just lie and say youve read it then start making shit up that it doesn’t actually say. no one else has read it either so they wont call you on it
If you liberals had actually read any Lennon you’d know that he explicitly states you should upbear all of my posts
Lennon said to imagine if there was no countries and everyone living together in peace, this is praxis.
This hurts because I had to meet one of these ppl in an irl org who vehement about stating that every country is imperialist and that Russia is imperialist and then I asked them what the definition of imperialism was and they never responded.
I had a 4 hours conversation with one of the anarchists I was recently organizing with and he basically did this.
Well, if ancoms read their theory, they’d be MLs, so.
Spout a big long screed on the problems with traditional family structures and that while modern nuclear families aren’t inherently problematic, there’s sure as hell a lot wrong with 99.9% of them. Then cite Engels on it, even if you haven’t actually read his stuff on family structures. The other guy hasn’t read it either.
My moms reading Lenin and she had to get a private reading tutor to help her understand it lol
that’s based af
I was just telling her about Lenin because she was complaining that everyone is just talking and never does anything and i was telling her how Lenin was both an academic and a revolutionary and that the 2 arent mutually exclusive. Then while in the phone she went on amazon and just bought copies of Lenins writings lol.
My mum makes similar complaints, but if I told her to read Lenin, she’d call me a crazy commie trying to radicalise her/recruit her to the local ML party. And don’t get me started on what she’d say and do if I recommended anything Stalin wrote. (Which, from a normie perspective, is fair. Lenin is more snappy and sassy. Can be a lot more fun to read.)
Well before i mentioned him my mom didnt know who lenin was. I dont think she even knows what the USSR was.
Well before i mentioned him my mom didnt know who lenin was. I dont think she even knows what the USSR was.
Oh wow… happy reading to your mom!
That’s… somehow both surprising, and not. But also explains a lot. If she hasn’t been poisoned about the USSR and about communism by the Red Scare, of course she’d be more willing than my yardstick for mums, that being my own mum and my friends’ mums when I was really little, to read communist theory once given an author’s name to look up.
My mother… lived through the Cold War, but says she didn’t pay much attention. She knows what the USSR was, from a typical imperial core perspective, vaguely. I don’t know if she knows who Lenin was. Talking politics with someone who can do the amount of damage to my life simply by socially withdrawing from me that she can, isn’t worth it for the extremely slight possibility that she might be convinced to read one of my favourite nonfiction books and discuss it with me.
Basically, trying to bring her around is likely to further put her off socialism rather than get her to read about it, and I can’t afford to piss her off by trying.
Yeah I’m not financialy reliant on my mom so I don’t need to worry about that. Once you are stable and on your own you could try to talk more openly with yours. But that’s up to you.
It’s not financial reliance, that would be a lot easier to create other pathways for and rely on a lot of people/groups/tools a little instead of on her a lot. It’s… I have disabilities that are difficult to explain and require a lot of very specific support that is far more difficult to describe and define, that no one else, no matter how passionate they are about helping people or how well paid they are to do it, has ever been able to get right and help me more than they hurt me in trying and failing and in the process viewing me as a small child. Mum is the only one who’s ever been able to usefully help without treating me like I’m three years old and walking all over me.
So yeah, I can’t afford her not wanting to be around me. And because it’s such a direct thing, the bar for how much is safe to irritate her is far, far lower than your typical “I can’t piss my mum off because she pays my rent/she’s my landlord and I can’t afford to rent a room elsewhere” situation.
my mom would probably report me to the fbi or something if i told her to read Lenin
I’m not entirely certain mine wouldn’t report me to federal antiterrorism for telling her that.
My dad? He’d drag me into a city police station to ask the desk cop where he should report a Soviet spy. Generally act like a very confused old Cold Warrior. Just to terrorize me as much as possible, with no real intent to actually cause the government to waste any time on me.
Well, there is a definite functional literacy problem in a lot of countries that’s been getting notably worse in recent times, so I’d absolutely believe that things like that are a combination of Lenin’s stuff being tricky for a modern reader without some of the historical and cultural context of pre revolution Russia, and just… low literacy skills. And if wanting to read Lenin is getting people in that functional literacy gap to learn better literacy skills, then I think more people need to be convinced to read his work!
Also, your mum is so cool. I wish my mum would read theory. (Then we could have a book club. A book club with two members is a little sad, but it’d be better than not having one at all.) She’s the most communist leaning “liberal” I’ve ever dealt with, but she won’t call herself a communist and if you ask her to read anything that came out of a revolutionary movement, she starts sounding just like my stuck in the 70s Cold Warrior dad.
