“Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.”
— Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done? | Audiobook
It’s time to read theory, comrades! As Lenin says, “Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.” Marxism-Leninism is broken into 3 major components, as noted by Lenin in his pamphlet The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism: | Audiobook
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Dialectical and Historical Materialism
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Critique of Capitalism along the lines of Marx’s Law of Value
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Advocacy for Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
As such, I created the following list to take you from no knowledge whatsoever of Leftist theory, and leave you with a strong understanding of the critical fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism in an order that builds up as you read. Let’s get started!
Section I: Getting Started
What the heck is Communism, anyways? For that matter, what is fascism?
- Friedrich Engels’ Principles of Communism | Audiobook
The FAQ of Communism, written by the Luigi of the Marx & Engels duo. Quick to read, and easy to reference, this is the perfect start to your journey.
- Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds | Audiobook
Parenti’s characteristic wit is on full display in this historical contextualization and analysis of fascism and Communism. Line after line, Parenti debunks anti-Communist myths. This is also an excellent time to watch the famous “Yellow Parenti” speech.
Section II: Historical and Dialectical Materialism
Ugh, philosophy? Really? YES!
- Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy | Audiobook
By understanding Dialectical and Historical Materialism first, you make it easier to understand the rest of Marxism-Leninism. Don’t be intimidated!
- Friedrich Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific | Audiobook
Engels introduces Scientific Socialism, explaining how Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for public ownership and planning by centralizing itself into monopolist syndicates and cartels.
Section III: Political Economy
That’s right, it’s time for the Law of Value and a deep-dive into Imperialism. If we are to defeat Capitalism, we must learn it’s mechanisms, tendencies, contradictions, and laws.
- Karl Marx’s Wage Labor and Capital | Audiobook & Wages, Price and Profit | Audiobook
Best taken as a pair, these essays simplify the most important parts of the Law of Value.
- Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism | Audiobook
The era of Imperialism, which as the primary contradiction cascades downward into all manner of related secondary contradictions.
Section IV: Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
Can we defeat Capitalism at the ballot box? What about just defeating fascism? What about the role of the state?
- Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution | Audiobook
If Marxists believed reforming Capitalist society was possible, we would be the first in line for it. Sadly, it isn’t.
- Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution | Audiobook
Further analyzes the necessity of Revolution and introduces the economic basis for the withering away of the State.
Section V: National Liberation, De-colonialism, and Solidarity
The revolution will not be fought by individuals, but by an intersectional, international working class movement. Solidarity allows different marginalized groups to work together in collective interest, unifying into a single broad movement. Marxists support the Right of Self-Determination for all peoples and support National Liberation movements against Imperialism.
- Vikky Storm & Eme Flores’ The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto | (No Audiobook yet)
Breaks down misogyny, and queerphobia, as well as how to move beyond the base subject of “gender” from a Historical Materialist perspective.
- Leslie Feinberg’s Lavender & Red | Audiobook
When different social groups fight for liberation together along intersectional lines, they are emboldened and empowered ever-further.
- Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth | Audiobook & Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed | Audiobook
De-colonialism is essential to Marxism. Without having a strong, de-colonial, internationalist stance, we have no path to victory nor justice. These books are best taken as a pair, read in quick succession.
Section VI: Putting it into Practice!
It’s not enough to endlessly read, you must put theory to practice. That is how you can improve yourself and the movements you support. Touch grass!
- Mao Tse-Tung’s On Practice & On Contradiction | Audiobook
Mao wrote simply and directly to peasant soldiers during the Revolutionary War in China. This pair of essays equip the reader to apply the analytical tools of Dialectical Materialism to their every day practice.
- Vladimir Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder | Audiobook
Common among new leftists is dogmatism over pragmatism. Everyone wants perfection, but dogmatic “left” anti-Communists let perfection become the enemy of progress.
- Liu Shaoqi’s How to be a Good Communist | Audiobook
Organizing is a skill. If we are to be successful, we must work to better ourselves.
Congratulations, you completed your introductory reading course!
With your new understanding and knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, here is a mini What is to be Done? of your own to follow, and take with you as practical advice.
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Get organized. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Red Star Caucus, and Marxist Unity Group all organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one!
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Read theory. Don’t think that you are done now! Just because you have the basics, doesn’t mean you know more than you do. If you have not investigated a subject, don’t speak on it!
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Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground, let nobody go forgotten.
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Be industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your knowledge.
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Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others.
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Be persistent. If you feel like a single water droplet against a mountain, think of canyons and valleys. With consistency, every rock, boulder, mountain, can be drilled through with nothing but water droplets.
