Need a few recommendations

My friend is in a relationship with a hard-core self-styled 'Communist'. She's easily influenced and has only been absorbing the one-sided readings he's been feeding her. Can any of you recommend some readings that will provide a more rounded reality of communism or at least introduce a decent line of argument that reflects reality and not propaganda? Id also like to expand my knowledge of the subject too. Already familiar with Solzhenitsyn
Cheers

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Gramsci's prison notebooks

Thanks user. Will look into that

>introduce a decent line of argument that reflects reality and not propaganda?
>Already familiar with Solzhenitsyn
This (You) is on me.

Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek KoĊ‚akowski
Is God Happy?: Selected Essays by Leszek Kolakowski
Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin (particularly Thesis 1)
The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper
The Making of Modern Liberalism by Alan Ryan
The Law of Peoples by John Rawls
The Road to Serfdom by Hayek
Democracy in America by Tocqueville
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
the first I mentioned is without a doubt exactly what you are looking for (a very long work that critically approaches all the major thinkers of Marxism from
the rest are fundamental texts in liberalism that tend to wean people away from marxism
if you want a study of what life was like under Stalinism "Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization" by Stephen Kotkin is fantastic
alternatively, if you friend begins reading neutral/relatively unbiased biographies of key marxist historical figures, it usually tempers their ardor, especially Stalin or Lenin

*from their earliest greek antecedents to the prominent figures of the mid twentieth century

...

this is why we need White Sharia

Many thanks. This is extensive

Thanks for this great post. I have been dying to read Kolakowski for so long, after (IIRC) his hilarious exchange with Perry Anderson.

Would you say that Main Currents transcends bias and is a solid critique? Not just a catalogue of grievances?

I don't mind bias at all if it's properly and incisively applied as a tool for meaningfully dismantling another system of thought - the radically unique gestalt of an author on a topic can open the possibility of a totally "other" view than what you're accustomed to, if it's done well, and isn't a lazy smear.

But there are authors, like Bertrand Russell for example, who may be great stylists and entertaining writers, but who are absolutely useless when it comes to critique. Instead of breaking into the enemy system's house and fucking everything up, for you to see in gritty detail, they just stand out on the front step and mutter snarky comments about the owners.

Evola, Al ghazali and Averroes will be good for her

This bitch "is" or will be whatever the strongest man in the room wants her to be.

that's just called Sharia

Kill yourself, illiterate maggot.

Communist Manifesto, Marx

Yuri Bezmenov

Hannah Arendt, that woman should be more popular than fucking Nietzsche.

thenation.com/article/conscious-pariah/

Very insightful, I didn't know this, does this mean he's also worth reading?

I'm currently reading Is God Happy? by Kolakowski and it's great,it has certainly helped reshape my views on Communism a little and made it easier to come up with good arguments against my far-left friends. It's high up on this guy's list for a reason I would say.

eric hobsbawm, especially age of extremes

b8

"Wage Labour and Capital" and "Value, Price and Profit" because most """communists""" are just stupid red-liberals who haven't read Marx and don't know shit about his economic theory. These are short texts who are pretty easy to read.
"Homage to Catalonia" by Orwell because it shows how the Soviets screwed the CNT/FAI.
"The Society of the Spectacle" and anything from the Situationist International journals because Debord was right all along about commodity fetishism and Marxism-Leninism.
"Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher is a nice alternative/complement to the SotS.
Nick Land because smart (formely) amphed-up right-wingers who read too much scifi are cool, and Meltdown is probably where we are heading.
"Inventing the Future" by Srnicek & Williams just to give her an unorthodox left point of view taking cues from Land, even though they have been criticized for only reinventing social-democracy.

I have heard "The Conquest of Bread", "Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement" and "The Next Revolution" are also good, but I haven't read them yet.

The Communist Manifesto sucks.

>The Open Society and its Enemies
You got meme'd, friend. This book is nearly universally considered not worthwhile by academic philosophers.

communism doesn't work

Source?

If you want a humorous take on life in the Clown World that was the late Brezhnev to start of Glasnost' era, The Compromise is excellent.

On the literary side of things, you'll probably want some Dostoevsky.

Notes from underground is largely a response to Chernyshevsky's what is to be done, Lenins favorite book.

Characters in Demons are largely based on the true life anarchist end of the Communist arena, Bunin and Nechaev.

Alberto Moravia has a nice essay in which he argues that Crime and Punishment is Dostoevsky's duel with Marx.

>Road to Serfdom
This

Victor serge memoirs of a revolutionary

>woman let's herself be molded into any politics her boyfriend wants
Fucking why? Can't she think for herself?

Do you have any understanding of women? They adapt and mold themselves to be what they think high status males want in order to increase their mating opportunities.

Amazes me how there can be "self styled communists" when there are people alive who've experienced how terrible communism turns out to be...