Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Have a seat in the overpriced, sweat-infused Razer™ gaming chair over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
What about Dominico Losurdo it Gramsci? Are these available? Or do you mean the big five?
It seems similar in Spanish, too. But maybe I just don’t know where to look. The difference seems to be that Anglo Marxists are sat in universities writing books, whereas the Spanish speaking Marxists in LatAm are too busy organising and doing praxis – only a few have time to write up their work and that might be later.
One benefit with English, which is actually a significant problem, is that the are loads of ‘academic’ Marxists, pumping out book after bookb and article after article. The problem is that the owners of the publishing industry print these works because on the whole the get in the way of revolution. The main messages are always qualified by anti-communist criticisms about Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. There are some exceptions but unless you know who they are, you have to wade through ten+ works before you find one that is revolutionary. By that point the message is diluted. If it’s this kind of theory you can’t find in Italian, maybe you’re not missing out?
Apparently lemmy didn’t publish my comment, stil: Supply (and so price) varies from author to author.
Marx n engels is not uncommon, just bought all of das kapital for 15 euros
Lenin is really common
Stalin is hard to find
Mao is almost impossible to find, price reflects that (excepts sometimes at flea stores, where one can find the little red book for 1-2 euros)
All of gramsci’s works are in big supply
Losurdo is rare
The best deals are at flea markets and 2nd hand stores, the average book costs between 1 and 3 euros in person or on ebay between 3 and 15 euros.
Its really interesting the fact that most classics in English were printed in the USSR, you always learn something new!
It’s similar where I am, btw – I keep an eye out in second hand bookshops and book fairs for the good stuff.
Some ideas for finding tiny publishers…
Versobooks and Pluto Press re-publish some classics. In fact, it’s a bit annoying because they don’t always make it clear that they are publishing something that is out of copyright. Sometimes it’s also ‘filtered’ by a modern ‘radical’. An example of both problems in one is a collection of Mao’s essays taken from marxists.org and introduced by Zizek.
It’s still useful if you know what you’re looking for. Haymarket and Brill also publish some rarer classics, working with the Historical Materialism journal.
FYI versobooks has just started a new project of translating it’s major texts into Spanish under a Spanish-language wing. It’s a bigger market, but maybe there are plans to do the same for Italian. Just note that verso apparently refused to translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into English (while translating most if not all his other make works) – if that reveals anything about verso’s politics and how it ‘guides’ the English corpus of leftwing thought.
There’s also Akal, which has published some verso books in Spanish. And Plutón Ediciones has published some Marxist work, like Politzer’s Principios Elementales de Filosofía. Maybe there are similar small Italian publishers that only have websites? It sounds like you’ve already checked and been disappointed, though.
El Viejo Topo did translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into Spanish. Maybe they have an Italian partner, which does similar things?
Strangely, of all publishers, Penguin releases some Marxist classics. Don’t discount the big publishers when looking for some rarer works.
Apparently the most important and prestigious communist press in Italy “editori riuniti(reunited editors)” published a book called (and I translate) :stalinism and nazism: A comparison of dictatorships, this was the largest and best press in the 60s 70s and 80s and now became jacobin-level opportunism
Anyway sorry for the rant, its always painful to see a real one fall to opportunism
Oh shit.
Keep ranting! I don’t mind.
Stuff other than theory? I could write a das kapital with all of my rants but I will start with this: The Italian education system is the most reactionary in the world. My choice of school is very limited, either I continue going to this one I hate (graphical school, soubds good in theory but in practice is shit, like social democracy) Or i go to artistic school (I dont have the artistic abilities to go there) or I go go the agrarian school (waking up at 6am every morning ) and why so you may rightly ask? Because every other fucking school has (and get ready) LATIN!!! a language that no one speaks as a native, a dead language, and yet most high school paths have this class in it, for this small little fucking clause I’m excluded from most schools (Latin is extreeeemely difficult, just Google or dyckduckgo it) and get this, put your seatbelt on comrade because this one is very funny, you won’t stop laughing even tomorrow, the nearest school to me (I could basically jump ofd my window and be already in school) HAS FUCKING ANCIENT GREEEEEEK like comrade, we are not in Greece, no one speaks ancient greeck, anyway I’ll stop ranting and I hope I didn’t waste too much of your time
Honestly, I’m hear for it. It’s interesting hearing about Italy from someone who lives there.
That’s bizarre, though. What a strange choice of languages.
On the other hand… Marx read Latin and Greek, so you could go straight to his sources if you learned one of those. And you’d find it much easier to teach yourself the other romance languages if you had Latin under your belt.
How did you learn English? Is that taught in schools?
From kindergarten to university, american imperialism to “thank” little fun fact: Italy has 31 endangered languages, none of which thaught in schools, but we still teach languages that people last spoke thousands of years ago!
edit: pls tell me if you can read this message, lemmy is giving me problems
I can see your message. You might have to refresh the page to see your own comments.
I knew there were a few. I didn’t realise how many. It’s a shame about the endangered languages. I bet some of them are based on Latin, still. But are any of those languages from another language family?
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