this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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What is the easiest piece of theory you've read? You can post multiple in the order of easiest first to hardest last. (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by HexaSnoot@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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In terms of theory, I don't consider myself well read. Theory is often really tough for me to read. Even with very easy-to-read writers like Michael Parenti, it's dense with mindblowing info. And things like the book Will to Change by Bell Hooks hits me in really raw feelings so I stopped at the first chapter. I need the easiest authors and their easiest-to-read works, or else I'm just not reading.

-Micahel Parenti: What’s a Slum? Urban Poverty and Marginality in America

-"I Have a Dream, a Blurred Vision" by Michael Parenti"

-Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth

No idea how I got through "Friendly Feudalism." I read these all about 3.5 years ago before I lost the bandwidth to go further.

Edit: I tend to watch things more so I guess you can add video links after everything else too.

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[–] XiaCobolt@hexbear.net 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

If there was a ratio of how dense and vitally important the information is, and how short and easy it is to read, pretty much anything Stalin wrote.

Foundations of Marxism Leninism, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Marxism and the National Question, all good examples.

Complex ideas laid bare in simple terms, I read Critique of the Goetha Programme by Marx first then State and Revolution by Lenin and then Foundations of Marxism-Leninism and it was helpful like honing a blade.

But I think it would have been easier going backwards.

[–] Cowbee@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Stalin's writing style is also just really relaxed, clear, and patient. Very different from how the West depicts him.

“In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Series of things that are very good.”

-Che Guevara

[–] Mardoniush@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

He was a published poet, after all.

[–] XiaCobolt@hexbear.net 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's 2025 the trans woman with a unicorn profile picture is telling you to read Stalin.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 days ago

Damn right, the immortal science