I love your mother, she’s incredible.
I think shes just like your normal non propagandized proletariat. Shes spent her whole life working and is basically a blank slate politically. She hasnt been radicalized to be anti communist because shes too busy working to watch the news. I think theres a lot of people like that out there. She doesnt know what communism is or who Lenin is so she isnt gonna have some knee jerk reaction to it.
The thing is, the Red Scare was so pervasive that a lot of people with basically her amount of actual understanding do have a knee jerk reaction to “communism”.
That’s amazing
I learned theory the old fashioned way: by arguing with cranks on a BBS forum with 9 members
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if leftist BBSs were a thing back in the day. Or if techies who used the small local ones tended left enough that getting into arguments about theory was a thing that happened not infrequently.
From my own experience the lefty BBSs and IRC channels were full of cranks and academic cranks. A weirdly high number of them were Avakians or die hard Trotskyites.
They were largely full of arguing and mud flinging, but some were very helpful to me as a teenage burgeoning leftist. Maybe my experience is very anecdotal but that’s how I remember it. Very knowledgeable people who would often split, make their own even smaller forum, then come back a year later claiming to be a different sort of leftist. Lots of struggle sessions over very minor differences in ideology so I guess some things stay the same.
But as far as I know the very reputable Marxists.org started from some kind of crankish BBS or chat room so honestly I gotta respect them for that
Early Internet leftists were mostly Trots, and party splits were a common and expected occurence? Gee, what a surprise.
(Way too many Leftist Websites even today look like they were made at the very beginning of the Net, before the Soviet dissolution, and haven’t been layout/style/coding updated since not long after that, some look like real time capsules. And a lot of that type of leftist sites are run by Trotskyists. Plus, y’know, Trots and party splits are like Protestants and church splits. We call it sectarianism for a reason.)
I don’t know what an Avakian is but I assume they’re even more of a crank magnet than Trotskyist parties.
I wish those chat rooms were still a thing. Completely useless for anything meaningful, but I do sometimes just want to argue with a random Trot I’ll probably never have to see again til we’re both blue in the face.
I wonder how much more common arguments about the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, in the vein of modern lefty-net struggle sessions about China and Cuba, were back in the days when the Internet was brand new and before the dissolution/right afterwards, the whole “this was the left when the USSR wasn’t quite dead yet” is probably the only reason I so desperately want to know every little detail about that era of Online Leftism.
there are still lefty chatrooms but a lot of them are just discord channels where several times a year some of the mods get revealed as pedophiles. It’s not as fun as you’d think. Hexbear has so far been the best lefty internet experience I’ve ever had, ever. Believe me, it’s much nicer to have a ton of people who are both knowledgeable, agreeable, and not tainted by weird online crankery.
Also Avakians are the Revolutionary Communist Party, and that’s a whole bag of weeds I won’t waste your time with lol. They aren’t so much cranks as they are very uh…aggressive? With their presence and propaganda. Plus there’s allegations they’re a cult. But they generally have the correct messaging. I’ve personally always found them a little fishy, but whatever
Oh yeah, leftist Discords are definitely a thing. The best ones are for MLs only and make you fill out a short ideological questionnaire. Some are an okay place to participate in group theory reading if a more organised party or an IRL reading group isn’t something you’re able to join or organise. Some have good resources. Just avoid the cranks and Red Guards types in the chats. The bigger the server is, the less likely it is to be any fun.
Oh, RCP. I think I’ve dealt with one of those cranks a time or two. Yep. Nutjob magnet. Imagine a Mormon missionary, but his button down is red, his name tag says “Comrade [name]”, and he’s trying to sell you a newspaper and recruit you to a rather culty communist party, not give you a religious book and recruit you to an actual religious cult. That’s what dealing with the RCP(I think that was who he claimed to be with?) guy I ran into online a few months ago felt like. (Or maybe that was a different cultish Trot party. There’s a lot of them around.)
Not to add onto the pile, but I made a Read Theory, Darn it! intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. It’s a very Red Sails-y list with my biases pretty open, but it’s designed to be easy to follow and start off very small, working its way up in complexity as you go. Give it a look, and let me know what you think!
Thank you, comrade! You are an excellent asset to the community as always <3
Thank you!
Ahh, leftist websites. Just mention theory, someone directs you to a reading list.
Damn, I love this place.
