Viyella [he/him]

I think Why Marxism earns its role in the reading list for providing the reason to take the upcoming pieces of writing seriously. It’s intuitive to expect that more modern books and the economic and social arguments they provide will be more accurate, better tailored to a contemporary audience and simply more developed. Anti-capitalism isn’t exactly a rare strain of thought; is there really nothing and no one new that supercedes Marx and his ideologues?

Day argues that Marx in common understanding is respected, but only engaged with in a distorted manner that only serves to obscure Capitalism’s nature and therefore how best to overthrow it. He emphasizes that Capitalism emerged through a clear and discrete revolutionary break and with it came a fundamental change: unlike the lords, kings and emperors of the past, each masters of their societies, capitalists are subservient to capital. No amount of wishing on an individual capitalist’s part would allow them to overpower market logic for pro-social ends; they would simply be outcompeted.

From this starting point, he argues that AES nations are qualitatively different from capitalist ones, able to overpower Capital in the long term not only within their own borders, but even within capitalist nations in their sphere of influence. He points to how the PRC’s covid response influenced South Korea’s and how the wealthier European nations, previously pressured into becoming welfare states when they neighboured the USSR, felt no such compulsion with covid.

He states that the current structures of AES nations are products of serious study and experimentation, built off of the springboard of Marxist analysis, and are necessary to examine and learn from for any prospective socialist project.

Without a text like this in the introduction, I think the list sorely misses a reason to read works like those of Marx, Lenin, or even contemporary authors from nations whose categorisation as Socialist is hotly debated like Cheng Enfu, not to mention figures like Deng or Xi. Understanding that a Marxist background is uniquely capable of understanding Capitalism, that its applied forms have seen historical and current success, and that the parts more likely to be controversial to an English-language reader, such as DemCent or a one party state are not movie-style third act swerves that betray the espoused democratic values of Marxism, but methods with proven success against a global overarching system, are all important factors in making a reader understand what all this is for.

As an aside, while I feel like I should avoid reading other people’s comments on the text before submitting my own to make sure I’m not subconsciously adjusting what I think about the text, my being late to this week’s set meant I couldn’t help myself

I can’t exactly deny that some bits of the essay feel like comebacks thought of in the shower, but it’s probably still a good essay despite that.

Studying theory isn’t a task that ends once you join a party or even successfully sieze power. It guides your actions and in turn, results allow you to refine it. Additionally, study does not mean rote memorisation to pass a test, but seriously engaging with the text, analysing if it truly is applicable to your conditions, criticising others’ interpretations if you believe they’re incorrect and allowing yourself to be criticised in return. Any less opens up vulnerabilities in revolutionary parties and countries.

It’s a short enough text that the Vietnam-focused sections don’t take up too much time and it coming from the point of view of someone who made it out of the other end of a revolution does help sell its importance, but I understand why it could easily be cut, especially since most of the text can be summarised by the 5 statements at the end.

Brief tips universally applicable for basically any project. Among other things, be in a good physical and mental space, and understand why exactly you’re doing what you are and what you expect to gain from it.

The sentence in the first point about knowing what to extract is particularly helpful to me. I recently started going through Muinteoir_Saoirse’s transfeminist reading list, and thought to take handwritten notes of This Sex which is not One. At first, I tried to write at least a sentence or two for every paragraph, with the idea that if Luce Irigaray thought it important enough to include, I should make an earnest attempt to make sense of it. While this meant that I worked a lot harder to make sure I didn’t resign to leaving complicated sentences misunderstood, the second chapter, likely no more than a 30-45 minute read casually, ended up taking me at least 6 hours over the course of a week to get through. Accuracy and precision has to be balanced with practicality, and good note-taking is a vital part of that.

A short essay on the inevitability of discussing, in the mainstream mind, the BBEGs of socialism. Nia Frome reminds us that even if Stalin and Mao were faultless angels, capitalists would still have a vested interest in slandering them, given the pair’s nature as leaders of nations committed to the overthrow of capitalism. Regardless, they were humans who made decisions with positive outcomes and decisions with negative outcomes.

Additionally, they weren’t playing an rts: they didn’t supernaturally micromanage millions of people to do their nefarious bidding. The successes of socialism that Frome lists such as comprehensive literacy campaigns that covered hundreds of millions of people were ultimately enacted by committed, educated, agency-having party members, supported by working people who collectively owned society and directly benefited from its improvement.

Refusing to analyse the successes and failures of socialist projects under the banner of it not being “real socialism” has some major rhetorical failures when talking to skeptics. Conceding that the only socialism to actually matter to anyone was the bad type but that you’ll do it differently for sure this time wouldn’t convince anyone, no matter what noun you choose in place of socialism.

