this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Theory Discussion Group
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Moved from /c/genzedong since the rules are a bit different.
This community is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome.
Rules:
- No bigotry, anti-communism, pro-imperialism or ultra-leftism
- Always engage in good faith (don't respond to hostile comments, just report them)
- Posts can be unrelated to the reading group but must be related to Marxist theory
- Keep comments on topic
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Moved to a new community since the rules are different from /c/genzedong's.
Here you can suggest texts for the reading group. They should ideally be reasonably short, but larger ones (not Capital, there's already a reading group for that on Hexbear) can be divided across several weeks.
Comments that suggest texts that fit these criteria will be selected based on upvotes. You can participate from any instance that's federated with Lemmygrad.
Some suggestions from the previous thread will be used for future sessions.
I know it's a bit clumsy in one comment, but I have a few suggestions:
Marx, 18th Brumaire - a classical work that I think is still under appreciated and apart from the theory, it contains some excellent prose as well.
Gramsci, The Modern Prince (starting on page 127 in this version) - Gramsci's views on the (communist) political party which I just started reading myself.
I would also like to suggest Class Struggle by Losurdo, but I'm worried that it might be a bit too long for this format of discussion group. Still, I think it's an extremely valuable book that everyone should read.
It's not really a theory book but I really enjoyed J is for Junk Economics it has some lib stuff in there but for the most part it is a very good dissection of the modern capitalist system. It's laid out like a dictionary and I think is best used as such. For example:
End of History - A term reflecting neoliberal hopes that the West’s political evolution will stop once economies are privatized and public regulation of banking and production are dismantled. Writing in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) coined the term “liberal democracy” to describe a globalized world run by the private sector, implicitly under American hegemony after its victory in today’s clash of civilizations.
It is as if the consolidation of feudal lordship is to be restored as the “end of history,” rolling back the Enlightenment’s centuries of reform. As Margaret Thatcher said in 1985: “There is no alternative” [TINA]. To her and her neoliberal colleagues, one essayist has written “everything else is utopianism, unreason and regression. The virtue of debate and conflicting perspectives are discredited because history is ruled by necessity.”
Fukuyama’s view that history will stop at this point is the opposite of the growing role of democratic government that most 20 th -century economists had expected to see. Evidently he himself had second thoughts when what he had celebrated as “liberal democracy” turned out to be a financial oligarchy appropriating power for themselves. In 1995, Russia’s economic planning passed into the hands of the “Seven Bankers,” with U.S. advisors overseeing the privatization of post-Soviet land and real estate, natural resources and infrastructure. Russian “liberalism” simply meant an insider kleptocracy spree.
Seeing a similar dynamic in the United States, Fukuyama acknowledged (in a February 1, 2012 interview with Der Spiegel) that his paean to neoliberalism was premature: “Obama had a big opportunity right at the middle of the crisis. That was around the time Newsweek carried the title: ‘We Are All Socialists Now.’ Obama’s team could have nationalized the banks and then sold them off piecemeal. But their whole view of what is possible and desirable is still very much shaped by the needs of these big banks.” That mode of “liberal democracy” seems unlikely to be the end of history, unless we are speaking of a permanent Dark Age in which forward momentum simply stops.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back and Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution by Lenin.
I'd also like to suggest tagging people each new thread (especially when it has multiple parts like the recent Fanon one), and advertising this comm on the main one more, as I myself didn't even notice it existed.
The Foundations of Leninism by Stalin
Unity of the Working Class against Fascism by Dimitrov
How long is too long? I will always recommend Fascism and Social Revolution by Rajani Dutt.
I have to recommend both:
Anti-Dühring by F. Engels and Materialism and Empirio-criticism by V.I. Lenin
They are both considerably long but can be easily divided considering they are structured of multiple short chapters.
I personally believe that those are the best books to learn about Dialectics and Materialism, the two aspects of Marx's Philosophy which became the basis of all Marxist theory, and therefore, are crucial reads to anyone who wants to learn Marxism without falling for ultras or revisionists' traps.