you know haha funny 5 person book club, selling papers, marxists.org

but if we are in the “dark age” of leftism currently are they the equivalent of Irish monks copying ancient Marxist texts for safekeeping?

maybe those 5 person book clubs are monastic circles with complex scholarly initiation rites

those papers, well somebody has got to retain the skills to publish physical media

and marxists.org is basically the marxism library of alexandria

    • Edie [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      1 year ago
      Lemme quote CriticalResist again

      Marxists.org is ran by trots and they’ve been known to edit stuff to fit their bias – notably in Mastering Bolshevism from Stalin, whole sections are missing and they give the work a completely different name. They’ve also removed portions and footnotes from Progress Publishers (Moscow) books.

      As much as possible, we shouldn’t use them. You simply cannot know if their edition of a book will be truthful or not. They also rely on old translations for many texts, while I’ve found that newer translations tend to flow better.

      Here are libraries we can use other than marxists.org. Make sure their own copies don’t come from the MIA though obviously.

      Source

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    What exactly is a scholar monk? Trots have a selective canon, generally one intended to promote the idea that Trotsky was the co-revolutionary with Lenin and that one should engage primarily with Trotsky’s speculative (and historically, a failure revolutionarily) works in exile. They talk about transitional programs so much they forget to engage critically with their failure to produce the revolution that requires transition.

    I think there is a parallel in that Trotskyists are often correctly labeled as “academic Marxists”, which is really just an insult meaning, “a self-labeled Marxist that is wrong and does no organizing but uses a lot of words and references from Marxist theory”. Is that a monk scholar? They catalog and go on at length about hypotheticals but fail to do praxis, e.g. converting the nonbelievers and educating the believers?

    Marxists.org is useful in that it makes works available for free and is an easy to remember domain. There are other projects doing similar things but they don’t have the luck of owning a domain called marxists.org.

    • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Medieval life hack for self sufficiency: all you need is a simple robe, a vegetable garden, a modest lifestyle, discipline and community, a constant stream of large sums of money for taking in third born sons of aristocrats, high taxes paid to you, being a landlord over large areas of fertil land and of course literally owning the poor peasants who live there and do backbreaking labor for you. Actually, scratch the modest lifestyle.

    • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Only small minority were, as most monastic orders were founded to pray and only in some monks laboured. Overwhelming most of monasteries were funded with some kind of backing, so they either had serfs or some other income as fiefs. Both catholic and orthodox churches were nearly always biggest landowners in their countries.