I got like 90% through a paragraph of my thoughts before I scrolled down and realised it was practically identical to hello_hello’s. I can’t tell if that’s a coincidence or if it was just me subconsciously going along with hys comment so I’ll leave it unsaid. The summary I’ll give instead is that any socialist, but especially communists, will have to deal the Stalin question at some point, and engaging with him as the human leader of a party filled by people all bringing their own influence instead of as a pied piper who charmed a nation of hundreds of millions will always bring better analysis.

Marx’s WLC is what helped me understand how class antagonism manifests itself in its most mundane but most applicable form, and VPP did a better job than any summary I’ve read in explaining the value of labour, labour-power and how surplus value arises. Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism is an excellent text in its own right and Lenin’s writing style makes him easy to read even when surrounded by endless tables, and the two follow-ups easily bring his analysis to familiar contemporary circumstances.

Incidentally, I found that Foundations of Leninism being slotted soon after Cheng Enfu’s Five Characteristics really strengthened the point that the post-WW2 world order was specifically created in fear of Communist revolutions. While it’s easy to dismiss Stalin’s conclusion that revolutions should no longer be expected in the most developed country, but where the global system of imperialism is weakest as a post-hoc rationalisation to explain the success of the October revolution and the failure of the German revolution, reading it so soon after learning about the qualitative changes the Global North made to minimise inter-imperialist wars really reinforced the idea that the Bourgeoisie have no choice but to respect and respond to the conclusions of DiaMat, and gave Stalin’s analysis the sense of being right too early, which Communists should always aim to be.

I thought that the changes made to the Philosophy section when the basic list was first posted were a bit of a downgrade. Elementary Principles of Philosophy basically single-handedly rewrote my opinion on what philosophy is/should be i.e. that it is a tool to help you understand the world, one that fails to do so is not a useful philosophy, and that popular philosophers in the liberal world (such as various Ancient Greek or Roman philosophers, or those like Nietzsche) are kept popular specifically because many are too outdated to be useful for anything other than self-help, or act in service of supremacist ideologies. Additionally, the book’s regular chapter summaries are exceptionally helpful in learning to apply DiaMat as a tool, which is something that Dialectical and Historical Materialism’s format wasn’t conducive to. I did briefly read your exchange with Edie about the error Elementary Principles makes so I understand why it’s omitted now, and I’ve noticed that you’ve updated the philosophy section again, so I’m hoping that it’ll be useful from the perspective of practical application.

I realise my comment’s already become massive so I’ll try to be brief with the rest. I think the Communist Manifesto is a bit lengthy and meandering, and is sandwiched by more focused works that are easier to glean key information from. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention when I read it, but I found Gramsci’s Intellectual to simply not have as much information as I was expecting and felt a bit disappointed. Given how important Cultural Hegemony is as a concept, I think I was expecting a lengthy, all-encompassing work akin to Lenin’s Imperialism. I think Masses, Elites and Rebels is an excellent text just for the way it drives home the necessity to understand that everyone has agency and generally act consciously or unconsciously in the way they think benefits them, and I regularly use his reasoning with my more liberal friends to explain the seemingly absurd ways that AI bros and CEOs act, or why wealthier people seem to cling to international pariahs like Zionism to very positive reception.

On that topic, my memory’s greatest disservice was likely to Why Socialism. I went in expecting a well-meaning but underdeveloped argument for a planned economy on the basis that anarchic production left too many people’s needs unmet, and instead found an essay that does a surprisingly good job explaining that class society is created and shaped for the explicit benefit of its ruling class, rejects the metaphysical argument of human behaviour acting totally according to an unchanging nature, and even that the value of labour-power is simply the minimum wage required to keep enough workers alive, the price of which is shifted up and down depending on how scarce or available jobs are at the time. Perhaps most surprisingly, all are asserted as true by Einstein without any argument in favour of the typical liberal obfuscation. While I imagine that he wouldn’t write on something without being thorough about it, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a consequence of the USSR’s proximity acting as an anchor on the left side of the Overton Window.

Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all.

Much like when reading This Soviet World, it does hit hard when a sentence written nearly a century ago rings true today. The paragraph after about education contrasted with some of the final chapters like Youth Set Free, where teachers go to great lengths to find children’s interests, and the more advanced students help the ones struggling as a matter of course really does highlight how our current system starts atomisation early.

Despite my praise for the essay, it probably is still worth heavily mulling over its inclusion for the reason hello_hello mentioned. In the same way that Cowbee took a while to add Stalin to the list because it risks making it radioactive for people who don’t already view the USSR positively, including Einstein does the same from the opposite end where it risks putting off people who very reasonably have no patience for humouring a zionist, even if including the most famous scientist helps with mainstream credibility.