this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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you know haha funny 5 person book club, selling papers, marxists.org

but if we are in the "dark age" of leftism currently are they the equivalent of Irish monks copying ancient Marxist texts for safekeeping?

maybe those 5 person book clubs are monastic circles with complex scholarly initiation rites

those papers, well somebody has got to retain the skills to publish physical media

and marxists.org is basically the marxism library of alexandria

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What exactly is a scholar monk? Trots have a selective canon, generally one intended to promote the idea that Trotsky was the co-revolutionary with Lenin and that one should engage primarily with Trotsky's speculative (and historically, a failure revolutionarily) works in exile. They talk about transitional programs so much they forget to engage critically with their failure to produce the revolution that requires transition.

I think there is a parallel in that Trotskyists are often correctly labeled as "academic Marxists", which is really just an insult meaning, "a self-labeled Marxist that is wrong and does no organizing but uses a lot of words and references from Marxist theory". Is that a monk scholar? They catalog and go on at length about hypotheticals but fail to do praxis, e.g. converting the nonbelievers and educating the believers?

Marxists.org is useful in that it makes works available for free and is an easy to remember domain. There are other projects doing similar things but they don't have the luck of owning a domain called marxists.org.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

a funny connection my sleepy brain came up with this morning reading a post about trot book clubs i'm not seriously saying they are actual scholar monks that hasn't been a thing since the end of the middle ages

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Of course, friend. Sorry if I came across as belligerent or argumentative, I mean to just be riffing along as well.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

it's all good. text medium and all and most of us are neurodiverse im sure. sometimes i'm afraid to riff about stuff that goes too deep into serious territory because i am very much a leftist layperson.