Read theory, it's literally online for free. Join a reading group. You spend hours doom scrolling on Twitter to no end. All that's gotten you is deep knowledge of every twitter beef between 400 follower nazbols.
Edit: It’s not an issue with the site but online discourse about the left in general. Why are y'all upset about shoeonhead or black hammer or whatever new group of dumbasses is saying some new dumb shit. I'm talking about how every few days lots of leftists are surprised and upset that their fav twitter personality said something really stupid.
That was the struggle of his time. Basically imagine DSA was a viable party during a second American civil war and had a large portion of the military actively involved in it, but within DSA you have the actual workers, and the petite bourgeois business owners. The workers want proletarian revolution and the petite bourgeois say "just vote" or something.
Also, Value Price and Profit and The Civil War in France are fantastic for getting a Marxist base. I'd also recommend the People's Marx which is a re-edit of all 3 volumes of Capital into like 300 pages.
it's interesting stuff so far, and I am learning about how he overcame the opportunists of his day. My plan right now is to chug through more Lenin, then try to tackle Marx directly once I understand that.
I would just go directly to Marx tbh. Lenin's adaptations and developments from his readings of Marx are his own, they are not Marx's context or content and there's nothing wrong with reading them directly to understand Marx (and imo there are severe divisions between Marx and Lenin on their conception of socialism and transition).
I understand what you are saying, but I usually get a better grasp of things if I can see them in practice, or at least in a practical application, before just seeing their treatise. I tried to get into Das Capital without anything else before, and was immediately lost. This seems to be working better for me, so I am just going to continue as I am, but thanks for your input.
You are taking the right path, imo it is better to read Lenin first before the more complex stuff by Marx, although maybe you should read the communist manifesto or value price and profit or some other of the "popularised" stuff by Marx first.
However with Lenin I think State and Revolution or the infantile book are better starting points. Especially the infantile book is very, very relevant to terminally online twitter weirdos.
I tried State and Revolution once before, and it immediately went way over my head. I understood just enough to win a few arguments though. After I clear WITBD, I'll take another crack at state and revolution and then move on to the infantile book. Thanks for the recommendation!
Most of Lenin's texts are basically angry effortposts which are usually addressing something very specific but from which you can draw much more general conclusions and see how he applied marxism in practice. However there is also Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism which is a little bit harder but it's more general. However of course it's worth reading the shorter texts by Marx and Engels before all that. Just don't try to read Capital because you'll burn out.
Imperialism: the highest stage of cringe will be my endpoint for reading Lenin, then I'll move on to short Marx and Engels. Thanks for your advice, but I'm going to use the reading tactics that usually work for me. I might revisit this if I find my strategy not working.
Yeah alright but I'm saying that partly because there's a logical progression in that Lenin builds on Marx and Engels and occasionally even departs from them so it's worth knowing what they said first.
Good deal, definitely start Marx with those ones I mentioned. That's like 400 pages total for all 3 and you'll have a really solid grasp on all the economic stuff as well as the frameworks of communism and how it arises from capitalist contradictions.
I read Lenin first too and going back and reading Marx made me realize that there isn't really a "Marxism" without "Leninism". Like Lenin's whole deal was just doing exactly what Marx said.
That's really not true, there are significant changes from Marx's thought to Lenin's, and substantial (the large majority in fact) amounts of Marx's writing Lenin didn't have access to either. There's also important ideas that just are not Marx's. For example the withering of the state is not from Marx, it's a statement Engels made. Lenin also draws significantly from other Marxists for a lot of his base, especially Hilferding and Kautsky (the point of the renegade Kautsky is after all that Kautsky's earlier writings were very important for Lenin and that he went renegade post war) who are all part of imo a departure (and not a good one, it makes fundamental mistakes) from Marx's political thought and critique that becomes dominant in the SPD and then the Bolsheviks.
I'm just gonna counter the "withering away" point by saying that while Marx may have never said that phrase specifically, it is heavily implied in his definition of state. He frequently mentions that the state is a tool of class oppression and that the workers "seizing the machinery of the state" is more of a destruction of the state machinery and replacement by democratic worker counterparts.
He also asserts many times that the goal of a proletarian revolution is to abolish class, and therefore the worker's state serves as the tool with which to resolve those contradictions.
From these points, you can concluelde that the state must either away, or at least as I believe Engels puts it, transition from an administration of people to an administration of things. Which I would say constitutes a withering away (as without class conflicts, the state has no reason to exist).
Kautsky's big sin was the assertion that the revolution could occur within the framework of the bourgeois state, an idea which Marx heavily criticizes in The French Civil War.
Right, but Marx is still in other places, like the notes on Bakunin, quite ambivalent on how much "state" there is in a worker's state. Like being a workers "state" for Marx still requires things like the destruction the bureaucracy and the army. Furthermore Marx was never completely convinced by the common instrumental view of the state that is attributed him. This period is also still pretty short, and imo from the critique of the Gotha program and some sections of Capital, it's pretty clear that the state does not exist by the time the first phase of communism rolls around (which is really the big change with the worker's state for Lenin since it still exists in the first phase of socialism).
Once again, The Civil War in France is the big turning point for Marx. He described the governing structure that emerged in the Paris commune as the form of the proletarian state. He also makes it clear that the state like that exists until the class conflict doesn't. At no point did he say that the Paris revolutionaries should have disbanded their councils and disbanded their national guardsmen.
He also made it clear that "ideology" plays no part in the formation of the proletarian state as it assumes the form it needs to survive. His evidence being that the main ideologies of the Parisians said nothing about formation of councils and revocable representatives. The workers organized in a way that they needed to to survive the encirclement.
Also I'm calling bullshit on Marx ever saying that the state stops existing before the first stage of communism. He clearly says that the length of the different stages cannot be known and will likely take generations. He also states the role of central banks in the first stage which are absolutely a state appendage.
How can central banks be in the first stage when money has been abolished in the first stage. That's ridiculous, where on earth are you getting that?
The principle distinction between the lower and higher phase of communism for Marx is that in the higher phase "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished". That is the defining feature, not the presence of the state.
Yes really, the state does not exist in the first stage of communism, it is gone. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not exist in either of the stages. The DOTP, which is the only stage with a workers state, is an intermediary stage between capitalism (really the last stage of capitalism while it is being abolished) and the first stage of communism.
Class conflict does not exist in the lower phase of communism, that is very clear. Marx would not have used the word communism if it was still there.
He muses in I think volume 2 or 3 of Capital (I was reading the Borchard edition so I can't remember exactly which, I'll try and find it tomorrow) about how Joint Stock companies would be useful and mentions that the Parisians stopped at the treasury when they should have taken it over.
He was also very clear about how centralization increases efficiency and that currency is fine, but needs to be tied to labor value or be replaced with "labor vouchers" which I think is kinda pointless now as we have a credit system and paper currency that can serve that purpose.
From The Principles of Communism
i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inher- itance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.