Those that know me know I work a lot on prolewiki.
Online resources are a dime a dozen, and I notice they tend to focus on the beginner stuff. And in most reading lists / youtubers / communities / other repos, it all revolves around marxism 101.
It got me to ask how can we talk about the more advanced stuff on prolewiki? Learning the basics will only get you so far. There’s only so many different ways and so many different people you can teach the basics to – if they’re serious about their marxist studies, people will have to look into more advanced stuff at some point, beyond the basics.
But then I started thinking, what is actually advanced marxism? Past the beginner level. Isn’t the point of marxism that we make it accessible to everyone, thus making complex concepts feel basic and at anyone’s reach?
Perhaps basic marxism is its three components: the philosophy, economy, and class struggle. And anything past that such as how to apply marxism yourself or theory on decolonisation, feminism, LGBT issues etc.
But making your own analyses and understanding the theory of further developments since Marx are two different things for the student of marxism.
Or perhaps it’s the same three components, but in more details – delving into the history of philosophy, learning about the class struggle in different countries and periods, learning about other economy theory?
What is advanced marxism, and how can we bring it to the people over the internet?
I believe what one could consider “advanced Marxism” is the application of Marxism to philosophy, history and economics, or rather the dialectical method of thinking to these branches of science.
One of the reasons these are some of the fields that are used more by Marxists is because of the need that Marx had to prove the nature of capital and profit, and so on, but in reality it could be applied to anything and every branch of science could be expanded and improved with dialectics, just like Engels did with his dialectical study of the natural sciences, or how Marx applied it in his later years to the study of mathematics and calculus. While I don’t think this expanse is unnecessary, it’s not as important to understand the class struggle aspects that could be translated into praxis, so that’s why sticking with philosophy, economy and history are more important.
If you’d want to go into either of those, you’d need to get a basic understanding of Spinoza, Ricardo, Hegel, Descartes, Adam Smith, and probably a few others. Still, I think understanding some basic Hegel you can get to understand dialectics, and I haven’t tried reading Das Kapital yet, but I guess you could get something from it even though you have very basic economics.