See title, this builds up on the previous request for reading lists, but is a bit more open ended and is supposed to be a contemporary update that I would like to post twice a year.
The texts at best are accessible without too much previous knowledge. Open for videos, and other media, as well as group formats, and activities too. You have to participate in protest training and actually cook for others to see how both those things feel.
I would be more happy with fewer thick works or only excerpts from complicated stuff, than to suggest the complete collection of Marx’s works. Some popular and recent books i.e. Jakarta Method, Klein, or recent organizing books would be welcome, too.
The next time I post this question (and feel free to paste your own suggested template) will be December/January 2023.
Thanks Pluto!
While I think the introductory texts of the second link (Communism Reading guide) are a good start, they are a few too many and while they build a good historical Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin basis they aren’t recent. The first couple of texts I did recommend to others, too, but could you do give a selection of the works you would recommend and add a selection of recent ones you would add?
Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology
and
Otto Wille Kuusinen’s Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism: Manual (2nd edition).
The “classic” (old) guides are much more informative, tbh, than the classics; they give more context to the classics and sum up the information therein.
Marxist Political Economy by John Eaton is also a great one, though gets more technical near the end (but absolutely great if you want to understand Das Kapital without having read it yet, which usually comes years into reading Marxist-Leninist texts).
Return to the Source by Amilcar Cabral is a good one, though obviously not entirely Marxist; teaches you how to think, I feel. Nikolai Bukharin’s work also has a “teach-you-how-to-think” kinda feel to it as well, which I feel is priceless. And Amilcar Cabral’s analysis of class dynamics is also priceless nowadays as, while racism is a huge fact of life, I feel that you can’t talk about class nowadays without being called a “class reductionist.” But Cabral talks about class here in a way that is much more fruitful and teaches others how to analyze class and different classes and so on and so forth.
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) by the CPSU is also great and teaches one how to think strategically and tactically in movement-building.
Fundamental Principles of Marxism: Political Economy & Philosophy by Daniel Rubin also explains things in an even more simpler way and teaches one about how to apply Marxism to real-world situations and movements, even if you don’t agree with how the CPUSA applies it. It’s also anti-Stalin, but it has some good takes outside of explaining Marxism-Leninism that I feel are really important (it was written back in 2008, btw, when the communist movement was very… err, different than how it is now).
Zhuangzi (Library of Chinese Classics) by Zhuangzi with Wang Rongpei as translator (written during the late 1990s) is also pretty good and teaches one, again, how to think. It’s also, obviously, not a Marxist-Leninist work. But I feel that it should be included in thinking analytically. Cultural Psychology and Qualitative Methodology: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations by Carl Ratner is also good for this and maybe gets people interested in Lev Vygotsky, the most famous Soviet psychologist to have ever lived.
Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel talks about modern conditions in America and how they’ve changed since, say, the 1960s and 1970s; good for activists, organizers, etc. It’s anti-China but its anti-China takes are too paltry and too silly to take seriously.
I’ll stop for now, but one problem that may be present in everything I’ve talked about here is that… these are books. Not essays or articles like you’ll often find in marxists.org.
The main ones that are “small” compared to most books are: Fundamental Principles of Marxism: Political Economy & Philosophy by Daniel Rubin, Marxist Political Economy by John Eaton, and Return to the Source by Amilcar Cabral.
I would at least include Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology in any reading list, though, even if it is a moderate-sized book (nearing 300 pages long in the Cosmonaut addition, which has a stupid Foreword written by a Trot that you can skip).