[The Immortal Goon]

There are very often asks for a reading directory for certain works. The SN-RF on this board is working on such a reading list. Here is what has been offered so far.

Should you want to discuss them, then do not hesitate to start a topic, or even a ready list.

The Marxists

The Basics

• David Harvey: The Crises of Capitalism
  [youtube]qOP2V_np2c0[/youtube]
  The quick, illustrated guide to application today

• Marx and Engels The Manifesto
  A concise and easy-to read narrative of the basic postulates.
• Engels Principles of Communism
  A simple read, meant to do exactly what it says.
• Trotsky If America Should Go Communist
  A very simple exercise in explaining to an American how the Bolsheviks viewed the possibility of an American United States.
• Connolly Socialism Made Easy
• Einstein, Why Socialism?
• Monthly Review, Approaching Socialism
  
  
  The Intermediate
  
  Must Reads
  
  
  • Lenin The State and Revolution
    The text outlines Leninism, for the most part. Important concepts include the, "withering away," of the state, the functional reasons why revolution is to happen the way Leninists claim, as opposed to social-democrats and other Marxists; and also the conception of actual democracy as opposed to democracy in theory.
  • Marx Wage, Labour, and Capital.
    Kapital is the perfected version of this, which was meant for a wider audience. It lays out the economics in a more brief and more readable way. One of the important things is the use of human interaction with reality based upon his or her material conception of production.
  • Connolly and DeLeon Connolly-DeLeon Controversy
    It outlines very well how Marxists should handle culture, that is it is a reflection of our material reality and not something that can be crafted by individuals. Further, it marks a shift from the increasingly stodgy Marxists of the Second International with Connolly overthrowing one of the Popes of Marxism in an ideological fashion. Connolly goes onto be the first of this generation of new revolutionary Marxists to start a revolution, even if he dies trying it. Lenin is said to have been greatly influenced by Connolly, and this is where Connolly steps out of the shadow of the previous generation of Marxists.
  • Kollontai The Workers' Opposition was an attempt to bring Lenin back into Leninism, in a sense. Here we start to get into the Stalin-Trotsky fight, but Lenin and Stalin are essentially against Kollontai and Trotsky in this instance. Lenin's position is that Kollontai is describing a socialist or workers' state, when the USSR had not come close to being either and needed to take that fact into consideration. Irony of irony, then, that Trotsky eventually accepts this view and—after Lenin dies—Stalin throws it aside and attacks Trotsky for having it. Perhaps the beginning of the conflict that split the movement for decades. Marxists in general were in favor of Kollontai's platform, some just did not think it was something that could have been done at the time.
  • Engels Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
    Marxism as applied to history and anthropology. It does as much as anything to showcase how the historical interpretation of Marxism works
    
  • Terrorism and Communism - Trotsky
  • The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction - István Mészáros
  • Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses - Louis Althusser
  • A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right - Karl Marx
  • Some Theoretical Implications - Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy
  
  More Intermediate
  
  • Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder: Chapter 4: The Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled - Vladimir Lenin
  • Perspectives and Tasks in the East - Leon Trotsky
  • What is Socialist Feminism? - Barbara Ehrenreich
  • China and its Supporters Were Wrong About USSR - Harry Haywood
  • Socialism and Nationalism - James Connolly
  • Malcolm X, Black Nationalism and Socialism - George Novack
  • Racial Hatred - Ho Chi Minh
  • Appeal Made on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party - Ho Chi Minh
  • Engels to Borgius
  • Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs - Fred Magdoff
  • Neoliberalism and Canada's Ruling Class - Greg Albo
  • Britain’s Noxious History of Imperial Warfare - John Newsinger
  • Ireland: Republicanism and Revolution: Part Nine - Alan Woods
  • World War I: The breakdown of capitalism - Nick Beams
  • Petroleum and Propaganda: The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry - John W. Farley
  • The Epochal Crisis - John Bellamy Foster
  • US imperialism and the proxy war in Syria - David North
  • Micro-credit and the return of debt bondage for world’s poor - Denis Krassnin
  • Capitalism with Zero Profit Rate?: Limits to Growth and the Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, Working Paper No: 2007-05 - Minqi Li
  
  Advanced
  
  Capital
  
  • Das Kapital (Made accessible with David Harvey)
    Michael Heinrich An Introduction to the Three Volumes
  • Ernest Mandel An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory
  • Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy (PDF)
  • Volume I
  • Volume II
  • Volume III
  • Hans G. Ehrbar's Annotations to Marx's ‘Capital’
  
  Other Advanced
  
  • Socialism and the Path to Socialism: Vietnam's Perspective - Nguyen Phu Trong
  • The superiority of Socialism (wiki)
  • Vietnamese Political Studies and Debates on Vietnamese Nationalism. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2: 2 (August 2007), pp. 175-230 - Tuong Vu
  • Literature on Planned Economy, Value theory & Exploitation.
  • Anwar Shaikh(Use the web archive for this).
  • Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx - Benedetto Croce
  
  Anarchism
  
  
  • An Anarchist FAQ
  • What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  • The General Idea of Revolution in the 19th Century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  • Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
  • The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
  • What Is Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman
  • Anarchism: What It Really Stands For by Emma Goldman
  • Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolph Rocker
  • Notes On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky
  • Listen, Marxist! by Murray Bookchin
  • Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology by Murray Bookchin
  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
  • Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber
  • Anarchist Economics
  
  The Social Democrats
  
  
  • Harrington, Michael: Marxism and Democracy

Continued Discussion

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