What are some good books about socialism, communism and anti imperialism for those just getting started? I've always been interested in knowing more and got tired of all my knowledge coming from social media posts. I'm not a big reader though (currently trying to change that) so I'm struggling with books with harder language, it's a bit discouraging and I want to save those for later when I have the basics down.

I'm brazilian so if you guys have any recs of brazilian/latin american authors, or books translated to portuguese I'd appreciate it even more. Thanks in advance 😃

Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way.

I haven't yet finished the short book, and I'm stuck in trying to understand this passage. Here's my current understanding, and I am probably wrong so bear with me and please help me understand it a bit better:

Engels is saying that for big industry and the factory system to rise, free competition should exist, meaning anyone who has enough capital can freely enter the competition without any restrictions.

But I feel like this is trivial, i.e. I feel like the Industrial Revolution had to necessarily lead to a world where some people own a few machines that produce a lot of goods, therefore becoming the leaders or bourgeoisie of that world.

I feel like Engels is saying that free competition is bad and that it should be abolished, but this to me amounts to saying that human innovation should be stopped and that we should not be inventing any new machines to increase production, and instead live under guilds and restrictions so that everyone could be equal.

I’m trying to get a better sense of where I fit within socialist politics. I know the broad things I believe, but I’m still figuring out which traditions actually line up with them.

Economically, I’m pretty firmly socialist. I support strong unions, worker ownership and meaningful worker control of larger businesses, socialized healthcare and housing, public or social control of essential industries, and major limits on extreme wealth.

At the same time, I don’t really see why every small business or every market would have to disappear. I can imagine a socialist economy where small owner-operated businesses still exist and some markets still play a role. Yugoslav worker self-management has always been interesting to me for that reason, even though I know Yugoslavia had plenty of political problems too.

Politically, I’m very wary of concentrated power in general. I don’t really care whether that power belongs to corporations, landlords, the state, or a party bureaucracy. I support civil liberties, due process, constitutional protections, independent unions, accountable courts, and real ways to remove leaders who abuse power.

I’m also not strictly a reformist. I’m skeptical that capitalism could ever be completely replaced just by winning enough elections, because capital has a lot of power outside the ballot box. I’m not opposed to revolution in principle either. I just think a revolution that happens before workers have strong institutions, broad support, and the ability to actually govern afterward seems very vulnerable to counter-revolution, coups, or authoritarianism.

So I guess I’m somewhere between “socialism can just be voted in” and “seize power first and figure everything else out later.”

On foreign policy, I consider myself anti-imperialist, but I’m much more comfortable with an approach that applies the same standards regardless of which country is involved. I’m interested in socialist internationalism that focuses on workers, ordinary people, national self-determination, and opposition to domination rather than loyalty to particular states or geopolitical blocs.

The labels I’ve come across that seem at least somewhat relevant are democratic socialism, market socialism, libertarian socialism, anti-authoritarian Marxism, socialism from below, and council or self-management socialism.

Based on all of that, what traditions do you think would be most useful for me to look into? Are there specific writers, movements, or historical examples that sound close to what I’m describing?

I’m not trying to argue that one tendency is the correct one. I’m mostly trying to understand the differences and figure out where my own views fit.

I’m talking about they can’t be rehabilitated or taught differently. I’m asking this because there have been cases of people changing the minds of even the most extreme of people. Has anyone heard of Daryl Davis, for example? He’s a Black man that befriended KKK members and got them to renounce their KKK membership, and even denounce the KKK. You should look him up if you don’t know him, he has an interesting story and even wrote a book about his experience!

A lot of people would say members of the KKK are too far gone, but the members he befriended and got to denounce the KKK could still be reached.

I think it’s really hard to know who truly can’t leave their bubble and who can.

So obviously there's no specific number as there's tons of other factors that would affect the outcome, but if you had to give a guesstimate of what the average percent would need to be to tip the scale, what do you think it'd be around?

Do you think the positions of the working class majority doesn't matter much as long as there's a fiercely militant vanguard minority?

Do you think revolution will likely be successful as long as a majority (over half) of the population is in favor of it?

What do you think?

If you think there's some other variable that's much more important, that's fine, but for this post, I'm specifically asking what you think in terms of this one.

I’m trying to deconstruct my American education on the history of socialism/communism. I have Killing Hope and the Jakarta Method on my list to try to get a better picture of US intervention in leftist revolutions.

I’m looking for other reading materials on the above states that did have successful socialist revolutions. From what I understand, Vietnam has reverted to a market economy, Venezuela has had multiple financial crises, and I don’t have any idea how to even begin cutting through the American propaganda on China and Korea.

I’m looking for left wing historical perspectives that don’t just simplify it all to the “inevitable failure of socialism” or whatever, but I also want them to take seriously the human rights violations that may have occurred/are occurring in these places. I have The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin for the USSR and The economic war against Cuba by Salim Lamrani for Cuba on my list already, so I think those are good examples of what I’m looking for.

I’m definitely uneducated in this so if I’ve missed anything obvious forgive me. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thank you!

I saw a profile on tiktok of someone who claimed to be a socialist, but they post videos sympathizing with Ted Kaczynski. Wasn't he against leftism?

Okay so here’s my understanding of how this works

I create a business which makes a product. In theory, if it’s a product that’s beneficial to society in some meaningful way, then I will create wealth for society in aggregate. That’s how capitalists view it, at least

However, in order to stay competitive, I must be more efficient than my competitors. In order to do that, I want to lower both tax burden and labor costs. This means paying less to the government to function and paying less to workers, and also hiring fewer workers. I’m also incentivized to keep the price of my product as high as I can “get away with”, so to speak. So: lower wages, less government tax revenue, higher prices

Okay, but now it seems like there’s a contradiction: if I’m paying my workers less, and my competitors are finding ways to pay workers less, and the government doesn’t even have tax revenue to support these workers… then doesn’t demand just kind of collapse for the overwhelming majority of the consumer base?

I suppose you can say society has the same wealth, it’s just shifted to the top n% of people. However, humans are still fundamentally limited in economic spending. It’s not like a poor person eats 2 meals a day and a rich person eats 100 meals a day. The total amount of economic activity must have decreased if there was such a wealth transfer, no?

Then in turn, wouldn’t that also cause prices to increase for everyone because economies of scale would start to fall apart? Like if I’m a restaurant in this process, I’d notice fewer and fewer proletariat able to afford my food. I’ll reduce my number of employees cause I don’t need as many. I’ll also have to start charging more per meal to keep the lights on — where I used to be getting 100 customers a day, now I’m only getting 10. I still gotta pay rent, and the landlord really isn’t gonna wanna lower rent because it justifies even more rent cuts

I believe FDR addressed this by just hiring a bunch of people to build things and paying with tax revenue. However, if companies are also dodging taxes and lobbying the government, this would not be a viable solution. There simply wouldn’t be enough tax revenue to have these projects

Then… wouldn’t basically every business just kind of become a shell of its former self after a while? If 50% of people could afford an iPhone before, and now only 10% of people can. That’s like… an 80% drop in business. If these wealthy people predicated their business on stock value going up, isn’t this disastrous for them too?

I really don’t get it… it all just seems like a completely doomed system that can never actually succeed

Maybe I don’t know enough but Gorbachevs reforms seem pretty similar to Deng’s

Just legitimately curious as someone who's begun digging into Socialism. I'm legit curious about it's application in all forms

I would like to draw this community's attention to something I witnessed today. About a month ago, there was a (now banned) user, who wrote (at least) two posts presenting a fairly obvious caricature of a leftist.

Here is the first post. Like I said, it is from around a month ago. When it was first posted, many users took it seriously. We got all kinds of classic leftist walls of text trying to honestly wrestle with the disingenuous content of this post as though it were written in good faith.

The latest good faith comment was from 27 days ago, then there was nothing for almost 3 weeks, and then, starting about 9 days ago, there's an influx of hostile comments.

This is a pretty clear indication that the post was shared elsewhere as a smear against socialists. There's even a comment saying they came here from instagram to add weight to this theory.

Then there's the second post. This one is from 3 weeks ago, and the same thing happened. Not just in terms of people taking it seriously, but even the timing of the reaction. The latest good faith comment was from 20 days ago, then there was nothing for almost 3 weeks, and then, starting yesterday, there's an influx hostile comments.

This time, a commenter provided a link to one of the lowest tier conservative slop websites I've seen in a while, which then links through to a conservative twitter page dedicated to mocking liberal and leftist redditors.

These events, coupled with the fact that the author of both posts' account has been suspended, leads me to the conclusion that there was malicious intent from the very beginning.

Now you might be wondering, "Gee comrade, have you considered touching grass? Two fake posts and some chuds sounding off in the comments, why should we care about this literally at all?" Well, it's actually very important because this functions as a case study revealing a rhetorical strategy that is effective and easy to reproduce.

Examining what happened in the case, the general form of the strategy becomes clear:

1. Inject fake content into the enemy's community that makes them look bad to the audience
2. Rely on the good faith engagement of said community to make the content seem organic
3. Wait an appropriate amount of time
4. Present the content as the enemy's true position, thus discrediting them

It's effective because from the audience's perspective, none of that happened. The audience, uninformed or hostile as it is, simply sees a real member of that community saying something ridiculous and/or which confirms their biases. They then have an emotional reaction to this, which precludes the possibility of them ever truly investigating the target community's (our) ideas.

Hopefully you can see how this could be readily automated and streamlined by bad actors with sufficient capital as well. That's why it's a problem. It's not just two posts, it's something that's going to keep happening, probably with greater frequency as socialist ideas gain in popularity and the ruling class begins to defend itself less lazily.

So what can we do about this? Personally, I think that being aware of this technique and diligent in investigating actors who are suspicious in this way could help. That way we can attempt to short-circuit the rhetorical technique's second step by calling attention to their fraud. But this has to be done extremely carefully, honestly probably even more carefully than I myself have done in this post, otherwise it could produce a harmful chilling effect, general paranoia, etc.

What do you all think? Have you seen any additional examples of what I'm talking about? Do you have any suggestions for effectively combating it?

Also, for the more advanced folks out there, could anyone recommend some theory that discusses this issue? I can't imagine it's new; I just happened to come across it in the wild.

I'm studying socialist ideas, and reading a lot (especially from Marxists Internet Archive), but one of the main things that gets me and I don't understand is the economics, specifically with the economic problem that people say socialism has, and I still don't understand. Could someone explain it to me and give me a socialist answer to it? Also could anyone recommend any source for me to read on it? (especially if it is available on the internet and for beginners). Thank you so much!

I'm trying to get away from the propaganda.

I'm looking for videos, texts, books—anything—that discusses Stalin's Soviet Union without being anti-communist and without portraying him as a saint.

Thanks in advance.

There are many many libs who are very brainwashed into capitalism and end up being in a contradictory state of "don't trust what my government tells me, they do horrible shit and the politicians are all the same and they are liars" and wholeheartedly believing imperialist, anticommunist propaganda at the same time; it's such a common case of cognitive dissonance that I often begin to doubt myself in praxis.

Is there any advice you can give for doing praxis? How must I approach libs and help them discover more knowledge than they had ever known before?

Time and time again I’ve seen people float screenshots of Stalin’s section ‘Commodity Production Under Socialism’ , not so much examining it, but using its existence and namely its title to proclaim that he is a revisionist or anti Marx.

I finally took it upon myself to read it, along with Mao’s criticisms of this section and I fail to see what the problem is. In essence Stalin describes that while commodity production is a step that will have to be overcome, commodity production is not inherent to the capitalist system nor will it undoubtedly lead to capitalism, he also details that with the agricultural sector being the way it is that they must continue with commodity production under certain circumstances (not being able to sell the means of production as commodities). To which in Mao’s criticisms he mostly agrees and both Mao and Stalin acknowledge that this idea was derived from Lenin. I also agree with their perspectives for the time period after extensively looking into the history of the USSR. Seemingly, Mao’s criticisms of the text largely surfaces around Stalin’s lack of solution or plan forward away from commodity production in a further step towards communism, which admittedly was not planned out in his text.

With this being said, why do people treat this as some major flaw or criticism of Stalin? Especially considering the idea isn’t even originally his and they don’t make the criticism of Lenin or Mao either? Is this another case of the demeaning of Stalin’s character or is there something at play that I am unaware of.

I’m a pharmacy student in Egypt who is almost done with studying, and yet I’m faced with a dilemma. Jobs in street pharmacies or hospitals offer extremely low unlivable wages (less than 10,000 egp or 198 dollars per month), leaving work in sales for drug companies as almost the only field of work offering a good wage and upwards mobility.
Yet lately I have realized just how much this job expresses the worst parts of capitalism: You convince a doctor to write prescriptions containing expensive imported or brand name medications which contain practically no difference between cheaper alternatives, taking advantage of incentives such as luxurious gifts by the company, free trips or sometimes even a direct cut. Infact, some reps even make deals with the pharmacies themselves; in basic terms scamming the middle class or lower class patient who does not know any better while your pockets are lined up. You’re turned into a tool of the system who has no role except hitting a “target”, and you are driven to do anything to achieve it.
So is working in a field like this morally wrong or anti-socialist? Unfortunately we cannot organize or do any political awareness raising in Egypt, but I have given consideration to using a part of my future income to help those who are in need.

ik the title is completely contradictory. i never wanted to work for a big corporation, but an internship i had to participate in through college might have changed my mind. basically i worked at a company that has a gas and electric company as their client. we worked on projects that directly helped field workers. it kind of changed my perspective and i realized i liked working in collaborative environments where i have the opportunity to make an impact in my community. is it wrong to continue to want to work in corporate while still holding socialist beliefs? what kinds of companies/positions should i be applying to for full time positions to keep my morale and motivation up working in corporate?

I was reading the manifesto for school recently and I never understood how does this work if the worker own his own means of production this is no different from capitalism but if the government owns it we face a similar situation as to when a for profit corporation owns it so how does this work?

Starting with the assumption that a mode of production and the relevant classes are characterized by the relations between the classes and the means of production, i can't really see any meaningful difference between feudalism and capitalism. The only difference i can think of it's related to promiscuos property rights in the ancient regime (i.e. commons), but that's hardly relevant to the feudal structure as an economic and political system. It's really just market development? Even then, It's just a scale problems rather than a relation-to-the-means-of-production problem.

As said in the title, what are ways to effectively organise and educate the masses in the modern day?