I’ve read a lot online and listened to a lot of videos/podcasts in the last 3 or so years, but I’m genuinely interested in reading solid theory (instead of hearing them quoted in YouTube videos, podcasts and articles). I am not smart enough to understand das kapital and I don’t read books that often at all (I have read the manifesto)
What should be the first three books I buy to warm myself up into understanding the theory more in depth compared to quotes, memes, YouTube videos/podcasts etc. (I was thinking maybe a Marx book, Lenin book and a Foucault book? But I have no idea!)
What would your suggestion for your first 3 books
PS I’m also new to the chapo.chat community! I haven’t been a part of a cth community since the original was banned so sorry if it’s in the wrong community!
The words “dictatorship of the proletariat” make me question the volcel life 🥰 but in all seriousness thank you heaps for the recommendations! I don’t know how far I align with anarchism in comparison to Marxism/Marxist Leninism but I reckon I should give it a shot in the name of ~self exploration~
It's definitely not an either/or situation in a lot of cases anyway. Anarchism and Marxism are often fantastic critiques of each other. Marxists say you need a state, and a strong one, to protect yourself from the inevitable backlash of capitalists powers coming to destroy you, while anarchists will remind you that a strong state lends itself to strong state repression, and can often end up bureaucratic and oppressive nightmares. Neither critique is wrong per say, but I definitely lean more heavily on the former than the latter. And regardless, we're both in agreement that the current state of things (and the state itself) must be smashed for a new world to be born. We'll figure out what that new world looks like together when the time comes!
I think the variance in opinion on the state among Marxists is greatly visible in Marx himself. I mean Marx makes critiques of anarchism to Bakunin, but then makes anarchist-esque critiques of statism too in lots of places. All the while also musing in a few letters whether or not the US can vote its way to socialism. He wrestled immensely with what the state was, and imo never came out with a satisfying theory of it.
To me the most satisfying answer is that fundamentally Marx is a radical democrat, and wants political organs of radical democracy as a means of freedom from domination, and that's antithetical to the state. I'm not sure Marx believed the state could whither to "simple administration" as Lenin put it. Engels put that withering quote in the anti-duhring, Marx never said it. When we look at drafts of capital and other notes, you can see Marx and Engels disagreeing with each other constantly over what the state is. We also have letters where Marx is frustrated and notes that he wants to get around to writing a capital length work on the state, but he never got around to it. It's not clear to me what at the end of his life post Paris Commune he thought. I do think he certainly thought the state machinery had to be utterly destroyed and political organizations remade with the DOTP, and the form of organization he thought socialism would be under is some sort of federated commune, but I'm not sure at the end if he would still call an intermediate organization a state anymore or whether there could be one. Remember Marx's lower stage communism, which we have very little notes on, has already abolished commodity production and the market entirely while Lenin's renaming of it socialism has changed what it meant perhaps significantly imo.