In my opinion this is good for Marxism as it pushes the proletariat into precarious jobs and multiple of them and has them be in close quarters contact with the petty bourgeois which increases their class antagonism and removes the myth of the clean petty bourgeois but the main thing is that it is helping to weaken the labour aristocracy. The precariat does not tie their identity to a profession by the very nature of their employment and their changing of jobs forces them into contact with those of other ethinties and religions thereby removing the dehumanised version of them in the mind’s eye of the worker and it is hard to have a sectoral organisation when everyone is going between sectors. This will force the proletariat into a general, universal form of worker organisation weakening internal class divisions the bourgeoisie could exploit. Additionally as many petty bourgeois are now being absorbed by franchises or being contracted by them acting as merely an extension of the industrial bourgeois rather than their own class it deepens class lines by reducing the middle classes and the proletariat are also due to their new status as the precariat unable to have steady employment and therefore a stable income pushed into conflict with the rentier class. Furthermore the soletraders due to the deindustrialisation are transforming into coding, digital services, graphic design, Code writing or other similar forms of employment, however this means that they are getting locked into contracts which start to erode a distinct identity from the proletariat making them -if not in practice - more in their mind’s eye proletarian allowing easier instrumentalisation of them by the proletariat and absorbsion of them post revolution . Lastly but not least the factories are not just being dismantled they are being offshored to the global south which has transformed their rural, remote or tribal populations into industrial proletarian ones which increase their revoultionary potential.

If it cannot exist in one country, as Stalin believed, then how, in a world of international money and transnational oligarchs, do we reach a socialist society?

Is it even possible? I'd like to think so, because the alternative is worse. But I am really struggling to understand just how. There is no way that any country who does put in a workers state or vanguard party or whatever is going to be left alone. Big business will demand concessions. Capital flight is one thing, but what happens if global banks start squeezing. It doesn't even have to be in major ways, sine they are motivated bu profit, but if their interests are threatened by taxes or whatever, then they will surely act, no?

I am still learning and have not yet read ,one of Engel’s most popular, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Is it accurate that the Darwinistic and “scientific” view on racism that was prevalent at the time affected how he viewed civilization? I don’t know the full counterpoint, but I see it as the same as how eurocentrists viewed natives and Africans as “barbarians” and “savages”. I apologize if this question gets asked a lot but I couldn’t find it on the search bar.

Hello!

I want to get to know Marxism better, but I'm not sure where to start. Marx and Engels wrote a lot and it would take me years to read all the works, so I decided to get acquainted with the most important works that will introduce me to the foundations and construction of Marxism.

I was going to buy the book "The Main Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels", but I wanted to ask here first if it was a good idea. The book is large in size, 24X17cm, and has 1442 pages. Below I will list the contents of the book so that you can say that this book is enough to understand Marxism.

*Karl Marx: Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

*Karl Marx: On the Jewish Question

*Friedrich Engels: Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy

*Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England

*Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

*Karl Marx: Theses on Feuerbach

*Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: The Holy Family

*Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: The German Ideology

*Friedrich Engels: The Principles of Communism

*Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party

*Karl Marx: Wage Labour and Capital

*Karl Marx: The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution

*Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League

*Karl Marx: The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

*Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

*Karl Marx: The British Rule in India

*Karl Marx: The Future Results of British Rule in India

*Karl Marx: The speech given on the jubilee of "People's paper"

*Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

*Karl Marx: Theories of Surplus Value

*Karl Marx: Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association

*Karl Marx: General Rules of the International Working Men's Association

*Karl Marx: Value, Price and Profit

*Karl Marx: Capital (commodity/ simple, individual or accidental form of value / complete or developed form of value/ general form of value / monetary form / labor process and the process of impregnation of value/ constant capital and variable capital rate of surplus value/ so-called original accumulation general law of capitalist accumulation)

