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.
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.
Make an introduction thread.
Tally votes on what to read next.
Announce the reading for this week based on the results from step 2.
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.
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! 😁