Hello everyone, welcome back to Theory Thursday. With the looming privacy issues I had to remake my account, taking down the previous post. Sorry about that!
Before the previous post was taken down, Principles of Communism by Frederick Engels was in the lead. So this week we will start there! Seeing how it’s a quick read, we can get it done in once session.
You can find it online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
If anyone can find any additional resources (study guides, ect.) to help with reading this theory please comment below.
Study up comrades and we’ll meet again on Thursday to discuss the text.
Great, I like this idea. Looking forward to it.
I’m glad to see this is back. I think you should repost the original concept/plan for this so people who haven’t seen it before can easily get on board.
Original Post:
THEORY THURSDAY
Hello everyone, welcome to Theory Thursday! The point of these posts is to read a bit of theory every Thursday, and discuss with fellow comrades.
This is going to be a community led project. We’re going to vote as a community to decide on what to read and when. Post reading recommendations in the comments, let the community vote on what to read next, and go from there.
This week will be dedicated to finding what to read. I’ll give this post time to have a healthy discussion among the community. I’ll post the results first thing on Monday. Then I’ll start posting annually on Thursday where we’ll discuss the topic of choice. Think of it like an online weekly book club with your fellow comrades.
Again, this is community led, so feel free to give feedback.
Comment your book recommendations below. Let’s have a good week comrades!
Comments/Book Recommendations: The reading recommendations were Principles of Communism, Wage Labor and Capital, Thesis on Feuerbach, and On Contradiction. Principles of Communism and Wage Labor and Capital were tied at the time the post went down. Seeing how Principles of Communism is more beginner friendly, I think we should start there. Sorry OP who suggested Wage Labor and Capital, we’ll vote again this Thursday so don’t worry, there’s plenty of reading to be done!
Might be interesting to crosspost it on the bigger comm like !communism, as I think others would like to take part in it.
Great idea! I’m not sure how to do that unfortunately, but if someone could help me do that I’d be happy to cross post this thread.
If you’re on desktop, you just need to click on this little button
and select the community. I think both genzedong and communism will find this interesting.
Edit: on second thought, I’m not sure if the uncertainty was over how to cross-post or what to put in it. But if the doubt is over the latter I think just cross-posting the full text as is is alright!
Ok cool, I think I did it right. Thank you for the help!
It worked. It brought me here from Genzedong through communism. Starting of theory Thursday with a soviet doll. It’s like a Russian doll but it’s theory inside theory inside theory.
Where do you meet?
We’ll meet here on GenZhou and discuss under a post related to the topic. I might’ve started this, but by no means is this ‘my project’. This is a community based project. So I allow and encourage comrades to start their own posts and add to this however they see fit.
Oh, I thought you were doing a synchronic thing, I’ve read this a couple times so I could have joined if that was the case.
So my plan is to post every Thursday roughly following this guideline.
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Make an introduction thread.
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Tally votes on what to read next.
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Announce the reading for this week based on the results from step 2.
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Read it a little bit at a time and discuss the reading on a weekly post. Repeating this step as many times as necessary to get through the text. Some text like Capital will take a long time to get through, some can be covered in just one session. We’ll play it by ear and see how much we can handle at a time. The cool thing is these threads will be open to participation at any time, you don’t actually need to be there that very day to interact with the discussion. I’m hoping that comrades of the future can look up these threads when they’re doing their own study and see the discussions that were had.
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Repeat steps 2-4 until the sun burns out, or until nobody cares to participate anymore, whichever comes first.
I’m just kind of figuring it out on the fly at the moment. I’m no authority, or academic, or some kind of expert scholar on theory. I’m just some dude who thought this might be a fun exercise on this community. Most importantly, at the end of the day, I want this to be a community run thing. So if anyone has any ideas of making this better in any way feel free to comment on the threads or DM me about it.
It’s a good idea. @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml set up something similar for ‘non essential’ books (the NEBulae Book Club). That was fun although unfortunately I got terribly busy IRL and dropped off. (I can’t believe that was four-to-six months ago! Where did those months go? I kept meaning to check back in about it. Sorry for disappearing like that.)
No worries at all! That’s an unprecedented amount of time for me to focus on a project, and I really appreciate having you around for reading motivation! 😁
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