• NotMushroomForDebate@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    19·
    2 days ago

    New edition of the introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list in the works?

    Lemmy user Cowbee is well-known for their tireless efforts in educating the wider Lemmy community on Marxist-Leninist positions and theory. They are also the author and maintainer of the renowned “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list.

    The reading list has received much praise from long-time MLs, newcomers, and curious liberals alike, earning the recommendation of prominent users such as Lemmy developer and .ml admin Dessalines. At the time of writing, the reading list has amassed over 320 upvotes on Lemmy.ml.

    It was first published on November 12th 2024 and has undergone significant changes since then. It has undergone two major revisions, the latest of which was in August of 2025. For comparison, one of the earliest versions can be found on a crosspost to lemmy.world from November 29th 2024.

    We have recently received information from credible sources that a third major revision of the reading list might be just around the corner.

    What can we expect from revision 3?

    We can only speculate in this section, but Cowbee has previously provided hints as to what changes we might expect. Cowbee has expressed on multiple occasions that they would like to bring the reading time down to 50 hours[1][2]. The list currently sits around 60 hours total reading time. They have also hinted at possibly splitting the list, creating a separate history-focused list[3][4]. This idea has however faced some pushback from the community[5][6].

    It is difficult to predict the exact changes that will be made, but in a more general sense, according to Cowbee, the goal of the third revision would be “to make the guide more lean, readable, and remove overlap as much as possible.”[7]

    We have reached out to @Cowbee@lemmygrad.ml for a Lemmygrad exclusive preview of the much-anticipated third revision, and will continue to provide new information as it becomes available.

    P.S.

    This comment is just for fun, don’t take it too seriously :)

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
      17·
      1 day ago

      This is a very cute idea comrade, thanks!

      For starters, why make a rev 3? There are a number of reasons, but it primarily boils down to 2 contradictory feelings I have:

      1. The guide is too long for a “basic” reading list. Anyone wanting something a few hours long will see it and likely bounce off.

      2. The guide is too incomplete for areas I think are necessary, such as new sections on history, culture, art, propaganda, AI, hard skills, soft skills, and more.

      These two competing goals leave the guide as an incomplete but long basic list that feels like it occupies a limbo space. My main solution, therefore, to do the following:

      1. Trim and reduce redundant works, making each minute spent as efficient as possible

      2. Split it into sections:

      a. A true beginner list that will allow anyone to keep up with the basics of Marxism in conversation, and make following the main guide easier

      b. A true “cadre training” list that goes far more in-depth, without skimping on any areas, like an expanded version of the current list post-trimming

      c. A section on history, especially on settler-colonialism, liberalism, and socialism in practice

      d. A section on skills, like how to start a reading group and party from scratch, how to agitate, first aid, light guerilla warfare (maybe too fedbaity?), simple evasion, language learning, diet and fitness, OPSEC, OSINT, gardening, repair, self-defense, etc.

      -Essentially, I think any revolutionary needs to actively train and prepare for revolution, not just simple organizing. I also want anyone to be able to follow this list, urban or rural, global south or global north, and take away core skills for self-sufficiency, community organizing, and better surviving the day to day both pre-revolution and during revolution.

      -Every revolutionary should, therefore, be multilingual (dominant language + most locally relevant secondary language at a minimum), physically and mentally fit (within reason), capable of defending themselves (with whatever is necessary), capable of leading small groups, performing simple first-aid, practice community self-sufficiency (such as covert communication, gardening, cooking, power generation, survivalism, etc), all sorts of useful tools for any cadre. If a revolutionary doesn’t meet those areas, that’s fine! It just signifies what they should be working towards passively, on a regular basis.

      1. A spanish version. In the imperial core, english is the most spoken language, but within the US Empire spanish is heavily spoken as well. Being able to better reach these comrades would dramatically aid organizing

      2. A QR code link. Being able to place a sticker in prominent spaces and have people see it in public would be great for outreach!

