How well-read are you, Holla Forumsyps?

...

Oh shit guys, pack it up, we got BTFO by human nature! Guess there's nothing left to do but go to mises.org

Thanks for the serious replies, I came across as a snarky cunt in the OP.

Realistically, how long will all this take to read, and what would you recommend for someone who will very shortly be forced into the wage slave lifestyle?

I get the impression that the more literate users of this board have a large amount of free time to read in, which I lack.

• The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels)
• The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects (Leon Trotsky)
• Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society (Mao Zedong)
• Combat Liberalism (Mao Zedong)
• The Ego and Its Own (Max Stirner) - WIP
• Stirner’s Critics (Max Stirner)
• The False Principle of Our Education (Max Stirner)
• Art and Religion (Max Stirner)
• The Burning Question of Trade Unions (Daniel De Leon)
• Is There a “Woman Question”? (Daniel De Leon)
• Race Riots (Daniel De Leon)
• Industrialism (Daniel De Leon)
• The Right to Be Greedy: Theses On the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything
• Reform or Revolution? (Daniel De Leon)
• What Means This Strike? (Daniel De Leon)
• Preamble of the IWW (Daniel De Leon)
• Syndicalism (Daniel De Leon)

• Democratic Confederalism (Abdullah Öcalan)

I've become disillusioned with politics all together, I'm just reading literature and philosophy now. The only significant classical marxist works I haven't read would've been The Origins, The Grundrisse, and Capital vol 2 and 3.

this isn't a biased list at all.

Im a philosophy and writing major so I do read a lot but beware you can read plenty and still be a fucking retard. Ive probably read about 5 books in the last 6 months.

Already plenty of good recomendations in this thread

...

also
How the hell can people live and labor together in a truly free and equal society if automatons will inevitably make the working class largely redundant? Who would own these automatons, the state? That'd be ironic on multiple levels.
The future redundancy of labor will only breed decadence unless you massively invest into education, though that would breed a massive intelligentsia as all that theory requires application to be useful, and lead the state quickly towards a technocracy.

The only way I can envision a communist state in the future is a luddite one and possibly isolationist, since creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs tends to put you at an economic disadvantage when you could be doing things more efficiently with machines, in comparison to your competitors. So essentially, you'd end up with something akin to the DPRK if you don't want things to change beyond communism.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is valued for its insight in human behavior if you abolish every kind of standard and institution as anarchy rules. More than often, people band together because otherwise the story would be boring cooperation makes survival more likely and is NECESSARY for reproduction, which usually leads to the creation of tribes. But the fun part is always when multiple tribes clash out of survival, or ensuring survival through domination.

But if you're going to treat human nature as a meme then you're bound repeatedly bash your head against the wall. Moreover, don't use observed cycles and trends in history as an argument ever again if you're going to treat human nature as a meme. It's not aliens who wrote our history, after all.

Perhaps you should look into how to avoid socialist revolutions from turning into cults of personality by observing the trends leading up to the creation of socialist states instead of sticking solely to theory. It's not that impossible, Iran is doing just fine, but nobody ever seems to acknowledge Iran or why socialist policies turned out just fine in Iran without the place turning into an authoritarian shithole being ran into the ground by corrupt incompetents.

Of the list gave you, if you want some short books, and just a small introduction because you have not much time I would say The Communist Manifesto (great introduction although take into account whilst reading it that is an outdated book, even Marx himself said it in latter works),
State and Revolution by Lenin (A good analysis of Marx and Engels thoughts, and covers lots of topics, is short and well structured so you don't need long reading sesions to grasp it).
And although he has not included it I suggest also "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg (It is also a short book ,and a great critique of why reformism (socialdemocracy) does not work) you can find it in the same page.

if you read EVERY SINGLE thing linked, maybe a few weeks, (or months if you're a slow reader). IF you have a full time job then a while, but just read that intro to marxist economics one to start, if you read anything

Wew. Careful, you might read a few cheesy fantasy novels and become a Nazi

I've read a little of everything. I don't read as much of the canonical leftism as others, because it's trash.

