(Part 2) Best products from r/communism101

> i am only able to find part of this in german : https://mlmtheorie.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/ueber-den-marxismus-leninismus-maoismus/

This one did I already read! It was good help and especially because I am interested in how the Peruian Communists applied Maoism not long ago and (almost) had success!

> that part and the rest is here, it's really good - "the general political line of the communist party of peru" : http://gplpcp.wordpress.com

This sounds interesting! Definetly will give it a look.
Someone suggested me this (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/1785354760/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and I just bought it. Totally excited. But still: everything about MLM is welcome :)

I've been meaning to read this book, which addresses these questions. Unfortunately, I can't find a pdf. From the book description:

>To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation.

>Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth.

>While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.

I was able to find a number of texts, ranging from general to bizarrely specific, which you may like to read. I have provided links where possible.

1. Abeywickrama, K. L. - "The marketization of Mongolia"
   (requires Monthly Review subscription, can't find free version)
   
   
2. Humphrey, Caroline - "Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia"
   (free)
   
   
3. Dari, Khongorzul - "Three Aspects of Economic Transition: The Case of Mongolia" (couldn't find free version, only abstract available)
   
   
4. Humphrey, Caroline - "Theft and Social Trust in Post-Communist Mongolia" (free)
   
   
5. Rossabi, Morris - "Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists" (excerpt of first chapter is available, couldn't find free version)
   
   
6. Rupen, Robert - "Mongolia in the Sino-Soviet Dispute" (free)
   
   
7. Ginsburg, Tom - "Political Reform in Mongolia: Between Russia and China" (free)
   
   
8. Ginsburgs, George - "Mongolia's "Socialist" Constitution" (free)
   
   
9. Rahul, Ram - "Mongolia between China and Russia" (free)
   
   
10. Rahul, Ram - "Mongolia: Transmogrification of a Communist Party"
    
    
11. Smith, Robert - "Mongolia: In the Soviet Camp"
    
    
12. Scalapino, Robert - "The Communist Revolution in Asia: Tactics, Goals, and Achievements"
    
    
13. Morozova, Irina - "The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia" (if you can find this, then definitely read it, the description sounds amazing)
    
    
14. Morozova, Irina - "Socialist Revolutions in Asia: The Social History of Mongolia in the Twentieth Century" (sci-hub is currently downloading this, not sure if the link works)
    
    
15. Owen Lattimore, Sh Nachukdorji (?) - "Nationalism and Revolution in Mongolia" (free)
    
    
16. Shirendyb, B. - "By-Passing Capitalism" (free)
    
    
17. Liu, Xiaoyuan - "Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911-1950" (free)
    
    
18. Rupen, Robert - "How Mongolia is really ruled : a political history of the Mongolian People's Republic, 1900-1978" (not free)
    
    
19. Cultural policy in the Mongolian People's Republic / a study prepared under the auspices of the Mongolian National Commission for Unesco (free)
    
    
20. History of the Mongolian People's Republic / translated from the Mongolian and annotated by William A. Brown (free)
    
    
21. https://www.marxists.org/archive/fox/1935/03/mongolia.htm (free)
    
    
22. Bawden, Charles - "The Modern History of Mongolia"
    
    I hope you find this compilation to be useful in your studies, comrade!

Today's your lucky day. One of the best books I've read:

http://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Biologist-Richard-Levins/dp/067420283X

easy to understand for a layman but hugely influential. There's also a followup book which I haven't read but is probably excellent.

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Under-Influence-Dialectical-agriculture/dp/1583671579/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=41BqJjrwY6L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR214%2C320_&refRID=0Z4QTS33J5JGVA4YV9GY

I'm not sure that it would be any more complicated than doing this in a capitalist, market-based economy. Capitalist firms have to do this kind of planning but without any sort of knowledge of what other firms are doing or will plan to do in future. A collaborative rather than competitive system would allow information-sharing to a much greater extent and thus simplify things to an extent.

Beyond that is the fact that a lot of the specialization is brought about through capitalist priorities that themselves wouldn't make sense under socialism. Plenty of parts are incompatible through a specific intention to make things harder for competitors or consumers (e.g., printer cartridges, or anti-tamper screws).

Beyond that, as other people said, the Soviet Union was able to plan for relatively complex machinery and they did so without the benefit of digital computing. We can now process data at a vastly greater rate; Cockshott and Cottrell in "Towards a New Socialism" calculated that this sort of industrial planning was perfectly feasible with late-80s/early-90s computer technology (including a hypothetical television-based data network to implement decentralized processing, before the Internet became commonplace).

I plan on working up a monograph over the next few months about the history of the Communist Party in Texas. Another great book is https://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Hoe-Communists-Depression-Morrison/dp/0807842885 which is about the activities of the CP in Alabama during that time.

I'm a CPUSA member, thanks for showing interest in the party, comrade.

We censored art too, and for less good reasons. Have your friend go to cia.gov and read about the "Congress for Cultural Freedom." This was a CIA-backed organization that actively promoted avant-garde art as a cold war measure; Jackson Pollock, the famous "abstract expressionist" who literally just threw paint at canvases, was the one of the artists they funded.

