Theory that's translated from their originals to simple to understand English so that I don't have to stare at a paragraph for 20 minutes and do an hour of research to figure out what it means

    • Neckbeard_Prime [they/them,he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Try something by Mao. Something about the Chinese-to-English translations gives the vocabulary and sentence structure a very terse, almost blunt, feel as compared with 19th century works by Marx, Engels, or even Kropotkin. It's almost like reading Simple English Wikipedia articles in that sense. This has the opposite problem, though -- instead of nuggets of truth being lost in a sea of Victorian era verbosity, now you have extremely dense stuff to try to unpack. You're still reading the same sentence over and over again trying to understand some deeper meaning or missing context, but with Mao, that's like 8 words.

      Edit: Here you go:

      https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/date-index.htm

      This one in particular is pretty noteworthy (Combat Liberalism):

      https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm