Tag: anarchsim

Some ways of explaining the necessity of identity based struggles for the liberation of the working class:

1. We need a united working class in order to have the revolution. If we piss off women/poc/disabled people by being dicks to them, we divide the working class. Men can be expected to organize with women, women cannot be expected to stick around if they’re inundated with misogyny.

2. To put in another way, class is the central pillar, balanced in the center, supported by all other forms of oppression on all sides. The pressure of those oppressions keeps the central pillar in place and the pressure of their weight makes it impossible to pull it out, however if we knock out the supports, we can easily topple the central pillar.

3. To put it into a cute metaphor with mice and cake: Let’s say there are three groups of mice, one has a 7/8ths of a cake, one has 1/8th of a cake, and one has no cake.

The mice with no cake are like “Hey it’s pretty shitty we don’t get any cake”

And the mice with 7/8ths of the cake tell the mice with 1/8th of the cake “Well I mean you could divide it with them, but then you’d only get 1/16th of the cake then” and the mice with 1/8th are like “HELL NO” and attacks the mice with no cake.

And then sometimes one of the mice with 1/8th of the cake go to the mice without cake and go “you know if we joined together we could get those guys’ whole cake”

And the mice with no cake are like “…you won’t share your cake with us and you attacked us for asking for any cake at all so we don’t really trust you… maybe if you were less shitty to us?”

And then the 1/8th cake mouse accuses them of dividing the working class.

Also sometimes one of the 7/8ths cake mice is like “We should both give them 1/16th of the cake, I know it’s a huge sacrifice, but it’s the right thing to do” but it’s really just doing that to keep the 1/8th mice focused on making sure the mice with no cake don’t get any of their slice so that they don’t gang up with the mice with no cake and take the whole cake and divide it in half.

Hi, first I’d love to say that your in-depth posts on Marxism and luxury communism are amazing and much of what you’re saying I agree with. How did you “discover” communist theory and what theory would you suggest for someone who’s new to communist/Marxist theory?

Well I always kind of hate admitting this because it’s so common for leftist women, but I was radicalized by my spouse.  I was a sort of soft-soc dem “I guess this is the best we can do” sort before that, and like simply being told about some of the history and having someone I respected and trusted tell me a little bit about what the actual ideas were (as opposed to the ideas anti-communists spout as communism) made me want to learn more, and then joining the IWW (being tired of fucked around by clients) people told me stuff, and gave me books, and I read snippets of stuff on tumblr and it was all quite gradual.

As for that, I mean I’m not a straight up Marxist (I’d describe some of my ideas/politics as Marxian but I don’t straight up tow the Marx line all the time).   I’m like… a communist, with sympathies with anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist stuff, and with various sorts of left-communist tendencies.  I’m good buddies with syndicalists, leftcoms, Trotskyists, especifists, even some Maoists.  Just so we’re clear though I have a bias against Leninism and Leninist descended tendencies (Maoism, Trotskyism, and their especially shitty brother Stalinism)

So for your very most basic stuff:
Wage Labor and Capital by Marx is super useful and relatively brief, makes a good explanation of the Labor Theory Of Value.

The Preamble to The Constitution of The IWW is pretty cool 

I think Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike are useful intro pieces 

As a vision of a Communist society I have to admit I’ve a serious weakness for Kropotkin’s Conquest Of Bread.

After those it really depends on what you’re interested in learning about.  Economics, History, what various tendencies are like

I think the first few chapters of Capital by Marx are really good if you can get through them, but they’re super dense (and are really more about the way Capitalism functions than ideas for a new society) and if you can’t it’s cool cause Wage Labor and Capital spells it out pretty well.

I really like Women Without Class by Julie Bettie and Formations Of Class and Gender by Beverley Skeggs which are less explicitly communist but are great works on gender.

The Free Women Of Spain is a really cool book about Mujeres Libres.  I also recommend The Statement of The Combahee River Collective and Sex, Race and Class by Selma James as some short essays that are super useful and important. Also Radicalizing Feminism by Joy James

Emma Goldman’s 

Anarchism and Other Essays is an interesting and useful book, though it’s not a personal favorite.

Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of The Earth (the latter of which I have no read) by Fanon are really good Marxist texts on colonialism, race, and anti-colonial struggle

I also think there are some useful strategic points in Malatesta’s What is to Be Done 

I also think Montefiore’s Young Stalin and Court of the Red Czar are interesting and unbiased analyses of an awful but very interesting man and useful for understanding the failures in Soviet Russia.

My spouse says Lenin’s State and Revolution is good and useful for seeing where a set of seemingly admirable principals can go really horribly wrong (also it’s quite short) though I think Lenin is best read with a good grasp of the actual history of the Soviet Union and where its failings actually were and what went wrong because there’s a lot of weird misinformation out there so like… there needs to be a good companion book I can recommend.

Leninism or Marxism by Rosa Luxemburg is cool

Also the graphic novel Red Rosa is cool

Also this book on the Bread and Roses strike is cool.