Rules TBD.
There are many Brazilian comrades on lemmygrad.ml that could help with materials in Portuguese, and I'm sure the PCB (partido comunista brasileiro) also has a good introductory reading list.
For a shorter english introduction, I maintain this crash course socialism that goes over the basics.
Thank you! This is the original poster, now with a lemmygrad account. I looked at all reading recommendations and I think I will start with your crash course. Your commitment to privacy and software freedom (being a Lemmy dev) are big positive signs to me. The working class cannot organise when Big Brother is always watching and advertisers (including political propagandists like Cambridge Analytica) use AI to individually manipulate us.
No probs! Glad I could help.
This war has many fronts, and one is who owns and controls our social media platforms. US-capitalists own nearly all of the communications platforms worldwide, and use them to advertise to us, sell us pro-US lies, turn us and our data into products, and forward that data to their government to spy on the world. Reddit is (i think) the 5th most popular site worldwide, so this is one small way I can try to help reverse that trend, and allow people to create their own social media outside of US control.
Welcome! For your first question, Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net are explicitly oriented towards Marxism (Hexbear also has Anarchists and other leftist types, Lemmygrad is Marxist-Leninist). For your second, I actually wrote an introductory reading list you can check out if you want.
Hi friend!
For what Marxist instance would be best given your background, well there are only two total, to my knowledge, so you could just try out both and see what you like best! They are Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Lemmygrad is smaller but is more focused on Marxism-Leninism in particular. Hexbear has a ML-ancom and everything in between left unity stance and places great emphasis on making the space safe for people of marginalized groups. Lemmy.ml has many Marxists but is not explicitly commie.
For reading recommendations, this can be a difficult question to answer because there are many important texts in the Marxist tradition and some of them, particularly the foundational ones, are dense and challenging to read. I do strongly recommend reading the core works of Marx and Engels, since they define Marxism and later works are based on them. The order in which to read books really depends on how you prefet to read and learn.
I prefer to read from "the beginning" and already knew the relevant philosophical background so I just read Das Kapital right after The Communist Manifesto. But reading Das Kapital takes a long time. Reading groups dedicate months just to Volume 1. If you prefer a faster introduction and summaries, then I recommend Heinrich's companion text. Heinrich inserts some of his own opinions, but you can balance these out by reading Marxists critical of Heinrich, like Michael Roberts. If you want an even faster and simpler introduction, you can work backwards by reading short overviews from newer texts and blogs and so on and then make sure to try and tackle Capital later. But remember that the farther from the original works you get, the more likely that you will learn something incorrect about them without being in a position to notice it.
Another strategy is to start with Lenin, particularly his own notes on Hegel and Marx, and proceed to Stalin's overview of Marxism-Leninism, which includes an overview of Marxism. These are much easier to read than the source texts. All of the works so far will have Portuguese translations.
Regarding tolerance of Catholic faith, both instances will likely not care so long as this does not mean contradicting community standards, e.g. a vocal tradcath would contradict the feminist stances of both instances. Both instances have Christian comms, similar to subreddits. Lemmygrad's all seem to be inactive, though. Hexbear is, generally speaking, against insufferable New Atheist contrarianism (and so many of its original proponents became reactionary).
Regarding having Latin American context, both instances of course have a good amount of comrades from Latin America. I know that Hexbear has an active Latin America comm.
r/communism reading list or ProleWiki reading list. A lot of these books are available in Portuguese on ProleWiki or if not you can go to marxists.org
Cowbee (auth, btw, jsyk) has an intro reading list: https://lemmy.ml/post/22417306
Don't know what you mean by "auth," it's pretty standard Marxism, but thanks for linking it!
I was describing your ideology more so than your reading list, in case that wasn't clear. Iirc though, you've said something along the lines of not feeling "authoritarian" is an appropriate political descriptor at all
My ideology is Marxist-Leninist, the list I made reflects that. I agree with Engels with respect to "authoritarianism" as a concept, elaborated on in On Authority. Generally, it isn't a useful descriptor for many things, or rather it is so overused and under-examined that it ends up simplifying concepts to the point that they become more confusing.
Liberty is the iron fist of the invisible hand, and authoritarianism is the tyranny of the wage-slave majority.
I translated the communist manifesto into a rap for people who want a quick intro https://youtu.be/0Rw0QvEjwuQ
Marxist-Lemmyisim.
Way more chill and non-toxic than Reddit's r/Communism
Marxist-Leninist's (ML) like to cite "On Authority". Here's an anarchist view: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/punkerslut-on-authority-a-response-to-friedrich-engels
I don't really think this is a productive text to link. It's littered with historical inaccuracies regarding the efficiency and working class upliftment that happened and continue to happen in AES states (which are indeed not magical wonderlands, but really existing Socialism nonetheless) such as the false claim that Chinese workers cannot strike. Furthermore, the author appears to be making a hit piece, rather than engaging with the text to see if there's any value to it, and in this process there are several errors. Honestly, I think it ends up being insulting to Anarchists more than Marxists, and I'll get back when I wrap up.
In the first section, the author describes a production process requiring no authority, just mutual consent. There are a number of issues here. The first, it assumes a lack of consent in a Marxist system. The second, it overly simplifies production. When you create a phone, for example, there are huge supply chains at scales unimaginable by any given worker, highly trained engineers and technicians to design and maintain both the machinery and the phones themselves, armies of safety and quality workers that ensure the conditions are not toxic and that the phones themselves are working and not dangerous, production managers who run the assembly lines, and educational bodies that train the workers, including the engineers. These educational bodies need methods of accountability at large so they don't teach false physics, like V=I/R instead of V=IR.
Engels argument is that production needs "authority." This is correct, no matter how you slice it, you must restrict freedom to misdesign, freedom to spill sewage into the drinking water, freedom to slack on maintenance, freedom to not do lock out tag out on machinery during maintenance. Engels also is making the argument that this is consensual to have a functioning society of mass cooperation and complex industry, but the Author tries to pretend it isn't and that only "voluntary cooperation" is valid. The Author misframes Engels and in the process slanders Anarchists who understand that some hierarchy is necessary and just! The only other conclusion is that Anarchism must be of a return to earlier production methods where complex industry no longer exists, but such an aim would result in the resurgance of Capitalism.
This strategy is the same for the whole article, misframe Engels point that "authoritarian" is nonsense as everyone needs some level of exertion of authority (such as to prevent a nuclear power plant from exploding), and then pretend Anarchists want a Utopia where everyone magically decides to just voluntarily arrange themselves in complex production while denouncing "authority" and that nobody would ever disagree with this. It slanders the Anarchists I know are more reasonable than this, and it misframes Engels entirely.
I could go on, but I think I made my point.