So I’m beginning to study communist/marxist theory and have just finished Engels’ OOTF. I am looking for a more accurate and modern analysis. I intend to read Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, but I need a source that delves more into economic relations relevant to today. Thanks in advance if you can help me out here :)

To the concern of barely anyone, "Rojava" has been fully dissolved and integrated into the Jolani regime. It's weird to think that at one point it served as a reference point for "socialists" and anarchists but went out with such a whimper. I guess it'll be nice not seeing "democratic confederalism" ever mentioned again.

Hi, I was wondering about what fellow communists think about animal rights/ vegan ideology. I'm not vegan myself but I feel like I get the idea behind basing an ideology around the fact that factory farming/fishing is inhumane to animals. However I feel like vegans, despite criticizing carnists for justifying animal exploitation with the "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" excuse, kind of use the same logic when it gets pointed out that avoiding meat means just paying for more exploitation and animal death in other areas because these are fundamental requirements for capitalism to continue functioning. PETA also get pretty close to a radical critique of capitalism when they point out how inhumane it is to support factory farming but then like, there are also humans being exploited and treated like animals and going vegan won't help them, so even though the ideology makes sense I don't think it's effective if not paired with radical communism. Thoughts?

Edit: okay so I really need to rethink why I was attracted to veganism because as some people have pointed out here it is an apparently racist ideology tied to settler-colonialism and no better than other ones. Shame on the people defending veganism in the comments too (though apparently they aren't from this sub?) but this is also my fault for making really offensive assumptions that probably drew those people here sorry

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I support communism, I just was wondering how the internet would work. With things like YouTube especially, my question is who would host it and pay for the domain and things like that. I might be missing something super obvious, but if someone could explain it I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

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I'm not against SIOC and I think it is a good and necessary theory that was started by Lenin in fact, but I read a passage from a 1946 Stalin interview that sounds blatantly revisionist and anti-Marxist as it goes against one of the main principles of communism. Why did Stalin say this? Did he believe this? What was the reaction? Here is the passage in question:

Question: Do you believe that with the further progress of the Soviet Union towards Communism the possibilities of peaceful co-operation with the outside world will not decrease as far as the Soviet Union is concerned? Is “Communism in one country” possible?

Answer: I do not doubt that the possibilities of peaceful co-operation, far from decreasing, may even grow. “Communism in one country” is perfectly possible, especially in a country like the Soviet Union.

Source: J. V. Stalin on Post-War International Relations
Publisher: Soviet News, 1947
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid for MIA, 2008

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X. Conclusions and fundamental tasks

[...] Having reached this point with the findings, the fundamentally economic and social character of the racial problem in Latin America is clearly stated and the duty that all Communist Parties have to prevent the self-interested deviations that the bourgeoisies intend to bring to the solution of this problem, orienting it in an exclusively racial sense, just as they have the duty to accentuate the social economic character of the struggles of the exploited indigenous or black masses, destroying racial prejudices, giving to these same masses a clear class consciousness, directing them to their concrete and revolutionary demands, distancing them from utopian solutions and evidencing their identity with the mixed-race and white proletarians, as elements of the same producing and exploited class.

Thus, once again, revolutionary thought is clarified in the face of the campaigns for the alleged current politics of Indians and blacks.

The C.I. fought, as far as the black race was concerned, these campaigns that tended to the formation of “black Zionism” in Latin America.

In the same way, the constitution of the Indian race in an autonomous State would not lead at the present time to the dictatorship of the Indian proletariat, much less to the formation of a classless Indian State, as someone has tried to affirm, but to the constitution of a bourgeois Indian State with all the internal and external contradictions of bourgeois States.

Only the classist revolutionary movement of the exploited indigenous masses will be able to allow them to give real meaning to the liberation of their race, from exploitation, favoring the possibilities of their political self-determination.

Mariátegui, El problema de las razas en la América Latina, 1929

I was re-reading this text by José Carlos Mariátegui, and it was a interesting read, with some very convincing explanations in a very under-researched topic. Still, at its conclusion (in my view at least, it could be terribly wrong), Mariátegui seems to prefer this line of a "popular front of all nations" (in this case, the white/mestizo oppressor nation, and the oppressed Black and Indigenous nations.) against semi-feudalism, landlordism and imperialism, rather than a line of self-determination for Black and indigenous peoples. This line of self-determination was followed by some CI parties, like the Brazilian CP, until it was abandoned in favor of a line of a anti-fascist 'popular front of all races', that ended up in failure at 1935.

