The first political book I read that finally made things click for me was Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. It’s still my favorite book to this day.

Comrade Shark Fucker said,

“I know a lot of people who travelled through levels of radicalism before ending up where they are now but that hasn’t been my experience. Marxism-Leninism was the first political ideology that made sense to me. It made the world make sense after it seeming so nonsensical for so long.”

This resonates with me and my experience very strongly.

As a child my mom struggled to raise us kids; As a young adult I found it hard to find and keep down a job; I was homeless for 3 years in my early twenties; When I finally got housed, I spent all of my time working at physically punishing jobs and spending my free time trying to recover my body for the next workday. At no point throughout all of this did I ever feel compelled to want to think about politics. Not even a little bit. To me, politics was about complaining and worrying about other peoples’ lives. I had enough shit to complain about and enough worrying to do over my own life. In this way I had always been apolitical. The few times I tried to understand something political being discussed on the news, I could never come to an understanding that seemed to hold up to scrutiny. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t smart enough to understand the political sphere.

Once some time passed and I felt that my life was more stable, and I had the time and energy, I decided I wanted to learn about politics. I in fact remember telling myself, “This year I want to develop my political beliefs.”

Growing up, I had always been distrustful of big businesses and the government. When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher handed me a Time magazine with the front cover showing a burnt-out tank from the US invasion of Iraq, it was then that I decided I hated the US military for what it was doing. I think it was because of this that every political and philosophical ideology that I ended up trying to understand when I got older made no sense to me at all. Everything was hypocritical and contradicted itself and seemed to just support the very status quo that even 3rd grade me knew was evil. It got to the point where it seemed like it wasn’t even possible to develop a coherent political worldview. I was so frustrated with reading philosophy and about political theory, that I even missed out on scoring with this guy I liked because I told him I hated philosophy and it turns out that philosophy was like his main passion. Oops.

Eventually I stumbled upon Marxism-Leninism, and everything finally clicked. With Historical Materialism, History stopped being an abstract list of disconnected events and finally became something that could be understood as a progression of human interactions that follows laws of societal development. I remember the first time I made a prediction about something geopolitical I saw on the news and seeing my prediction be proven correct a couple weeks later. It was very exciting. Materialist Dialectics, as a scientific understanding of development in both nature and humanity, finally put to words the natural way I thought and viewed reality, even as a kid. The humanist elements of Marxism allowed for me to pour my heart out, grieve deeply, and love fiercely without relying on moralizing to be the basis of my analysis. Marxist economics was the clarity that allowed me to finally understand the exploitation that I and everyone I know was/is suffering under. Understanding the settler contradiction and the concept of the labor aristocracy allowed me to understand why people I loved were behaving and being so awful. Indigenous liberation, black and brown liberation, women’s liberation, trans liberation, queer liberation, it all just made so much sense to support, especially when viewed through a historical materialist lens. And it felt so good to finally be able to understand and explain all the shit reactionary behavior that I saw everywhere from the news to the workplace to the schoolyard.

I went from being completely apolitical and uninterested in politics directly to being a Marxist-Leninist actively organizing and fighting for the liberation and dignity of workers and oppressed peoples. Strange how life turns out.

Shirtless Wizard is the obvious answer but excluding them, The Party Animal would absolutely beat the himbo and the dilf.

After reading Wage Labor and Capital two weeks ago, my study group and I just finished Value, Price, and Profit. It was really good and I felt that it was an easier read than Wage Labor and Capital. That said, for modern audiences, I feel like the first 6 chapters could have been skipped and replaced with a paragraph summarizing Marx’s argument against Weston.

Reading these two texts together while sitting in the breakroom of my job gave me a deep feeling of dread as I listened to the ways in which my coworkers conversationally support our own exploitation and recontextualized how I view the social dynamics of my workplace. I equate that feeling with a fish becoming aware of the water their swimming in. I often get that feeling after finishing a political book, but these two texts really drove that feeling within me and it has prominently stuck with me since.

My study group will be taking a break from reading and will begin focusing on creating slideshows for each book we’ve read for our ML class we’re making. While working on that, I think I’m going to read two books in the meantime. I’m going to pick up where I left off with Settlers, but that text is very long so I might try to also read Roland Beor’s ‘Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide’.

