I normally give people https://web.archive.org/web/20250129205319/https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/ if they seem open to it. It’s fine, but I feel like we should have our own version with our favorite redsails essays no? I also don’t love hitting people with 19th century primary sources as the first things they encounter lol. Is that revisionist? People don’t like big words and they’re gonna bounce after 10 minutes if they get confused…
Thanks comrade!
For anyone taking a peak, I am planning a rev 3 down the line.
4·18 days agoMaybe one should publish the work it has done.
Or… the work could just sit
08 Nov 2024… for a bit on the computer.
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Oh, awesome! That’s another banger!
Finished Adoratsky’s work by the way, I really enjoyed it but I’m unsure if it will replace Politzer. Politzer makes some minor errors, but is better at explaining dialectical materialism overall.
What are Politzer’s errors? I only read a little bit of his work but the closest thing to an error that I saw was that (so far) it didn’t seem to explain that there are very different meanings of “idealism” that are relevant to Marxism.
Politzer makes minor misunderstandings of internal contradictions. This is rectified in my list by adding On Contradiction right after, but taken as a single source of dialectical materialism, it can lead to errors in how we view contradiction itself, resulting in vulgar dialectics. An example is when Politzer characterizes the crushing of a flea as not an example of autodynamism, instead characterizing it as external and mechanical, while Mao more accurately shows that the winner and loser of a battle is determined by their internal characteristics.
This is a decent thread going over it, along with debate around Politzer’s understanding and dialectics in general. It’s actually what’s prompting me to take a detour from Capital Volume 3 and revisit dialectical materialism to patch up holes I may have.
Thanks, the link is helpful.
No problem!
Yeah, I skimmed it while making the EPUB and I kinda had the feeling it wasn’t a good replacement.
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Yep, will probably have to add Anti-Dühring and Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, then split the guide into “Basic” and “Advanced.” I’m unsatisfied with the level of philosophy in the current guide, but just dropping those in when the guide itself is already ballooned means it’s no intro guide.
Better to have a true intro section that covers the basics as simply and quickly as possible, and a true advanced section where I can put everything I want.
Sounds great.
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Thanks!
This is my short and sweet list:
- Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein
- Principles of Communism - Engels
- Communist Manifesto - Engels & Marx
- Elementary Principles of Philosophy by Georges Politzer
- Wage Labour and Capital - Marx
- Value Price and Profit - Marx
- Reform or Revolution - Luxemborg
- The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism - Lenin
- What Is To Be Done - Lenin
- State and Rev - Lenin
- Inventing Reality - Parenti
- Blackshirts and Reds - Parenti
I also tend to send people Cowbee’s list as well.
I have a friend that is working through this one and it seems very well rounded: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQbU3KmoemuCAPO_b4HMaB8uvY9JGPrhH5aMS3Mm8AL8hjr2kT2ewjcfnsNgqJpMEmEe8Jbr6g9uPf0/pub
You need to add a backslash
\or two spaces at the end of a line
To make a newline (without it becoming a new paragraph, like when you add an empty line inbetween)
Your current list is slightly hard to read because it’s missing these.Or you could make
- A list
- By adding
-in front of each line.
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I never knew you can make new lines using the backslash and space
This is awesome
Thanks!!Shit my bad. I usually check formatting when I do this but I just woke up lol.
Thanks comrade!
You put a lot of effort into that post so it’s saved lol.
Thanks, but the more I see it the more unsatisfied I am with it, haha. Gonna make a rev 3 down the line, focusing on my own studies first.
How is this not surprising lol
Depends on who your target audience is. Why do you want to get people into Marxism and where do you think they should end by following the trajectory?
Is it people who have lost hope and spend their life on consumer distractions? Is it students who have bough into the lies of capitalism? is it workers who have fallen into the trans of propaganda? It is your duty to study your environment and decide which approach should you take best. I can’t recommend you anything concrete, because I’m not part of your community and I don’t understand what’s going on there, on the ground.
But you’ve done some work already and have noticed that people get turned away by big words. You are not going to get those people to read the big books, that much is clear. You can either transform the theory into a simplified version yourself or link something like Second Thought to them. If you end up getting them to go outside and start building socialism nice, if not then change your approach. Personally I judge the results based on how many people we can get to join our efforts in building something and I say we because doing anything alone is kind of antithetical to Marxism.
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