I’ve found the quality of my study went up dramatically when I started taking notes in my phone whenever a new concept came up, and trying to rewrite it in my own words. It helps you engage with the text more, not just drilling it into memory.

Hi Comrade, good to see you engaged with learning leftist/Marxist theory. I think all of us are trying to learn things and while in this day and age information is highly available, learning is not just a matter of reading, it’s a complex process. I’m not an expert in this area, but what I can do is share my personal experience, my sensations etc.

The first things to do is reading. I think many colleagues here have a reading list to recommend. So, depending on the person they can offer different material, but since there’s a big amount of existing theory it’s very hard to read everything. So there are many different paths you can follow.

You can start by reading pamphlets, which are a little bit of condensation of Marxist philosophy, economic and political theory, organization, agitation and propaganda. They will give you a base in some core categories, but be warned that you won’t be able to understand them fully unless you engage in more in-depth stuff. After this, what I personally did was to improve my understanding in dialectics. Then I started reading on other topics, like Lenin’s political organization theory and Marx political economy.

I also recommend watching videos or engaging with discussion groups to understand some concepts you learn through reading. You won’t be able to understand everything just by reading, it’s important to discuss this with other people as they can give you more insights or explain the same thing in a different way.

I also recommend watching/reading/discussing criticism of Marxist theories as well as criticisms of criticisms. For example there’s a lot of criticisms of Marxists by anarchists and a lot of criticisms of anarchist by Marxists, or socdem theory criticism of Marxists and Marxist critique of socdems, or Maoist critiques of Leninists and Leninist critiques of Maoists. It’s important to hear the contradictory from time to time to not only test your ability to engage with it, but also to improve your understanding in theory as well, and opening your eyes to weak points in your understanding of the world. There’s unfortunately too much dogmatism and sectarianism in leftist circles, and if you don’t engage with criticism in a healthy way you will end up as one more dogmatist or sectarian.

Last but not least, put theories to practice, if you can. I’m currently not organized because I don’t know any org in the area I currently live, but as Marx put it, philosophers tried to understand the world, but the point is to change it.

Other than that, keep on your learning journey, I hope you enjoy it.

Try to teach someone else what you’ve learned. There’s nothing that will expose knowledge gaps like encountering those gaps in real time.

If you’re having trouble with reading without getting distracted, there’s browser extensions that you can schedule to block all the distracting sites at certain times on certain days. This really helps you keep to a certain schedule for being productive, it’s something I would start with (Leech Block NG on firefox is pretty good for example)

As for how to retain it better, I always like to watch lectures and interviews with the authors if they’re alive, or for older works there’s usually discussions or companion lectures like David Harvey’s Reading Marx’s Capital.

E1: Something that helped me particularly was getting a solid grasp on the specific assumptions and methodology of Dialectical Materialism, studying it as if I was learning to do math. Mao’s On Contradiction and Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism are pretty short works that explain the framework very well, so it should let you cross-reference any difficult idea you find in other texts by trying to build it up from first principles.

E2: Completely tangential, but I recently started playing The Talos Principle 2 and (this might sound completely consumerbrained, I know) it is legitimately a pretty good way of engaging with a lot of different philosophies, but it focuses on Dialectical Materialism and does a good job of explaining how it relates to the others. If you have a decent gaming PC it might help retain some more of the concepts if you played it.

I couldn’t sit and read theory to save my life. Marx Madness podcast was a game changer for me. Their ability to engage me and contextualize the theory really helped me. I do need to go back and reread some of it but I feel like I could better understand it. Season 1 is a bit rough because they went with one chapter per episode so there’s a few really long ones but S2 onwards they really started to get into a decent rhythm.

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