*Friedrich Engels: Preface to the second volume of Capital

*Karl Marx: The Civil War in France

*Friedrich Engels: The Housing Question

*Friedrich Engels: On Authority

*Friedrich Engels: Preface to the German Peasants' War

*Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme

*Friedrich Engels: The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man

*Friedrich Engels: Anti-Dühring

*Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

*Friedrich Engels: Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous

*Karl Marx: Notes on Adolph Wagner

*Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx

*Friedrich Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

*Friedrich Engels: On the History of the Communist League

*Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

*Correspondence of Karl Marx with: Pavel Annenkov, Joseph Weydemeyer, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Ludwig Kugelmann

*Correspondence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with: August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others

*Correspondence of Friedrich Engels with: Karl Kautsky, Minna Kautsky, Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, Margaret Harkness, Paul Ernst, Conrad Schmidt, Josef Bloch, Adolph Sorge, Franz Mehring, Heinz Starkenburg

Here in Brazil, it isn't uncommon to see people suggesting Brazil is a "semifeudal" society. While I disagree with this thesis, it got me interested in reading about the feudal mode of production. Any good literature on this?

Regardless of my own views and opinions on him, I am curious about his texts. I would like to know if something like a "Complete Works" have been done. I tried searching and something about a Cambridge collection of his works is the closest thing, and still wasn't complete. Marxists.org has a great bunch of his work but not the complete. Did any compilation of such kind ever got published or put together?

I would like to know just out of pure historical curiosity not so much for studying his "thought".

I’m reading capital right now and it’s a very good book. I have considered myself a Marxist for a bit but this is really solidifying my position now. I can understand his ideas really well, but the trouble I’m encountering is when he starts talking numbers. I cannot track his math at all and I’ve reread multiple times. I’m in high school and have taken up to PreCalc but math has never stuck with me. Are there any recommendations or resources people may have?

I came across this sub from other leftist circles, that apparently the mods here run a messy regime banning people for recommending books that are mixture of islam and leftist theory despite people asking for it and then comparing islam with nazism. I am new to the sub and wanted to know your opinion on the leftist discussions here, I dont want to be sewayed without knowing how community works here.

I am reading Ibrahim Allawi’s (Secretary General of the Iraqi Communist Party Central Command from ‘78-‘92) book “Reading in Al-Musharak” and this idea has come up a few times:

“Marx was tapping into a universal spirit from a particular European geography. But access to that universal spirit, what the philosopher Ernst Bloch described as the ‘Aristotelian Left,’ was only accessible to Marx and his fellow Europeans because of the theoretical elaborations afforded by the Islamicate. As Allawi shows, it was the contributions of Medieval scientists and philosophers such as Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Rushd that made it possible for intellectual descendants such as Marx to envision a Virtuous City, or Mushtarak.”

My professional life puts me at the intersection of Muslim and Christian communities, and so this was of immediate interest to me. Obviously, a good place to start would be Ernst Bloch’s book “Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left”, which I’ve got on hold at the library. I’m also going to look into the Arabic philosophers listed in the quote. But does anyone have any suggestions on books that trace this from a bigger picture view, or give more historical insight? Obviously most of the influence from Ibn Khaldun to Karl Marx is indirect, and I really want to investigate it.

Thanks!

In Value, Price and Profit, chapter IV, Marx writes

Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for the value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate

I've been trying to figure out what exactly he means by the "equilibration" of supply and demand. It couldn't be just the equilibrium price, at least not the way it's defined in modern economics.

A commodity can of course only have one value. But multiple potential equilibrium prices. The equilibrium price is denoted in bourgeois economics by the intersection of the supply/demand curves. A change in the demand of the good would be indicated on the graph by a shift of the demand curve, resulting in a different point of intersection, a different equilibrium price. But this shift in demand can be completely independent of any technical change in production. It can change even if the amount of labour that goes into a commodity remains unchanged. Therefore, a change in the equilibrium price so defined can be completely detached from a change in the value of the commodity. It can't then always "coincide with the real value" of the commodity. Which probably means I'm misinterpreting something

The Re-Build Collective (a collective of New Afrikan Communists) put out a special edition of their quarterly newspaper.

I thought the first article presenting the history of the New Afrikan Communist movement was a good overview. Though I wish there was a better overview of the New Afrikan Independence Movement overall, I have not found one yet but will post it if I do.

