[Husky]

Hey all,

I've been interested in learning about Marxism. At this stage, I know absolutely nothing. Can anyone recommend me some texts I should read/? Not necessarily works by Marx/Engels, but just some great online articles? Suggest as many as you want

Also what is neo-marxism's relation to marxism?

regards

[The Immortal Goon]

The Manifesto is good.

Principles of Communism is a simple read.

Maybe try If America Should Go Communist.

Connolly is great. Maybe Socialism Made Easy.

[quetzalcoatl]

This is a nice overview, somewhat simplistic, but it gives you the Big Picture.

David Harvey: The Crises of Capitalism
[youtube]qOP2V_np2c0[/youtube]

[Voluntarism]

He completely fails to mention that we live in a credit based economy which is only possible to the extent that it has been because of government regulations and monopolisation of currency. Goldman Sachs etc couldn't exist in the size that they are without it. Nor could have the debt crisis have morphed into a sovereign debt crisis if it wasn't for the willingness of the state. Credit-based monetary systems require inflation to continue. Inflation is one of the key repressive elements for the average person. Productivity growth and innovation (principally from capitalism) improves the lot of the average citizen despite the ongoing financial repression.

[quetzalcoatl]

He completely fails to mention that we live in a credit based economy which is only possible to the extent that it has been because of government regulations and monopolisation of currency. Goldman Sachs etc couldn't exist in the size that they are without it. Nor could have the debt crisis have morphed into a sovereign debt crisis if it wasn't for the willingness of the state.

This is actually quite in line with what Harvey was saying. Marxist analysis acknowledges the complicity of the state in the continuation of modern capitalism. But modern capitalism is all of a piece. It is intellectually dishonest to praise capitalism's efficiencies while rejecting its troubling aspects as reducible to actions of the state.

Credit creation is indispensable to capitalism. It is no accident that private credit markets dwarf official currency creation bu many orders of magnitude.

[Voluntarism]

This is actually quite in line with what Harvey was saying. Marxist analysis acknowledges the complicity of the state in the continuation of modern capitalism. But modern capitalism is all of a piece. It is intellectually dishonest to praise capitalism's efficiencies while rejecting its troubling aspects as reducible to actions of the state.

Credit creation is indispensable to capitalism. It is no accident that private credit markets dwarf official currency creation bu many orders of magnitude.

Capitalists worked with non-credit based private currencies for centuries before the state monopolised it (or despite previous monopolisations) and enabled the credit based economy of the 20th century to arise. Invariably it was states who debased their money supplies faster and greater than private currency providers.

Edit: This is not to say that recessions and speculative bubbles don't occur under capitalism just that they are invariably accentuated and enhanced by state regulatory interventions on currency.

[anticlimacus]

This is not to say that recessions and speculative bubbles don't occur under capitalism just that they are invariably accentuated and enhanced by state regulatory interventions on currency.

This is not entirely accurate. The state, it could be vary well argued, is precisely what has kept capitalism alive in the 20th century--through both brute force and economic intervention.

[quetzalcoatl]

Capitalists worked with non-credit based private currencies for centuries before the state monopolised it (or despite previous monopolisations) and enabled the credit based economy of the 20th century to arise.

I'm sorry but you've totally missed the mark. Why are you even talking about currencies? It's not about currencies (which are irrelevant in this context) but about credit, and more specifically credit markets. It's the development of private credit markets which enabled 1) the debt ratchet mechanism 2) the creation of derivatives and other financial innovations. The absolute structural necessity for these leveraging tools exists independently of government manipulation, although governments do play a minor role in regulating clearing mechanisms, etc. These massive private credit markets are what fuels speculative bubbles to this day.

Currency debasement is a red herring - a kind of red flag to distract Austrians and other simpletons from the actual mechanics of capital accumulation. Austrians are totally comical about the money supply; in fact it is credit market supply and demand that determines real money supply. Why do you guys continuously yammer on about currency, when market forces are the prime driver of the money supply...it totally makes no sense.

[Rei Murasame]

I would also add to the reading list:

• 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

Basically indispensable, must-reads.

And then (arranged in this order deliberately):

• Eighth Regional Congress of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, 08 to 12 Jan 1974, Chapter 4: The National and Democratic Tasks - Ahmad Hassan Al-Bakr
• 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
• Why imperialism mourns Mandela - Bill Van Auken
• 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

All great articles.

And finally:

• 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

My list is a small cross-section that is intended to be as broad as possible. However, what I call 'broad' is of course constrained by my own biases, so my list should be taken in addition to what everyone else has already given you, and not as a substitute.

[fuser]

Rei, you still a fascist?

I don't think I have read half of the articles from your list.

[Husky]

thanks a lot everyone, just fantastic! in particular, thanks Rei!

[Rei Murasame]

Rei, you still a fascist?

