I've read the Manifesto, now what? I ask my anarchist friend and he says to read The Conquest of Bread. My Leninist friend says to read Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Both tell me that Lenin/Kropotkin respectively are shit and I should ignore the other's advice. I was planning to read something by Marx instead, but I have limited free time and Capital is too long. Leninist also claims its not that important to read Marx. If possible could I get a good writer? From my admittedly limited experience it doesn't seem like these early Marxist polemics are particularly engaging.
>i have limited free time Are you gonna die in the next two months or something? If you're not ready to commit don't even start.
For determined people though: The Marx-Engels Reader Road to Wigan Pier Homage to Catalonia Capital (non-abridged of course) What is to be done Quotations from chairman Mao Zedong Selected works of Deng Xiaoping (two tome version)
I would recommend more, but it depends on the language you speak. If you only know one then stick to this
Oliver Harris
Already done both. Its important to understand the ideas that shape our world even if you disagree with them.
John Williams
Obviously Bakounin, State and Anarchy
Asher Mitchell
I havent looked into it myself, but hegel and whatever jewish kabbalistic type stuff is where marx comes from, maybe have a go at that.
Dylan Hill
Loved homage to Catalonia, Looking forward to Wigan Pier one day. Orwell gets me on a deep level. I'll put the Marx Engels reader on my list.
Wyatt Morgan
Marx is brilliant on the topic of economics, but his political theory and his commitment to statism, which led him to break the main body of socialists off of the first International, has been a huge failure for the movement. He should have listened to Stirner, he should have listened to Bakunin. Lenin's writings you might want to sample, but he's as big an idiot as Trotsky. The glorious promise of the Russian revolution fell flat on its face. There are fools who still think there's nothing wrong with North Korea.
Bookchin started out as a Marxist but turned to anarchism, but towards the later part of his life synthesizes the two disciplines in the book The Next Revolution.
I recommend a sampling, including this anthology, and Stirner's For contemporary takes on Marx I just listen to Wolff and Harvey
I forgot to say, avoid modern shitters like Zizek who refuse to deal with the real problems and questions and rather meme their way around the subject to make money, fame or whatever.
For anarchism:
What is property Leo Tolstoy - on anarchy Selected works of Dorothy Day Berkman & Goldman if you can find anything John Zerzan (anarchoprimitivisim against civilization is a good start) unabomber's manifesto Avoid anything by chomsky dealing with the topic, or any modern queer/lgbbq/faggot """thinkers"""
that should cover a lot of different points
Oliver Price
Go with your gut and read Marx. If you dont want to commit to Capital, there are shorter texts like Value, wage & profit or Critique of the Gotha programme.
Joseph Harris
Oh ane ignore this poster. Harvey does not understand abstract labour and Wolff is just going on about workers co-ops, which do nothing to combat the law of value. Basically these are not marxists and the poster has no idea what hes talking about (duh, anarchists...)
Jonathan Reed
I also like this here. They go into a lot, including how the USSR came so close to managing a real socialist economy, Oh and avoid this edge-master and his Christian psycho-killers
If you're planning to get to grips with what being a Communist is actually like, start reading books about dieting.
Noah Nguyen
>wanting to read people responsible for the 20th century. Don't read modern political philosophy you dipshit. These "muh praxis" commies are like, 40 years behind the times. >what about China? You can't be this fucking stupid
Carter Turner
>wants to larp socialist/communist like a faggot >only reads the manifesto which says nothing about communism >doesn't want to read Capital because it's too long
The talmud, the torah, anything jewish or freemason as that's what the bolsjeviks were. Start picking up water fasting as well just in case, as living in communist utopia means a lot of starving as the succesful farmers will be murdered for being burgeoise.
Nathaniel Ross
>i want to learn about marxism but don't want to read Marx
Absolute state
Kevin Green
Being a Commie in the 21st century isn't a real thing. It's just a retrograde LARP looking at the past and trying to jam it into the present for lifestyle purposes. There is no working class in the First World compared to the early 20th century and 19th. Class/economy has shifted dramatically, politics too. You aren't a plucky rebel, you have nothing in common with a West Virginian (white) coal miner, or a factory worker in Victorian England. You can openly state "I am a Marxist/communist/anarchist" in public with 0 backlash. You won't be fired from your job. You won't be harassed, demoted, and ostracized from society. There is no risk roleplaying a commie. The mythos you are trying to draw on for your gay little lifestyle experiment is absent. Marxism/communism as concepts have integrated with the thought process of Western elites. You can go to a university/college and easily find/form ones of these groups. Lecturers, teachers, even if they're just Liberals they'll be tacitly supportive or regard you as "idealistic" but a bit misguided.
