Likely that you’re familiar already, but you’d probably also be interested in Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America.

I’m also very curious about it, it’s on my list, but I probably won’t get to it until later on. I’ve heard it’s quite disorganized and chaotic without having a straight forward plot. So, you liked it then overall?

Yes, I got the new ones, thanks

I’m still just slowly going through Losurdo’s Democracy and Bonapartism, and I think I might start Dubliners by James Joyce as my next fiction book.

P.S. my notification didn’t work, not sure what’s up with that

yes

Yes, I’m really liking “My Universities” as well for the same reasons. They’re part of his autobiographical trilogy: “My Childhood”, “My Apprenticeship”, and “My Universities”. And it seems I’ll be reading them out of order.

I’m finishing “My Universities”, a short autobiographical novel by Maxim Gorky about his struggle for revolutionary education in late 19th century Russian Empire, and I’ve also started Losurdo’s “Democracy or Bonapartism”.

she needs to find better material if she wants to do something greater than pander to her audience

She doesn’t. She’s petty bourgeois and her income relies on her audience’s subscriptions.

This also isn’t the first time she doubled down on bad takes just because the majority of her audience already think/feel what she’s reinforcing, and she has never responded well to criticism from Marxists. You might remember from a few years ago when she was pushing the brainwashing narrative, which as you pointed out here with AI, also lets her audience feel like a superior elite and dehumanizes the masses.

I think you should try “Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns” by Domenico Losurdo. It’s the book that really helped me understand Hegel and see how Marxism built on his method by focusing in on the rational kernel in his system.

In the West, the capitalist is actually most often taking the cookies from the Global South and giving multiple to the white worker.

Plekhanov deals with this topic and many closely related issues is his On the Role of the Individual in History (1898) essay. I would recommend you read this in its entirety first.

I am struggling to see how so many revolutions would have succeeded merely by waiting for the masses to rise up by themselves?

This is not the ML dialectical materialist view. If you’re interested in exploring the relationship of masses and elites, which you’ve probably observed only in the reactionary West, I would recommend this essay from Roderic Day: Masses, Elites, and Rebels. When you read past revolutionaries like Lenin praising the proletariat for being revolutionary and holding the correct ideas, that’s not them sucking up to them, it’s a real description of a revolutionary proletariat in a revolutionary time lead by a communist party. Also, this short text by Stalin covers a very brief overview of the dialectical nature of these relationships.

Maybe you would also be interested in Gramsci’s writings about intellectuals and political parties from his Prison Notebooks, or dialectical materialist philosophy in general.

Some recommendations: there are more good essays on the topic on Red Sails, In Defense of Materialism - Plekhanov, The Dialectics of Nature - Engels, The Dialectical Biologist - Lewins and Levontin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism - Lenin

Ivan Katchanovski has a lot of research on the Maidan coup with a lot of evidence debunking the western narrative around it.

https://uottawa.academia.edu/IvanKatchanovski

His twitter

This blog has some very good analysis of the tariffs: article 1, article 2, and article 3.

This is where a book club or theory discussion group would be very helpful. Just getting a different perspective on the same text can facilitate understanding, and I find it also helps to connect the theory to examples of historical or current events.

I know it’s a bit clumsy in one comment, but I have a few suggestions:

Marx, 18th Brumaire - a classical work that I think is still under appreciated and apart from the theory, it contains some excellent prose as well.

Gramsci, The Modern Prince (starting on page 127 in this version) - Gramsci’s views on the (communist) political party which I just started reading myself.

I would also like to suggest Class Struggle by Losurdo, but I’m worried that it might be a bit too long for this format of discussion group. Still, I think it’s an extremely valuable book that everyone should read.

Some good reading and marxist analysis of AI and art on this blog: Article 1, Article 2.

It’s called ‘The Swerve’, and it’s not just limited to superhero stories. Here’s a short essay exploring it further: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/

Lemmygrad is a more serious site, I agree, and that’s why I use it instead of hexbear. However, I do still think we can improve. I’ve noticed a decline in the frequency of the type of theory discussion posts that I really liked when first coming to lemmygrad, and an increase in low effort posts, probably coinciding with the reddit exodus last year.

One thing I really like here is that certain matters are considered settled in the lemmygrad community. For example, each time a new “is Russia imperialist?” thread pops up, prople quickly link to past threads with excellent answers or post another version of those answers. I just think we could do that sort of thing - debate, come to a conclusion, adopt it as our stance backed by our arguments and proper sources, and present it when asked - with many more topics which still just “hang in the air” somewhat.

In today’s world, socializing online is not some distinct separate thing, it’s an integral part of daily life for basically everyone.

Yes, the western masses benefit from imperialism, but they are also exploited and it’s the communists job to successfully link the struggles against this exploitation with wider anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World.

It is easier to just sit idly in the status quo, but do you find that to be an acceptable level for communists to be at? We’re not talking about the masses in general here, we’re talking about self-identified communist spaces. I want and expect more from them, and a critique of their current errors is a first step to changing them.

Those communits weren’t somehow “at the forefront of organizing” before, and then decided to start publishing articles. They became the forefront of organizing by publishing these articles, having these debates, and putting the things they figured out into practice. This is a centeal thesis of Lenin’s What is to be Done?

Yes, the current western left is not going to form a vanguard tomorrow, conditions will still need to change. But at some point a vanguard will need to be formed by western communists, no one else can do it for us. These barriers aren’t permanent, and they can be overcome. A part of that includes ideological struggle and debate within communist spaces.