/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18347590]

what were the most insightful and enlightening books you've ever read? the ones that really opened your eyes and changed your life the most

pic related for me

[Anonymous No.18347604]

>baiting /pol/ in 2021

[Anonymous No.18347615]

>>18347604
This isn't /pol/ bait, it's baiting actual Marx readers.

[Anonymous No.18347617]

Mein Kampf.

[Anonymous No.18347856]

[Anonymous No.18347879]

[Anonymous No.18347913]

Das it mane :3

[Anonymous No.18348115]

The more I learn about Marxism the more I suspect that Capital was just the result of Marx becoming autistically obsessed with English theorists of political economy, to the point that he was obsessed with writing "the" book to supersede them. Even if it meant saddling the socialist movement with an outdated and ambiguous bible nobody asked for, and even if he should have known that nobody gave a fuck about English political economy. It seems like a positivist temptation on Marx's part, like he thought if he just did it well enough, it would overcome the problem of (by then already dated) bourgeois positivism, and other "objective" theories of political economy.

From what I understand nobody really read Capital for 40+ years, they read either Engels' summaries of his interpretation of Marx in Anti-Duhring or Kautsky's summaries of Marx, OR they took for granted that Capital was "the smartest book, scientifically true and proven smart" and told nonsocialists to read it, without reading it themselves or even being able to explain its contents, much like they do today. It seems clear that even in Second International times, most socialists who identified Capital as their bible had no fucking idea what it meant or even what it said.

If it was misinterpreted as positivistic, i.e. as simply correct and true because more "scientific" and "objective," then it failed miserably to do what Marx intended, because it contributed to a solidification of bourgeois naive scientism among the proletariat at the worst possible time. This would be Lukacs' Hegelian reading of a "ruptureless" Marx which is probably the orthodox one today. If it was simply positivistic, "scientific" in the epistemological rupture sense of Althusser, then it was either false (simply bad "science"), or the trueness of science is meaningless since you have to socially engineer the proletariat to accept it anyway, which makes it indistinguishable from a falsehood, and makes blanquism/leninism or gramscian voluntarism inevitable.

What's even more interesting is that Engels' style of materialistic-positivistic Marxism was probably embraced by the majority of average Second International Marxists, but nobody today would defend it anymore. Most people who identify with this kind of aggressive materialism are on reddit jacking off to Elon Musk, not Marx/Engels.

So did Marxism really even have a heyday? Capital was hardly understood in the Second International, if it is even understood now. It was little more than a fetish object for shallow materialists. It clearly did not raise class consciousness and cause a proletarian revolution, and may have even weakened class consciousness, while also giving communists an excuse to jack eachother off bickering about its interpretation for a thousand years instead of doing praxis.