I've read:
Marx (meh, I guess he's slightly important)
Kropotkin (good!)
Goldman (boring)
Rousseau (good!)
Stirner (good!)
Castoriadis (great debunk of Marx)
Some leftcom articles and stuff that were pretty awesome, including one by Z.A Jordan that absolutely BTFO's dialectical materialism.
Debord (decent)
Tiqqun (forgettable trash tbh)
Tolstoy (Brilliant)
Ha-Joon Chang (good!)
Segments of the Elgars' Companion to Post-Keynesian Economics

and a tonne of general philosophy. tbh political philosophy doesn't really interest me anymore

I'd say the best four introductory texts to Marxist theory are Engels' Principles of Communism, followed by The Communist Manifesto, and then rounded off with Part 1 of The German Ideology and Marx's Wage Labor and Capital. Those are four short pamphlet sized texts that should give you a good basic understanding of most of Marx and Engels' key ideas, their theories of Class, Historical and Dialectical Materialism, and Scientific Socialism. From there I'd say you should real Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Lenin's The State and Revolution, this should give you a basic understanding of where the line in the sand is drawn between most modern day Marxists and Anarchists. Happy reading user!

Srsly if you have not a lot of free time, watch that video, the firs two minutes explains basic commie beliefs, the rest gives you the crimes of captialism, how it is enforced.

Here's some links.

The Principles of Communism:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

The Communist Manifesto:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Wage Labor and Capital:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/

Part 1 of The German Ideology:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01.htm

The Conquest of Bread:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread

The State and Revolution:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

Everything I've linked in this thread is either a pamphlet or an incredibly short book that can be read on and off, so unless whatever job you get means you literally can't find one to two hours in your day when you can sit down and read, which I very highly doubt, you have no reason to complain. Remember, most of these pamphlets were written with the Proletariat in mind, and were read by workers in large numbers in their own time.

you don't need a lot of time to read, i read on my break at work and thats pretty much it. sometimes at the park on other days too. point is just make 15-30 min a day for reading which is really nothing especially if you enjoy what you are reading. Principles of Communism is a good intro, as well as Wage Labor and Capital. I would also recommend Communism and Capitalism from Dauve.

We intend to abolish all classes, including the "working class" (proletariat). The "working class" becoming redundant is ultimately a good thing.

They'd be held in common and managed by a public administration of sorts, which is not a state according to the marxist definition (which is an organisation that enforces class rule through enforcement of property rights).

For starters decadence is a complete non-issue, this is just the usual reactionary fetishism of productivity. If people no longer have to work in order to survive, what does it matter how they spend their time? Secondly in the absence of private property, competition and market exchange, there is no reason why people cannot pursue an obsolete activity: just because a fully automated factory can churn out a given product for free doesn't mean I can't make that product myself because I happen to enjoy it. I can still make hand made furniture because I enjoy woodworking, I can still grow my own food because I enjoy tending to a vegetable garden, I can still tinker with electronics etc. It's only under conditions of market competition that people are forced to abandon such activity simply because it becomes obsolete.
As for an intelligentsia: They aren't really a separate class. Your class standing is determined by your relationship to the means of production, if you get payed to perform an activity (or are underemployed) and cannot live off property ownership alone, then you are proletarian regardless of the task you perform. A scientist is every bit as much a prole as a factory worker or a homeless person begging for money. Being proletarian is a state of dispossession from the means of production, not through performing a particular set of tasks. In any case we intend to abolish the entire proletariat, intellectual proles included.

Once again, we literally intend to abolish "jobs" in the sense that they exist today. We intend to abolish the distinction between work and leisure. In a fully developed communist society people will be free to pursue whatever activity they please without being locked into some narrow activity in return for pay. All socially necessary labour being performed by machines will ultimately make such a society easier to realise.

Communism is a global system by necessity. If communism has been achieved there is no economic competition.

This.

No need to be so nasty my man, I just suspect the majority of this board is not as well-read as they pretend to be.

Your recommendations are genuinely appreciated.

t. M-L

shit i switched the words i always do that

That was rather poor wording on my part, but I was referring to removing the human element from labor possibly having the consequence of making people feel unable to contribute to society if all of our necessary living conditions are already being sustained by machines. There's plenty of other ways to contribute outside of labor and establishing your role in society, sure, though automatizing all means of production and having an ensured comfy life is bound to breed complacency unless productive behavior is being actively encouraged in one way or another.

