Communism

lists include too many books and act more like repositories than actual reading lists or syllabus.

This is so true and I'm guilty of doing it myself. Someone will ask for a suggestion and boom, here's every book written on the topic.

Great list. I don't remember reading this work by Harman but I'll give it a go. The rest, I can agree, are a great place to start and to build a solid foundation. As you say, we (should) never stop learning, so if someone gets the basics down with this list, they can choose a direction for further study and follow it.

I think we might also want to select some podcast episodes that offer solid commentary that make the texts more accessible. Possibly Red Menace?

This is a pretty good list I think for new Marxists. I agree that often people are suggested like 100 books to start with and it may be overwhelming. I probably would have put State and Revolution instead of Imperalism but I am interested to hear why you didn’t put in State and Rev because I personally would have thought of it as absolutely essential reading.

I'd say to make Value, Price, and Profit a requirement alongside Wage Labour and Capital; they're often published together too. But regardless, good list.

Where’s the list?

Just got through the first one and it's a cool read.

I already expected from the Trotsky references that the USSR takes would be weird, but one thing I found surprising was his portrayal of feminism. From my understanding, what he calls "feminism" is just the liberal feminism traditionally espoused by the likes of the LibDems or the Labour party and that there was actually always a strong Marxist Feminist current.

Can somebody more well versed in that help me understand it better?

I'm currently reading "Counterrevolution and Revolt", and there are a few interesting points regarding your list.

The modern working class is not composed mainly out of factory workers and other producers of material goods. The vocabulary needs to be adapted to be approachable, and the concepts relatable. Otherwise you either get an intellectual "elite" using specialised terms to quickly exchange ideas, or a circlejerk where everyone is repeating stuff like "seize the means of production". In either case the message wasn't received by the group it should have.

Another important point is that the Russian texts don't have much relevance to modern workers. We're not starving, oppressed, and fighting for survival. Capitalism has had decades to learn how to keep the working population docile. It might be a better idea to use texts that deal with modern forms of capitalism because they're more likely to successfully introduce these topics to non- academic beginners.

If I remember correctly, he also had a similar point about Marx and how the economy and capitalism in the 70s (when the book was written) were completely different to what Marx was writing about. My take is that if you give someone a difficult book, written about a difficult topic like economy, and on top of that it's written about a system that's not the one you're living in, they're most likely not going to finish it.

That's from the perspective of spreading the idea of a revolution to common people. If the goal was to create a list for academics to begin their revolutionary education, I'd add a note about some TLDR of German idealism for the more adventurous.

Post the list, the link isn’t working.