/lit/ - Literature

Worth the read?

Any recommendations for an art history book for the layman?

>>1154408
>implying Marxism is something else than the scientific analysis of the material life process of capitalist society, ie political economy
Also, the Coming Insurrection is a load of horseshit, they give their best to sound as dangerous as the Situationists while spouting nothing but hot air. Insurrectionism, my arse. If you want to read something worth your time, stay with the original, you could begin with "On the poverty of student life".
And Empire... two old operaists looking for a surrogate for their holy cow, the industry proletariat. Actually, over here in Europe, the hype over that book died down soon, then the Multitude-concept was milked for half-arsed social democrat activism for a while (I think that's its only use) and now nobody cares about Multitude, Empire and all that crap any more. No loss.

Hey OP, commiefag here. If you want a firm understanding of marxism, you won't get around reading Capital, at least try the first volume. It was edited by Marx himself (unlike the other two volumes which were published by Engels after Marx's death) and is actually quite readable. If you have the right kind of cynical humour, you might even laugh out loud sometimes while reading, Marx was a dirty old bastard.

If you want a tl;dr version of Capital vol 1, you might want to try "Results of the Direct Production Process" (you can find it online), it was intended to be a chapter at the end of vol 1, rehashing its contents (ie the production of surplus value) to lead over to vol 2.

The Communist Manifesto is a great piece of rhetoric, but you should always remember that Marx/Engels wrote it before they had really developed their economic theories, they even retracted some statements in it a couple of years after publishing it.

As to more reading tips: perhaps Lenin, after all he was really influential on 20th century communism. "What is to be done?" is for example one of the communist classics on the question of organisation. Council communism and left communism are pretty interesting, too, Pannekoek, Bordiga etc. Try marxists.org.

Recommend me something eloquently written with homosexual subtext, please?