Looking to get more down in dirty with Marxist thought, but don’t just want to bounce around individual texts like I have been. I’m looking something structured like a curriculum, does something like that exist?
i would recommend joining a reading group, preferably one associated with a party or org
reading on your own is all well and good, but if you have no one to correct misunderstandings then you will end up like the surprising amount of people i see in marxist spaces who do not know the difference between labor and labor-power, for exampleSelfishly, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list I like to share. The target reader is the US liberal curious about Communist theory and practice, so it doesn’t really get down and dirty with Capital, Anti-Dühring, or figures like Plekhanov or Chernyshevsky, but it does have a structured order intended to build up a comprehensive base that the reader can use to then go and read whatever they please as they further their education on their own.
I’ve been going through this. I’m currently on History of the C.P.S.U. (B). There are a shit ton of books on the list and it has them organized into levels going from beginner, intermediate, advanced, and very advanced. Each level has 3 or 4 trimesters, each with a generous selection of works to read. It also has a background reading section for pre-beginners. While the background reading list has some of the usual suspects like the 'Festo, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Stalin’s introductory text Dialectical and Historical Materialism, it also has some lesser seen picks like works that Adoratsky and Cornforth made on dialectical materialism.
Speaking of lesser seen picks, there are some works on several of the levels I don’t normally see mentioned here or on Hexbear, like the Shanghai textbook on political economy, Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, some Plekhanov, some Lukacs, some of Gramsci’s works that aren’t his prison notebooks, etc.
How are you liking it? I am planning on following it after I finish my Red Sails binge as an opportunity to revisit the classics and also flesh out my understanding with some of the lesser known works.
Liking it a lot so far. It really puts into context why they made the decisions they did.
Good to know, thanks. Going to use it as a baseline for next year’s theory study.
I started using this when I read your comment & yeah, this is fantastic. It’s exactly what I’ve needed. I’m on Dialectical Materialism by Adoratsky & it’s explained so well. Thank you for posting this!
This is excellent! Exactly what I was looking for.
Although, part of me is sad we aren’t all sitting at wooden desks raising our hands, as the stern, communist schoolmarm scolds us at not knowing the theory of wage labor value.
But seriously, time to climb the mountain, comrades!
Have you read Capital?
Gently, geeeently working my way there, it’s pretty daunting. I have a good resource I found though, a podcast called “Reading Capital with Comrades”, that I’m going to use to follow along with them to understand the text better. But I’m trying to bite off a small, digestible bite at a time, both to gain full understanding and not just surface level, and because it’s too much for me to do any more than that right now.
Join us over on Hexbear too! I run a weekly reading thread, though it’s been lonely there the last month or so.
