El choque de olas

Is Marx still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distort the news in a mostly mainstream direction; why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while money continues to accumulate in the hands of relatively few; why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere; why U.S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world; why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recessions, underemployment, and neglect of social needs; and why many political officeholders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest.
—Michael Parenti, “Blackshirts and Reds”

This is my reading list for furthering my Marxist-Leninist education. I have divided it by sections according to topic. It is subject to change.

Most of these texts are available for free online. Many of them have been uploaded as audiobooks on YouTube.

I have put the more basic texts at the beginning of each section. You may start with these.

The Basics

What is communism? Why (and how) should we study Marxism?

• How to Organize and Conduct Successful Study Groups
• “The Socialisation of Society” (Rosa Luxemburg)
• “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (Marx & Engels)
• “The Principles of Communism” (Engels)
• “What is to be Done: Engels On the Importance of the Theoretical Struggle” (Lenin)
  (Go down to section D)
• “How Lenin Studied Marx” (Krupskaya)
• “MLM Basic Course” (Foreign Languages Press)
  Longer book that covers many of the topics below.

Dialectical Materialism

How to understand the world around you and your place in it as a revolutionary.

• “On Contradiction” (Mao)
• “On Practice” (Mao)
• “Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism” (Lenin)
• “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (Lenin)
• “Materialism and Empiriocriticism” (Lenin)
• “Anti-Dühring, Part 1: Philosophy” (Engels)
• “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (Engels)
• “The Meaning of Hegel” (Plekhanov)
• 
“On the Role of the Individual in History” (Plekhanov)

Historical Materialism

How does the world change? Why does history progress as it does? Why do societies take on the forms that they do? What is the material basis of society, politics, and culture?

• “The German Ideology” (Marx & Engels)
• “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (Stalin)
• “Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (Engels)

Political Economy

How does capitalism really work? How can we build socialism out of capitalism?

• “ABC of Communism, Part 1” (Bukharin & Preobrashensky)
• “Synopsis of Capital”, (Engels)
• “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Marx)

  This is the big one that’s hard to get through but super important for understanding everything else. Similar to Chapter 1 of “Capital Volume 1”.
• “Anti-Dühring, Part 2: Political Economy” (Engels)
• “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (Lenin)
  This one is essential to understanding how capitalism works today and how it causes so many of our world’s problems.
• “Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism” (Kwame Nkrumah)

Political Economy Part 2:

Some longer books.

• Capital Vol 1 (Marx & Engels)
• Capital Vol 2 (Marx & Engels)
• Capital Vol 3 (Marx & Engels)
• “Fundamentals of Political Economy: The Shanghai Textbook”

Scientific Socialism

A theory of social change grounded in material conditions, class, and economic analysis rather than ideals.

• “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (Engels)
• “Anti-Dühring, Part 3: Socialism” (Engels)
• “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” (Lenin)

Building the Movement

How do we start?

• “What is to be Done” (Lenin)
• “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy” (Lenin)
• “On Strikes” (Lenin)
• “What the Friends of the People Are” (Lenin)

  Refutation of Narodism.
• “The Revolutionary Road / Dường Kách Mệnh” (Ho Chi Minh)
  In Vietnamese, but Google Translate can handle it. This is great because it’s very simple language and also very broad in its scope.

The Party

What is a party? What does it do? How should we build one and make it effective?

• “One Step Forward and Two Steps Back” (Lenin)
• “The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work” (resolution of the Comintern)
• “Araling Aktibista”
• “A Dialectical Approach Toward Inner Party Unity” (Mao)
• “Methods of Work of Party Committees” (Mao)

Revolution

What is revolution really? How does it work?

• “The State and Revolution” (Lenin)
  This is a foundational text and a must-read.
• The Platform of the Reformists and the Platform of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats (Lenin)
  The role of a revolutionary party in periods of upheaval.
• “All Power to the Soviets!” (Lenin)
• “The April Theses” (Lenin)
• “Lessons of the Revolution” (Lenin)
• 1919 Program of the Bolsheviks (CPSU)
• “Ten Days that Shook the World” (John Reed)
  
Longer book, an on-the-ground report of the October revolution.
• “Love and Struggle in Mao’s Thought” (Whitehead)
  
This covers a lot of topics, only 155 pages, very good read.

Socialist Construction, Government, Economy

So you’ve had a revolution. Now what?