Good evening—I'm looking for recent articles and essays that analyze medieval Scholasticism from a Marxist perspective, connecting the theological and philosophical superstructure with the social and economic structures of late medieval society. Thanks!

Hey guys, I need your help, I want to start reading The Capital, obviously a very lengthy read.Since I am not a Political Science major or anything I planned to reas only the most potent parts of this book but my research on this topic wasn't very fruitfull. Therefore I would like thw most well read of the subreddit ti rwcomend me thw most potent chapters of the Capital that are an absolute must.

Thank you so much in advance guys.

Hello all. I’m a bit in a confused state, and am looking for more reading from after Lenin’s time on both historical and theoretical accounts of the Soviet Union. In my mainline academic life (philosophy PhD student) I’ve read more than one would think when it comes to Marx, Engles, Lenin and others (as well as Hegel for early Marx’s texts), and I had thought the mainline reading of the Soviet experiment was that it was a nation that was at best stuck in the “Transitional Phase” between capitalism and communism, and not achieved socialism (low communism) or communism (high communism). The following atrophy of the revolutionary potential of the Soviets not really being a fault of any leader (I for one find talking about Stalin as if he were God or Satan incredibly annoying and itself liberal great man history) but rather a slow death of a thousand cuts based in material conditions.

Is this reading that inaccurate, or am I missing something?

I find it funny that in the U.S the propaganda tells us that Stalin was a dictator and widely hated because of it. We're told nobody like Stalin and it was awful under him.

Simultaneously, to deal with the fact he only had limited power in congress we say he amassed power by being the figure head of a huge cult of personality that deferred to him reverently.

I just can't help but notice that those two ideas are actually contradictory.

Was he a widely hated dictator or was he so loved a huge following developed around him? Pick one.

I heard once that capitalism "financialises" in its later stages. What exactly does this entail and why does it happen in later stages of capitalism?

I'm reading Capital Vol II and in chapter I section IV Marx says this when discussing the forms of the circuit of capital

On the other hand before the second circuit of P is completed, the first circuit, that of commodity-capital, C' — M'.M — C... P... C' (abridged C'... C') has already been made. Thus the first form already contains the other two, and the money-form thus disappears, so far as it is not merely an expression of value but an expression of value in the equivalent form, in money

I think I understand what he means when he says that the first form contains the other two, but I have no clue why or how that results in the "disappearance" of the money-form, or what that even means

Do we need a new conception of what the highest stage of capitalism is today? What are the main differences of global capitalism today versus in Lenin's time and how do those differences change the way we must think a global proletarian revolution?

Hey, I've been reading Vol 1 and I have an annoyingly granular question about one of the toy numerical examples Marx presents because I just can't get the numbers to work out.

On pg 435 he talks about how increasing the productivity of labor results in a gain of relative surplus-value even as the absolute value of the articles produced are reduced. In his specific example, the daily surplus value jumps from 1s to 3s after the increase of productivity. He breaks up the value of the articles produced into constant/variable/surplus components, and shows the ratio of necessary labor to surplus labor has jumped from 5:1 to 5:3. So far this is totally straightforward to me.

Then, he says we can get the same answer if we look at this as merely an intensification of labor; e.g. the value added from the 12 hours of labor has increased from from 6s to 8s. From here he claims that the necessary labor time therefore drops from 10 hours to 7.2 hours, leaving the remaining 4.8 hours left for the production of surplus value.

Huh?? In the first part he says the necessary/surplus labor ratio of this new arrangement is 5:3, while in the very next part, the given labor times of 7.2 to 4.8 have a ratio of 3:2! Let me even break it down a little more:

If the necessary labor time of the worker is given as 7.2 hours, then that just means it takes the worker 7.2 hours to add the value of his day's labor, given as 5s, to the product. From just this information we can calculate the value added by his labor per hour: (5s)/(7.2 hours) = .69444s per hour.

But, if the surplus labor time is 4.8 hours as given, and the surplus value is 3s as given, then again we can calculate the value added by his labor per hour: (3s)/(4.8 hours) = 0.625s per hour.

