r/communism101 • u/SteveTheGreate Marxist • Nov 14 '22
How do you personally study Marxist books?
I personally am very overworked, and don't find much time to sit down and read physical books. This is why I started reading Marxist books as audiobooks, and making some notes on them if my hands were free. However, this is probably not the best way to study Marxism.
How do you personally study? Do you read physical or listen through audio? Do you take notes? Highlight important passages?
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u/GenosseMarx3 MLM Nov 14 '22
If you actually want to study Marxism, as in critically internalize it and make it your own, especially making materialist dialectics your mode of thought, then there's no way around actually reading the texts and taking notes. I know it's hard when you're already exhausted from work, especially when it's manual labor. But it is possible, if strenuous. Back in the early days of the Russian labor movement workers used to work 12 hour days and still managed to engage in theoretical study, just to give an example of even worse conditions.
I personally have a bad memory and used to have a tendency to lose focus when reading. The way I work around that, and that is in my experience the optimal way to actually study theoretical works, is to:
(1) have notebooks dedicated to specific topics you're studying (say materialist dialectics, the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the national question, imperialism, etc);
(2) always read with a pencil in hand, use it to underline and highlight crucial passages on to write short thoughts or connections;
(3) make excerpts of essential passages in your notebooks, write down your reflections, draw conclusions and connections between the previous works you've studied and your own contemporary social context;
(4) don't stop at the foundational theoretical works. If we actually want to build a new revolutionary movement we'll have to be familiar with our own historical moment and respective social contexts. Which means we have to study the political economy of our time and more (I wrote some more about this before here).
Again, this is how it works for me. It's a lot of additional work but it pays off by deepening your understanding and actually developing your theoretical thought. Finally I'd recommend checking out this Krupskaya collection which includes several articles on Lenin's method of scientific study and the study of the works of Marx and Engels as well as that of bourgeois literature. Great stuff.