In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
That’s a ton of reflection and openness, so I just want to commend you for that. Fantastic to hear and see.
Initially, I want to give a general basis for what can be considered bourgeois. The Bourgeoisie are those Capitalists who do not need to perform labor to survive, and earn their money via ownership alone. One can be a business owner actively and a member of the bourgeoisie if they can simply hire someone to manage in their place, but a member of the petite bourgeoisie cannot hire a manager to take their place and still make enough money to survive.
As for general reading recommendations? You have a lot of paths you can go. I don’t personally recommend going full ML or full Anarchist right off the bat, usually it takes a lot of reflection to pick a tendency. I myself don’t even have a tendency I identify with, as I believe the process towards progress is unique for each country and state.
If you want a real quick intro: Principles of Communism, by Engels, is an extremely quick read. Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein is another fantastic paper. The Communist Manifesto is good, but it’s extremely fiery and usually is better after you’re familiar with Marxism.
If you want to get a quick intro that breaks more into the theory side (as in, you’ll be more well-read than the vast majority of online leftists with little effort), read both Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labor and Capital by Marx. They are condensed and simplified versions of what Marx greatly elaborates on in Capital, his seminal masterwork.
For Anarchism, An Anarchist FAQ is a good starting point. Note that Anarchists usually align with Marxists on analysis, but not on strategy.
There’s also topics like Syndicalism, Market Socialism, the idea of Reform vs Revolution (Rosa Luxembourg has a good paper on that), and more, but those are fantastic bang for buck reads.
If you still want more, you can always read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and The Conquest of Bread, the former for Marxism and the latter for Anarchism.
Hope this helps! There are tons of YouTube videos as well that simplify Marxism as much as possible.