      3. Making sure everything is convenient to read on the phone natively, but also on eReaders or via audiobooks. My target will always be reading on a smartphone during breaks. One of the bigger obstacles is longer books, Prolewiki has a newish “reading view” for some works but not all. I like ComLib from comrade @Edie@lemmy.ml for ebooks, but I can’t use ComLib for everything. This is an ongoing effort for me to try to make them more readable in every preferred format (eReaders, web reading, and audiobooks are the big 3).

      The biggest obstacle, however, is my own reading. I need to develop myself more before I try to expand the guide to my own ambitions. I’d like it to also be hosted primarily off of Lemmy eventually, and without my own username attached to it, as a sort of anonymized, generalized guide that can be QR coded anywhere and be applicable and useful all over the world, without such a Statesian focus.

      All this is to say that it’s probably late 2026-2027 by the time the next rev genuinely comes out, and will likely be the “finalized” list.

      • prof_tincoa@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Essentially, I think any revolutionary needs to actively train and prepare for revolution, not just simple organizing. I also want anyone to be able to follow this list, urban or rural, global south or global north, and take away core skills for self-sufficiency, community organizing, and better surviving the day to day both pre-revolution and during revolution.

        Fucking yes, please! =D

        I also liked the idea of having two lists. Like a first semester, second semester of college thing.

      • ∞🏳️‍⚧️Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]@lemmy.ml
        6·
        2 days ago

        I would love to make more ebooks, but besides not having energy and adhd, I keep wondering how to do (e.g.) footnotes and end up in a rabbit hole of trying to look into it. This is the Nth time I have ended up on this exact fucking thread EDIT: it I have it bookmarked ffs! And I just end up with “fuck it, just do something” in the end.

        There is a longer rant about EPUBs and HTML and CSS that if we had been irl I’d probably done, but I don’t have it in me to do in text. I’m sure you already have an idea, you can practically track the times I’ve opened up an EPUB to work on it by just looking for when I complain about this shit.

        I would love to have others help me do EPUBs… but as you can see it’s difficult.

        In short, what’s the best practices for EPUB? I have no fucking clue, and I only keep becoming more jokerfied

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 days ago

          I empathize with your pain, comrade. Even in my reading list I’m still not sure what “best practices” would be, be it formatting, commentary, what to include, what to exclude, the finer nuances are hard to come up with! For what it’s worth, the way you have them in Dialectical Materialism are my preference: bottom of the page the footnote appears on, trailing onto the next page if necessary without extending to the next paragraph until the page after the footnotes are done, and with the footnotes stored at the end of the book.

          I’m not sure if it’s standard or not, but it’s very readable on mobile and on an eReader, with easy-to-find references, so I like it!

          I’d be of little help other than a springboard for HTML and CSS discussions, but if I can help, please let me know!

          Also if I were absolutely evil I would love it if Rev 3 could be entirely comlib works, but that’s an incredible amount of work to ask of volunteers and entirely unreasonable. If you find yourself wanting to do more books and are looking for examples, I can always give suggestions from the list I make, but I’m never going to ask you outright to do that because that’s an awful lot of work.

          • ∞🏳️‍⚧️Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself, fae/faer/faer/faers/faerself, love/love/loves/loves/loveself, des/pair, null/void, none/use name]@lemmy.ml
            5·
            2 days ago

            bottom of the page the footnote appears on, trailing onto the next page if necessary without extending to the next paragraph until the page after the footnotes are done, and with the footnotes stored at the end of the book.

