this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
22 points (100.0% liked)

marxism

3984 readers
7 users here now

For the study of Marxism, and all the tendencies that fall beneath it.

Read Lenin.

Resources below are from r/communism101. Post suggestions for better resources and we'll update them.

Study Guides

Explanations

Libraries

Bookstores

Book PDFs

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm not sure what I think about this but just throwing it out there.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Who ever this person is needs to get their head out of their ass. Western Marxism did not produce an academically honest critique of the Soviet Union, it served to sell lies to Soviet leaders about how much better and more free their populations would be under democratic socialism, which never came to fruition.

Whatever problems exist within Rockhill's analysis, the fact that there has been no actual widespread public Weatern leftist re-examining of the Marxist-Leninist approach, in light of the opening of the Soviet Archives which put to bed the most absurd of Soviet stereotypes, is a damning nail in the coffin of most of these so called 'honest intellectuals'.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

Tbh, there's been a massive re-examination of the USSR since the archives opened in the 80s and 90s. This re-examination has been based on the archival evidence and materialist analysis, and can be seen in works like The Great Urals, Affirmative Action Empire, Arctic Mirrors, On Stalin's Team, etc. This work has not been carried out by Marxists and is often not read by leftists however

Why? For the first, because in general the more marxist you are the less likely you are to 1) decide to go into academia, 2) be accepted into academia, 3) be funded. The people who do this (useful) archival work on events that happened decades to a century ago are going to self select for people more interested in interpreting the world than changing it.

For the second, because 1) the more effective as an org a leftist group is, the less time.they will spend studying hundreds of pages of academic writings, and 2) many marxists either do not know such works exist, or discard them out of hand for not being written by leftists

All this is unfortunate, bc without such detailed examinations of the USSR, China, etc (warts and all) we cannot hope to do better in the future