I was a far-right lunatic until about 2009, when I started turning left. I have read many (center-)leftist articles from Jacobin, Common Dreams, The Guardian, and, from Brazil, Carta Capital and IHU (Catholic liberation theology).
Lemmy (despite my suboptimal instance) and communist friends got me interested in actual Marxism, but I have not yet really studied it. So please recommend:
- The best Marxist Lemmy instance for my background.
- Marxist books or videos in approximate reading/watching order. For the next many months (I suspect six months) I will have very little time, though.
Bonus:
- reasonable tolerance of Catholic faith and individual morality
- contextualized on Brazil, Cuba, broader Latin America or China
Background: Brazilian Catholic male autistic ADHD IT analyst with an electronic engineering degree and MsC in computer science. I have a son with my wife. I highly value privacy and software freedom. I read English well, but Spanish quite poorly. Native Portuguese speaker.
EDIT: I got a lemmygrad account. I am still processing the other recommendations.
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Marxist-Lemmyisim.
Way more chill and non-toxic than Reddit’s r/Communism
Welcome! For your first question, Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net are explicitly oriented towards Marxism (Hexbear also has Anarchists and other leftist types, Lemmygrad is Marxist-Leninist). For your second, I actually wrote an introductory reading list you can check out if you want.
There are many Brazilian comrades on lemmygrad.ml that could help with materials in Portuguese, and I’m sure the PCB (partido comunista brasileiro) also has a good introductory reading list.
For a shorter english introduction, I maintain this crash course socialism that goes over the basics.
Hi friend!
For what Marxist instance would be best given your background, well there are only two total, to my knowledge, so you could just try out both and see what you like best! They are Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Lemmygrad is smaller but is more focused on Marxism-Leninism in particular. Hexbear has a ML-ancom and everything in between left unity stance and places great emphasis on making the space safe for people of marginalized groups. Lemmy.ml has many Marxists but is not explicitly commie.
For reading recommendations, this can be a difficult question to answer because there are many important texts in the Marxist tradition and some of them, particularly the foundational ones, are dense and challenging to read. I do strongly recommend reading the core works of Marx and Engels, since they define Marxism and later works are based on them. The order in which to read books really depends on how you prefet to read and learn.
I prefer to read from “the beginning” and already knew the relevant philosophical background so I just read Das Kapital right after The Communist Manifesto. But reading Das Kapital takes a long time. Reading groups dedicate months just to Volume 1. If you prefer a faster introduction and summaries, then I recommend Heinrich’s companion text. Heinrich inserts some of his own opinions, but you can balance these out by reading Marxists critical of Heinrich, like Michael Roberts. If you want an even faster and simpler introduction, you can work backwards by reading short overviews from newer texts and blogs and so on and then make sure to try and tackle Capital later. But remember that the farther from the original works you get, the more likely that you will learn something incorrect about them without being in a position to notice it.
Another strategy is to start with Lenin, particularly his own notes on Hegel and Marx, and proceed to Stalin’s overview of Marxism-Leninism, which includes an overview of Marxism. These are much easier to read than the source texts. All of the works so far will have Portuguese translations.
Regarding tolerance of Catholic faith, both instances will likely not care so long as this does not mean contradicting community standards, e.g. a vocal tradcath would contradict the feminist stances of both instances. Both instances have Christian comms, similar to subreddits. Lemmygrad’s all seem to be inactive, though. Hexbear is, generally speaking, against insufferable New Atheist contrarianism (and so many of its original proponents became reactionary).
Regarding having Latin American context, both instances of course have a good amount of comrades from Latin America. I know that Hexbear has an active Latin America comm.
I translated the communist manifesto into a rap for people who want a quick intro https://youtu.be/0Rw0QvEjwuQ
Cowbee (auth, btw, jsyk) has an intro reading list: https://lemmy.ml/post/22417306
Don’t know what you mean by “auth,” it’s pretty standard Marxism, but thanks for linking it!
I was describing your ideology more so than your reading list, in case that wasn’t clear. Iirc though, you’ve said something along the lines of not feeling “authoritarian” is an appropriate political descriptor at all
My ideology is Marxist-Leninist, the list I made reflects that. I agree with Engels with respect to “authoritarianism” as a concept, elaborated on in On Authority. Generally, it isn’t a useful descriptor for many things, or rather it is so overused and under-examined that it ends up simplifying concepts to the point that they become more confusing.
Liberty is the iron fist of the invisible hand, and authoritarianism is the tyranny of the wage-slave majority.