Communism has been advertized in the West as a pseudo-rebellion from day one. Sid Vicious in the punk days really did want to be edgy and against contemporary society, so he put on a shirt with a Swastika. What happened? He was told by his agent to take it off and put a hammer and sickle on instead. Che Guevara t shirts, multiple movies portraying communists in sympathetic lights, Communists aren't threatening to the system anymore. Back in the 19th century and early 20th? Sure.
Communist thought has always attracted bourgeois sentimentalists and even aristocrats, like Lenin, Engels, the overwhelming majority of Marxist figureheads, but today it's even worse. Communism is an entirely middle class college kid "movement" (if you could even call it that). Again, it's a LARP profile, not a real response to a genuine problem. An inorganic wielding of an old corpse, propped up by egotistical cultists trying to seem 'revolutionary' while remaining comfortable. Marxist thought has so thoroughly fused with systemic forces you now have the strange child of it: these intersectional IdPol histrionics. There are no 'Old Marxists' left, because the poverty that sparked interest in these thoughts in the West has largely been alleviated. All you have left now is tranny, gay, pedo, nigger and other 'oppressed' groups (which aren't oppressed) to LARP for as surrogate proletarians. It's a joke. As a 21st century communist you are just a HR manager in training, spouting programming that is identical to that found in every major corporation.
>There is no working class in the First World compared to the early 20th century and 19th.
Explain
Michael Sanchez
>Marx is brilliant on the topic of economics
le diamonds are expensive becos a lot of human labor on dem africa mines amirite
Ryan Gonzalez
Reading Marx is much more important than reading either Kropotkin or Lenin.
Juan Edwards
not him but do you see many people working on coal mines and losing fingers handling heavy machinery today? or do most people work at offices or in commerce, with air conditioning, free coffee, healthcare and a month off each year? how the fuck can't you even see that?
Lincoln Thomas
>now what Yelp for a psychiatrist.
Jonathan Nelson
I don't see how working conditions having improved means there's no working class or how it contridicts Marx. They are still wage workers. Marx never said working conditions/material conditions of the working class would only get worse and they may increase absolutely but still decline relatively.
Cameron Sanchez
>explain he's an idiot. didn't the blatant racism give it away? do you see people exchanging their labor for wages? is surplus value created from that labor?
not sure why these folk even talk about this stuff when they evidently can't even understand the basic premise of it. dumb ppl. and bootlickers.
Gabriel Young
Hating kikes and niggers is a pre-ideological thing on the chins
Juan Diaz
it's a virgin low iq loser thing, certainly. probably a lot of overlap.
Asher Bell
The History of Economic Thought from an Austrian Perspective Avoid big print edition that exists for some insane reason.
Ian Peterson
Why did Marx create this fuckin retarded communism? He was against any idealogies and non practical stuff and then create the most unpractical utopical ideology possible. What's happened?
Bentley Rogers
Is the oxford abridged version of Das Kapital worth reading? Or should I read the original instead?
Cameron Sullivan
I'm not a Socialist and I doubt I'll ever become one. As I said above, its important to read about important ideologies regardless of your opinions on them. I somehow expected better from Yea Forums. Never said that, quite open to something shorter then Capital.
Nolan Rogers
>Manifesto >Loved homage to Catalonia OH NO NO NO NO NO
You better don't fall for the communist meme. Read history textbooks on communism, the animal farm, read classic liberals or Keynes if you don't like muh freedom and get a grasp on how economy works and why commies needed to apply market economies to their systems, read Machiavelli and the art of war to understand political systems.
Manifesto is the bluepill on communism because Marx wrote all sort of senseless shit before all the terror and murdering happened. I repeat, communism and anarchism are fucking memes, don't fall for it for fucks sake.
