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recommend books
what are some good books to read and learn more about socialism/communism?
I always recommend these three for those just getting into communist thought.
The Principles of Communism
Wage Labour and Capital
The Communist Manifesto
You can find these and pretty much any other book you may need here for free.
http://marxists.org/
A good overview is "The Class Struggle" by Karl Kautsky
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
I suggest listening to ВАЛТЕР. But maybe i would add Value, price and profit, and the three books about french politics (they read a lot easier than the writings critiquening the political economy): The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France. If you start with Marx and Engels, you also don't have to (yet, at least) pick a side in what this site usually calls the tendency war. However, there's a couple of things to keep in mind:
- they wrote their books in the 19th century, which means a lot of the political positions they take were valid in that time, but maybe not today. Instead, look at how they came to their conclussions, watch the method they use.
- There's not one Marx or Engels, there are several. They chanced opinions several times (one example is the early belief that the average salary always was pushed against the bottom, something they didn't think 20 years later). Sometimes, these different points of view is at work in the same book.
- A lot of the books are in reality manuscripts or texts that Engels edited after the death of Karl Marx. While the opinions of the relationship between them differs between people, it's propably best to see them as two people working on the same project (call it the communist project or whatever), while at the same time not having exactly the same views of everything. As for the editor part on the behalf of Engels, the latest research shows that he made some pretty substantial changes in the second and third book of Capital.
- Sometimes, they are wrong. Don't use it as a bible, use it as a weapon. If you don't feel like spending a couple years reading thick books, you can at least throw Capital in the head of some smug upper middle class bastard, since it's a heavy book.
The ABC of Communism.
pew pew pew
Is that the one by Bukharin?
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
The books that most influence me are the communist manifesto by marx and engels, the state and revolution by V.I. Lenin, Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg and quotations of chairman mao
this is a good intro.
capitalism and communism - dauve
Everywhere it is the police who do the whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who sit smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks the table, overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments.
I'm just going to say Bukharin...
This book is a brilliant introduction, written to explain communism to the masses in civil war Russia.
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
Anything by Selma James.
You can't learn to swim in a library.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
The transitional program by trotsky is substantial. It has to deal with the decaying epoch of capitalism which is what we're in.
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
Partija Rada (Party of Labour)