ChicagoCommunist
Buy A Thousand Plateaus, open to a random section, and let it flow through you.
Mostly joking. Your best bet imo is to alternate between broad overviews and particular interests. Primary sources are often overrated, especially with the more obscurantist writers. Start with the broad secondary sources, then delve into the specific primary sources that interest you. Paint a blurry image that becomes detailed where you want it, rather than trying to paint a single highly-detailed pixel with no surrounding context.
A philosophy podcast or YouTube channel can be a good start.
Identity labels seem to be a thought-quelling mechanism. As is moralism. Complex theory needs to be approached with an intellectual and analytical mindset
What tactics were used during the Russian and Chinese revolutions? What classes and contradictions were they contending with, what hurdles did they have to overcome, and what choices did they end up making (and why)? Did these strategies achieve their intended purposes, in the short term, mid term, long term? How might those strategies play out in different circumstances?
As the complexities are dissected and analyzed, a moral analysis can also take place: what are my goals and values, and how do these tactics and their effects relate to them? Is there a discrepancy between a desired outcome and the tactics necessary to accomplish it? If so, can that be reconciled?
But naked values with no analysis are unlikely to accomplish anything, and can in fact lead to outcomes that benefit our opponents. If We Burn is a good overview of this problem in the protests around the world during the 2010s.
At the same time, people who reveal themselves to be thinking without analysis can be dismissed, be they liberals, anarchists, or MLs. But the depth of thought is the operative variable here, not the identity or category.
Reminds me of when a site claiming to document Uighur internment was caught using thispersondoesnotexist-like face generation and claiming they were prisoners.
Pretty wild times.
I'd recommend reading Graeber. Stagism is a useful reduction for educational purposes, but beyond that it's an antiquated understanding of human social development. In abstract I would say that nothing is strictly necessary, there's an infinite spectrum of ways to be.
Diamat is a good model for understanding social change, it just has to engage with real complexities.
Diamat stay winning
Newpipe, pihole