Justin Sullivan
>>the animal farm >What is Orwell >>history textbooks on communism Daily reminder that the black book of communism is at best misleading and at worst straight up lies
Luke Roberts
>the black book of communism Obviously misleading, better read Solzhenitsyn. But, first, you need to know what happened in the last century. You can start with Russian civil war, even if you read the Wikipedia it'll be fine.
Wyatt Ortiz
you call things "memes" and say things like "bluepill" then refer to a bunch of stuff your high school civics teacher might have recommended to you. why do you think anybody would take you seriously? you present yourself like an idiot.
Lucas Torres
>me don't like you so you're an idiot If I hand out to you the hardcore books you wont even read them. History of communism is enough to debunk the system.
>bunch of stuff your high school civics teacher might have recommended to you So... memebooks like the manifesto?
Bentley Peterson
it's not that "i don't like you" it's that you present yourself like a self-important pre-teenager, and nobody will ever take you seriously. why are there so many people like you on a literature board? reading Yea Forums and wikipedia articles of books you're too lazy to read isn't "literature."
Hunter Reyes
why is everything a "meme"? did you never learn real words or have you just spent so much of your life on message boards that you can't even tell that your behavior is anti-social?
Alexander Bailey
>you present yourself in a way i don't like so i ignore what you actually said That's woman-tier logic
Xavier Rivera
you act like a child, people will treat you like one. unsurprisingly, your inability to understand basic social behavior overlaps with your alienating and objectively wrong views on women.
stupid, lonely and insecure or just developmentally disabled? what do you think, Yea Forums?
David Butler
Me on the left
Asher Rogers
>Dear Socialists, >my anarchist friend >my leninist friend I can only imagine such a self righteous bunch of middle class fart sniffers as you must be
Refutation-by-aesthtics is a perfectly valid rhetorical device >but rethoric is badder than logic What is this, 1850?
Daniel Bell
>badder Ok then. I just dissmis what you wrote because you are just make yourself look like idiot
Isaiah Phillips
>Towards a New Socialism Seconded. While Cockshott is a bit too M-L for some, his and Cottrell's insights into modern ICT and its implications are quite refreshing. While I my personal tastes lean towards an approach that goes another way than the USSR, I respect how Cockshott & Cottrell do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead they provide a response with a step forward and past the USSR, taking what worked and improving upon it with modern technology and theory, rather than trying to go around it by conjuring some "disconnected" fresh sect. And they are thorough and professional at it, focusing on the new subject and theory, taking a figurative step forward rather than dwelling to correct the past.
>then refer to a bunch of stuff your high school civics teacher might have recommended to you
Better than recommendations from an ""intellectual"" in the tertiary education system that had open communists in it and support from the Soviets for the entire Cold War.
commies can't into aesthetics because they are soulless materialists
Liam Williams
They're not even materialists, because you should have "perfect" peoples that doesn't exist in reality for communism to work
Adrian Gomez
>Improve your world, but don't think about improving the world. The world can't change. Perhaps it could be, my short-sighted friend, that I see this as one-of-many long-term programs towards improving my own life? Please, stop being a Status-Quo Warrior. Fukuyamaism died in its crib.
>its important to read about important ideologies So why not read Capital then, since that is the book where Marx and Engels outline their ideas as to what communism/socialism is, instead of reading around the subject?
Dumbass.
Jordan Rogers
I didn't write world, i specifically wrote 'lives", blind idiot
Gavin Myers
>change spook >improving spook >program spook >life spook >normative calls to stop something that's definitely a spook
Brayden Gray
Because a good man is hard to find.
Elijah Ortiz
Making fun of this retard doesn’t obligate anyone to be a communist.
Lucas Russell
We live in a world.
>not knowing what a spook is
Joseph Martinez
>We live in a world. Exactly. "We live in the world". Not "we world in a world" like you implied
Parker Ross
>knowing spook lmao
Chase Peterson
what the fuck is this schizophrenic list? random, theoretically worthless books like Homage to Catalonia (even if it's an enjoyable book) and zero marx
Caleb Morris
You still don't get it, do you dear? To change your life you must change your world in some part, and when the world changes around you so does your life. To improve their own life, one must work towards improving the conditions that define it. These changes may be small and personal, or large social efforts. We unironically live in a society and "no man is an island entire of itself".
Or is "life" to you sitting alone as a hermit in a mud hut, and "improving" it is patching the hole in the roof?
