(Part 3) Top products from r/communism

Cuba documentaries and where to find them:

Fidel Castro: The Untold Story (youtube) - Highly recommended as a first step, great overview of Fidel but also the revolution and the internationalism of the Cuban revolutionary state

El Che (the documentary with Paco Taibo on Netflix) - Entire life story of Che told by a great leftist author.

¡Luchando! Cuba's Struggle to Survive (Kanopy) - Covers the Special Period in Time of Peace, where the US doubled down on the blockade after the fall of the USSR when Cuba overnight lost 80%+ of its trade economy

Cuba and the Cameraman - Netflix - A left liberal documentarian travels to Cuba over the course of several decades, checking in with friends there and showing footage from his interactions with Fidel. Pretty cool, watch with a discerning eye.

Return to Cuba - Kanopy or Prime - A Cuban woman who has lived in Italy for years moves back to the island. Focus on the economic experiments, kinda fascinating.

Fidel es Fidel - youtube - Fidel talking about things, making speeches, playing with kids. Released to celebrate his 90th birthday

B-B-B-BONUS CLIPS

Long, unedited interview by ABC with Fidel in 1964 where he speaks english (rare) and lays it all out there

First Secretary of the Embassy of Cuba presents a detailed look at Cuban economy, healthcare, tourism, Cuban democracy, the blockade, etc in a forum on US-Cuba relations

Thanks again for the continued dialogue.

It's not a theoretical disconnect or prejudice that I've encountered but a vernacular one. I think it's anachronistic to call Jesus a communist, but he's clearly interested in an alternative economics based in communitarian values rather than those based in autonomy. That's not to say by any means that they're not compatible (I would consider myself a liberation theologian), just that the Jesus figure of the Gospels is a bit more slippery than that.

You may be interested in Ward's work. He does a lot with the religious nature of capitalism, and though he comes from the theological side he's highly articulate in discussions of commodification (his dissertation was on Derrida and Karl Barth, and since has done a lot of work in semiotics and Marx). Daniel Bell has written an excellent book as well where he applies Deleuze and Guitarri to liberation theology. Philip Goodchild has written what a friend of mine considers to be the best analysis of money he's read, though I haven't read it myself.

Hey there. I remember when I came to this crossroad in my own political journey very well and so I just wanted to offer a bit of insight to maybe help give some perspective.

I already see a lot of people throwing around the lines that connect Marx to Lenin to Stalin and see people talking about the misinformation campaign surrounding ML theory more generally. But I know I didn't really find any of that kind of stuff helpful until I was already 100% sold on the philosophical basis of Marxism, so let me just throw this into the mix:

Whether you end up more on the side of Anarchism VS Marxism–Leninism(-ect.) will probably come down to this major philosophical question: in your opinion, how do we best build Socialism?

Now if you believe that the best way to do this is to build Dual Power structures outside of any sort of state and to oppose the state directly through non-hierarchical organization, you'll want to read more Anarchist theory in order to better aquatint yourself with that line of thought to see if it makes sense to you. A lot of people like Bookchin or Bakunin for this.

If you think that it would be better to take control of- rather than destroy entirely- the currently functioning state apparatus in order to retool it towards advancing the agenda of Socialism (rather than Imperial Capitalism), reading into traditional Marxist theory is probably going to make more sense to you. It would most likely be seen as gauche to advocate for reading Lenin here, but I'm going to anyway.

Now both of these systems have overlap with each other and there are people on both sides of the spectrum who will promote elements from either but usually the distinction is one of bottom-down collectives VS top-down organization. People advocating for the former will say that the latter is vulnerable to hierarchical exploitation and people advocating the latter will say that the former is structurally unsound and too easily dismantled to be viable.

Eventually, the relevant thing you'll have to contemplate is which matters more. Is it more important to you that Socialism is built, its foundation is very strong, and that formerly subjugated groups are insured top-down protection from an empowered body? Or is the dismantling of unjust hierarchies paramount, even if the movement is more likely to get crushed/be irrelevant to the existing power structure?

Also if you want an accessible introduction to Marx more generally, I don't think I'd be out of order to suggest that you pick up a copy of Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right. Regardless of anything else, I'd recommend you start here to see if it makes sense to you. Do a bit of research. Learn your personal philosophical underpinnings. Learn the major criticisms. And then apply all of this in a practical way out in the world, whichever way makes the most sense to you.

Hope this was helpful! Good luck!

Two relevant quotes by Marx here:

> But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political
economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially of the co-operative
factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold ‘hands’. The value of these great social
experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that
production on a large scale, and in accord with the behest of modern science, may be carried
on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the
means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion
against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is
but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil
with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

So co-operatives do have positive potential in that they reflect very elementary and thereby contradictory forms of the new society in the old, an early and incredibly incomplete manifestation of the political economy of the working class. For more on the topic of 'political economy of labour' this I would recommend the excellent book by Micheal Lebowitz, Beyond Capital.

> The co-operative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first
examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases,
in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce
them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished there, even if at first only in
the form that the workers in association become their own capitalists, i.e., they use the
means of production to valorise their labour.

But they are also fated to reproduce the "worst defects" of capitalist production, because the workers are compelled by capitalist competition to act more and more so like a collective capitalist. Those co-operatives that survive, let alone those that begin to really prosper and expand, are only able to do so by behaving like capitalists, and so are forced to either hire wage labour or contract out to other more conventional capitalist companies.