That’s a cute snoot. Boop!
i’m still in phase 1: just read some books again, damnit. the brainrot runs deep.
luckily i’ve gotten back into the rhythm of reading physical books and separate it from my sloptime.
now i just find a way to gather some physical theory books without putting a giant red flag on my Palantir report when ICE scans my license plate
maybe i just order a bunch of political books all at once? from across the entire spectrum?
I like the eReader -> pirated/free theory approach. You can use VPNs and whatnot to anonymize your downloads, store them locally, and the eReader is a nice middle-ground between physically reading and getting a ton of books you want to read.
I have such a hard time reading anything but fiction on an e-reader, especially theory. i tend to underline and flip back to certain sections when reading theory and its so much easier to with a physical copy. this sucks because books, particularly theory, can be expensive
Yep, doesn’t work for everyone! How we engage with a medium is deeply personal, and what works for some people doesn’t work for others.
This is the way. Get one of those paper white ones too. Helps with distractions.
Yep! I like my kobo because I can sideload Koreader on it and it has physical buttons for turning the page.
Oooh, physical page buttons sounds like a super neat feature on a dedicated e-reader.
4·4 days agoI use an android tablet as a reader, and the volume buttons work quite nicely for that.
Yea it feels nice!
Ooh, I like that too! I found an old e-reader in a box of junk I was cleaning up a couple months ago, first thing I did after finding out it does in fact still charge and turn on, was get some theory to read and load it on there, it hasn’t helped me actually get to reading it as much as I’d hoped it would, but it is an excellent solution if you want a device that does nothing but store and display text!
I also like the “increase pages read by 1 per day” approach, up until it becomes too much to handle, be that 1 page or 50. It helps build the habit without overwhelming you!
That sounds actually pretty useful.
You should put together a post on this stuff, you seem not just well educated in theory but also good at teaching people the concepts and explaining how to read theory, I guess. Like a stereotypical inner party cadre of the good old days. A post full of methodology like this and little tips and tricks would probably be just as broadly useful as your reading list.
Thanks, I appreciate it! Though I’m not an expert or anything, my list is just my own views and what I like, and that tip right there is just what works for me. I know it isn’t going to apply to everyone, and people will disagree with my theory list anyways. I just made it for my own selfish desires to have something I can share when I feel like it may be relevant!
Yeah, I get that, it’s just that a lot of us are a lot worse at this than you seem to be, and I’ve noticed a tendency in leftist spaces to tell people to “read theory, darn it” or post reading lists, at a much higher rate than understanding that it’s not usually a lack of desire to read it leading folks to not do so and addressing real issues with solutions that have worked for at least some of us. So I’d encourage anyone who’s made a reading list to also share their tactics for getting themselves to sit down and read, and I’d encourage anyone who’s shared a trick or two to post all their tips and tricks somewhere. Not just you, comrade.
Fair! That’s why the opening sections cover tips for study, and why it’s even a good idea in the first place. I just think that how to read is such a subjective area that really needs to be more fine-tuned than theory is, so it’s a lot more malleable. Thanks for the input!
I’d suggest not buying anything you don’t want tracked online. (and if you’re really paranoid, don’t use a bank card, either.) I know, harder said than done when independent bookstores are closing and explicitly leftist bookshops are even thinner on the ground, but there’s always ways around buying things online.
i’m sure i’m already lit up like a christmas tree. but ordering Kapital or state and rev seems like something that goes beyond curiosity into “active kill list”.
and i can’t do e books i’ve tried, it just feels like phone. there’s one semi-nearby leftist bookshop but it’s anarchist and i would be surprised if they have any Marx at all.
Wait until you start getting to the math equations
“So wait, how much should a good coat cost in relation to the price of linen, again?”
20 yards of linen
aaaaa no math no math
No math! Only revolution!
It’s just a quick 30 books
Me, reading some theory, looking at the rest of the reading list I still have to get through.
I usually try to read paragrph by paragraph and sumarise it. If i cant, I go sentence by sentence.
It’s long and tedious, but at least you get out of it actually understanding something.
Another tip it that usually essais will be structured by having a thesis, a certain number of arguments for a thesis, and then a certain number of explanations for each arguments. Figuring out which part is which helps with comprehension, but also not missing the forest for the trees.
don’t feel bad about taking your time!
I think I more struggle with making the time than with understanding what I do get around to reading, tbh. I just thought the picture was funny in this context (and wanted to make a vaguely Commie Pooh Bear meme that isn’t racist lib garbage).
