What do I NEED to read outside of the regular theory (a la "Settlers")

Trans Liberation Beyond Pink and Blue is a hexbear favorite.

Fanon's wretched of the earth is a real strong classic on the "third world"

Anything by web dubois and fred douglass is a good start for the origins of racism in the us. Anything by Dr. King, too.

Blood in my Eye is a good read, and pretty quick.

I will always tell every single human to read The Art of War at least once.

A lot of the recs in this thread cover events that resulted in imperial slaughter or triumph and left/anticolonial movements losing, so if you want a bloomer rec the book October by China Mieville is a gripping retelling of the February & October revolutions in Russia that overthrew the Tsar and then established a communist government. Gotta have a dream to work toward.

IDK I'll just recommend stuff I've read recently.

I'm definitely seconding Trans Liberation Beyond Pink and Blue. There's an audiobook if you're into that.

If We Burn was a really interesting retrospective about the protest movements of the 2010s and what they accomplished, and how they failed.

For history I recommend the John Brown biography by W. E. B. DuBois, as well as his other work Black Reconstruction. Also The Jakarta Method, which covers the ways the US instigated coups and genocides in Indonesia and Brazil (and elsewhere) by backing military dissatisfied with their progressive leaders.

Also, the Red Mars series for a purely fictional story. Has some decent sci-fi nerd shit, a cool revolution, and loads of characters.

Just a heads up with Settlers, it's a very good read and makes some very good arguments but it makes some scholarly errors. Don't take everything it says about history as gospel. All respect for J. Sakai, he was not an academic but he was organising since he was a teenager. I recommend checking out some of the other stuff he wrote cause he has a lot of interesting perspectives.

I would say once you're done with Settlers you wanna check out the stuff by the Black Panthers, a lot of whom were/are scholars. Angela Davis' "Women, Race and Class" is one I specifically always recommend. That's good for intersectionality and really good for where you're coming from geographically speaking.

Others have recommended Fanon, I will also do so. I also highly recommend Walter Rodney a Guyanese scholar who wrote some very accessible works in the 70s, mostly talking about his home country as well as the wider Caribbean and a lot about Africa. Some of his stuff here

A more recent book I recommend is "Red Star over the Third World" by Vijay Prashad. He's an Indian historian that's still active and has written a lot of good books in English. You can find a lot of the talks and interviews he's given on YouTube as well.

When I went to go find that last link I also found this depository of stuff) which has a lot of stuff I think that might interest you. Lots of Palestine stuff at the top and a lot more of the stuff you're asking for as you scroll down.

This one is quite interesting it's a book about the connections between the US black liberation movement and the Korean liberation movement, the internationalism practiced between the two groups who felt they were fighting the same enemy. Rest of the stuff on that site is really good as well.

Last thing I'll recommend is this book by a small, defunct British communist party on Trans issues from a left-wing perspective. It's mostly focused on debunking a lot of the classic transphobic arguments, including the ones you hear that are "rational" or "scientific".

Frank recommended some great stuff!

If you still find yourself with US mythology Zinn's A People's History and Loewen's Lies my Teacher Told Me are a must. Keeping in mind they both at some level have anti-commie brainworms.

Continuing US history, Horne's Counter-revolution of 1776, Beard's Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution, and Davis's Women, Race, and Class. Should pretty much cement that most of what you were taught about US history and the revolution is bullshit.

Then you can get into foreign policy with Blackshirts and Reds, The Jakarta Method, Washington Bullets, Blowback Podcast.

If you want a primer on Neoliberalism and how it's taken over Frank's Listen Liberal, Mayer's Dark Money, and MacClean's Democracy in Chains has you covered by examining neoliberalism's rise in US political parties and media capture.

These are my key recommendations that helped me clean my brain out, excluding Feinberg and Fanon that Frank covered. Pick and choose as necessary, but the groups I have them in tend to compliment each other real well.