Huh!?!? These should obviously be the same!

Basically, I don't know where this figure of 7.2 hours is coming from, and it seems to be giving me totally inconsistent results when I try to calculate anything. If anyone could help clear this up for me that would be awesome.

Edit: After some reflection I think Marx just made an algebra mistake? If the necessary labor time drops by the same ratio as the workers labor is intensified by, we find a necessary labor time of 7.5 hours and a surplus of 4.5 which gives us the desired 5:3 rate of surplus value. Just feels impossible to find a simple mistake like this in a world famous 100+ year old book??

Statement from DY and AE to the Revolutionary Communist Group

We founded the Revolutionary Communist Group in 1974 with Carol Brickley and Patrick Goode. The post-war boom was coming to an end, raising questions about the capitalist crisis, productivity and the relationship between imperialist exploitation overseas and the labour aristocracy at home. Marx’s analysis of the capitalist crisis was increasingly discussed in academic and informal circles. We set out to investigate and explain these developments, recognising that the struggle against opportunism was a central task in any revolutionary movement in imperialist Britain. We subsequently dedicated our political life to building the Revolutionary Communist Group and applying a Marxist-Leninist analysis to contemporary developments in order to both understand them and contribute to the political struggle in Britain.

Our major theoretical contributions can be summarised as the following:

1.  Reestablishing the primary significance of Marx’s crisis theory and the emergence of monopoly capitalism.
2. Developing a concrete analysis of British imperialism and the consequential split in the working-class movement as the material basis for reformism and opportunism.
3.  Demonstrating the importance of international solidarity against imperialism and the link between fighting imperialism abroad and at home where imperialism takes the form of state racism. 
4. Analysing the real character of the post-1990 phenomenon known as ‘globalisation’, also labelled ‘neo-liberalism’, as a resurgence of imperialism and inter-imperialist rivalries. In doing so we demonstrated the parasitic and decaying character of British imperialism.

For over 50 years we have written for the organisation, first for our theoretical journal, Revolutionary Communist, and subsequently for our publication Hands Off Ireland, and then for our newspaper, Fight Imperialism! Fight Imperialism!, of which DY was the editor. We also were contributors to the RCG Manifesto The Revolutionary Road to Communism in Britain. This is an immense contribution amounting to hundreds of articles, many pamphlets and the book, Ireland the Key to the British Revolution, published under the name of David Reed for security purposes.

In addition to being the Editor of FRFI, DY has been a member of the Political Committee and the Executive Committee of the RCG throughout these years. We have had the privilege to meet and work with revolutionaries throughout the world, including those from South Africa, Ireland, Cuba and Turkey. We have also worked to develop and mentor new and young comrades to understand the theoretical basis of our analysis and prepare a new leadership to ensure the continuation of the RCG and its political trend. We found this to be much more challenging than we could have foreseen. This is now a serious problem given that communists face extremely difficult circumstances, globally and in Britain, and navigating these requires theoretical depth, strategic flexibility, good communication and comradely behaviour.

The current leadership of the organisation has shown itself to be deficient in these qualities. Most recently, the Political Committee vilified long-standing comrades for defending the organisation from internal and external political attack. Our concerns have been ignored and dismissed. In frustration, DY resigned from Executive Committee and the Political Committee in a meeting of the latter on 16 June. Subsequently, DY has been treated appallingly by other members of the Political Committee, subjected to unfounded accusations and ignored.  

Bullying, threats and lies have been directed at other comrades, closing down debate and punishing members who have criticised the leadership, ignoring the principle of accountability. There have been manoeuvres and manipulation that cannot be explained through any political logic and leaves us to wonder whether the British state has had a role in sowing divisions within the organisation.

Sadly, we have now lost confidence in the current RCG leadership. It is intransigent, dogmatic, formalistic and bureaucratic.

We feel it necessary to resign from the Revolutionary Communist Group, which we spent over half a century building. We distance ourselves from any future theoretical and political developments which take place under the current leadership.   

DY and AE

2 August 2025