You might try also asking [email protected].
I know “real” Marxists shit on it because it’s not 7000 pages of letters to local parties in Munich, but Mao’s Little Red Book literally exists as an entry point for people of various cultural and education backgrounds who don’t want to PhD Marx…
I haven’t seen any Marxists shit on it myself. In fact it’s available on ProleWiki.
I find 99% of why the left fails is self policing on bullshit that doesn’t matter while we’re dead on a global political level as China is just ethnofascist at this point (cue the CCP downvoters and haters) and Cuba and Venezuela are about to collapse after decades of US sanctions and the DNC is now the Cheney conservative party. Meanwhile the right grows.
I find 99% of why the left fails is self policing on bullshit that doesn’t matter
Mostly we fail because we live in the imperial core, and we have been suppressed, purged, and even assassinated by it for over a century.
China is just ethnofascist at this point (cue the CCP downvoters and haters)
Ask and you shall receive. You’ve been taken in by your own country’s Cold War II propaganda. Previously, previously, previously.
Yes, as a lower class Uighur, my lived experience is CCP good… If you’re reskinning mosques as pagodas, you’re the oppressor as surely as the Jews in Israel, granted via the soft bigotry of low expectations, I will give the CCP credit for being less abjectly inhuman than the LOW bar Israel sets, but camps are camps and making the third amendment relevant is a thing that ONLY exists at scale in Uighur China, where the one big family bed has an assigned state bureaucrat who sleeps with your family
[Edit: since the CCP can do no wrong set are VERY slow, let me clarify, I am NOT literally a lower class Uyghur in China – I have internet and apparently no CCP handler-- you fucking dumbasses. I am literally shocked that you people are this dumb. it’s honestly impressive.]
where the one big family bed has an assigned state bureaucrat who sleeps with your family
Do you have actual evidence, or are you accepting the testimonials of CIA-backed radical fundamentalist Islamist Uyghurs? Previously.
So your claim is no Chinese bureaucrats ever slept in Uighur beds, embedded with them?
So your claim is no Chinese bureaucrats ever slept in Uighur beds, embedded with them?
No, my claim is: what are you even talking about, and where is your evidence? Is “Chinese bureaucrats sleeping in beds” a metaphor for something, or are you talking about literal beds? What a bizarre thing to say.
Edit to add: This is what you take at face value? https://www.vice.com/en/article/male-chinese-officials-monitoring-uighur-women-sleeping-same-bed/
A cadre from the ruling Communist Party in Kashgar, Xinjiang, who wished to stay anonymous, told RFA that between 70 and 80 families in his township were put through the program.
You know what Radio Free Asia is, right?
Please consider developing some real media literacy. Previously.
Yes, as a lower class Uighur, my lived experience is CCP good
Do you often pretend to be someone you’re not online? Is that why do you delete all of your posts & comments that are more than a week old? Curiouser and curiouser…
Ethnofascist? JFC.
Don’t listen to this person. You can trust me, I’m actually a commune of 13 Uyghurs that writes like a Redditor and parrots US propaganda right down to its terminology. Ask me about lived experience.
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Counter argument.
All political theory is a waste of time.
The only thing that matters is votes and winning elections.
Study the real candidates and their current policies. Work for the ones who will actually help the people.
Trying to split the hair of ‘Marxist/Socialist/Social Democrat’ doesn’t get anyone elected.
mho
I don’t really think this is a counter-argument, but a counter-thesis. When we look historically, the Russian “Socialist Revolutionaries” once celebrated an “end to theory.” They believed that getting into the weeds on which strategy was correct and which direction to work towards fundamentally weakened the party. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, maintained that theory was strictly necessary, Lenin’s famous line going “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice.” Today, we can easily see that the SRs were wrong, and the Bolsheviks were correct, and successfully their methods of analysis and revolution were applied elsewhere, like China and Cuba.
I addressed this first, because your core crux, that “only voting matters,” is something every Marxist would reject. You rejected theory while quietly supporting your own, perhaps unknowingly, and this ends up working against your entire thesis. Marxists maintain that Revolution is necessary, because we have watched the success of Revolution and the failure of Reform through the 20th and 21st centuries.
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I (the OP) reply with from old lemmy.eco.br account because I don’t see these comments from my new lemmygrad account.
You mention Brazil, so I have to tell of our recent history.
We elected leftist president João Goulart in the early 1960s. When he tried to enact reforms, a coalition of businessmen, Catholic theocrats and treasonous generals overthrew democracy in a USA-backed coup. The dictatorship lasted 21 years.
