I am doing some study like a good Marxist. Currently I'm working hard at my job by listening through What is to be done by Lenin. I'm maybe 40% through...
And I am annoyed. People told me it would be a "banger" and instead it is very tedious criticism against "economism", retellings of some events that happened in the 1890s, and a lot of talk of some Bugotti dude who Lenin doesn't like. OK, so I get it, you think people pushing for economic reforms aren't doing enough. Why is this taking so many pages to explain such a point? And when do I get to the "what is to be done" part?
I swear so much theory I try to get through is exactly like this. I have enough exposure to soldier through it, but there's no way in hell I can give this to a radicalizing lib or anyone on that path and have them engage with it. It's a bad fit for my org's reading series because the people in this org still have lib brainworks to work out. This isn't going to be persuasive if it's hard to read in the first place.
So what's more "friendly" theory that can be more appropriate? Or if there summaries of these works in more pedestrian language I'm down for that. It's just so frustrating as someone who thinks I know some things to encounter these texts. The right doesn't propagandize like this! Why can't our propaganda be more like theirs since their propaganda works so well?
Skim through this when you get a chance: https://freelibrary.overdrive.com/media/4876007
Yes, it's right wing slop, but notice how it is laid out, how it is colorful, there's little comics and bits. It's a book that is accessible and looks appealing to read! It just happens to be capitalist apologia. I want a version of this but for our side.
If you're trying to get people into understanding the world around them but they aren't already into reading theory or socialism, I would probably avoid all the big-name nineteenth and twentieth century theorists to begin with.
An absolutely fantastic first look at the web of militarism and the flow of capital is Harsha Walia's Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. It uses largely liberal sources to build an explanation of how borders are militarized to control the flow of labour and capital, and how this is a key mechanism of capital accumulation. It links the US border policy, Fortress Europe, White Australia, Zionist apartheid, Ukrainian nationalism (this is pre-2022, so it is a crucial way to get people thinking differently to the lead up to the SMO), Brexit, the far-right nationalist resurgence, draconian immigration laws (including the similarity between Canadian seasonal workers and Gulf state slavery), special economic zones...and it presents it all as a complex web of violent enforcement of the flow of capital out of the Global south, and the arresting of labour to create tiers of hyper-exploitable labour in destabilized zones in the south, and in the form of undocumented labour in the north.
It is absolutely one of my go-to introductory books for progressive liberals who know capitalism is wrong but don't understand why. It doesn't rely on dry economic theory (which I love, no shade here, just a truth that a large portion of readers will not be engaged or moved by that), nor does it call to mind pre-conceived anti-communist bias. It's easily digestible, it's thorough, it's relevant to our current state of affairs, and it ties things together in such a way as to ensure that people learn that events are contextual and that headlines are not unrelated, unpredictable, discrete moments, but the result of economic and ideological systems that proliferate globally.
Once someone reads this book, it has done the important work of opening them up to understanding the concrete links between policing and policy at home, and the wars of devastation abroad. This is a crucial first step in getting people ready to really think through the necessity of dismantling the entire global system of capitalist rule.
From there you can go a lot of places, but Ali Kadri is a great step into deeper understanding of modern imperialism, especially beginning with The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. This will ground people in imperialism and the current drive for forever wars: why is it profitable and who profits. This can help demystify the liberal tendency to "not comprehend" why there are always wars in some places, why wars of eradication and destruction (like Gaza) are carried out. It's so much deeper than just "wanting resources," as we see in places where the war often renders the resources less profitable than a simple annexation or neocolonial resource plundering.
This will also help dispel myths like that China, Russia, and Iran are simply competing imperial powers. And that is a major stumbling block for many anti-war progressives, even when their hearts would otherwise be in the right place.