/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3637045]

What would be essential stuff to read from, or about, Marx?\

Also, is there a way to read Marx without seeming like a douche?

[Anonymous No.3637057]

>>3637045
Why of course, by reading Das Kapital.
It is only douchebags like Sean Hannity who don't know the difference between socialism, communism, and Marxism who make reading Marx sound like a douche. He had some pretty valuable ideas. All humanities today flow from him.

[Anonymous No.3637061]

How to not be a douche while reading Marx: Don't tell people you're reading Marx and don't use his critiques in any kind of setting even though it's incredibly easy to apply Marxist criticism to fucking everything.

Essentials are Communist Manifesto, German Ideology, and Capital Volume 1 (proceed with the others only if you REALLY want to).

[Anonymous No.3637064]

Read David McLellan's Selected Writings of Karl Marx. It's got some abridgments of Marx's major works and it's a good entry point.

Also

>fearing what other people will think of you

[Anonymous No.3637136]

manifesto is a good entry point
if that's all you read then you're a douche

[Anonymous No.3637212]

>>3637061
>Communist Manifesto, German Ideology, and Capital Volume
Won't The German Ideology be a better introduction?
Still I agree these are the essential books.

Polite sage because these threads alway end in trolling.

[Anonymous No.3637223]

>>3637212
>Forget to sage
>MFW

[Anonymous No.3637230]

>>3637212
manifesto is like 70 pages or something
it was designed for the working man to understand

[Anonymous No.3638743]

Stirner

[Anonymous No.3638800]

>>3637223
my dad just asked me what I was laughing at, you almost made me explain 4chan to my dad, fuck you. 4CHAN LIT NO LESS NOT SAGING

[Anonymous No.3638835]

>>3637230
As was Wage Labor and Capital.

[Anonymous No.3638862]

Stirner, no seriously, Stirner.

[Anonymous No.3638868]

This is an easy ready and a fair representation of his thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Ideology

[Anonymous No.3638875]

>>3638862
This.

[Anonymous No.3639032]

I like Marx but I find the Marxist meta-narrative/teleology to be bullshit.

Capitalism is always on the verge of collapse and it hasn't happened yet and Marxists states seem worse than late capitalism at its most pig disgusting.

Are there any Marxists who don't subscribe to the teleology but still use Marxist analysis?

I heard Merleau-Ponty does this, correct?

[None !Rrxa7zePwI No.3639039]

take the early marx

[Anonymous No.3639046]

>>3639032
Communism is supposed to come out of a highly advanced state of capitalism. The 'marxist states' you refer too were more failed experiments of impatient peasants.

[Anonymous No.3639067]

>>3639032
>marxist states
>existing

[Anonymous No.3639073]

>>3639046
>Our system failed cause we were not highly advanced yet! Guys it's your fault! Let's try again!

[Anonymous No.3639076]

>>3639046
> durr we were wrong in hindsight but we're definitely right about it now

Just sounds like Westboro baptists or something.

[Anonymous No.3639078]

>>3639067
I laugh at this pic but I don't really get it. What was Bakunin all about? What about states?

[Anonymous No.3639080]

>>3639078
bakunin was an anarchist

[Anonymous No.3639086]

>>3637045

>Also, is there a way to read Marx without seeming like a douche?

By reading him in the Third World.

[Anonymous No.3639088]

>>3639080
I realize that, but that doesn't explain much.

[Anonymous No.3639091]

>>3639088
bakunin hated marx and told him pretty much what was in that pic was going to happen
just read bakunin, god and the state isn't that long

[Anonymous No.3639113]

>>3639073
>>3639076
I'm not even a Marxist but it's clear that Marx intended communism to follow thorough industrialisation, not precede it. In Russia and China they mostly roused the peasantry and tried to skip straight to utopia from feudalism and basically diverged from Marxism in such a way that you can't hold Marx' theory responsible for that than you can blame Nietzsche for Nazism.

[Anonymous No.3639129]

>>3639113
fair enough, but didn't Marx believe that the communist state would come really soon in his lifetime? Like late 19th century?

I just really can't buy into this whole "there will be a communist state, but I can't specifically state what it will look like, because that will just be ideology, but it's gonna arrive"

[Anonymous No.3639138]

>>3637136
this. if you want to approach th topic with a modernist twist, start with Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. it will show you how marx's theory of alienatio, reification and surpluss value manifest in today's society. then read das kapital keeping in mind the historical context (google: how to read marx) .

[Anonymous No.3639157]

>>3639129
Marx probably didn't believe there would be such technological advances.

Just saying, if we're still living in capitalism when we have robots capable of building other robots to do work for us then I'm gonna be POed

[Anonymous No.3639170]

>>3639167
Cool, I'm not OP, by the way, but I guess this is a serious recommendation to read Stirner? /lit/ has turned me off reading his work

[Anonymous No.3639167]

>>3639088
Bakunin said if 'the proletariat' (the party) takes over state power, that will just lead to a different kind of oppression, and the state will never 'wither away' (as marxists claimed). Stirner basically made a related argument even before Marxism really existed (in its materialist form), and Stirner's criticism of Feuerbach was instrumental in bringing Marx' change from idealism to materialism about.

[Anonymous No.3639175]

>>3639170
Your loss, the less Stirnerists the better.

[Anonymous No.3639195]

>>3639113
You have to hold Marx accountable for this. The two largest and most successful revolutions have taken place not in advanced capitalist states, but in partly feudal societies. Lenin and Mao are good to read to find out why Marx was wrong on this, but basically, the periphery is where revolution is more likely to happen, not the center.

[Anonymous No.3639301]

>>3639170
yes. The influence on Marx is well documented (Arvon, Essbach), less clear is his putative influence on Nietzsche. The parallels are definitely there.

[Anonymous No.3639322]

>>3639175
Why then did he write his book?
inb4 read it, I'm on /lit/; i don't read

[Anonymous No.3639368]

>>3639322
>Why then did he write his book?

"Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought — I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it.

If your weal lay at my heart, I should act as the church did in withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments, which make it a sacred duty for themselves to ‘protect the common people from bad books’. But not only not for your sake, not even for truth’s sake either do I speak out what I think. No —

I sing as the bird sings
That on the bough alights;
The song that from me springs
Is pay that well requites

I sing because — I am a singer. But I use you for it because I need ears."

~Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum

[Anonymous No.3639377]

>>3639067

[Anonymous No.3639389]

>>3639368
>No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world.
He remembers me of someone who suggested that darwins theory of evolution now applies more to passing on ideas then DNA.

[Anonymous No.3639393]

>>3639389
In case of men of course.

[Anonymous No.3639397]

>>3639377
lel