In 2002 we managed to elect president Lula da Silva, an intelligent working class moderate leftist. However, he bet on class conciliation (not class struggle). To be elected and then to govern, he formed a broad political alliance and made big concessions to the right. By 2016 there was a huge effort to overthrow his sucessor President Dilma (leftist woman economist, former guerrilla). Biased judges convicted Lula in later broadly discredited trials. Corporate media harshly campaigned against the Workers Party (PT). Corrupt hipocrites in Congress worked hard to worsen our economy, which was in a big fiscal crisis. For example, they established full pensions for women at the age of 52 and men at the age of 57, for those with documented jobs since the age of 18, in an old aging population. Politically motivated corruption trials dismantled some of our best companies. They broke the economy, blamed Dilma, then impeached her on made up charges. When casting his vote for impeachment, congressman Jair Bolsonaro praised Ulstra, the Army Colonel who had tortured Dilma decades earlier when she was captured by the dictatorship. Now in power, those same right-wing hipocrites pushed for men and women to only retire at the age of 65 – 13 more years (for women) than the previous year when they were opposing Dilma. They settled for 62 for women, 65 for men, still far less “generous” than they were in Dilma’s opposition.
Before the next election, Lula, the most popular candidate, was imprisioned and then the “winner” was obscurantist far-right Bolsonaro, a loud fan of the military dictatorship. Bolsonaro made a very bad administration, lost the following election, then planned and put in motion another military coup involving the assassination or “neutralization” of the elected President, Vice President and a Supreme Court justice. We just barely escaped it, and Lula still has to fight an overwhelmingly right wing media oligopoly, far-right disinformation in the digital platform oligopoly, a terrible right-wing Congress, and impeachment threats. While far better than Bolsonaro, in this scenario Lula accomplishes far less than the people need. He cannot even stop the assassination of indigenous and land reform activists, let alone enact the long dreamed properly progressive taxation and democratization of the media (including digital platforms) oligopolies.
In Brazilian history, the parasites in the economic elite concede nothing without a fight.
I’ll remove my original commnet. However, I still believe that the US is much closer to the next election than it is to a revolution, unless you count a right wing coup as a 'revolution.
Elections in Brazil and America will never bring about Socialism, though. Fuethermore, Lenin was not in Russia, correct, but the Bolsheviks had been working towards building up the Soviet System via Dual Power that led to successful revolution, and Lenin had played a major part in that. Moreover, it was the propagandizing and organizing of the Working Class that led to an actual revolution, which theory played an instrumental part in.
The New Deal was brought about by elections, as were the systems in places like Sweden.
The New Deal was brought about during a time of mass poverty in the context of the rising Soviet Union in order to prevent a similar revolution, the fall of the latter has resulted in a thorough destruction of the former. Same with Sweden, where disparity is rising and safety nets are crumbling. Further, Sweden depends on Imperialism to fund itself.
It also was a response to mass protests and strikes that militant labor movement was able to organize.
Yep! I don’t think I said that outright, but the revolutionary pressure was there internally as well.
Neither of you points disproves the fact that the system improved due to democratic change without a revolution.
Like I said, the election will probably come before the revolution.
The system temporarily improved because there was a risk of revolution internally and a successful revolution externally. Without both, concessions don’t come. Moreover, justifying Imperialism, ie vicious exploitation of the Global South, is monstrous.
Welfare state / new deal policies will always be precarious, because they leave things as they are: with capitalists in control of the economy and thus the political system.
Not only that, but many of these global north welfare states, are funded via imperialism (usually with a tax on imports of goods produced by super-exploited workers in the global south), which means these social services are just being carried on the backs of the global poor. Just look at where H&M has most of their production facilities for example. Poorer capitalist countries (which are the vast majority of countries), aren’t able to fund much if any social services in that same way.
Some links:
Nothing there refutes the fact that, in the US, we’re going to have an election before we have a revolution.
Also, if there is a revolution in the US, companies like Blackwater [or whatever name they have this week] are much better prepared to take over than the Socialists. It would be like when the Shah fell in Iran and the religious zealots took over.
I’d suggest you to look for a guidebook on any of Marx’s works, or Engels. He’s right about many things, but he is a boring writer. Reading his stuff is tedious, especially without a guide. I see others recommend starting to learn about Marx from people after him, but I completely disagree that that’s a good place to start. Dictators, oppressors, and war crime deniers have nothing of value to say.