Cogito, ergo sum.
Chase Rodriguez
>To change your life you must change your world in some part, and when the world changes around you so does your life That's just your interpretation of life. I don't believe in a idea of changing world (which is impossible) for some unhuman dreams. Life of human is adaptation to nature and always be
Kevin Hughes
Then you're in the wrong thread.
Colton Jenkins
I don't think so
Aiden King
No, this definitely isn't the thread for immature heads. Yes, I see a lot of poltard pissing all over it, but they don't even understand what the topic is, much less know how to critique it. Go play in your Plato or bible threads
Evan Jenkins
This is thread about communism. immature heads are targeted demographic for this thread. And you can't kick me out of it anyway, so you either an actually start a constructive dialogue (which you probably never had in your life) or stay in you impotent pretentious state
Jace Carter
See? You have no idea what you're talking about. Just memes and old propaganda.
Read a little matter of fact history on the revolutionary age; the industrial, the political, the social. Go.
Joseph Gutierrez
What's the points of your posts? If you disagree with me on something just adress it and give some arguments
Just don't get emotionally invested in any cultic personalities. The idea that society can be "scientifically" fully understood let alone planned is highly untenable; "economics" and "sociology" of all forms is largly unfalsifiable pseudoscience.
>From my admittedly limited experience it doesn't seem like these early Marxist polemics are particularly engaging. Do you mean Marx himself? Ya I would say Marx wasn't that good of a writer. "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" is probably one of his better short polemical works marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
then read: >"wage labour and capital" and "value, price and profit" for a very abridged explanation of what Capital vol.1 is about. both about 60 pages each I think >the first chapter of "the german ideology" to get a grasp on historical materialism. around 60 pages also >the "critique of the gotha program" to clear up misconceptions about what marx had in mind for a communist society that's the essential marx im pretty sure
Camden Rogers
If you want one thing to read on each side I’d say for anarchism just skip ahead to Black Flame by van der Walt and for Leninism just read Foundations of Leninism by Stalin.
Black Flame is a global history of anarchism, which attempts to build a coherent theory based on the successes and failures of movements across the globe.
Foundations of Leninism is the text that formalized ‘Leninism’ into a coherent political doctrine and it’s *vastly* more readable than anything Lenin wrote himself. For better or worse Stalin is a better writer than basically any other major communist I can think of.
Xavier Carter
that post is clearly ironic you abysmal tripfag
Gabriel Butler
The Critique of the Gotha Program with Korsch's intro, nice and short
The subject of this thread touches on the human world and human systems, not some fuckin laws of nature. These things have shifted and have been consciously changed innumerous times across history, you brainlet.
Hudson Wood
They wanted to know about Leninism, might as well get it from the source.”Leninism” as a political tendency was invented/formalized by Stalin as an interpretation of Lenin’s writings, not all together different from “Marxism” (at least back then) being Engels’ formalization of Marx.
Lenin never wrote a book where he explicitly drew out a comprehensive system of thought that he then labelled ‘Leninism’ and demanded adherence to.
Similarly, as JPM lays out in Continuity and Rupture, “Maoism” doesn’t come to exist as such until like 1989 at the earliest.
If you want to know what Lenin thought then read Lenin, but if you want to understand “Leninism” you have to read Stalin.
Lincoln Cooper
Now explain how goods are values at an equilibrium Wait Marx does that....
Alexander Sanchez
Moby Dick Also, get some new friends.
Dominic Morales
>Towards a New Socialism Github link?
William Myers
>Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's first wife, wrote in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on "campfire folklore" as opposed to objective facts. She wrote that she was "perplexed" that the Western media had accepted The Gulag Archipelago as "the solemn, ultimate truth", saying that its significance had been "overestimated and wrongly appraised". She said that her husband did not regard the work as "historical research, or scientific research", and added that The Gulag Archipelago was a collection of "camp folklore", containing "raw material" which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
Jeremiah Walker
Alright Capitalists if you really want me to understand BASIC ECONOMICS then what should I start with?
>you can read Solzhenitsyn directly and think for yourself
or
>you can listen to what some user on Yea Forums literally copypasted from Wikipedia that says a 2003 NY Times article says Solzhenitsyn's first wife said that Solzhenitsyn said something.
