Hey,
I’m quite new here learning stuff, having fun and mostly not understanding a whole lot, although I only had nice interactions around here 
Please share resources you think would be nice for me to learn about. Also feel free to ask my opinion about various subjects and teach me if you think I’m wrong/ignorant. I reserve the right to ignore some stuff as I suffer from anxiety and sometime getting out there is hard.
I might also be willing to discuss via SimpleX
I consider myself a leftist although not that educated.
If you haven't come across their stuff already, Socialism For All (also on SoundCloud, Spotify, and via podcast amongst other options) covers a huge amount of articles, speeches, and ebooks. They offer a really broad range of stuff which is mostly theory-oriented.
I'd also urge caution about getting into factionalism. It's okay to have positions and to have values but there are things to be learned everywhere and if you get too invested in dogmatism and investing a lot of yourself and your politics into a particular faction, especially when you are still new to all this, then that can become a major obstruction to the learning process. It is far better to say that you don't know something or that you don't know enough to make a call on a particular movement or event in history than it is to jump to a conclusion without investigating the matter thoroughly.
One example here is Che Guevara. He is called The Butcher of La Cabaña by Cubans who fled after Castro came to power because he oversaw hundreds of executions at La Cabaña.
That seems pretty cut and dried, right?
The problem is that the executions were done after a judicial process that the Cuban government held that was modeled after The Hague as a war crimes tribunal. The people who were sentenced were found guilty of egregious crimes against the Cuban people and it was only those who had substantial evidence against them who were sentenced to execution.
Imagine a civil war, one between the radical left and a far right government. How many people could you imagine committing war crimes in that situation? Hundreds? Thousands? Even more?
Of course 500 executions is a high number and you are welcome to disagree with capital punishment or to question whether each person was actually guilty of the charges they faced. The judicial process is not 100% and it never will be. But that being said, you'd be able to find 500 people in the US government alone who are indisputably guilty of war crimes, with a small mountain of evidence to back this up. And that's without even mentioning the people who are serving in the US armed forces.
What I'm driving at here is to be deeply skeptical and not in the sense that you deny evidence and regress into trusting your gut instinct or the prevailing narrative but rather to be very skeptical about convenient narratives and the situations where people give information that is quite shocking on the face of it in order to nudge you towards a particular conclusion. Ask yourself what you know about the subject and the surrounding context before you make a judgement call. Be okay with not knowing and in acknowledging when you don't know enough; ignorance which is accounted for is the first step on the road to knowledge. Embrace this fact and avoid the streamerbro urge to concoct hot takes based on zero foreknowledge of a subject.
It's all about learning, growing, and fighting for a better world. Don't fall into the trap of treating it like it's teamsports.
This is the beginner text: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
45 minute to an hour read-time.
Thanks, I’ll try to find an audio resource as well as it might make it easier for me to listen to while working and then come back to the written text for passages that are more complicated for me
Thanks for the list. I would say undecided, When I was younger anarchism principle resonated a lot with me, however as I was trying to dig more into in, the answers I got from people were vague and not actionable enough to me. Like how would the transition period to realized socialism look like? How would we defend against capitalist nations trying to subdue us? etc.
This might however be more of a critic towards anarchists I met and my failure to find answers while looking online, rather than anarchism, not sure.
That's a reasonable critique that I generally agree with, though Anarchism has had a lot of growth over the years in terms of theory and practice.
I will say though, based on your answers, the list I linked would be great. It starts you off on simple terms and concepts, then goes in-depth, then expands it to the modern era, then it moves to organizational theory and practice. I've read more works than are just in this list, but it really does serve as a great guided experience for the basics.
Then, you can branch out to Feinberg, Fanon, Losurdo, Parenti, or swing over to Anarchists with Goldman, Kropotkin, etc. Don't refuse to read theory "across the aisle," there's a lot to learn from everyone.
If you already have some basic background in philosophy from the modern period, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (a book on that list) is an incredibly helpful book for articulating various Marxist ideas. It made a significant impression on me in a way that the "Introduction" texts on that list never did.
Other than stuff that’s already been mentioned here, there are a lot of great Revolutionary Left Radio (people just refer to is as Rev Left) episodes where the host Breht breaks down complicated topics in a very understandable, friendly way. And listening to Matt Christman talk through different historical events on Hinge Points is super interesting and a great way to start thinking about history and politics as a dialectical process (forces in contradiction that are interacting with each other and producing something new through the process). Definitely second Blackshirts and Reds though, very good starter
https://mega.nz/folder/cuMwjRyK#eDPayQSdYFwaCh9qr8zzPw
This is a great resource curated by comrades from CLN
Its stands for Chunka Luta Network, they are indigenous comrades that sometimes post here
Gotcha, indigenous from North America. That looks really interesting, especially as a non US resident! I don’t know a whole lot about movements there!
As a former addict/drug lord I always love to ask: What's your leftist opinion on drug dealing/the war on drugs?
I'm pro legalization of drugs as I think prohibition does not help society and war on drugs is a failure which worsen risks associated with drugs consumption, production and sale.