Now you might argue that promoting certain kinds of art is different than censoring anything that isn't in the Official Style. But Western artists were under heavy pressure to toe the avant-garde line. McCarthyism, for example, all but forced American composers to write serial music: a heavily mathematized form of composition that was mostly discouraged in the Soviet Union. Music written in more traditional styles became branded as "communist." In Europe, the American-backed Darmstadt Summer School -- which, until very recently, one had to attend in order to be recognized as a composer in the West -- basically condemned anything but the most avant-garde styles as "authoritarian." Aaron Copland, a leftist American composer whose work often drew from folk styles, went from this to this after being called in front of the House Un-American Activities Commission.

Which is to say: art is not apolitical, and it does not take place in a vacuum. From the standpoint of their class interests, the western bourgeoisie were perfectly correct in censoring art that, from their standpoint, was subversive. Similarly, the socialist countries were and are perfectly justified in censoring art that is being used as a wedge to to drive their societies apart. Interestingly, socialist countries' bans on avant-gard artistic styles were never as complete as the Western media likes to claim: in addition to very traditional pieces like Gliere's Heroic March for the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR you had things as modern as Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima . This actually seems to argue for a greater artistic plurarity than you had in the West; the criteria was not whether art was old or new, but whether it advanced or retarded the socialist cause.

Sources:CIA article on the Congress for Cultural Freedom

Richard Taruskin: Music in the Late 20th Century

I would recommend getting a good introduction to Marx's Capital and reading that along with at least a few chapters from volume 1. Michael Heinrich's An Introduction to the Three Volumes is good; so are David Harvey's videos.

From Capital, read at least the following sections of volume 1:
Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, Section Three
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament

For Marxism after Marx, the following would be a good place to start:
-Karl Kautsky's Road to Power
-Eugene Debs' Canton, OH speech

USSR:
-China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution is good place to start.
-Marx/Engel's Preface to the 1882 Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto
-Lenin's April Thesis
-Trotsky: read at least a little of The Revolution Betrayed. His biography of Stalin is also worth reading.

Third World Marxism:
CLR James: The most important Marxist of the second half of the twentieth century. Read the following:
-Black Jacobins: the classic history of the Haitian revolution
-Modern Politics: a collection of speeches on Rousseau, Lenin, etc.

Post-Keynesian Marxism:
Michał Kalecki's Political Aspects of Full Employment
-Leo Panitsch and Sam Gindin's The Making of Global Capitalism: a recent and highly academic Marxist analysis of globalization.

Pat Sloan has a book called "Soviet Democracy" which talks about how unions and managers functioned in the 30's in the USSR, should offer a good model to help imagine what that could look like going further.

Paperback/Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1092297391/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_tYMUCbD9FD8BD

Free scanned PDF of the original text:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.261348

I've been studying dialectics lately and I agree, it is intimidating. I've gotten down some of the basics but haven't been able to really apply and internalize it yet. Here are some sources I found helpful:

On Dialectical Materialism

On Dialectics

I've also started reading Dialectical Materialism by V.G. Afansayev. Its pretty good if you can spare the five bucks.

What do you want to get out of it? Do you want to read overblown maximalist literature with ideology? Then go for the 50 page speech in the middle of it. Or any of her terrible philosophy books, or some secondary literature by protege Leonard Peikoff.

If you want the story, just watch the movie. It was even more boring than the book, but it's a movie.

If you are looking for well written philosophy that supports capitalism, I wouldn't start with Rand. Maybe read some Adam Smith, or Milton Friedman. Maybe another Comrade on here can help you with that? I'm under-read in capitalist philosophy and economics honestly.

I'm no expert but I'll answer your questions as best as I can.

1. When I became a communist I too, was an anarcho-communist, but that was mostly because I didn't understand anarcho-communism and communist theory as a whole. Not to say you don't understand communism and your own ideology, I'm just gonna run down the reasons why I made the switch. What you (probably) define as anarcho-communism is the end-goal of Marxist-Leninism(on the right under definitions), but Marxist-Leninism has a sort of transition phase, in which the nation switches from whatever economic system it was previously under to socialism. The reason behind a slow transition to communism is because a communist society is a stateless society; in other words, a straight switch to communism in any nation would lead to a collection of communes suddenly becoming their own 'nations' for lack of a better word. As you can probably imagine, every other nation would be quick to take advantage of such a decentralized society. Let's imagine an anarcho-communist USSR, do you believe that every commune of this large nation would band together to fight Hitler? There is a chance they would, but there is a chance they wouldn't, and it wouldn't even matter if most of the communes joined the war-effort, if the ones in cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd didn't then the war would end before it began! I don't typically like making that kind of argument, as it relies on a lot of what-ifs, but I think it's important to think about that what-ifs when regarding ideological debates. Anywho, that would lead to the question of, when does a Marxist-Leninist society make the switch to communism? That comes from the idea of the Global Revolution, in which the entire world erupts into communist revolutions; the switch can only happen when the entire world becomes communist, otherwise, every non-communist nation will take advantage of each commune. TL;DR Anarcho-communists and Marxist-Leninists agree on what communism should look like, but anarcho-communists want to make a transition from having a state to not having a state, instantly; Marxist-Leninists want to implant a socialist society until the Global Revolution has run its course. But that doesn't really answer your question, why would we prefer to live under an authoritarian regime as opposed to a democratic nation? We don't, and we (arguably) have not. Forgive me for my ignorance on the matter of elections in the USSR, but I believe the system worked something like this: the workers would vote for a workers council(run's specific job...places), the worker's council would vote for an administrative soviet (state legislative), the administrative soviet would vote for the Congress of Soviets, which was the federal legislative body. It is, debatable, whether this system protects the democratic rights of the masses (I personally think it does) but it would be complete folly to say it was a dictatorship, and if it was, that would be the fault of opportunistic traitors to the revolution! TL;DR We don't.
   
