Hey, I’m quite new here learning stuff, having fun and mostly not understanding a whole lot, although I only had nice interactions around here
Please share resources you think would be nice for me to learn about. Also feel free to ask my opinion about various subjects and teach me if you think I’m wrong/ignorant. I reserve the right to ignore some stuff as I suffer from anxiety and sometime getting out there is hard.
I might also be willing to discuss via SimpleX
I consider myself a leftist although not that educated.
If you haven’t come across their stuff already, Socialism For All (also on SoundCloud, Spotify, and via podcast amongst other options) covers a huge amount of articles, speeches, and ebooks. They offer a really broad range of stuff which is mostly theory-oriented.
I’d also urge caution about getting into factionalism. It’s okay to have positions and to have values but there are things to be learned everywhere and if you get too invested in dogmatism and investing a lot of yourself and your politics into a particular faction, especially when you are still new to all this, then that can become a major obstruction to the learning process. It is far better to say that you don’t know something or that you don’t know enough to make a call on a particular movement or event in history than it is to jump to a conclusion without investigating the matter thoroughly.
One example here is Che Guevara. He is called The Butcher of La Cabaña by Cubans who fled after Castro came to power because he oversaw hundreds of executions at La Cabaña.
That seems pretty cut and dried, right?
The problem is that the executions were done after a judicial process that the Cuban government held that was modeled after The Hague as a war crimes tribunal. The people who were sentenced were found guilty of egregious crimes against the Cuban people and it was only those who had substantial evidence against them who were sentenced to execution.
Imagine a civil war, one between the radical left and a far right government. How many people could you imagine committing war crimes in that situation? Hundreds? Thousands? Even more?
Of course 500 executions is a high number and you are welcome to disagree with capital punishment or to question whether each person was actually guilty of the charges they faced. The judicial process is not 100% and it never will be. But that being said, you’d be able to find 500 people in the US government alone who are indisputably guilty of war crimes, with a small mountain of evidence to back this up. And that’s without even mentioning the people who are serving in the US armed forces.
What I’m driving at here is to be deeply skeptical and not in the sense that you deny evidence and regress into trusting your gut instinct or the prevailing narrative but rather to be very skeptical about convenient narratives and the situations where people give information that is quite shocking on the face of it in order to nudge you towards a particular conclusion. Ask yourself what you know about the subject and the surrounding context before you make a judgement call. Be okay with not knowing and in acknowledging when you don’t know enough; ignorance which is accounted for is the first step on the road to knowledge. Embrace this fact and avoid the streamerbro urge to concoct hot takes based on zero foreknowledge of a subject.
It’s all about learning, growing, and fighting for a better world. Don’t fall into the trap of treating it like it’s teamsports.
This is the beginner text: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
45 minute to an hour read-time.
Other than stuff that’s already been mentioned here, there are a lot of great Revolutionary Left Radio (people just refer to is as Rev Left) episodes where the host Breht breaks down complicated topics in a very understandable, friendly way. And listening to Matt Christman talk through different historical events on Hinge Points is super interesting and a great way to start thinking about history and politics as a dialectical process (forces in contradiction that are interacting with each other and producing something new through the process). Definitely second Blackshirts and Reds though, very good starter
What do you lean, Marxist, Anarchist, undecided?
Thanks for the list. I would say undecided, When I was younger anarchism principle resonated a lot with me, however as I was trying to dig more into in, the answers I got from people were vague and not actionable enough to me. Like how would the transition period to realized socialism look like? How would we defend against capitalist nations trying to subdue us? etc.
This might however be more of a critic towards anarchists I met and my failure to find answers while looking online, rather than anarchism, not sure.
That’s a reasonable critique that I generally agree with, though Anarchism has had a lot of growth over the years in terms of theory and practice.
I will say though, based on your answers, the list I linked would be great. It starts you off on simple terms and concepts, then goes in-depth, then expands it to the modern era, then it moves to organizational theory and practice. I’ve read more works than are just in this list, but it really does serve as a great guided experience for the basics.
Then, you can branch out to Feinberg, Fanon, Losurdo, Parenti, or swing over to Anarchists with Goldman, Kropotkin, etc. Don’t refuse to read theory “across the aisle,” there’s a lot to learn from everyone.
If you already have some basic background in philosophy from the modern period, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (a book on that list) is an incredibly helpful book for articulating various Marxist ideas. It made a significant impression on me in a way that the “Introduction” texts on that list never did.
just be kind to people