>why do lefties accept firsthand accounts and not heavily funded smear campaigns from the Pentagon? No tankie.
Evan Perry
Read Sorel
Luis Johnson
Thanks for the dl link, user. But I'm more interested in seeing what projects there are. >taking what worked and improving upon it with modern technology Any open source projects? A proof of concept?
Jordan Williams
Animal farm was written by a socialist
Grayson Davis
> the Western media had accepted Who the fuck cares about the media? You're on Yea Forums, not /gossip/.
David Reyes
>thinking there are more fakes in radically leftist thought than in any other 'radical' ideology lmao
also, the idea that someone can make millions off of a fake image is a great reason to become a communist.
Kevin Nguyen
>being thrilled about free folgers when people are born into billion dollar fortunes hell yeah man
Easton Cooper
Goyim please
Jack Hall
Maybe there aren't so many literal factory workers and teamsters, but there's plenty of working class people in under-compensated jobs in construction, retail, medicine (nursing), police departments, public offices, fire departments, etc. Just because the working class isn't dying of coal dust any more doesn't mean economic oppression doesn't exist.
Jason Smith
I've done that.
t. Trump voter who knows an order of magnitude more about them than you do
Caleb Miller
What is wrong with extracting surplus value
Charles Gomez
If it's so little work to get diamonds, then why aren't you rich?
Would there be markets at all in a Marxian communism? How would production be determined? Would there be no price signals? Not a fan of capitalism I just don't get how this shit would work out very well.
Gabriel Jenkins
Suggest an alternative.
Dominic James
No. Collective ownership of the means of production means that markets become irrelevant. For basic biological necessities, you do not need price signals because your caloric and water requirements stay within a narrow range. Price signals actually distort the efficient distribution of goods and allocation of labor because what people want, as a general rule, rarely overlaps completely with their basic needs. Price signals are a meme and flimsy justification to continue a system surplus labor value extraction by the rich on the working class. In a system where your basic needs are met, any free time can be used to produce or consume entertainments and diversions on the basis of sharing. Sharing economies do work in practice, and have countless examples.
Jacob Harris
I am aware of generalized reciprocity which you call 'sharing economies' however whether such a system would work for all distribution in a large, complex society is, to put it kindly, arguable. People with little storable wealth or withing strongly communitarian cultures, sure, but I doubt you are advocating primitivism which would be a more ideal material and cultural environment for such a system to successfully take hold.
Your description of how 'biological necessities' would be rationed seems, well, Spartan. This isn't bad, necessarily, but it isn't very attractive, either What you seem to be presenting is a system where designated 'needs' are provided free of charge but one would be SOL regarding the things which they merely want.
I am no fan of the way things are but I'm not entirely sold on your presented alternative wherein I would get my ample spaghetti ration but if I were to want a tube guitar amplifier I am not sure I would know what to do. Would there be a 'store' or whatever with bins of free resistors and capacitors and transformers and diodes and valves? Who made those and why? Because it was their passion to do so? Because if they didn't they would be excluded from the spaghetti ration or shot? It almost seems like a brilliantly constructed engine with no means of sustaining rotation.
Alexander Jenkins
Why do people need amplifiers? If you're very interested, you would probably spend your time at the musicians guild constructing and maintaining equipment, similar to how it was done before Fordist industrialism. Not even to mention the fact that fabrication facilities for electronic components rely very, very heavily on automation, and mass produced parts can often be wholly produced with very little human interaction. A combination of automation, voluntary free association, and economic planning can account for anything that we currently do on threat of being kicked out of your apartment, tanking your credit score, and having no food. There are also almost certainly new activities, commodities and so on that will arise in a post-scarcity social arrangement. We already currently have more than enough food and shelter to sustain everyone. For basic necessities, the hurdle is a social one, not an economic one. Our current social arrangement necessitates an economic situation where it's impossible to ever ensure the basic welfare and common good.
Levi Rogers
literally low iq, no wonder you're a commie lmao
Lucas Richardson
warning about the dangers of stalinism, retard
Gavin Cruz
>begins post with literally >ends with lmao >calls others low iq for believing differently Bless
Connor Sanders
>makes a useless post >fills it with meme arrows gottem! another victory comrades
Mason James
>The only way to defeat a powerful shitposter is by copying them exactly except not as good
