It is once again, again, time to collect more suggestions. As usual, texts should be Marxist theory of some kind and will be selected (if appropriate) roughly based on number of upvotes.
For those who aren’t interested in participating, is there any particular reason other than the time commitment? Leave your answer in the comments and don’t forget to like and subscribe
Avoid suggesting the following texts since they’ve already been used:
Previous texts
Marx:
Engels:
Lenin:
- Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
- “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
- The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
- The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
- The State and Revolution
- What is to be done?
Stalin:
Mao:
Other:
- Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism
- Clara Zetkin’s Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win
- Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1, 2-3, 4, 5-)
- George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye
- Georges Politzer’s Elementary principles of philosophy
- Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism
- Liu Shaoqi’s How to Be a Good Communist
- Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds
- Roderic Day’s China Has Billionaires
- Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide
- Decolonization is not a metaphor
- Psychological Warfare in the Strategy of Imperialism
Though there is the opposite problem of some people treating universal truths as if they are mendable (coughs so hard I accidentally say “Economists” and “Bernstein”). Do you think that universalizing the nonuniversalizable is more common than the other way around in western leftism?
In general, yes, i would say so.
I’d say so. You commonly see people quote mining theorists to make a point. Treating works like sacred scriptural texts in which each sentence is a verse of timeless wisdom. Too many people get stuck in marxism 101: class reductionism, vulgar materialism, determinism, spontaneity fetishism.*
I’d venture to say there isn’t much utility in ever assuming universality, other than maybe temporarily to accommodate beginners (kinda like how Newtonian physics is still taught in lower level physics classes).
If a concept is true it can be argued for and stand up on its own merits, just like it was in its original context. We can examine modern modes of production and see that in many ways the fundamentals have not changed since Marx’s analysis, for example. We can examine how things differ and think about how that might change the analysis.
If nothing else, doing so is a useful practice for the learner, honing their dynamic analytical ability rather than flatly memorizing the thoughts of one person.
*Although those specific shortcomings might be a result of not enough reading period, since they all get addressed in the theory. Still, reading to understand analysis is more productive than reading to memorize conclusions.
I have not noticed that problem before (though I have experienced my conservative professor saying communists treat communism like a religion lol). Marxism 101 is unfortunately what one might be stuck in if they are not interested in learning deeper facets of Marxism.
Honing analytical ability is an interesting way to put it.
I have a half-baked thesis that treating things like religion is a Statesian thing, because I have noticed it a lot, but not in a way that’s unique to communists. My only off-internet experience of it among leftists though was a trot org.
Off the top of my head, one example of questionable universalization is referencing Marx to oppose modern gun control measures. It may or may not be correct for leftists to oppose them, but “under no pretexts” is a platitude with little more relevance than “shall not be infringed”.
Another is invoking revolutionary defeatism against countries the West is attacking.
I’d argue the trend of people adopting fringe identities online (like adopting one specific Marxist-Leninist as their saint who was more correct than the others) is a result of this. Since Marxism-Leninism is supposed to be dynamically applied, different circumstances/theorists can have different conclusions and still just be Marxist-Leninists. No need to be a Dengist or Stalinist or whatever, they’re all ML.
Well, it could be projecting their understanding of the world onto other people (ewww Trotskyism). What way could you reference Marx to oppose gun control measures? I know of a YouTuber (Wisecrack, I believe) that said Marx did not necessarily support revolution, but I have never heard of the “Marx would have opposed gun control” idea. Revolutionary defeatism? Could you clarify this point? Yeah, there is a whole community based on ideologies, and it ends up being really inaccurate sometimes (I think there is also extensive use of the political compass, which is not useful).
That’s basically all there is to it, really. Marx wrote to the German workers in like 1850 something like “under no pretexts should the arms be given up, any attempt to do so should be frustrated by force”. And people take it to mean “In 2026 Marxists should use their [non-existent] political capital to oppose magazine capacity limits”. I’m representing the argument really uncharitably here, there’s gradients of course, and perhaps it’s a useful quote to try and break non-Marxists from their misconceptions about communism. But it’s clear from the context that Marx wasn’t trying to write an 11th commandment.
Revolutionary defeatism, like refusing to fight in inter-imperialist wars, instead using them as an opportunity to seize power. Relevant in the context of multiple imperial powers vying for control like in WWI, less so in wars of extermination and imperial conquest like WWII and forward. It’ll commonly be invoked against Iran, or even Palestine in fringe cases, or historically to argue against the Chinese communists temporarily uniting with the nationalists to fight the Japanese.
But you could argue that the circumstances might have justified a fight against the Japanese first (though I do not know the exact circumstances behind the war, and I know that Japan had a really nasty history with how they treated Chinese people), so calling it revolutionary defeatism seems strange. I have heard of such a thing when someone (probably Lenin) talked about WWI and how all countries (besides Russia and Serbia, I think?) had their communist parties fight for their motherland rather than seizing opportunities or whatever.
And Marx not supporting revolution reeks of Western academia’s attempts to coopt him. I’ve heard that take a lot from specifically college-educated liberals whose only exposure to him was in like introduction to philosophy or sociology.
Yeah, I remember someone here saying that Marx was turned into a mere theorist or something, and it echoes the “liberal effect” that plagues many communist and anti-capitalist figures: they are demonized, ignored, or pacified (in this case, Marx is generally pacified by being turned into “some well-meaning but wrong theorist”. Honestly, are college people the type that is most likely to become communist? I saw a video of a Cuban meeting a college communist (I think it was a skit, but still), and there is this weird assumption that communists are somehow overrepresented by college students (probably from conservatives spreading the cultural Marxism trope, despite that phrase having nothing to do with Marxism).