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
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.