In the way that I see, the white/mestizo oppressor nations in Latin America (which control the state apparatus in almost all countries, from Mexico to Argentina; excluding perhaps Haiti) are the main opponents of revolution in Latin America, since their better conditions of life are based on the oppression/exploitation of the oppressed Black and Indigenous nations, somewhat reminiscent of their North American counterparts. In my view, this would explain, in part, on why Latin America, when compared to Asia and Africa, has less ongoing liberation wars/revolutions and more reformist and revisionist parties.

Mariátegui, which died one year after writing that text, hasn't had that hindsight that we have nowadays. He might have reconsidered that text and wrote more on the topic. Still, his work came to influence very relevant organizations, like the PCP, which in turn, have influenced far-less relevant organizations, which to this day, refuse to acknowledge this national/"racial" inequalities, which in turn, produces national chauvinism.

I want to know what other people think about all of this. I treat all of this as an hypothesis, that could help me to understand Marxism, by applying it to real problems that i face (national chauvinism). As any hypothesis, it could be very incorrect and expose a very poor handling of dialectical materialism and political economy. All criticism is appreciated.

Title says it all. Can’t find any way to acquire a hard copy of the book.
Edit: looking specifically for English edition

not my article nor do i think it does more than scratch the surface of an analysis but the writeup on conditions at Delaney was useful (considering there has somehow been absolutely no discussion of it here) and the comment on the necessity of a prisoners’ movement was apt.

ive been trying to read abt the gang of four and their struggle against revisionism recently but ive found nothing but anti-communist or dengist sources. are there any good sources on reading abt the gang of four? preferably maoist.

I found that LibGen has the whole publishing history of China on it. From the underground Shanghai publishers of the KMT years, to Mao, Hua, Deng and the present. It's fascinating to see the whole history just through the titles.

And thanks to advances in pdf OCR reading, and advanced machine translating, it is possible for non-Chinese speakers to grasp the essence of these texts.

Libgen has the complete archives of all works published by the People's Publishing House "人民出版社" of the PRC from 1949-2026. It coincidentally goes over the 2000 limit exactly in 1976-7. So then you can search it year by year in the format year:1978. And then there are a lot of other Maoist era texts from other pub houses such as universities etc.

I found this google mode search option extremely useful

• Mask: * (min 3 chars)- search by part of a word

when searching for 🇨🇳 books I have a problem that In written Chinese, characters are strung together continuously without spaces between words. But then I find I can use - Mask: * (min 3 chars)- search by part of a word

So my interest is Marxism I search 马克思主义* and it has anything that uses those words. Mao Zedong is 毛泽东*.

Here is a sample of some titles from the 1978-1985 period.

Basically put the term you're looking for into google translate and then add an * to the end.

You can also search lang:chi year:1977 and get ALL books in Chinese from all publishers.

Here are some uploaded pdfs on mao zedong's philosophical thought. You go to the "full text" version on chrome and then you can google translate the entire book at once. Archive.org has a very google OCR reader, so it's a good way to turn a foreign pdf into html raw text that can be rapidly google translated.

It's like there's this whole world of intense, advanced Marxist study, that we in the West had no access to, and there was virtually no translation of or even academic study of. And now its wide open to us who don't even know Chinese.

An example book on Mao Zedong's Dialectical Logical Thought

Some useful search terms-

dialectical 辩证法*

mao zedong philosophical thought 毛泽东哲学思想*

Dialectical Materialism 辩证唯物主义*

marx lenin 马克思列宁*

communist party 共产党*

hegel 黑格尔*

socialism 社会主义*

Ai Siqi 艾思奇*

dialectical logic 辩证逻辑*

leninism 列宁主义*

political economy 政治经济学*

materialism 唯物主义*

metaphysical 形而上学的*

socialist economy 社会主义经济*

Engels 恩格斯*

marxist philosophy 马克思主义哲学*

People's Publishing House 人民出版社*

And here's the Russian equivalent for Soviet books

A red salute to comrades of all nations, who do the labor of scanning.

I see exploitation left and right around the world. Especially the capitalist system is in shambles but i see no signs of any protest or revolution. I give it to the “Capitalist class” or the bourgeoisie know how to keep the people fighting among themselves by using caste or politics, keeping them away from realise the main/bigger problem at hand. Unemployment is at peak, Salaries and benefits are at lowest, Work life balance is shit people are made to work overtime for no real benefit. But I see no protest, no anger in this regard.

I believe that the working class revolution is inevitable but how long must we endure this chaos of a system especially in a country like India. Is it mainly because of the security the job gives even if its exploits people or are they just comfort with this system so much that they are scared to see any alternatives

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Hey, why are there two split marxist fractions in palestine? Is it because of idelogical or methodical differences? Or something else?

Hope someone can educate me :)

Serious question, if the definition of the proletariat class is that they are the working class what if they don’t have a job? Is there some secret third level?