rather than assumed. An Internet Archive scan marked only for print-disabled readers is not a public loan and is not labeled as one here.

The consequence is deliberate: some of the most important books in this library are marked paywalled. That is a statement about publishing, not about the book, and the routes below exist precisely for those cases. Use them, and use each other.

For groups in places without good library access, consider building relationships with sympathetic librarians, university interlibrary loan systems, and free online archives (the Internet Archive, the Marxists Internet Archive, the Anarchist Library). Mutual aid for book access is a part of how the school sustains itself.

You should not have to buy anything to study here. Some concrete ways in, roughly in order of how well they work:

• Interlibrary loan. Your public library can request almost any book, and often a journal article, from another library. It is usually free and usually takes a week or two. This is the most underused route there is.
• The Internet Archive. A free account lets you borrow scans of a great many books an hour at a time. Anything marked “free to borrow” here works this way.
• A library card. Many systems also hand you Libby or Hoopla, and some give you database access from home, which covers a surprising number of journals.
• Ask the author. Scholars are usually glad to send you their own article if you email and ask. It works far more often than people expect, and costs nothing but a short honest message.
• Ask the room. Someone in your group may have a university affiliation and a login. A group that pools what its members can reach is already practicing what this school is for.