I don't think I have read half of the articles from your list.

Well, I don't want to take the thread off topic (this is the Communism subforum after all), so I'll try to explain really briefly why I'm always reading Marxists so much, and why Marxism is valuable to me.

Spoiler: show

Basically I always build around these three steps:

• 1. A clear narrative about the current crisis based on some socio-economic class analysis.
• 2. Fundamental principles on which actions are based.
• 3. A path for community organisation which leads to a framework in which a programme may develop to address the contradictions at the root of the crisis.

What I choose to recommend is always based on the idea that the Third Position exists for the purpose of enabling the working class to join the middle class in a single unified front to channel all resistance into a fight against the international ruling class. The Third Position would become obsolete under only five conditions:

• 1. The Third Position will become obsolete if ethnicity and geographical ancestry cease to be any part of the driving force of human history.
• 2. The Third Position will become obsolete if the 'philosophy of praxis' (Marxism) becomes obsolete and ceases to describe the nature of class relations.
• 3. The Third Position will become obsolete if there ceases to be a need to channel all resistance into a fight against the international ruling class.
• 4. The Third Position will become obsolete if a socialist or syndicalist revolutionary consciousness could be created by a knee-jerk working class riot alone by itself, acting without middle class intellectual guidance or directions.
• 5. The Third Position will become obsolete if national autonomy and recovery of the lands which have been pillaged could be carried out by a knee-jerk parliamentary-political struggle of the middle class alone by itself in one country.

These five points emerged from my understanding of what the Third Position is about, and largely are influenced by Right-Socialist Japan, Socialist Vietnam, the Ba'ath Party of Syria, Ba'ath Party of Iraq, PFLOAG, and more. My claim is that points 1 and 2 will not happen, point 3 has not happened, and points 4 and 5 cannot happen. And that the Third Position therefore remains relevant to the material circumstances of entire regional groups.

With that in mind, you'll notice immediately that points 2 and 3 out of those five points, require that I must be fully and totally acquainted with Marxism, because Marxism is not obsolete, Marxism describes actually-existing-reality.

Also, if I repeatedly assert that the Third Position is a 'necessary synthesis of left and right', then I must take that to its logical conclusion. It really is absolutely necessary.

Regarding some of those articles being unfamiliar to you, it's just that my approach makes me more likely to pick different articles, so that's why I said "what I call 'broad' is of course constrained by my own biases...".

thanks a lot everyone, just fantastic! in particular, thanks Rei!

No problem.

[The Immortal Goon]

Ha!

I was going hard on the, "introduction," part. But if we're going to go harder line than take this as a next step:

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.

I personally like the Connolly-DeLeon Controversy for a few reasons. I think 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 has a lot of interesting things, but something that gets overlooked too much is her strictly political work (as opposed to fighting for the place of women in society and revolution). 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. That history aside, I think that 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.

And finally, as I have to get ready for work, but Engels wrote an interesting piece called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. It's not his best piece. It's not even that influential, all things considered. But I do think it does a good job of hooking Marxism into other disciplines, and also represents arguably the first modern environmentalist argument. A better piece, though far longer is, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

But it's considerably longer.

[Voluntarism]

Why do you guys continuously yammer on about currency, when market forces are the prime driver of the money supply...it totally makes no sense.

Simply because the credit economy in its current form could not exist without government created fiat currencies, government created central banks and government enforced FRB. It is anathema to natural money and associated credit markets.

[Husky]

Brilliant TIG, just brilliant

[fuser]

If you are getting interested, you should have these excellent lectures by David Harvey on Capital.

http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

[Husky]

I've been reading a bit and I've been quite surprised.

I thought that marxism was a philosophy, like say, libertarianism is or liberalism is. but to know that it's actually a methodology, a method to understand stuff, is pretty cool. I guess what's taken me most is the whole scientific vs utopian thing. now i understand why TIG always used to post along the lines of 'we cannot see into a crystal ball [when asked about specific details post revolution or whatever] but what we can do is analyze the past and present'

Manifesto and principles by engels were both an easy read and relatively quick.

thanks fuser btw for that

[fuser]

but to know that it's actually a methodology, a method to understand stuff, is pretty cool.

Exactly. Its a methodology rather than a utopian vision for a futuristic society based on moral principles.

[Husky]

Yeah, this is coming from a former (in other words recovering) libertarian. I was pleasantly surprised really. You can use Marxist analysis from what i've seen to analyze society (i could be wrong) without even being a revolutionary at all. it's simple a way to view human relations, society, sociology, etc etc in a manner that is empirical, and scientific. the best i've read so far was The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) by kautsky. was worth the read completely

can anyone recommend some work on marxist dialectics to add to my list (next up is Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State by engels

[Rei Murasame]

A better piece, though far longer is, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

But it's considerably longer.

It's definitely worth the read, I recommend this as well.