Imperialism too? Left Wing Communism as well?? What is to be done???
That's it, I'm powering through these books.
State and Revolution is SHOCKINGLY clear and accessible, and yes, not a million pages long.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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A somewhat surprising amount of it is also Lenin being very catty about political figures in his time lol
I was just about to say, it's like 30% throwing shade at Kautsky
It's great for people who love influencer drama because it basically is that
Marx have me the false notion that all these revolutionaries were wordy as hell. Talk about false consciousness!
Honestly even Engels is way more readable than Marx. When I'm reading Engels and then he block quotes Marx I'm all of a sudden 
I like when Marx says "in a word" and then it's a full sentence. Which maybe it is in German idk
I have to wonder if Capital would have been more accessible if Marx was anything other than German. There's a lot of "Germanisms" where he makes these huge ass compound words or almost tautologies with phrases like "The labor value is associated with the labor power of the labor voucher used by catgirl associates."
In a word, Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung
Muscling through Imperialism rn and was saddened to see how it wasn't easy to read like State and Revolution
Once he whips out the charts you know you're in a different realm
should listen to the Marx Madness reading series on it. They are great. Also their discord is where I met Sungmanitu.
We tried to read it for a Marxist book club, and I felt really bad because many people who hadn't had the instruction or the propensity to see why the numbers where important were struggling very hard.
haha im in the exact same boat
I polished off a good chunk today - honestly it gets a lot simpler after the first three chapters if I knew that earlier I would have pushed through them sooner
Most theory isn't super long but does sometimes assume you've read other stuff which is.
So Theory is like the Marvel Cinematic Universe ?
I... You're right and I hate it.
The marvel cinematic universe isn't short nor are the movies in it and i don't think any assume you can read in general
Nah but many modern marvel movies assume you have watched other stuff before. Just like theory 
All of history is the history of the Capeshit Struggle
lol the dense text of Capital assumes knowledge of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. You can really struggle without a foundation on liberal economics (also known as political economy) and got lost because you don’t know what Marx was referring to.
This is why I struggled reading it!
wait until you find out the communist manifesto is only 20 pages long
20 pages with 100 pages of forwards.
Very interesting forewords though
You can even have it read to you by our very own @dessalines@lemmy.ml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GrP0EVJkVE
Ooo thanks, I'll give this a DL to my AudioBookShelf server.
Ooh, that sounds like a very cool thing.
I need to download and sort some theory to read and put it on my devices... the family camping trip is coming up, there's pretty bad cell service in the campground, and I always get caught out with nothing good to read. As I spend the night before we leave scrambling to pack the final things.
If you have this set up you can use their mobile app to sync books to your phone so you can listen to them offline.
You should also take a look at this https://mega.nz/folder/cuMwjRyK#eDPayQSdYFwaCh9qr8zzPw
I got my ass out of bed just to post this.
Ooh, looks good, can't wait to sink my teeth into some of this, thanks comrade!
I highly highly recommend Palo Alto and Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. They cover some big blind spots among the western left regarding indigenous stuff.
Thanks for the rec!
Oooo what is this? Def yanking those audio books.
It's the Rodney Yellow Thunder online library put together by Sungmanitu and some other comrades in CLN, I kinda helped. 8 gigabytes of decolonial theory.
MEGA very stingy with allowing downloads, it would seem. Even with an account, I hit their "transfer limit" of 5GB in a single six-hour period.
Hell yeah!
Ooh, neat. I might have an old device lying around that'd be possible to set something like that up on, using that specifically for theory is the most leftist thing ever. Will have to look into that.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Wait until you hear about Mao’s famous works!
What!?
On Contradiction is like 30 pages! 
What a bargain!
Oh hell yeah dude, Mao is so (relatively) easy to read. I went Mao->Lenin->Marx and I think that's a solid trajectory.
Here's a compilation of work, but skip the Zizek intro https://aklatangbayan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/zizek-presents-mao-on-practice-and-contradiction.pdf
The Lenin library is good fucking shit
This is the way 
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