Currently I’m reading Nina Burton’s ‘Livets tunna väggar’ which translate to something like Walls of Life. It’s a book by a Swedish writer who inherits her mother’s summer house. When she wants to renovate it, she finds all sort of life around and in the house. She uses said life to teach you something about the intellect of various insects and animals, which goes deeper than humans normally think.
It’s a very interesting book that makes me think about non-human life even more. Creatures that are thousands of times smaller than we are have such complex societal structures. Humans have overcommodified animal life for centuries now, seeing them as property and commodities instead of complex and intelligent life forms.
What are you reading?
State and Revolution is essential for understanding the state and why Anarchists and Socdems are wrong. Imperialism is a good foundation for understanding today’s globalized capitalism. I gotta read Left Wing Communism sometime. I gotta go back and read his writing on dialectics, but I’ve covered my bases with other dialectics works (on contradiction is a total banger). What Is to Be Done is kind of overrated and very specific to Russia’s conditions at the time, though it may be useful to a well read strategist. That’s all I know about Lenin’s works.
I would say that What Is To Be Done? is one of Lenin’s most important works, if anything I’d say it’s underrated. Like (mostly) all of his works, it talks directly about the situation in Russia at the time, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. You just have to extract the universal principles from the tactical particularity he’s writing about.
WITBD? focuses on the need for organizing, and not just any kind, but actual revolutionary organizing with both theory and practice, for bringing together the proletariat with all other revolutionary classes and even individual intellectuals. It speaks against just focusing on a binary interpretation of class struggle (proletariat vs bourgeoisie), and instead it tells us to focus on any struggle that is revolutionary (anti-colonial struggles, gender liberation struggles, etc.).
Here’s how Losurdo describes it in Class Struggle:
I know, it’s important, it’s just boring, and more for advanced and organizing people. Without reading I already understand the distinction between tailing the masses and being a vanguard. It’s an important idea, it’s just a lot of reading for a simple conclusion dressed in time specific evidence.
Edit: by overrated I mean by larpers.