Woah, I just read Value, Price, and Profit. I got this one.

In case anyone still gets caught up on the old argument made against the raising of wages or the one more commonly made argument against having a minimum wage: Marx demonstrated that the value of a commodity is determined by labor time, not wages. Instead of raising prices, increases in wages simply cut into the capitalist’s profits. The money that is paid to the worker in the form of a wage and the profits claimed by the capitalist are both derived from the value created by the worker’s labor. So, when one increases, the other must decrease proportionally.

Value, Price and Profit - Marx

Settlers by J. Sakai

This week, my comrades and I started and finished Wage, Labor, and Capital. It was a doozy. I think that the reading was hard but not too difficult. I learned some new things, and I know for sure I missed some things too. All in all, I’m glad my group is finally moving out of philosophy and starting economics, even if economics hurts my brain and it’s not my favorite.

I tried starting “The Problem of Recognition in Transitional States, or Sympathy for the Monster (2024)”. I’ve seen a lot of praise heaped on this article, so I want to read it badly, but sometimes the language is too difficult for me to understand. I really want someone with a higher reading comprehension to sit down and read with me. Sadge.

What a good idea. I’d buy a pair

US Centric Understanding of Trotskyists Thought:

I’ve not dived deep into Trotskyism so my understanding is based on interactions with people rather than theoretical texts.

The following aren’t my personal beliefs.

Trotskyists don’t believe in the concept of a labor aristocracy and see all working class people as being roughly equally oppressed around the world. This is usually expressed in a chauvinist form of class reductionism with a lack of understanding of imperialism. This has two major implications that bear out both on a world scale and within the belly of the beast. First, unequal exchange and super exploitation don’t actually exist and that white workers in the US are under the same form of exploitation as workers within the periphery. Second, there’s no settler contradiction within the US and that if there is one then it doesn’t play an antagonist role and that the class contradiction is the primary and only contradiction worth struggling against.

Trotskyists, contrary to the basic tenants of materialist dialectics, don’t believe in the universal characteristic of development progressing in stages. Such as discussed in Mao’s book, “On Contradiction.” This manifests itself as Trotskyists frequently calling for mass general strikes despite there not being any organizational infrastructure or good timing to do so. This also manifests as a call to skip the developmental phase of socialism and to go straight from a capitalist imperialist society to a high level of communism in the form of a “world revolution.”

Historically, and this one is going to be the most divisive and you can check out the stalin era episodes of Proles Pod to hear more, Trotskyists, including Trotsky himself, conspired with Nazi Germany to act as a 5th column within the Soviet Union and conspired with Fascist Japan to act as a 5th column in China. Stalin believed it. Mao believed it. Castro believed it. There’s a huge amount of archival evidence to suggest this. And Trotsky and co were convicted of such in the Soviet Union.

Hard to pick any one specifically because I watch/listen to different ones for different reasons.

For podcasts and YouTube channels I enjoy:

• The Electronic Intifada

• The Red Nation Podcast

• The Black Myths Podcast

• Blowback

• Rev Left Radio

• Proles Pod

• The East Is A Podcast

• Revolutionaryth0t

• International Solidarity Podcast

• Adnan Husain

• Red Pen

• Hakim

• Luna Oi

• Non-Compete

• Second Thought

For the written word I enjoy articles from:

• Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

• Monthly Review

• Tricontinental has an affiliated media page full of anti-imperialist news sources from across latam, Africa, and Asia that I like to dive into on occasion.

Does anyone have any English language sources that cover latam? Preferably Marxist-Leninist but if it’s just genuinely anti-imperialist then that’s fine too. I realized that I’ve heard nothing about what’s going on in Bolivia right now and that’s telling me I need to branch out more.

They just released part two of their essay, “Nonviolence is Violence Too”. It’s very good in case anyone hadn’t checked it out.

Also, Too Black’s "The Black Myths podcast goes so hard. Especially their run of episodes on the klan.

It’s certainly Rye over Sourdough.

This brings the concept of interpretation of opposites to a whole new level

My partner just told me yesterday that they’ve been talking to their coworkers about unionizing and plan on calling in a union rep from a local union to talk to everyone whose interested.

I’m very proud of them. This is the first time they’ve done something like this, and I don’t have any experience with labor organizing. Does anyone have any resources I can share with them?