100 books like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Graphic Novel)

Joe Saccos’ work has had such an impression on me.

In 1991-1992, Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories, collecting stories for this masterpiece of journalism and comics. He was breaking new ground; Comics Journalism as a form did not really exist before this book.

On the ground, Sacco found that as a cartoonist, he could delve deeper into the experiences of the Palestinians he interviewed; all knew their identities were safe as the book would be drawn, with no identifying photos, no names. Their stories and pain pour forth. 

Looking back on this publication thirty years later, the situation has become far, far worse for Palestinians. This book is an excellent primer to understand the atrocities of the present and the context of their past.

In researching my graphic novel, I read many comics on slavery.

This atmospheric account of enslaved Virginians in 1831 is a hard read, but it made a great impression on me.

Powerfully, Baker uses the verbatim testimony from the confession of Nat Turner as he awaited execution in jail. The narrative does not pull its punches; in one scene, Turner recounts the murder of a plantation owner's baby. It is shocking, but Baker skillfully puts this in the context of the brutality of the lived experience of the enslaved, their own children being routinely abducted and sold by their masters.

The comic is a powerful slave narrative in this sparse and mostly wordless retelling of America’s most famous slave revolt.

Another book that I highly recommend is Vanni. It has a brilliant mix of deft cartoon imagery and meticulously researched verbatim materials. 

Dix and Pollock recount the story of one Tamil family’s journey from war-torn Sri Lanka to a place of troubled refuge in the UK. 

Vanni’s depiction of Tamil communities, caught in the crossfire of the brutal conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil Tigers, the devastating tsunami that hits the region, and then the refugee crisis that follows is an important and necessary reportage on one of the world’s most under-reported conflicts.

I grew up in a politically active family but had never read The Communist Manifesto. Martin Rowson's adaption blew me away. 

The book opens with an amazing series of spreads; in bold black and white and blood-splatted red, he charts the development of human history from the serfdom of early civilisations through the Middle Ages, up to the slave trade, the age of revolutions and the Industrial Revolution that ripped workers away from life in the fields and into factory labour and then on. 

From this, Marx and Engels begin their walk through the rest of the book, announcing, "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism."

Rowson’s dense and beautiful artwork makes demands on the reader; in its multi-layered depths of meaning, it’s a phenomenal achievement.  

This book is one of the texts that gave rise to Italian “operaismo.”

For me, as for many other Marx scholars, it is a fundamental text that teaches how to look at capitalist relations from the perspective of class struggle. This shift in perspective means looking at capital as a response to a conflict that forces it into constant restructuring, innovation, and reconfiguration.

The conflict also innervates workers' institutions, so that sometimes a refusal to participate in a strike can also be read and acted upon as a refusal to participate in the union's reformist and compromising politics. It is a way of reading social relations to free their political potential.

I could have mentioned other books written by E.P. Thompson. Each of his books has influenced my work.

Customs and Tradition contains "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." This brilliant and elegantly written essay shows how capitalism, to impose itself, had to modify the experience of time. This change occurred through numerous conflicts with the traditions and customs of the working classes.

E.P. Thompson teaches us to consider the political importance and emancipatory potential of these struggles and not to leave "tradition" and its energy to the right.

E.P. Thompson taught me to look at these conflicts not just as forms of resistance, but as tensions between mutually incompatible legal systems. A useful corrective to Foucault.

A renowned economist and Harvard professor with a bit of a cult following, Schumpeter provides a realistic evaluation of what capitalism is and whether it can survive if it does not do more to help a wider range of people.

First published in 1942, Schumpeter’s fear was the rise of socialism, but what he had to say about the failings of capitalism back then applies with equal force today.

Schumpeter was the originator of the term “creative destruction” to describe how capitalism works, and Part II of the book was the inspiration for my paper, “Can Liberal Capitalism Survive?”

The book has never been out of print. 

Although not Fromm’s best-known book, The Sane Society is crucial because it states for the first time a description of the human condition. I was astonished when I first read it, as it presented to me the possibility that the human condition could be described, and, therefore by implication, understood, something which had never before occurred to me. Fromm’s thesis is that society in the 20th century, when he was writing, can be characterised as insane, because it does not meet humanity’s real needs. Part of the revelation of this book is that such needs can be developed from an analysis of the human condition. Since reading the book, I have followed Fromm’s conviction that a real and true description of ourselves is crucial to humane ethical progress. 

This really engaging book shows how Capital, Volume 1 is implicitly modelled on Dante’s Inferno, from the way Marx stages the descent (katabasis) into the hell of the 19th-century factory to the division of the French and English translations into 33 chapters, mirroring the 33 cantos of Dante’s famous poem. Roberts almost makes you forget you’re reading political theory, an effect Marx was aiming for in trying to reach his socialist and working-class audiences.

Jules Boykoff has been writing about the Olympics for a very long time.

His work is smart, readable, well researched, and grounded in reality. He also happens to have been an Olympic soccer player. So he’s got credibility as a guy who values sports, yet still thinks the Olympics have a lot to answer for.

Celebration Capitalism is the book where Jules lays out his theory of how the Olympics, and other mega-sporting events, capitalize on sports celebrations to further enrich the rich, and impoverish the poor.

He builds on Naomi Klein’s concept of ‘disaster capitalism’ to make this argument, and in my opinion, it’s bang on.