Seeing the conversations around this topic in the post Most Western Parties Are Ossified and Failures I thought some folks might find value in this organizing guide created by USU. It draws from numerous articles they’ve written about organizing ML orgs from the ground up.
Forming a study group seems like a no brainer now that I realized Lenin, Mao and even Marx had their starts in study groups
Unfortunately I think I alot of people would be turned off by it being marxist, even if they dont have a real conception of what marxism is. I’m kinda wondering if its worth going straight to marxist texts, or maybe start with something more borderline to attract liberals that can potentially be converted.
You can get them with stuff that doesn’t have Marx attached to it. Think of it this way, in the late 1800s when Lenin was translating Marx to read him, he had no reputation yet in Russia. So we can do the same thing. Bring them stuff that doesn’t necessarily directly mention Marx etc but is written by marxists nonetheless. There’s even more palatable communists, like Ho Chi Minh is generally “accepted”, Engels, in some places Castro is also regarded more neutrally.
It really depends on the people who are interested but for the more borderline I’ve seen suggested Angela Davis’s Gender Race and Class or Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds and then Engels The principles of communism.