I’m a communist from the US. This website is for me to post random shortform stuff I feel like I want to write about.
If you’re interested in my learning journey or recommended readings:
I was a social democrat through high school and early college. I volunteered for Bernie Sanders and was disenfranchised and radicalized by his betrayal in 2016. In 2018, I started a weekly reading group with around 10 of my friends from high school that met on Discord. We read the following:
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Theses on Feuerbach
Wage Labor and Capital
Value, Price and Profit
Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
Blackshirts and Reds
Reform or Revolution
Everything from the Ho Chi Minh Archive on Marxists.org
Combat Liberalism
On Contradiction
On Practice
What is to Be Done?
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Blood in My Eye
And that was enough at some point for me to trust/use Marxism-Leninism as an accurate framework of critique and politics.
I would like to advise reading Mao’s Oppose Book Worship either first or early. It’s pretty militant and aggressive in its tone which might intimidate someone newer to the tradition, but I consider it the masterpiece Marxist work on anti-dogmatism. After that, I would suggest getting familiar with economic concepts one way or another, then you should pretty much be set up to read whatever you want. I can personally endorse something like this:
Wage Labor and Capital
Value, Price and Profit
The Introduction to Grundrisse
Everything I have seen from this textbook Political Economy issued by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R is great too. To be honest it seems like it might even be the best “first thing” to read in a vacuum but I haven’t read it myself so I can’t fully endorse it yet.
Once you have that grounding, you can at least avoid getting tripped up on a lot of the common terminology, and you should be all set to work your way through more stuff. The only thing that will be an obstacle early on is dialectics. I think I put I would suggest:
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
On Practice
Anarchism or Socialism?
Karl Marx (Lenin)
(I recently reread Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and I think the section on dialectics does way too little to explain how it actually works but it’s a good beginner-friendly read overall)
If you want to really get dialectics thoroughly, check out:
Science of Logic
Phenomenology of Spirit
Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks
Dialectics of Nature
I think that’s about all I can recommend for introductory Marxist literature. To be honest, it’s probably a lot drier and less fun than other reading lists you would find online because I think if I were to start over I would like myself to front-load a lot of the theoretical foundation. As far as like video stuff goes, you need to be careful because there are so many confused and impassioned people who position themselves as experts. I can personally endorse Taimur Rahman, especially his Marxism lecture playlist, S4A, and Gabriel Rockhill. I’m sure there are others worth watching, but those are the only ones that I like. Doing the reading and analysis yourself is what’s most important so you don’t just believe the first thing you’re told by someone.