• “ABC of Communism, Part 2” (Bukharin & Preobrashensky)
• “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (Lenin, 1918)
• “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (Lenin)

  On democracy in socialism after revolution, and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary.
• The Ten Major Relationships (Mao 1956)
  What new contradictions emerge under socialism? How do we develop them to build socialism, and not fall into imperialism?
• “Once Again on the Trade Unions” (Lenin 1921)
• “The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I.” (Stalin, 1926)
• “Constitution of the U.S.S.R.: Rights of Trade Unions in the U.S.S.R., Social Insurance in the U.S.S.R.”, V. Yarotsky
• “Continuing the Revolution After the Revolution: Socialist China, 1949–1976”
• “A Brief Timeline of Socialist Construction in China, and the Lessons of the GPCR”

Reaction and Fascism

What is fascism? How do we fight it?

• “Fascism and Social Revolution” (Dutt)
• “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International
in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism” (Dimitrov)
• “Blackshirts and Reds” (Parenti)

The National Question

How does a Marxist understand racism, national liberation, and self-determination for oppressed peoples?

• “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (Lenin)
• “Marxism and the National Question” (Stalin)
• “Functional Definition of Politics” (Huey P. Newton)
• “The 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolution on the Black National Question in the United States”
  With an introduction written in 1975.
• “The Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party” (Huey P. Newton)
• “Negro Liberation (Chapter VII: The Negro Nation)” (Harry Haywood)
• “A Critique of the White Blindspot” (Alan Sawyer)
• “Capitalism & Slavery” (Eric Williams)

Socialism in Colonized Countries

How is socialism understood and practiced in the imperial periphery?

• “On New Democracy” (Mao)
• “Protracted People’s War” (Mao)
• “Class Struggle in Africa” (Kwame Nkrumah)
• “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP 1969)
• “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (Walter Rodney)
• “Decolonial Marxism” (Walter Rodney)
• Red Polemique
  This blog covers questions in the Indian communist movement.

Woman Question & Queer Question

How does a Marxist understand sexism and queerphobia, and how is this different from liberal understandings? How can socialism end the cishetero-patriarchy?

• “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” (Kollontai)

Revisionism and Capitalist Restoration

How have people distorted Marx over the years? Why did former socialist countries go capitalist?

• “Marxism and Revisionism” (Lenin)
• “Marxism versus Liberalism” (Stalin & H.G. Wells)
• “Do Away with the Ideology of the Bourgeois Right” (Zhang Chunqiao)
• “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (Lenin)
• “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International” (Lenin)
“The Collapse of the Second International” (Lenin)
• “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie” (Zhang Chunqiao 1975)
  
Commodity production still exists in various forms under socialism engendering a new capitalist class whose interests are concentrated in the Communist Party if that’s where power is monopolized.
• “Critique of Stalin’s ‘Economic Problems Of Socialism In The USSR’” (Mao)
• “The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement”
(Sino-Soviet split)
  • “On Krushchev’s Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World”
• “THE GREAT REVERSAL: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989” (William Hinton)

Mythbusting

Clearing away the dirt that has been heaped on communism.

• “The Soviets Expected It” (Anna Louise Strong)
  
https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ALSSoviets.pdf

  The USSR at the beginning of WWII. What life was like, and how the USSR functioned.
• “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism” (Douglas Tottle)

  How the 1930s Ukraine Genocide conspiracy theory was manufactured by Nazis and the western press
• “Stalin: Critique and History of a Black Legend” (Losurdo)
• “Khrushchev Lied” (Furr)

• “Yezhov vs Stalin: The Truth about Mass Repressions and the So-Called Great Terror in the USSR” (Furr)
• “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” (Rockhill)
• “Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The GDR and What Became of It”
https://archive.org/details/StasiStateOrSocialistParadise/mode/2up
• “Studies on the DDR”
  
https://ifddr.org/publikationen/studies-on-the-ddr/
• “Humpty-Dumpty and the Fall of the Berlin Wall” (Victor Grossman)
• “Another Cold War Myth: The Fall of the Berlin Wall” (William Blum)

Against revisionist and non-Marxist tendencies:

Why be a Marxist-Leninist specifically?

• “On Authority” (Engels)
  Against anarchism.
• “Anarchists and Individualists as Related to Revolutionary Struggle and the Black Liberation Movement” (Huey P Newton)
• “The Theory of Permanent Revolution” (Bukharin)
  Critique of Trotsky.
• “The Errors of Trotskyism” (Various authors)
  Critique of Trotsky from 1924.

Socialism Today

In a world where capitalism seems all-consuming even as it decays, what does our future look like?

• “The Long Transition to Socialism and the End of Capitalism” (Lauesen)