Welcome to Gaia! ::

Okay, acting upon my promises for the guild. I begin first by adding a complimentary Interior Alligator to all of my posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Hn0yM00Fo

Secondly, I want to enact a educational program.

Every week we suggest a book that is to be read. at the end of the week we open a thread to discuss the book. This will not only serve the purpose of education to the newer members but will also work to increase activity within the guild as well.

Thoughts?

Agree on the chapter/article thing, because I think more people would be likely to participate if it was shorter. (For those crazy people with lives outside the internet!?)

Maybe if it's not online someone with it could scan it and pdf it though. ^_^

Yaaay, like a book club!

Sadism? Maybe you get your kicks off of the woeful remarks of someone who hasn't properly prepared for a discussion.

Are these only going to be Marxist works, or will you actually be admitting that there's leftist/commie types who aren't Marxists?

Eh, at first is fine. I expect non-Marxist works to be sprinkled in, though. The Guild is majority Marxist, so it makes sense to do majority Marxist readings. Just don't leave us other commies out in the cold. wink

OKAY. This is what I thought of yesterday and this morning when I was warm in bed:
Once a week a thread is started on a particular reading (say, Monday?). The thread is called something like 'Reading for 31/08/09: Principles of Communism' to start things off and it links to the reading. It also says what next week's reading will be and contains a link, so people can read that in preparation for next week's discussion. Anyway, in this thread, the reading is discussed.
As for how the readings are chosen, we could have a suggestion thread. Out of these, either the mods could choose OR we could use the complicated method I came up with, which is:
You may suggest one reading per post (and you must provide the link) and you may not post twice in a row. Then, we'll do the readings in the order in which they were posted; it will be fair because no person may have their reading read more than one week in a row. If for some reason it has gotten to point where there is no next-week's reading to announce on the thread, then someone may suggest more than once in a row.

I think appropriate materials for reading would include Marxist works, non-Marxists socialist and communist works, works using Marxist concepts and eventually works that are critical of socialism, communism or Marxism (so we can rebut them). Could be on any number of subject including social issues, politics and economy.

I agree with PrinCom being up first. Something nice and clear to get us started.

What do you think?

なぜ私か。。。

I agree with your idea, Kotka (which is also Rob's and Gracc's). It's a good idea for us to actually work in some lit and education as well as discussion to keep this guild alive.

Though, I think we should make an education committee which would be responsible to picking out the weekly readings. Just an idea. wink

We had committees back in the day, but they were scrapped. You can see the remnants of said committees in those subforums above this thread. They were an interesting so I wonder why they were stopped.

In any case we could try forming an education committee, but Dis Domnu's idea about articles works as well as the general suggestion about Principles of Communism (******** the rest of you, I'm not shortening it).

A supplementary idea to this is idea about readings is an actual Marxist issue discussion thread in which the topic of discussion changes. As opposed to read and finding a multitude of things being discussed we have a discussion about them here. Think of it as a better structured "Ask the (x)" threads.

For instance the beginning weeks could be stuff like a discussion on property and why Marxists oppose it and then move on to advance ideas like why Marx did not look much into account Eastern Nations in Asia and the Middle East and what he thought of them.

However this is all just suggestions. We shouldn't be overly ambitions and see one project go strong then suddenly be abandoned in the face of another idea or something else.