Communism
Discussion Community for fellow Marxist-Leninists and other Marxists.
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Marxists of all tendencies are welcome here.
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Check out ProleWiki for a communist wikipedia.
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When you say ‘not specifically Marxist’, does that mean (i) you (only) want to read non-Marxists, (ii) you don’t mind reading Marxists or non-Marxists (i.e. you’re just interested in the content/subject), and/or (iii) you don’t want to read 'the Marxists' or ‘meta’ work about Marxism/Marxist theory?
If it’s (i), then two decent books on logic and reasoning are:
If you mean rhetoric proper, you could always start more-or-less at the beginning, with Aristotle: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html
I suspect you meant a combination of (ii) and (iii) (which may be the same point worded in different ways) – you’re interested in learning about other fields and are happy to read works on those other fields whether they are written by Marxists or non-Marxists. Is that right? As Muad-Dibber and Soviet Snake said [Edit: /suggested], I would also start out by getting a good grounding in dialectical and historical materialism. It doesn’t have to be painful! Let us know if you want recommendations.
You may find two of my earlier comments about studying helpful:
On the construction of history, showing where people get their historical 'education' from, you might enjoy: Michael Parenti, History as Mystery (I’d have put this in the list with Dennett and Martinich but Parenti is a Marxist).
If you did want to start with linguistics, you might want to look up Vygotsky, although he is a Marxist: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/; maybe work towards Thinking and Speech: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/index.htm.
Vygotsky is the root of a lot of liberal theory on linguistics and learning. Unfortunately liberals tend to see the sense in what he says and think they can do without the revolutionary part of his dialectical and historical materialism but that’s liberals for you. Or there is Stalin’s short work on ‘Marxism and Problems of Linguistics’ (beautifully rendered on ProleWiki): https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Marxism_and_problems_of_linguistics.
If you’re interested in the relationship between society and the production of ideas, try Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Ideology_and_Ideological_State_Apparatuses. Again, though, he’s a Marxist.
Ahh no I absolutely didn't mean i) or iii). Marxist or non-Marxist, I just want to study the content itself. Thank you for the recommendations!
You're welcome.
To answer this question more directly:
It probably comes down to (1) propaganda, (2) lack of education, and (3) people's material interests making them not want to look too closely.
You're approach to look into the way that arguments are constructed (rhetoric/discourse/meta-discourse) should help you around the first one.
The other two are a bit harder. But reading Marxist literature will help. For example if people are talking bollocks about climate change and you've read something by JB Foster or Andreas Malm, you'll know where and why other people get things so wrong. You can then compare what Marxists say about any given topic to identify how non-Marxists either omit information (knowingly or unknowingly), lie, or are confused. But I think you're right, at this stage, not up debate right wingers. Better to build your own knowledge up first.