Recently ran into this excerpt on Brazilian politics by conservative Brazilian thinker Olavo de Carvalho:
"For someone to speak authoritatively about the communist movement, they must first have studied the following things:
The classics of Marxism: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong.
The most important Marxist philosophers: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Althusser.
Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski.
Some good history and sociology books about the revolutionary movement in general, such as Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington, The Pursuit of the Millenium, by Norman Cohn, The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin.
Good books on the history of communist regimes written from a non-apologetic point of view.
Books by the most famous critics of Marxism, like Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Raymond Aron, Roger Scruton, Nicolai Berdiaev and so many others.
Books about the communist strategy and tactics on their rise to power, about the underground activities of the movement in the West and chiefly about the "active measures" (disinformation, agents of influence), like those by Anatolyi Golitsyn, Christopher Andrew, John Earl Haynes, Ladislaw Bittman, Diana West.
The largest number possible of testimonies by former communist agents and militants who recall their experience in service of the movement or communist governments, such as Arthur Koestler, Ian Valtin, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz.
High-value testimonies about human condition in socialist societies, like those by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vladimir Bukovski, Nadiejda Mandelstam, Alexander Soljenítsin, Richard Wurmbrand.
This is a reading program that can be accomplished in four or five years by a good student. I do not know, either in the Brazilian right or left, anyone, absolutely anyone, who has accomplished it.
There are so many people in this country wanting to give their opinion on the matter, almost always with an air of wisdom, and nobody, or practically nobody, willing to make the necessary effort to give any substance to their words.
No honest leftist will do it without forever renouncing their beliefs. No rightist, without acknowledging that they were presumptuous, a fool, and in many cases, a useful idiot – sometimes even more useful and more idiotic than the leftist masses.
The left thrives on exploiting ignorance, both its own and that of others. Wherever it exerts hegemony, the prevailing commandment is never to read the works of adversaries and critics, but to spread distorted and caricatured versions of their ideas and biographies, so that militant youth can hate them under the illusion of knowing them. Universities that profess to offer courses in Marxism excel at this point, bordering on pure and simple mind control.
The right wing, well, the right wing cultivates its own forms of self-deception, which I've already discussed at length in this very newspaper. Perhaps I'll return to the subject in another article."
This rings very true for me in America as well. The amount of young right-wing people I've talked to who are incredibly animated about the evils of Marxism and go into a borderline witchhunt mentality for 'commie ideas' have zero literacy about communism, neither it's central tenets, any detailed understanding of its history, or of its more recent evolution. His criticism of the left - that it only understands opposing ideas in caricature, is 100% true of the American right. It's also true of the left here - I think it might be even worse, because the number of young leftists I've met who are even capable of discussing actually Marxism or Marxist economics is vanishingly small, and they all believe in a cartoonish strawman of the opposition's beliefs.
I don't pretend to have worked my way through this exhaustive list, nowhere near it, but I have checked a few of those boxes. The fact that I've met vanishingly few people who have checked as many, people who self-identify as virulently pro- or anti-communism and have much more intense, extreme feelings about the matter than I do, is shocking and sad. Politics on both sides of the aisle has devolved into mere pantomime. Just a posture, just a slogan, just a brand, with little or no understanding of the underlying principles. Marxism has become a zombie movement, transforming into ever more absurd permutations of itself, divorced from the questions of material production and the grand arcs of history and utterly preoccupied with mundane cultural and psychological affairs. Counter communism has just evolved into a similar counter-posture, a circus. Trump has stepped into the ring and is eminently suited to be ringleader, but he didn't build the big top.
It's just striking is all, how our chattering classes, talking heads, and political leaders on both sides are utterly bereft of erudition, even real-life expertise, or any connection to reality. Politics is like a funhouse hall of mirrors, with no substance and no point. People are filled with vitriol and can't even articulate why. It's almost like politics doesn't even exist anymore; it's become a kind of guerilla marketing campaign or MLM scam where cynical players manipulate the masses so they can push crypto scams or beg for superchats.