Basic Marxism-Leninism Study Plan
Introduction
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Lenin. The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
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Lenin. Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism
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Marx, Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party
Historical Materialism
- Marx, Engels. The German Ideology, chapter I
Scientific Socialism
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Lenin. What Is To Be Done?
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Lenin. The State and Revolution
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Lenin. Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International
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Lenin. Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism
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Lenin. Marxism and Revisionism
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Lenin. Marxism and Reformism
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Stalin. The Foundations of Leninism
Philosophy
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Mao. On Contradiction
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Engels. Anti-Dühring, part I: Philosophy
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Engels. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
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Marx. Theses on Feuerbach
Political Economy
How to Make Historical Materialist Analysis
Introduction to the method
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Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface
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Marx, Engels. The German Ideology, chapter I
Marx & Engels’ Application
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Marx. The Civil War in France
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Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
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Engels. The Peasant War in Germany
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Engels. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
Other
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Plekhanov. Historical Materialism and the Arts
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Plekhanov. The Materialist Conception of History
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Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai
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Divided World, Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism by Zak Cope
Resources for Marxist Political Economy
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The Law of Worldwide Value by Samir Amin
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Luxemburg. The Accumulation of Capital
I don’t want to be an ass, truly, but any foundational guide to ML should include marxist feminist texts, decolonization texts, and marxist influenced queer liberation texts.
ML is an evolving science and giving a reading guide that is fundamentally pre 1920 is not great. It’s reminiscent of what trots do tbh.
Seeing Sakai, who is valuable, but memeified, but not Fanon? Really?
Atleast include Kollontai, also. Maybe also some Arruzza and Federici.
Disagree or agree with PSL, but their liberation school curriculum is on point.
IMO this list is filled with redundant texts and non necessary reads also. This is fully inadequate to beginners, and also runs the risk of beginners seeing necessary and crucial developments in ML thought as secondary. A lot needs to be scrapped.
I’d also recommend including Althusser and Gramsci.
would you be down to amend the reading list? i’d love to read more on marxist feminism and queer lib. i’m familiar with fanon and am currently working my way through wretched of the earth.
Hey i remember you from chapo megathreads. First comment of yours I have seen here so a warm welcome, comrade.
Thanks comrade, glad to be here <3
Do you have any introductory texts you’d recommend for everyone after Fanon you talked about?
I feel this is too loaded for beginners. Should select five or so from this list for an introduction to beginners.
But I understand if you want copy the post verbatim as it was posted.
Does that mean I shouldn’t have started by reading Das Kapital? Because I started by reading Das Kapital.
I feel people should study Kapital at some point but I’d rather start with easier texts to get a general picture of MLism and then tackle Kapital. The reason is that the pamphlets are texts intended for the masses not accustomed to Marxism while Kapital is academic in nature.
That said, these are my personal beliefs and there is no single path to tread. As long as comrades are radicalised and educated, I am happy. :^)
There’s nothing wrong about starting with Das Kapital. But most who are just learning about Marxism-Leninism will consider it too difficult and too hard to understand probably — I read the first 4 chapters of Das Kapital so far (then I had to delay further reading because I no longer had the time or energy, I should continue somewhen), and I had to really study it like some people study math, i. e. write out all the important information in points, draw some scheme to visualize it, etc., so not exactly an easy book to start with. I started with Imperialism As The Highest Stage Of Capitalism, it was much easier and still addressed important aspects.
I’ve found that it’s best to read Capital in a group. That’s how I did it in high school (although I left that group at some point) and college in an independent study.
Also, the discussion and writing cements some bonds in the reading group.
Good Work.
That sub wont get banned though. It would be too mask-off for reddit to do that. Instead they’re just transforming the sub into a fake commie lib sub. Recently there was a series of weird bans towards genzedong members, totally random for posts months or weeks ago, including myself, for things like “abusive behaviour” even though the comments were lacking that. My ban was changed to a week long mute when i simply replied with “What?”. Seems to me like some kind of stealth attempt at purging the sub of proper leftists and just leaving it full of fake commie libs.
I tbink we also need a study list of current Marxist doing research. Economists (if you find them), philosophers, ecologists, and more because one of the critiques i always get is that the people I recommend are too old and we need stuff for this day and age. (I’d say we need to read both).
People like Graeber, Losurdo, and more.
Great list!
This is the list I personally used when I was getting into Theory but for the Political Economy section the Soviet Political Economy textbook I found to be very good
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/index.htm
Edit: also the book ‘fundamentals of marxism-leninism’ is a pretty good book but I have found it to be littered with traces of Kruschevite revisonism
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