I'm planning on starting a Marxist book club at my university, but I'm kind of dumb and have trouble understanding stuff, is there some trick I can use to understand more?
is there some trick I can use to understand more?
start a book club lol
Serious take: be humble, honest, and treat this as the opportunity to learn more. Knowledge is dialectical. coming to an understanding through discussion with other people will do often speed up the learning process.
explain and see the club as a chance to learn about marx and marxism from the horse's mouth. the idea is to suspend your beliefs for long enough to know whether there is anything marx and company said that is worth listening to, and why. still be critical.
This is how I did my first one. I had no intention of being a marxist. I thought it was important enough to need to know. i didn't know that if you read marx or marxists this way, you inevitably become one.
if you only did book clubs of materials that you already had fully informed opinions about, the others might ask if this is a book club or a lecture series. don't worry about not knowing everything. You will understand something that the other members didn't understand and they will get something that you didn't. you learn together and by asking each other questions. don't forget to look at the passages again after the session. You will probably find that this is when things pop as you notice details that others highlighted
there are tricks for increasing understanding. Don't be afraid to re-read difficult passages. Don't be afraid to skip over incomprehensible passages - come back to them later and many of them will make more sense without much more effort because you know what's coming up. Ask questions as you read, like
- what is marx arguing?
- who is marx arguing with - what to they say?
- why is marx saying this - what is the main argument?
- what is marx just explaining - what is he adding to what people already knew?
- if you don't understand a word or concept, you can try five things - 1. keep reading to see if the context makes things clearer 2. search the whole text for the same word because usage in another sentence might make it clearer 3. search the internet or marxists.org or their glossary for a description 4. make a note and come back to it later, trying one of the above three things 5. forget about it - if it's important you will come across it again and the new context might make the meaning pop without effort.
when you read sci fi and fantasy they say you have to suspend your disbelief, pretending that the world is real so the speculative elements don't put you off. otherwise the character gets to the other planet and you turn off the show because humans haven't visited other planets yet
I was thinking about how that idea might apply to marx .
Marxists imo have the most accurate explanation for reality. but most people come to marx with very different ideas, based on a bourgeois framework
to get the most out of Marx, we have to make sure of two things. 1. that we don't let our previous knowledge put us off or send us down too many dead ends. 2. that we do not turn off our critical thinking
To achieve this, we have to suspend our pre-reading-marx beliefs, for example about how the economy works and what it means to say something is 'good for the economy'. let the new knowledge in with an open mind. and suspend our beliefs about what is wrong with marx - marx made mistakes and his work has some holes that others had to fill in . We each need to think of our own criticisms - the ruthless criticism of all that exists is part of the marxist method. we need to apply that method to marx etc themselves. to achieve that, we need to kind of 'start again' by forgetting some of what we know (or think we know).
I've have already given this advice IRL before, and considering no one has commented anything similar, I think it applies here as well:
If you're looking for a introduction to communism and Marxism, you should read the manifesto, it's cut and dry, short and direct to the point it's trying to pass, it's literally made to be understandable by everyone.
But if you want more than that and are looking to actually understand and study Marxism, which I believe is the point of a book club, then you should definitely start reading about the Marxist world outlook, dialetical materialism, most of the mistakes and misunderstandings of leftist both here and IRL come from skipping this crucial step.
So if you are having trouble with the main texts, if you can understand diamat every book of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc., you read afterward will much easier to comprehend. On that note, to me, the best 3 texts about their philosophy are: Mao's "On Contradiction"; Engels' "Socialism Utopian and Scientific"; and M. Cornforth's "Materialism and the Dialetical Method", which I'd recommend then to be read in this order, and if after that you still want more, Cornforth's last book ends with further recommendations.
So basically, if you are having trouble understanding Marxism you should start from the very beginning and understand their method before jumping straight to the more famous and much more dense books.
Are you running it or participating in one? If you're actually running it and having trouble understanding the source material, that's trouble.
You could try preparing a presentation about what's being studied, and try to make it understandable to even somebody who never looked at the source material. Another tip would be to send the reading material well in advance and have everybody pitch in about what they understood. Just remember that there really are wrong opinions and interpretations, and it's your job to at least guide them away from those.
If you're just participating, don't worry too much. Maybe try to ground what's being read on your own reality or of those you know.
this seems true if others are looking to op for the answers. there's still value in encouraging people to read marx even if people are a little bit wrong. correct understanding will come later. It takes time. i did my first book club with an established marxist and their 'correct' explanations often went over my head. I think the key thing is setting everyone's expectations.
if it's a party and the person in charge of educating the recruits doesn't know their stuff, that might be different
You might need to do some homework. Every chapter, try to summarize the big ideas. Debate with people about your interpretations. Apply what you read to historical or current events and explain how they're connected. Things like that.
I suggest simply asking questions on lemmygrad.
The point of the book club should also be to help one another understand and learn. You aren’t teaching the others, you should all try to engage with the text and each others understanding.
