/lit/ - Literature

>>22982846
Read Main Currents of Marxism by Kolakowski.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Currents_of_Marxism

>>21797076
Read a book on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Currents_of_Marxism

What unit is use value denoted in? It is a quantitative economic unit right?

>>21582477
Start with Main Currents of Marxism, by far the most important philosophical work on Marxism. After that you could read Lukacs "History and Class Consciousness" as his Marxism, despite major problems, is the most true to Marx and most viable (aside from the various revisionist strands that today are just social demoracy).

>>21570369
And also read pic.

>>21518228
No, the working class are/were centred because of a logical deduction that the Proletariet are the subject-object of history, that is that they as a class had a special historic mission due to the fact that they're subjective need to overcome capitalism would mean the liberation of everyone (objective humanity) from exploitation by capital. Every other class merely places themselves on top and exploits a new lower class, e.g. the bourgoise replace the feudalists only to exploit the proles. However the working class, logically in this Hegelian-Materlist conception of history, have a special role in that their ascendancy doesn't mean creating a new lower class below the proles to be exploited, but the end of exploitation itself and a communist utopia.

It's not motivated by pathos towards workers, that's mere tactics or cant that comes later. Marxist support for the working class comes from a logical deduction within their philosophical system.

Read pic to understand them properly.

>>21481129
Instead of reading badly written screencaps, read books about what Marxism is and why it failed.

>>21436783
It's more complicated than that. Start here.

>>21249043
Kolakowski goes up to the 1970s and covers Marcuse (One Dimensional Man), where Western Marxism's turn to blacks, deviants, and lumpenproles begins. More interestingly Kolakowski points out that Marx's original endorsement of the working class comes from a philosophical deduction, not anything empirical nor practical study of economics (which for Marx would come later). If that philosophical deduction is wrong, if in fact it was not the working class who were going end all alienation and create the classless utopia of Winckelmann grecian dreams, then it is possible to transplant Marxism onto newly deduced liberationary groups: which is what Western 'New Left' Marxism did.

As history revealed post-Mark, the working class were content to reform capitalism, to form trade unions and bargain for better conditions, to get a "fair days wage for a fair days work", rather than abolish the wage system and create a classless society where all are liberated; to conventional Marxism the working class failed its historic mission, or perhaps Marx was wrong to identify them as its bearers, in any case new candidates can be put forward for the messanic role.

New Left philosophy is the practice of deducing new groups to cast as new messiahs for that Marxist schema of Young Hegelian eschatology.

>>21234006
It's been debunked.

>>20343438
Main Currents of Marxism

>>19113281
>Destruction of Reason
Main Currents of Marxism writes it off as unintellectual and the worst of vulgar Stalinism, where everything non-Stalinist is categorised as "irrational" because it opposes the party's (i.e. Stalin's) line, which as the embodiement of the consciousness of the world-historic agent class (the proles) is the only properly rational truth-maker, and therefore everything else is literally Hitler and creates Nazism.

Worth picking up? Looks comprehensive and well situated: 1970s Eastern Bloc philosopher reflecting on Marxism without excess attachment or resentment, at a histoical moment when the socialist states were stagnating but still alive, in power, and not yet defeated.

Not yet an autopsy on a dead subject that contemporary Marxist works must begin with (albeit some with hopes of resurrection or transmutation) but a philsophical history and critque of a living thing.