Books

Have you already heard the good word about dialectic materialism? I find hope in historical materialism. Yes, I realize, I sounded like a cultist right now, but joking aside, understanding the historical process helps a lot. It's all a process and capitalism definitely won't last forever. Anyway: Luna Nguyen has put in a lot of work to translate and add detailed comments and illustrations to "Curriculum of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism Part 1 - The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism" and "Part 2 - Historical Materialism" and is currently working on part 3. These are current, in use, up to date course books that students in Vietnam use to learn about this philosophy and science. The ebooks are free on the website I linked. I bought both of them and have already used the illustrations to explain dialectics in my book club.

It's not a concrete hopeful vision of what the future will definitely look like, because that would be antithetical to dialectics. Theory and praxis feed off each other and we can only find out by going there. But thinking dialecticaly really does help:

• it's not ultimate defeat, it's just the current moment. The negation is only ever partial and will itself be negated, a seed is carried on, that will bloom.

• It's not all or nothing, change is gradual until it suddenly happens all at once (quantity to quality)

• contradictions and crisis fuel growing class consciousness and the coming revolution. You don't need hope to scientifically understand, that the inevitable contradictions of capitalism are unstable

• your actions matter, they inspire people around you and inform our understanding (unity of theory and praxis)