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”
— Mao Tse-Tung
Just wrote this somewhere else. Maybe this is where it belongs: Good impulse to read theory, but 150y/o theory is not where I’d advice people to start. At least the german originals of what you recomend there are fairly hard to read. Plus they lack the development of marxist theory that happened since then. For example Gramscis thoughts or critical theory are so freakin important for marxism to be applicable to this society being far more diverse than good’ol working class in the factory vs. Monopoly man capitalists. I’m sure there is updated marxism and introductions available in english. (Dunno, Harvey maybe? Mayo?)
Also “how to conduct yourself as a leftist” sound strict af and kinda deterministic.
Plus there is no need to give stalin’s voice that kind of space.
I appreciate your input! From what I’ve curated, I picked a good mix of modern works like Blackshirts and Reds and foundational works, because they are relevant and necessary even today in my opinion. Since it’s an intro reading list, it’s difficult to include every good work, if you want, you can comment a suggestion of what to remove and what to take its place.
As for the “how to conduct yourself” bit, it’s just good general advice like suggesting to keep reading theory, getting organized, be persistent, etc. All generally useful skills even for non-leftists, but again, feel free to leave feedback in the comments of how you would change it and I’ll consider it.
As for the comment on Stalin, nowhere are his works listed, can you elaborate on what you mean?
A pity, at least the Foundations of Leninism should be included, at the very least the 6th chapter because this topic is where real problem lies for all liberals and succdems, and it leds them to assume proimperialist positions.
I mean i understand normies fear the name of Stalin, but it is really very critical point and a crucial addition to Lenin’s “Imperialism…”
I believe I covered the National Question sufficiently by including The Wretched of the Earth, though I am open to tweaking the list. The reason why I did not include Foundations of Leninism, on top of the general fear of Stalin, is because I believe it to be redundant and have successfully covered all of what Stalin covers in it in other, more in-depth works. Additionally, I am light on room in the list character limit, so I would have to swap it out or trim the intro/conclusion. Even further, I would rather include Marxism and the National Question over Foundations of Leninism, if my goal is to answer the question of the importance of National Liberation.
Do you have a suggestion for what could be swapped out?
Your list isn’t even that long, and both are short too, especially that you included works like Wretched or Lavender which are 300+ pages.
Yes. Again, I believe that Wretched answers the National Question already, and in more depth than either Marxism and the National Question or Foundations of Leninism. I specifically included Lavender and Red to showcase that liberatory struggles for marginalized groups are more effective when allied with other liberatory struggles.
Again, I am fighting the character limit, and trying to make a list that doesn’t scare away liberals. Including a work by Stalin absolutely is make or break for many liberals, period, meaning no theory ends up getting read. If you can make the case that Wretched alone cannot solve the National Question, or that it is good for me to trim some areas of the text body meant to guide and encourage the reader along, I am more than happy to consider it.
I agree that it is important to stress National Liberation as a means to prevent pro-Imperialist stances from forming, which is why I am seriously considering what you’re saying, but you haven’t explained why Wretched is insufficient. I understand that the works I have listed are longer, which is part of why I believe my list to be more comprehensive, even if it is merely an introductory list.
You can get a few characters by changing
comlib.encryptionin.spacetoc.encryptionin.spaceOh, thank you! I’ll make the edits in a bit.
Edit: just did it, thanks so much!
Seems like
?playlistPosition=1on Wretched of the earth and pedagogy of the oppressed audiobooks can be removed too.Also
&pp=[..]from Left-wing communism audio/mode/1upcan be removed from the archive.org links tooI won’t even disagree, except the point we can’t dance around Stalin for long. Probably not for more than few seconds it take any lib to ask question about him.
That’s a fair point, though I will point out that Blackshirts does a good job of that already, and is the second item in the list. It’s not like I need to have Losurdo as required reading IMO when the emphasis of applying correct analysis, supporting revolutionary movements, anti-Imperialism, and getting organized should lead people to correct conclusions even without reading Stalin’s work, which is mostly summarization of other work.
I’ll consider what you’ve said, thank you. I appreciate the constructive criticism.
Also thank you for understanding, i’m very fond of “Foundations” which have been very important step for my education, especially for the concept of critical support in antiimperialism so i advise it every time.
Okay sorry regarding stalin i mixed that up. It’s in the other reading list in the comments here.
On “conduct yourself” dunno, maybe this boils down to writing style. But the ML sort of theoretical style plus the horrors of undemocratic socialist history do make it important to stress the emphatic (as in: since critical theory and french subjectivity theory we debunked “individual freedom”, but still need to keep it as a goal) part of personal freedom & choice. That wording above doesn’t show that kind of self reflection imo.
