chat

I actually made a basic course on Marxism-Leninism yesterday, and would love feedback from you on it, like how it's laid out. I try to put more engaging texts sprinkled within, keep it at ~20 hours of reading time, include audiobooks where possible, and for What is to be Done? in particular I instead link the Abridged version over on Red Sails, which tries to bring the most relevant bits to the modern era and de-obfuscate language contemporary to Lenin.

Pedagogy is difficult. Marxism is broken into 3 major parts: philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism, and Leninism brings that to the age of imperialism. They also have to be taught in that order. Marxism-Leninism is therefore the unified ideology. This requires reframing how we think about the world, and it just isn't interesting for most people. That's why I try to bring in a variety of voices, mix shorter texts with longer ones, add art and diagrams, and ask questions at the end of each section.

Let me know what you think!

Uhm... well there's the manga version of Capital Vol. 1, if I recall, lemme search.

I found Das Kapital for Beginners by Michael Wayne pretty approachable. It has pictures!

https://annas-archive.li/md5/21474f35eff9cd8245359d7ef2f90550

Also, Parenti is a great Polemicist. All his stuff is easy reading imo.

This is really a great question and addresses our very important task. Accelerationist Comrade Trump is making the hidden contradictions of capitalism glaring and the glaring contradictions supernova, so now is really the easiest time to get through to people that capitalism itself is the problem i.e. we will not have a solution unless we ditch capitalism as a way to relate to eachother and the world around us. I would recommend some more straigtforward and modern authors like Clara Mattei and Richard Wolff.

The right doesn't propagandize like this! Why can't our propaganda be more like theirs since their propaganda works so well?

They are catering to honestly, deeply stupid people and have no regard for the accuracy of their statements. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Nothing at all like what we do. Following a link on that page you shared goes to this, which has a good gem:

Increasingly, the work of government is being done by people outside the government—unelected power brokers who are invisible to the American public but who pull the strings, set the agendas, create the incentives, and write the rules we must all live by. Using both government and non-governmental institutions, leftists have bypassed the legislative process to compel institutional compliance with partisan goals. The White House or the Congress may change hands, but the left remains in power.

In The Puppeteers, Chaffetz reveals how:

Susan Rice was put in charge of using the bureaucracy to make sure Republicans never win another election

The federal government now could be deployed to harvest ballots from Democrats

President Biden hired a Blackrock executive to run his economic agenda for the first two years of his presidency

State treasurers planned to use billions of government dollars to "address climate change" and "racial inequality," with almost no way for voters to stop them

Randi Weingarten makes more decisions for the education department than people who actually work there

Electing the right leaders is no longer enough. To take back our country, the American people need to understand that they're in a new fight. But it's a fight that's still eminently winnable, and Chaffetz reveals the playbook.

This is really not far from a Leftist line so in some cases we already have a foot in the door. Like

President Biden hired a Blackrock executive to run his economic agenda for the first two years of his presidency

This is definitely problematic and leads to concentration of wealth which then destroys the social fabric through lack of funding for public services and the destruction of democracy. Depending if your mark is liberal or right wing will define how you approach it i.e. "shouldn't we get these unelected bureaucrats out of here?" vs. "all the liberal gains since the New Deal are getting erased because of this!".

But yea, definitely not Lenin. I mean you have to first get them through Bernie and Mamdani before you even let them see Lenin.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e2b1eb9509d4862f6e435ef/t/64206bd917728c27ce623c26/1679846362608/1972+-+Organization+Means+Commitment+-+Grace+Lee+Boggs.pdf

Add this to the list

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.

Marx's Capital Illustrated is decent, as at least it explains MCM vs. CMC pretty well.