I would like drugs to be sold and controlled by the state to ensure sufficient quality control as well as having comprehensive harm reductions methods and/or courses available to the population and more specifically visible in sale points.
Help to deal with addiction in persons that are considering their addiction a problem should be freely available.
I would also love for the sigmats about consumption to disappear .
China would disagree.
I’m not a hardline anti-drug socialist myself, but there are arguments. China has their national trauma of the opium wars and the century of humiliation, and are now pretty anti-drug. Generally drug dealing and stuff can be seen as symptoms of the alienation under capitalism. People are exploited and lead meaningless lives and cope using drugs. It’s big money and there are lumpen-bourgeois elements that benefit, and legalization legitimizes them or gentrifies them. People run drugs because it’s an easier way to make money than other ways. If people had good jobs and stuff under socialism they wouldn’t use as many drugs. There’s an experiment that showed that rats in their own cage with access to cocaine would heavily abuse it, but rats with other rats to socialize with would only use it occasionally to party.
As for the war on drugs, it’s colonialism and the insanity that has been lied about to us. The CIA funded the contra death squads in Nicaragua by selling drugs and bringing crack to the black community, which would cause a lot of suffering and disunify them. Thus they would be easier to control and the state could use the drug trade to justify militarizing the police and locking up millions of black men, further weakening this internal colony.
There’s also MK Ultra which is imagined to be successful in a way. The CIA didn’t simply try to do mind control and fail. They succeeded in filling leftist movements with drugs so they’d be pacified. Hippies would trip and “realized” they could just solve everything with peace and love rather than violently rising up.
Not trying to start a fight, but curious what @Aliveelectricwire@hexbear.net has to say. Last this came up I argued the opposite side.
No worries I did not feel attacked. I certainly am aware of how drugs have been used in the past and especially how their criminalization was used to oppress people.
I still think that even in a socialist society people would use drugs because it's fun. I would hope that as you mention in such a society abuse would happen way less due to not needing it as a way to cope with our shitty lives. Criminalization imho would not solve an issue but create stigma around using while not actually stopping people from using them.
I think forbidding use usually creates more dangerous way of people using them. (e.g. Consuming more at once and using drugs that might be cut with shit)
I have no idea what's China policy on drugs, are users thrown in jail like in most countries ? I don't think that because something was used by a colonialist state to fuck up a population it should be banned (even though I can empathize with the trauma around it). I feel it's like currently LGBT rights are pink washed by neo colonialist states to try to justify why they do fucked up things in some countries does not justify these countries then oppressing LGBT communities to get back at the colons(even worse when most of the anti LGBT laws were initially created by these same colons in the past centuries).
What is China's position on alcohol and cigarettes? These are usually example of drugs that are legal and not stigmatized (despite having a high risk of abuse)
I agree with you. I don’t think China’s anti-drug policy is going too poorly but it’s not ideal.
I feel like there are no apparent benefits from tobacco smoking, but they at the largest producer and consumer for some reason. To be fair, it’s nationalized like you suggested. Pretty sure alcohol’s legal.
The Communist Manifesto, State and Revolution, and Blackshirts and Reds were my first Marxist readings so I'd recommend them
Reading theory is always a good idea. I've found listening to audiobooks at work to be the most engaging way to do it, and now that I'm almost done with Black Reconstruction I'm probably going to listen to Angela Davis's works next.
Ooh I ltke Angela Davis work. Her veganism and prison abolitionist stances have left a deep mark on me.
Dessalines' essays - the first couple of links was the first thing I have read.
Interesting topic, I have to say that I have not thought a lot about it even though I'm a sentientist vegan. I think the fact that cats usually kill a lot of other sentient animals when outdoors is a problem for me. I would much prefer people not to continue breeding animals and keep aeimals just for their own pleasure as I think it causes a lot of issues.
I would much prefer cats to be kept indoor and fed a well formulated and supplemented plant based diet as from my research I did not see any indication it cannot be done. I would also prefer cats to be sterilized as I think it's one of the less cruel way to prevent the population from exploding due to the facts we breed them with no care for them or the other non human animals.
However I have no idea whether it is a problem for cats to be kept indoor their entire lives, do you have resources on this subject?
do you have resources on this subject
haha no, I was just referencing a huge struggle session early on in the site's history that nearly tore the site apart.
I think a key for me was understanding what the relationship between theory and praxis was. Theory is the writings of people who are trying to develop ways of thinking which are useful for positive political change based on their experiences on the ground. Praxis is the actions of those people, driven by that theory. So they both depend on each other. You’re going to understand theory better if you’re out doing praxis and your praxis is going to be more effective if you’ve read some theory and learned from the mistakes of the past.
I'm here to teach you about trains. What questions do you have about trains?
(yes I understand that this is about leftism but my true expertise is trains)
I unfortunately do not have have a lot of questions about trains, it's my main way of transportation and has been during most of my life. I also have a friend who happens to be obsessed by trains and their miniature models and she usually gives me a lecture about trains once a month lmao
