<aside> <img src="/icons/clock-alternate_gray.svg" alt="/icons/clock-alternate_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Last Updated: 19 March 2025

</aside>

Palestinian militants reading Mao Zedong.

Studying for Liberation: The Analytical Field of Marxism

<aside> <img src="/icons/friends_gray.svg" alt="/icons/friends_gray.svg" width="40px" />

Instructors: Ammar Ali Jan, Paweł Wargan, Sarah Jane Raymundo

</aside>

"When I first got hold of the Communist Manifesto I found an explanation. In the midst of that forest of events, where it was very difficult to understand phenomena and where everything seemed due to the wickedness of men—their defects, perversity, and immorality—I started to identify other factors that weren't dependent on man, his morals, and his individual attitude. I began to understand human society, the historic process, and the divisions that I saw every day.” — Fidel Castro

In his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx wrote that “[p]hilosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” With this, he declared the inseparability of intellectual work and political work — the fundamental relationship between understanding and organization.

Every movement towards liberation came to understand that it could not change the world without understanding the reality it sought to affect, without understanding how that reality is organized, what social forces exist within it, and how these forces relate to one another. In other words, the world could not be transformed without a rigorous and scientific knowledge of it. Marxism provides us with a framework by which that knowledge can be gained.

In the introductory unit of The People’s Academy, we will gain a basic understanding of the Marxist analytical method; consider why so many of the world’s progressive forces have retreated from it, truncating our imaginations and paralyzing our strategies; and learn why it remains central to our common struggle for a world free from exploitation.

Required Readings

• 📖 Marta Harnacker, “Introduction”, Introduction to Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism, pp. 13-22

  • Bonus Reading:

    S20-Basic-Principles-of-ML-A-Primer.pdf

• 📃 Ammar Ali Jan, “Memory”

Recommended Readings

• 📖 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Ch. 1
• 📃 Nadezhda Krupskaya, “Organization of Self-Education”, On education: Selected articles and speeches, 192.
• 📃 Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt”
• 📖 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Additional Readings

• 📖 Fidel Castro, Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto (1986)
• 📖 Marta Harnacker, Introduction to Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism

Study Questions