Just because everyone is relinquished of the restrictions in their life imposed by capitalism doesn't mean that they won't use their free time to laze around bored out of their mind. Even before capitalism people had roles which played a part of the survival of their community. The possibilities of what one could do when given all the free time in the world is too broad, so it'd be difficult to really predict the consequences, but someone HAS to maintain those machines if people want society to function as envisioned, and some kind of central body would have to be instated to ensure the proper operation of all machines, on top of the logistics required to distribute the produced resources amongst the people.

This would require widespread altruism and charity to function properly, or to make it mandatory. That's just not how human beings or any society works, at all. The farther from us, the further into "fuck these randos" territory you head into. Its just how humans work, the whole "monkeysphere" deal and the fact you do need to keep optimal resources to ensure your future and that of your progeny. Communal structures tend to be small, perhaps the best course of action is for countries to become collections of individual communes. I'd sure love to help out every single person on the planet. What I don't wish for is a guy with a gun to my back telling me to do it.

I have been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

...

The Communist Manifesto
Wage Labour and Capital
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
State and Revolution
The Ego and It's Own

I've only been browsing for a couple of months now, so I usually don't weight in on topics unless they have been talked about in the aforementioned books.

I understood what you were getting at and simply disagree. There are plenty of tasks that have been automated even today where people still do some kind of high end, hand made, luxury equivalent. Just think of the vast number of expensive products whose selling point is that it is "hand made" and "authentic". I find it hard to believe that people would somehow magically find this kind of work less satisfying simply because a machine made equivalent exists. I also don't think people on the whole derive their self worth from wage labour, as people fucking hate it on the whole, especially the kind of mindless bullshit that makes up work under late capitalism (how the fuck are you meant to get a sense of purpose from office work or from warehouse work? how the fuck is shopping on behalf of some rich asshole meant to gave your lift meaning?). I certainly have never gained any enjoyment from wage work, the only times any kind of work has ever been satisfying for me is when I've done it on my own terms, regardless of whether I've done it for myself or others.

This is a bizarre argument. Your basically saying people need to forced to do something they enjoy. If you're bored the answer is to find something to do, which is easy when things aren't enclosed by property or priced to high for you to afford. Even mentally handicapped people will seek out things to do when bored.

It's not really "fully automated" if this is the case, but I don't see it being a problem. Messing around with machines is a lot of fun when you're not doing it under work conditions.

No shit. Seriously I'm not quite sure what your point is here as no communist denies that a system of administration will be necessary, though that body will not be a state. Which is to say it will not enforce property rights nor will it be a coercive organ (it won't have an army, police force, courts, etc). Any enforcement required would be carried out by the armed people themselves, the administration would simply exist to coordinate production and allocation.

Again, I disagree (and am tempted to say "speak for yourself"), but should some kind of incentive to perform the very small amount of socially necessary work that remains be needed, a labour voucher system r some equivalent measure could be implemented. I doubt this would be necessary in the long term however, people tend to be competitive and violent under conditions of scarcity, and no-one will perform 8 hours of drudgery a day for free, but neither of these apply to communist society. When your "work" consists of a handful of hours for a few days a week under relaxed conditions, with the rest of your time being taken up by leisure or whatever free activity you wish to perform, I doubt either incentive or coercion will be necessary.

I always say that the point is not to remove labour, but a system which forces it on people. The freedom to chose what to do and why, and to do it for itself's sake. As Chomsky put it, researchers work unhealthy hours commonly, as their drive to do what they trully wish to do gives them the motivation to do so. In that sense, they are probably happier than an artist that has to work on a factory, even if he somehow works only a half of what the researcher does.

not giving the NSA a complete list of the used books I buy with cash, but this seems like a good place to ask: a while ago I got a copy of Escape From Freedom and have started reading it, is there anything I should know (author full of shit or not, good/bad points, etc.)?

Should be:
I really need to be more disciplined about checking spelling.

Yeah, that's really what I'm trying to get across.

The problem with any online space is that the people who read rarely posts, and the people who spend all their time posting don't take the time to read.

