It cannot be lengthy, and it cannot drive people away by being too daunting a task to follow, so trimming it is still really critical.

Unfortunately the suggestion I came up with is quite long at 6000 words: Marxism and African Liberation by Walter Rodney, 1975. While the title makes it sound specific to African conditions, a lot of Rodney’s arguments are for the general applicability and relevance of Marxism to different times and places. He directly addresses questions of like, “Why should we care about these old dead white guys?” and explains that Marxist theory is a methodology to be adapted to specific conditions, rather than a set of policies that would be irrelevant in different conditions. It also calls out:

It is particularly true in our part of the world, that is, the English-speaking part of the world, because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism, a hostility that manifests itself in a peculiar way. It manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought.

In the English tradition, which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa, it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. it is fashionable to glory in one’s ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says - but why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.

So one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn’t read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one’s ignorance of the position.

It is rather difficult to seriously address the question of the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought, because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis, and from the outside as it were, it is extremely difficult.

I’m not sure if it belongs in the introduction because of it’s length, and it’s fairly dense. Part of it does depend on what the list is aiming to be, and who the target audience is. I think that there’s value in getting people to understand and consider Marxism, even from a neutral, academic standpoint. To adopt Marxism, you have to evaluate it, and to evaluate it, you have to understand it. Even if someone does not adopt Marxism and does not join a Marxist org, having people in other organizations who are not actively hostile to understanding what Marxism even is, is still potentially useful. But it’s a question of what the goal of the list is and who the target audience is.