Lastly, the more you read the better your comprehension will be. Consider if audiobooks or different formats might also help you understand better.
How about chopping it up into smaller pieces; like a few pages or paragraphs at a time .
Alternatively you can get together and listen to an audio book together
if you're reading something as big as capital you can also read someone like Cleaver or Harvey, etc, at the same time. They don't always go in the same chunks or pages as you want to but there are a few guidebooks that match the main chapters and sections
main thing to watch out for is the anti-marxist intros like Singer. they can be useful but you can't let their criticisms put you off because the criticisms are weak
the first is harry cleaver. he calls himself an Autonomous Marxist. He's not an ML (Marxist-Leninist). See his website - https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/
Cleaver wrote a book called 33 Lessons. each lesson explains the corresponding chapter in capital, volume I and what we can learn from it. He wrote the book based on his teaching. he published an updated version in 2019 with Pluto. I'm new to Cleaver so I can tell you he wrote this book but I can't recommend it as such as I've not finished it yet .
The second is david Harvey. he's also an academic marxist. Not an ML. He also taught capital for years. his lecture series is available on YouTube. he published a written version of his lectures with Verso. There's a volume one and volume two, corresponding to capital, volume I and II. the one that kind of corresponds more to Capital, volume III is different - it's called The Limits to Capital.
His website is https://davidharvey.org/about/ . I can recommend Harvey. his work really helped me to learn about marx .
these aren't the only two who have written guidebooks to Capital but they'll give you a flavour of what is available
What are you having trouble understanding? The theory material itself? What to pick? How to facilitate discussion?
Are you starting this from scratch, by yourself? Or do you have some friends who are helping you start this thing, as well?
Gotcha! So, I started a lefty book club with a couple friends, when I was in university. So in that sense, things were easier. But if you're starting with just yourself, you're gonna have to kinda start with boring stuff.
Come up with a name for your book club. Advertise it around campus. Make posters! If you see someone with a leftist sticker on their laptop or something, strike up a conversation!
Get at least 2 or 3 other people on board first. Then, if you're not a big theory-head, see who is. Or at the very least, see who's good at talking to people. Let that person start facilitating discussion. Have a few informal meetings, and see how they go!
You'll start to learn how things will work, the more you do it. This stuff takes practice, and you'll gain a lot of skills doing it, but don't assume it'll all go smoothly the first, or even the 5th or 10th time.
On that same point though, relax and have fun! Everyone is there to learn and talk about stuff.
If you're lucky, you night also develop opportunities to collaborate with other student groups, or community orgs, and do some activism as well. I know with the group I helped start, it grew over time to a full fledged campus activist org that held film screenings, talks, protests, mutual aid, and more. And that's because we kept making ourselves known on campus, and in the wider community, and put in the work to make that happen.
But, also don't feel like you HAVE to grow it that way, if you don't want to. You're free to just let it be a small reading group between you and some friends!
i would keep it simple and limited, when it comes to theory. The Communist Manifesto, Principles of Communist, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Civil War in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Capital Vol. 1 - that's more than enough. if you like, you can replace Capital with books like Lenin's Imperialism or State and Revolution.
something i would keep in mind - at the end of the day Marx was true to his roots as a philosopher. i would be surprised if you can pick up an 'introductory' or 'easy' text by Marx without taking notes and reading a second or third time.
when reading, questions you may ask: "Marx argues [point], but why? Is this argument convincing? There are a lot of words I'm familiar with here, is he using them in the common sense, or is he referencing something else? Is that his own theory and what he personally believes, or is he making a point about another thinker (i.e., Proudhon, Hegel, Smith, Ricardo, Lassalle, Feuerbach)? What assumptions is he making? Why should I believe this? Why do I agree/disagree with this?"
If you agree with everything you read on first encounter, without questioning or doubting it, you might've misread something or you might be missing context. I, for example, had to read Critique of the Gotha Programme multiple times because on first time I was careless and failed to distinguish between Lassalle and Marx, and the second time I failed to distinguish between 'wealth' and 'value' - both mistakes are so wrong I would've been better reading nothing.
i'm trying to think up a method or a book that'd be helpful to work from, but i don't want to limit Marx to philosophy
maybe trying these strategies with something light, but theory-heavy enough, would be helpful. for that i would recommend reading Chapter 1 of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Feel free to work through other portions as you please, or if you feel necessary, like the Introduction.
There's also Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire, and Development as Modernity by Lushaba
for the purposes of a book club, though, i'm sure The Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism will be alright. When you discuss with other people, you'll learn a lot faster. They'll pick up on details that you won't, and vice versa.
PS: I forgot to mention that Capital, at least the first volume, will be required at some point; and also, Theses on Feuerbach is deceptively short, each 'thesis' is densely packed info, I did not know this and, as a result, didn't really understand any thesis except the last
later on it could be a good idea to quickly look through For Marx by Althusser. this will give a good idea about how much someone can get out of Theses on Feuerbach if they study it carefully and research around the topics.