So the Mondragon Corporation, the most successful co-operative in the world, that many people love to point at as some sort of model for social transformation, now not only maintains in Basque country a large contingent of precarious wage-workers that are laid off during cutbacks in production, such as during a recession, but also "employ" both directly and indirectly tens of thousands of super-exploited workers in Third World Nations like Mexico and China. So not only are the workers acting as their own capitalists in such a scenario, they are also directly appropriating imperialist rents!

Or even the case of the moderately successful, but still relatively small "worker-owned" and "fair trade" co-operative that my partner was so unfortunately employed at for several years... as a wage-worker at a below poverty level wage. As it turns out, the "worker-owners" were 14 people, mostly original members of the co-operative, that exploit several dozens of people as wage labourers and the upper management generally ran the company like a personal dictatorship, firing people arbitrarily and unjustly and generally being extremely shitty people. As it turns out, my partner was essentially fired for standing up to her prick of an inept manager who had been sexually harassing the all female staff, after having already been written up for violating a "third party communication policy" that forbade workers from speaking to each other directly about workplace related issues.

For the record though, I do believe that co-operative forms of production have a whole lot of potential during the actual dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the transitory period of class rule of the working class and it's allies following a socialist revolution and the long transition to communism through socialism. For example, they've been doing great stuff in socialist agriculture in Cuba based on the co-operative model in the past few decades.

For people who appear new to communism I've tended to recommend the following. They're all basic, short, fairly uncontroversial amongst Marxists, and available for free on the web.

Principles of Communism - Engels
Outlines basic concepts.

Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
You've already read it.

State and Revolution - Lenin
Explains the basic ideas of... well, the state and the revolution. I'd say this was probably the book I found most useful in my early days.

Wage Labour and Capital - Marx and Engels
A basic introduction to Marxist economics.

Beyond that, I found McLellan's 'Marx: Selected Writings' to be really good. It's the only Selected Writings book I've read so I can't compare it to others, but I'd definately recommend it if you want to go straight to the source and see what Marx thought on a wide variety of topics (which is something I'd doubly recommend before jumping into a lot of 'what I think Marx said' books from others).

That's a good point about linear causation. I recently read this great work of analytic metaphysics. The short chapter on causation is great and takes aim at the traditional billiard-ball model of linear causation.

I recently read that Mattick review too. Moseley actually cites that review as an influence on his theory.

Well for Yugoslavian history after the fall of Tito (rather in depth). Watch, "The Death of Yugoslavia" 5 parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_AZZGqNN6Y

Its a bit anti-Serb though. I think the creator also wrote a book about the previous 150 years or so of Balkan geopolitical history:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Balkans-Nationalism-Powers-1804-1999/dp/0140233776/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1342276132&sr=8-5&keywords=yugoslavia

As for books if you want a pro-Serbian spin try:

http://www.amazon.com/Tito-And-Rise-Fall-Yugoslavia/dp/0786701919/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0

Though apparently it has some inaccuracies, West is normally a fairly proficient historian.

There is also this book, though Ive only ordered it and havnt actually gotten it yet about the details and effects of Yugoslavian socialism. I hope its not another communist basher, but fingers crossed:

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Marx-Tito-Practice-Socialism/dp/0521084024/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342276704&sr=1-5&keywords=rise+of+tito

Hope thats enough for you :)

Go read the Amazon reviews.

Hilarious. So many people pretending to have read it and pontificating against something they don't understand.

https://www.amazon.com/Slaverys-Capitalism-American-Economic-Development/dp/0812248414/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cp_5?ie=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0812248414&pd_rd_r=VV6K0B54G4C4D7FRX8J5&pd_rd_w=k09jp&pd_rd_wg=OEStf&psc=1&refRID=VV6K0B54G4C4D7FRX8J5

check out every author in this book. I've specifically heard good things about these two:

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/046500296X

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Cotton-History-Sven-Beckert/dp/0375713964/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CBC4DEDY0KK072A8T0A6

For the USSR I would recommend Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941, Red Bread, and Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel to start. All of those are accessible and written by westerners or emigres. None of them are uncritical of the USSR, and they all at some point exhibit what I feel are some unfair prejudices, but they are definitely worth reading. Red Bread in particular is sort of anti-communist. Also, read Lenin!

I also recommend The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone. She wrote it in the 70s, which is still modern compared to Rosa. She synthesized a lot of important philosophers into this text (Marx, Freud, Engels, etc.) and really helped revolutionize the 2nd wave feminist movement (now, you can criticize the 2nd wave all you want (and you should) but she was a Jewish Woman at the forefront with this writing). A lot of context can be brought into this if you read Engels' On the Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, if you haven't read it yet.

Also fairly cheap on amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/Dialectic-Sex-Case-Feminist-Revolution/dp/0374527873/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510763325&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dialectic+of+sex&dpID=514jT9a7qWL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

Maybe this book?

https://www.amazon.com/Cuban-Cure-Reason-Resistance-Science/dp/0226709175

Great that you're on Getty now. You're going to want to also check out Wendy Z. Goldman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Ronald Grigor Suny, other leaders of the "revisionist" school of Soviet Historiography who re-evaluated a lot of Cold War assumptions about Soviet politics.

Probably the best non-revisionist Soviet historian, Oleg Khlevniuk has a liberal bias but his 2015 book provides so much information that you'll learn a lot if you maintain a critical eye.