Holla Forums (like twitter, like reddit) will thus always have poor theory by default.

My recommendations for introductions (that at the same time manages to go beyond the standard leftist holy cows) would be Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (which clears up most bad interpretations of his works, most famously "Marxism"-"Leninism") and Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. I'd also recommend A World Without Money: Communism by OJTR/Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs.

After those I'd recommend you check out this list edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/reading-list-for-aspiring-ultra-lefts/ and choose topics that interest you.

It's a very comprehensive list for understanding Marx, but I'd also strongly recommend one does not uncritically stays within the confines of 'Marxism' as mere commentary on Marx. If you have the motivation, check out the Idea of Communism series or the works of Negri & Hardt for more contemporary thinkers. Or Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour, Althusser (and his disciples), Deleuze & Guattari if you want more heavy theory stuff.

I've read a lot and forgotten even more.

yawn

Meme list

Nietzsche got me into philosophy and reading in general. I felt a huge connection after reading Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. Started looking into his influences like Kant and Schopenhauer and stumbled upon Evola when I went through a reactionary/traditionalist phase. Started hanging with alt-right circles and realized none of them read any books or even knew a fascist writer or Marxist writer to save their race. Most of them just based their opinions off memes and unsourced infographs. Started looking into Marx's theories and left wing positions when one of my friends recommended I read Stirner's Ego and His Own, after that I found this place and have read Mutual Aid, a few writings of Bookchin, Che, Proudhon, and a bit of other critiques that I forget the names of. I have downloaded a bunch of shit from here so now I have a huge backlog I need to start on.

Is this supposed to be well read?

Really?

This isn't necessarily a comprehensive list, but it's what I can think of off the top of my head that would be considered theory:

Bakunin- God and the State
Berkman- What is Anarchism
Bookchin- The Next Revolution
Engels- The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State
Graeber- Debt:The First 5000 Years
Kropotkin- Mutual Aid: A Factory in Evolution
Kropotkin- The Conquest of Bread
Lenin- The State and Revolution
Luxemburg- The Accumulation of Capital
Marx- The Communist Manifesto
Marx- Wage Labour and Capital
Marx- Critique of the Gotha Programme
Marx- Capital (vol 1)
Ocalan- Democratic Confederalism
Proudhon- What is Property?
Rocker- Anarchosyndicalism: Theory and Practice

I guess the only thing your post illuminates is just how poorly read "moderates" are.

It's just bantz my man. Don't dish it out you can't take it.

Also, Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is another great short introductory read:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/

asked for beginner shit, got beginner shit. Hes not gonna read capital straight off the bat.

I'd drop God and The State tbh its very poorly written and doesn't come to too many conclusions you won't come to by yourself or haven't already.

Im reading das kapital and Im at the value chapter
I have read towards a new socialism by paulcockshott
Im reading zizek, an overall "explination" of his philosophy and Ive read the new classstruggle
Also Im reading the coffe of the exitencialists
Im planning on reading a book about revisionism from Leopold Labedz

Not enough if I am going to be honest.

I honestly am not a reader, its one of my failings I will admit. I really need to get communist books on audio-book or something.

I would not call myself incredibly well read but I've read enough to hold my own in conversation.

For intro to leftism (non-tendency) id recommend:
Wage labor and capital by Marx
Socialism: scientific and utopian by Engels
Mutual Aid by Kropotkin
Communalism, the democratic dimension of anarchism by Bookchin
1st philosophic manuscript of 1848 by Marx

These are just off the top of my head, other great ones mentioned in this thread as well

That image doesn't make sense. Ancaps are not against using violence in self-defence. The new farmer would have violated the previous owner's property rights, which would entitle the original owner to rely on force to remove the new occupant.

The non-aggression principle says you can't *initiate* force but you can use it *after* your rights have been violated.

I'm 100% okay with people feeling content with their lives, I don't know why you aren't.
Wow, user, I never knew people would seek out boredom in place of activity when given freedom. I thought this Communism stuff was a bit idealistic.
Nice arguments, am now Ancap, hail the machine.

Fairly well read. I don't read fiction, and when I'm not sitting at home being a depressed alcoholic piece of shit, I'm usually reading social theory.