That out of the way, you asked for feedback, not praise. Keep in mind some of my feedback is based on my own experience of learning, which is probably very different from native-English-speakers in the Imperial Core, which are probably the intended target.

To be clear, my target is primarily native-English speakers, but my intention is to be internationalist and flexible in application. As such, where I can bring in more applicability to the global south, I want to do so.

Seems to me that this is too heavy on the “Marxism” side and too light on the “Leninism”. There’s a lot of really good texts on theory and developing a Marxist understanding of the world, but very little regarding party work and praxis.

Fair point! My intention to keep reading time low enough is the crux of my issue, here. My “advanced section” was my original guide, but it was so long hardly anyone finished it. My goal instead is to get more completions for the basics, to prevent burnout. That being said, I think you’re right, adding more works on party organization would indeed be worth it.

whereas WitbD is a really messy read without context and frankly Roderic Day’s text is extremely lacking by portraying Lenin, in his words, as “a world-class observer and theoretician” rather than a dedicated party builder.

Interesting criticism, and on that note, I’m not opposed to swapping it for more works on party building.

I’m not sure what would be good inclusions here. Huey’s “The Correct Handling of a Revolution”, maybe? I see that in the advanced study guide you have included texts from Liu Shaoqi, which I haven’t read so can’t opine much, but maybe one of those could be included here? Besides that the best I can offer is Mao’s “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” and “On the Correct Handling” as shorter texts exemplifying Leninism

Excellent suggestions, especially Huey P. Newton’s text as it’s only 10 minutes long. I enjoy Liu Shaoqi’s work, but need to revisit them before inclusion. I love both of the Mao texts you picked out, so I’ll see how long they are.

On that note, on cultural hegemony. I’m quite biased due to heavily disagreeing with him lately, but I’d just scrap Jones Manoel there and replace him with something from his actual sources. His video essays naturally end up being very verbose while saying very little, which is fine for daily youtube videos but not for theory learning. And this is not even close to being his best video essay, so I don’t understand why it got picked up so hard by the Anglosphere. I’d go with Losurdo’s “Flight From History” or even “Western Marxism” if length is not an issue. “La Sinistra Assente” (“The Absent Left”) would actually be perfect here, but I only realised now by trying to find the English name that it has only been translated to Spanish and Portuguese, but never English.

Unfortunately, both of Losurdo’s works are several hours long each. I’m very curious about La Sinistra Assente, is this an article or a full book? For now, Jones Manoel’s essay serves the quite important role of helping de-brainworm the westerners reading my list, who overwhelmingly despise AES countries. If I can successfully replace it with a work of similar length, then I may do so.

Section 4’s checkpoint question on “level of development” makes little sense today without an understanding of imperialism and/or combined and uneven development, which is a section that would only be read afterwards. In those texts (and in general) Marx wrote about industrialising European countries which followed primitive accumulation, but today for most countries the trajectory is different due to the uneven development of imperialism.

Point well-taken, I’ll scrap it and replace it.

In section 2, I’d swap the order of Biographical Sketch and Three Sources, as they deal with the same subject and the latter is much shorter and summarised. Three Sources serves as a neat introduction, but if one read and understood the entirety of Biographical Sketch beforehand it won’t add much.

I disagree here, actually. The utility of Three Sources is in refocusing the reader on the coming sections, summarizing the key points they just learned. Biography lays out a story of Marx and his method, while Three Sources re-centers the reader on the coming sections. Just my reasoning for it.

I feel like Part I of Capital Vol. I should be in either this or the advanced guide. It’s self-contained enough to be read by itself, lays out the fundamentals really well and I don’t think Inferno does a good enough job of summarising it considering the reader is already going through other complex texts through these guides.

All 3 volumes of Capital will be in the advanced guide. You can think of the current “advanced guide” as the progenitor of the current basic guide, as a stripped down and simplified version of it, and the future, actual “advanced guide” as a fully comprehensive, modular list meant to be pursued as a collection of topics, each topic having its own order, but the order of the topics depending on what the reader needs. This is the utility of An Extremely Condensed Summary of Capital in the basic guide.

Section 5’s first checkpoint question opens the can of worms of “Socialism in One Country” that I think would be counterproductive given the texts in question are only from before the Soviet Revolution.

Interesting point, do you have any suggestions on what could help flesh that out? If not, I’ll take the question out and let the sleeping dog lie, so to speak.

I actually sat down to read redsails’s MER in order to give credence to my kneejerk rejection of it, but it surprised me by getting me to agree with most its claims. From the way I’ve seen people talk about it, I always assumed it was some typical first-world defeatist essay about how even the most lumpen of proletariat in the imperial core is metaphysically counter-revolutionary due to some supposed personal benefit from imperialism and settlerism. Instead it’s a pretty fair critique of the elitism of “free thinking rebels” who see themselves above the “brainwashed masses”. It’s right there in the title, damn it! I think the checkpoint question about it could be more leading in pointing away from first-world defeatism, but in reality I really just wanted to comment on how you really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover lol.

Agreed! It’s useful in eliminating the defeatism of fighting “brainwashing” as a concept. I rely on it pretty heavily when trying to engage with people on Marxism-Leninism.

And lastly, it feels odd that the Social-Liberation section has nothing from the BPP.

I actually had a work from Huey P. Newton in there originally, concerning the intersectionality, but it mainly focused on alignment with gay and queer communities, not black liberation. That’s why I swapped it out for the Combahee River Collective Statement, as despite not being Marxist inherently, it still provides that valuable layer to the discussion. I may add back in something from the BPP if I can find one of suitable length.