Gramsci! The concepts of hegemony and “senso commune” (sry dont know english translation) are essential to analyse current events. Also this protects lefties from babbling about classes in a way that alienates them from everyone just observing whats going on.
(Senso commune and gramscis notion of intellectuals also offers a neat way through the whole “get educated since otherwise you fundamentally don’t understand your own life”- rhethoric dilemma/arrogance issue)
You need secondary literature for gramsci though. He left 3000 pages of unstructured notes from fascist prison. You don’t wanna go through that. Unfortunetly I have no idea of english publications. Barfuss & Jehle Einführung is nice, in case you speak german.
Appreciate the clarification regarding Stalin.
First, offering advice on how to conduct yourself as a Leftist isn’t some spooky command. In the list I made, I literally say “to take with you as practical advice.” This practical advice includes joining a leftist organization (the bare minimum to be a leftist in practice and not just in theory), read more theory, fight white supremacy and queerphobia, be more industrious, learn self-defense, and be persistent. None of these get in the way of “personal freedom” in my opinion. My goal is to create Communists that want to change society and work to do so, not just intellectuals that want to endlessly critique society, and my list reflects that. If you have problems with individual bits of advice in that list, feel free to let me know.
Secondly, regarding your claims of Marxist-Leninist theory and “horrifyingly undemocratic” AES states, I do recommend you read the essay Why do Marxists Fail to Bring the “Worker’s Paradise?” It’s important to contextualize AES states, their successes and failures, properly. For further reading, Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan is a good historical account of the Soviet Democratic System, warts and all.
As for Gramsci, I am not at all opposed to including his writings, but my list is focuses on getting the most out of the least. I would need to remove a work and find a concise secondary work, in English. I can include his writings in my “DLC Pack” further reading list I am making. The target audience for my list is English-speaking, I made it in the context of the aftermath of the US election and am targeting disenfranchised liberals who may benefit from theory.
I appreciate your feedback however, and will add Gramsci as a suggestion for my DLC list.
Thanks. I read the tayangyu essay, and kinda liked it, but it didn’t really answer my questions…
Isn’t the author leaving the framework of dialectical thinking when they dismiss the relevance of ideas almost entirely in favor of material economical factors?
As in: Couldn’t have the development of productive forces happened with more participation?
Wouldn’t than the emergence of a democratic or collective subject have been faaaar more likely, even though and because people would have been confronted with the limits of economic development, as agents, not just as objects of that one and only party’s decisions?
Good question! The answer is that there were democratic structures in place in the Soviet Union. That’s the purpose of adding Soviet Democracy as a historical reference to be taken alongside the essay. These structures were not all powerful or fully democratic, I am not pretending the USSR was perfect. I am instead, however, contextualizing the earlier part of the essay, the line
When contextualized, Soviet Democracy was both a massive stride yet held back and incomplete by the real Material Conditions and level of development of the Productive Forces, leading to real setbacks and real weaknesses in said democratic structures.
I think it was not only those material conditions but also a deterministic ideology or maybe just power hungry leaders. (Good cue for taking the democracy part very serious from the beginning, because non or semi-democratic structures attract and create dictator-subjects, and projecting yourself outside that dialectic is as naive as it is arrogant)
Shooting thousands (or hundreds of thousands, as my hasty wikipedia research suggests) of the opposition, both left and right, is no matter of slow industrialization.
Admittedly I’n not fit in soviet history, but the combo of “oh they had democratic infrastructure” and secret deportation, incarceration and murder of even leftist opposition doesn’t sit right. And honestly, calling that “not perfect” feels like violation of emancipatory writing of history and way of living.
You’re free to make your case for it being because of “power hungry leaders,” though you’d have to grapple with the very real fact that Stalin tried to resign on 4 separate occasions and have his position eliminated. I’m not saying you’re wrong, it very well could have been a thirst for power, but you’ve done nothing to support your thesis, nor to prove that the Soviet model was non-democratic or semi-democratic. Moreover, you don’t define what “semi-democratic” means, nor what “democratic” is, and where that threshold lies.
To borrow your own words, using hasty Wikipedia research rather than attempting to better understand Soviet history before making authoritative claims is “as naive as it is ignorant.” You would do well to read the history books I listed before trying to make an argument on structures and events you don’t fully understand. I mean no offense by this.
The idea that the USSR was just a group that killed all opposition betrays that the USSR, as far as states are concerned, acted more leniantly towards violent opposition groups than other comtemporary states, as a quick example of how a simple manner of framing betrays the very real context of a situation.