See title, this builds up on the previous request for reading lists, but is a bit more open ended and is supposed to be a contemporary update that I would like to post twice a year.
The texts at best are accessible without too much previous knowledge. Open for videos, and other media, as well as group formats, and activities too. You have to participate in protest training and actually cook for others to see how both those things feel.
I would be more happy with fewer thick works or only excerpts from complicated stuff, than to suggest the complete collection of Marx's works. Some popular and recent books i.e. Jakarta Method, Klein, or recent organizing books would be welcome, too.
The next time I post this question (and feel free to paste your own suggested template) will be December/January 2023.
What about books from the Black Radical Tradition:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X with Alex Haley
Malcolm X Speaks by Malcolm X
Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton
Soledad Brother by George Jackson
Blood in my Eye by George Jackson
Assata by Assata Shakur
Ready for Revolution by Kwame Ture
Stokely Speaks by Kwame Ture
Most of them are either autobiographies or compilations of letters/speeches. You also have Walter Rodney's works (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, The Groundings with My Brothers).
And finally, there's the Vietnamese college textbook that Luna Oi translated: https://archive.org/details/intro-basic-princ-marx-lenin-part-1-final/. None of these works require you to be exposed to Marxism whatsoever.
That being said, there are too many of the same Reddit reading lists.
We need different reading lists with new or different or obscure titles.
Just reading the classics or reading more Parenti is something I think doesn't create more diversity of thought in the communist movement.
To a baby leftist I'd recommend Debt: the First 5000 Years by
, then The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, then How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.Have you read The Dawn of Everything? Would you substitute it with Debt?
With the Jakarta I agree, it is a good book to dispel the "morality" myth of the Western democracies. How to Blow Up a Pipeline I can't really assess for new readers.
Thanks for contributing :)
I only got a a few chapters into Dawn of Everything, and no I wouldn't substitute it fit Debt. There's a reason it's considered his opus. The whole premise is that when we look at the anthropological record there's really no examples of commodity exchange requiring money, and the idea that money developed as a convenient answer to bartering is a fiction that misunderstands how humans in communities actually relate to each other.
It's quite a radical text honestly.
The reason I recommend these three is that none of them are on their face super radical, they're all very seriously cited with mild registers, but each forces the reader to engage seriously with major left tenets:
Debt: this manner of commodity exchange is not human nature and never was
JM: what we call "left" is not violent, but we now live in a world where all left movements have been destroyed by fascists
HTBUAP: liberal nonviolence narratives are childish and our worship of these fictions is allowing fossil capital to destroy the Earth before our eyes
Dawn of everything hits all the key points of debt while challenging social hierarchies more thoroughly and more broadly. It's also much better-written thanks to his co-writer and the editing the fame can buy.
CPUSA Reading List - 2022
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/VJlD0b3eh4gMJovaypGkuW4m3Au-aksj+6oNDi50UFI/embed/
Communism Reading Guide
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/eAFqVc1JC8v8T5AEEWSPQ9YD4FR8tK6E97XEy+v78KQ/embed/
(I'm a CPUSA member, btw)
Thanks Pluto!
While I think the introductory texts of the second link (Communism Reading guide) are a good start, they are a few too many and while they build a good historical Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin basis they aren't recent. The first couple of texts I did recommend to others, too, but could you do give a selection of the works you would recommend and add a selection of recent ones you would add?
Nikolai Bukharin's Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology
and
Otto Wille Kuusinen's Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism: Manual (2nd edition).
The "classic" (old) guides are much more informative, tbh, than the classics; they give more context to the classics and sum up the information therein.
Marxist Political Economy by John Eaton is also a great one, though gets more technical near the end (but absolutely great if you want to understand Das Kapital without having read it yet, which usually comes years into reading Marxist-Leninist texts).
Return to the Source by Amilcar Cabral is a good one, though obviously not entirely Marxist; teaches you how to think, I feel. Nikolai Bukharin's work also has a "teach-you-how-to-think" kinda feel to it as well, which I feel is priceless. And Amilcar Cabral's analysis of class dynamics is also priceless nowadays as, while racism is a huge fact of life, I feel that you can't talk about class nowadays without being called a "class reductionist." But Cabral talks about class here in a way that is much more fruitful and teaches others how to analyze class and different classes and so on and so forth.
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) by the CPSU is also great and teaches one how to think strategically and tactically in movement-building.
Fundamental Principles of Marxism: Political Economy & Philosophy by Daniel Rubin also explains things in an even more simpler way and teaches one about how to apply Marxism to real-world situations and movements, even if you don't agree with how the CPUSA applies it. It's also anti-Stalin, but it has some good takes outside of explaining Marxism-Leninism that I feel are really important (it was written back in 2008, btw, when the communist movement was very... err, different than how it is now).
Zhuangzi (Library of Chinese Classics) by Zhuangzi with Wang Rongpei as translator (written during the late 1990s) is also pretty good and teaches one, again, how to think. It's also, obviously, not a Marxist-Leninist work. But I feel that it should be included in thinking analytically. Cultural Psychology and Qualitative Methodology: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations by Carl Ratner is also good for this and maybe gets people interested in Lev Vygotsky, the most famous Soviet psychologist to have ever lived.
Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel talks about modern conditions in America and how they've changed since, say, the 1960s and 1970s; good for activists, organizers, etc. It's anti-China but its anti-China takes are too paltry and too silly to take seriously.
I'll stop for now, but one problem that may be present in everything I've talked about here is that... these are books. Not essays or articles like you'll often find in marxists.org.
The main ones that are "small" compared to most books are: Fundamental Principles of Marxism: Political Economy & Philosophy by Daniel Rubin, Marxist Political Economy by John Eaton, and Return to the Source by Amilcar Cabral.
I would at least include Nikolai Bukharin's Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology in any reading list, though, even if it is a moderate-sized book (nearing 300 pages long in the Cosmonaut addition, which has a stupid Foreword written by a Trot that you can skip).
I just read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire and I would say it was immanently approachable and easy to understand. Doesn’t overly refer to Marx or Engels or Lenin but does have quotations from time to time. It’s incredibly enlightening especially making the distinction between subjects and objects of history.
The goal of these texts is to sort of do for capitalism / work / colonialism / patriarchy what the trans movement has done for gender: take it apart in front of your eyes and build a universe of alternatives that are more joyful and possible to start enacting now. It tries to ground this in socialist, feminist, and decolonial and anti-racist theory and praxis.
As We Have Always Done -- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson --4th world nationalist / feminist manifesto
Undoing Work, Rethinking Community -- James A. Chamberlain gives the concept of "work" the same denaturalization that's been given to race and gender recently. Imo helps Marxists go deeper into the critique of wage labor.
Caliban and the Witch -- Sylvia Federici PDF Download argues that primitive accumulation is cyclical rather than a one time thing, and argues that reproductive and women's bodies are a key site of primitive accumulation.
Freedom Dreams -- Robin Kelley PDF Download explores different alternatives to capitalism and white supremacy dreamed up by black movements through history.
Secrets of a Successful Organizer -- Labor Notes how to organize your workplace in bullet point form.
No Shortcuts -- Jane Macalevey a treatise on what is and isn't good labor organizing. Charts a path for organizers to avoid the common pitfalls. I don't agree with her on everything but she's still essential reading imo.
