The sailors' demands were good.

The Bolsheviks were being assaulted by forces from the reactionary wing of Romanov monarchists, reformist Social Democrats, former Imperial Army officers and soldiers in the anti-communist White Armies along with several foreign nations sending in interventionist forces, aid and supplies for the White Armies. Despite this, Vladimir Lenin regarded the left-wing opposition as the most threatening the Bolshevik regime faced. [...] The authority the Bolsheviks commanded, such as the Cheka and other exertions of control and supremacy were primarily used against left-wing oppositionists rather than the reactionary counter-revolution.

Adam Kotsko on how to read Zizek.

Kapitalism101's Law of Value series (I've not read/watched all of these yet).

"It is obviously true that one cannot understand the complexities of contemporary geopolitics and imperialism simply by reading Lenin and Bukharin. But it is equally true that if one ignores their key insights, it is not possible to make much sense of the otherwise bewildering set of events that is currently being played out on the international chessboard and, just as importantly, to come up with a coherent political strategy to oppose militarism, war, environmental destruction, and all the other horrors that capitalism creates. The framework Lenin and Bukharin developed a hundred years ago, taken as a methodology and not as a set of dogmas, retains its relevance for activists today."

Library Genesis has a PDF of the Penguin Classics version (translated by Ben Fowkes) of Marx's Capital.

"Ricardo was followed by two able and well-trained pupils — Marx and Marshall. Meanwhile English history had gone right round the corner, and landlords were not any longer the question. Now it was capitalists. Marx turned Ricardo’s argument round this way: Capitalists are very much like landlords. And Marshall turned it round the other way: Landlords are very much like capitalists. Just round the corner in English history you see two bicycles of the very same make — one being ridden off to the left and the other to the right."

"Keynes says the crisis comes about through a lack of ‘effective demand’, namely an unaccountable fall in investment and consumption and this causes profits and wages to fall. Marx says: let’s start with profits. If profits fall, then capitalists would stop investing, lay off workers and wages would drop and consumption would fall. Then there would be a lack of effective demand, as Keynesians like to put it, but this would not be due to a drop in ‘animal spirits’, or ‘confidence’ (we often hear that phrase from economists: ‘a lack of confidence’), or even due to ‘too high’ interest rates, but because profits are down. The problem lies in the nature of capitalist production, not in the finance sector."

Good review of Caliban and the Witch by Karl Kersplebedeb.

"Posadists were once notorious on the far left for their cultish devotion to their leader and their bizarrely positive views on nuclear war."

A long Austin Chronicle article on the Red Guards Austin. My favorite part is when the assistant chief of police calls them "anarchists". Marxist-Leninists love that.

Ian Angus gets to the bottom of a mystery. Spoiler: it was Karl Kautsky.

"There is another myth that needs to be exploded -- the myth that social revolutions are made by tightly disciplined cadres, guided by a highly centralized leadership. All the great social revolutions are the work of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions to which the revolutionary and his organization contributes very little and, in most cases, completely misjudges, The revolutions themselves break out spontaneously. [...] If a revolutionary organization is not structured to dissolve into the popular forms created by the revolution once its function as a catalyst is completed; if its own forms are not similar to the libertarian society it seeks to create, so that it can disappear into the revolutionary forms of the future -- then the organization becomes a vehicle for carrying the forms of the past into the revolution. It becomes a self perpetuating organism, a state machine that, far from "withering away", perpetuates all the archaic conditions for its own existence."

"There are a myriad of ways one can object to the LTV, but the idea that is is nonsensical and incoherent is simply based on misunderstandings. One may well disagree with the premise that labour is the source of value (I do, simply because I have no positive reason to believe it). One may also endorse alternative theories over the LTV. But, based on a clear understanding, there is no a priori reason not to develop a comprehensive understanding of Marx’s theory, and treat it in the same way one would treat any other theory in economics."

An illustration of workers alienated from the products of their labour.

I don't know what direct democracy is, but it sounds tedious.

This is a long video, but I thought it gave a good idea of how Trotskyists (well, at least this one) relate to anarchism.

David Harvey's video lectures on reading Capital.