2. There is no 'how to be a Marxist-Leninist/any form of communism that isn't anarchist' manifesto, we are all, sometimes regrettably, individuals. Becoming a Marxist-Leninist doesn't mean you have to defend Stalin any more than being in favor of democracy means you have to support Andrew Jackson. TL;DR No.
   
3. I'm new to the movement so I don't have a very good communist and/or non-communist reading list, but I'd be careful when trying to find a non-biased source, as in truth, there is no, and there will never be a non-biased source. Everybody came from a nation with an ideology, everybody grew up around people with beliefs, everybody has read things with an author, and thus, the only unbiased source a man can find in this world, are animals so ignorant of their own nature they surprise themselves with their hand's existence after each cycle of the moon! TL;DR Don't have any unbiased sources, but you could look at Grover Furr's Khrushchev Lied and then read this as an analysis of the previously mentioned book.
   
4. Solidarity amongst our Leninists, Maoists, Syndicalists, and even, our anarchists, is (arguably) the most important factor for the Global Revolution, whether it turns out to be peaceful or violent. Every communist can agree on one thing and that, is that we all want to see communism one day, and we want our children to never know of this morally bankrupt system we call capitalism. Right now, there are only 10 or so socialist nations in a world governed militarily, politically, diplomatically, and economically by capitalists. We speak of unionization, yet we fight over what name it should take! Ridiculous, is the word for it. Utterly ridiculous, and a line-of-thinking that may not just cost the spread of communism as a whole, but the freedom of the proletariat that every one of us preaches! I do not think that we should not argue or 'bicker' over ideology, as debate is necessary for any group to function, but these debates should be, just that, debates. It is, however, important to keep in mind there are blood-feuds between communists on the interior; for example, Trotskyites and Marxist-Leninists will never get along, and I think fairly reasonably so. Trotsky and his followers shamed the Soviet Union and provided much of the ammunition the West fires at us, Stalin, on the other hand, killed Trotsky and many of his followers along with him. (To any Marxist-Leninists out there, I know, Stalin was quite justified in his purges, but, for the sake of argument I'm pulling a bit of an r/ENLIGHTENDCENTRISM) Clearly there is a real feud there, one that can not be solved by saying, "let's just go out for a couple of cold ones, alright?" but, the feud should not go as far as siding with Hitler over Stalin because you're a Trotskyite. TL;DR Pan-leftism is important when battling fascists, imperialists, capitalists, etc., but debate within the party is necessary, along with some feuds between sects being valid.

I highly recommend this book “Meaning of Marxism” which is a great introductory text and comes with study questions for your group. I used this during my socialist reading group while I was in college. Haymarket Books is a great publisher for many of the texts you’ll need and they often run sales. https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Marxism-Paul-DAmato-ebook/dp/B003P9X72Q

Of course I second Hobsbawm 1789-1914 series (not a fan of age of "Age of Extremes" liberal narrative though -- Hobsbawm was right, he wasn't capable of writing a history for that era).

I haven't read them but Ivan Berend and Georgy Ranki are two historians I have on my "to read someday" list that extensively cover that era. Specifically they wrote "Economic Development in East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries" and "Hungary: a Century of Economic Development" together. It looks like Berend might've become somewhat anticommunist after the the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe but he also produced another history book on the era which Hobsbawm seemed to review positively. Anyway, Berend seems to have been strongly influenced by Marxist historiography and to cover what Hobsbawm covers as well only focusing more on the region you're likely interested in.

I unfortunately don't have pdfs but the first two works I mentioned can be purchased used for fairly cheap, you might try abebooks.

For me it was best to start with secondary texts. Paul D'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism and Peter Singer's Marx: A Very Short Introduction were both wonderful resources.

And yeah she has a book about them here: https://www.amazon.com/Living-City-Migration-Education-California/dp/0807871133?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

I haven't read it, but I have read Black Against Empire (recommended by another commenter) and can say it's really incredible and give what I'd say is a pretty fair account of the Party's full history (whereas I think Murch's book just gives the history of its formation?)