            This is not me (per say), this is… I think you use KoReader? I do and I make my EPUBs with it in mind, and if I’m unsure I’ll test things on it. But it’s nothing more than the internal structure being tagged correctly for this to work in e.g. KoReader. Calibre will do a popup, and I mention that because these two are in my mind in one category of how readers deal with footnotes, the other category (at least that I know of) is that they… don’t, the user has to click the footnote (which is a link) and be taken to the footnote (and the somehow get back to the previous location). And I try to keep both in mind, and make something that will hopefully work for both of them. And then there is pandoc in the back of my mind, which understands footnotes (again when correctly tagged) but with at minimum the caveat that the footnote has to be internally in the same file (epubs are just ZIP files with primarily html files inside) and so should I keep the footnotes at the end of each chapter like I’ve done sometimes, but then in that mobileread thread someone was complaining “If there is anything I can’t stand, it is getting to the end of a chapter’s actual content and finding page after page of footnotes clogging it up before the next chapter” asdasjidbsoidjfhgasdoiufghasdoiufha<sdlfkhsidlofhjvasodufhiasdlifuh

            And this is just footnotes, don’t get me started on other shit. Like, say you want to make a leader, you know, a thing that has existed for probably decades in print, support for some kind of it exists in CSS3, but KoReader does not support that IIRC. And that leads me to one of the problems, HTML/CSS engines jokerfied because (for example) KoReader uses the CoolReader engine, which is a custom engine rather than like Chromium or Firefox or Safaris engines, which one the one hand is good, but leads to incomplete and differing completenes of implementation of HTML/CSS stuff. It’s like what I’ve heard the fucking 90s were all over again! And I have no idea what other weird HTML/CSS engines are out there in other readers, so who knows what I am doing that is actually not working on someones tablet.

      • NotMushroomForDebate@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Thank you for the very in-depth response! This has me even more hyped up :)

        I think you have a great read on how to make the list(s) as useful and accessible as possible for different audiences (though I do share your worry on the potential ‘fedbait’ aspect of some sections).

        Once you are comfortable with a more-or-less ‘finalised’ version of the list, would you like to see this turn into more of a team or community project?
        Less so in terms of changing the content, rather having contributors with different skills and focuses such as localisation, hosting a website or a wiki, collecting and digitising books, ‘marketing’ so-to-say by designing posters, stickers, or even shareable memes, etc.

        I wonder if it could become a canonical list for something like Prolewiki as it would already mesh well with things Prolewiki already does such as the library and collecting ebooks, as well as adding editor’s notes to existing works. Maybe @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml could share their thoughts on this.

        • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
          8·
          2 days ago

          We easily rehost reading lists as category pages, and then located inside https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Reading_lists. The upside is they can directly contain links, the downside is after that it’s up to people to find them in the midst of all our pages. I am actually (very slowly) in the process of making a bunch of reading lists based on our absolute beginner’s; very short lists but lots of them on all sorts of different topics instead of every topic all at once.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
            5·
            2 days ago

            Interesting! I might end up doing that. If you’ve seen my list, it’s kind of like what you describe, one large list but with a dozen smaller sections like imperialism, colonialism, feminism, party work, etc. It’s meant to build up over time, but can be skipped around to specific sections.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 days ago

          My goal is to eventually let anyone do anything they want with it, so the community aspect is nice! I want to finalize it, maybe make minor tweaks and edits, but essentially step away from it any let people use it for their own local conditions, make changes, tear it apart, etc.

          What I don’t want is a competitor to Prolewiki. I like Prolewiki as it is, and if the team there wants to include my guide, then that’s great! That’s why I link Prolewiki more than any other work. The problem is that Prolewiki doesn’t have everything I want, and I also really like the epubs from ComLib when applicable.

          All that being said, yes, my goal is to let people localize, do whatever they want, use it as a template, and then do whatever it is they want.

  • SlayGuevara@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    2 days ago

    Recent events feel like I’m just waiting for disaster to happen any time while pretending everything is fine. But then again stuff has happened before without no consequences.

    • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      Say what yo will about trump he knows how to manage a crowd. Everyone is so distracted waiting for the other shoe to drop they aren’t talking about the Files.

      • SlayGuevara@lemmygrad.ml
        11·
        2 days ago

        Would files saying he was there doing illegal shit matter at this point, you think? At best it would impeach him but I fear the Republicans would just continue doing whatever and maybe move Miller forward. Like they invaded Venezuela without permission.