[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 880 KB, 2016x2880, Leftist-Reading-List.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19778200 No.19778200 [Reply] [Original]

What do I need to read before reading Marx?

>> No.19778211

>>19778200
Just dont read marx

>> No.19778214

Kolakowski

>> No.19778216

You need to be somewhat familiar with the ideas of classical economics ex. Ricardo and Smith

>> No.19778217

>>19778216
Assaf Neto

>> No.19778225

>>19778200
Socialism is the idea that if you kill and steal from enough people, equality will emerge.

>> No.19778274

>>19778211
why not?

>> No.19778345

>>19778274
read him >>19778214 and you will understand

>> No.19778469

A good book on tying knots so you can hang yourself.

>> No.19779781

The Greeks
Aquinas and Ockham
Descartes (very important)
Locke
Leibniz
Hume
Kant
Fichte
Schelling
Hegel (very important)
Marx

If you do that, by the time you get to Marx you will no longer have any desire to read Marx, as philosophy begun in 1780 and ended in 1800.
Hegel is the finality of philosophy and of reason, so do not continue beyond him, unless for exposition of his system.

>> No.19779810 [DELETED] 

>>19778200
What's with the anarchist and new left retardation on here?

>> No.19779823

>>19778200
>>19778200
>need to read
nothing desu you can just read marx

if you want to have deeper understanding of his ideas read the classic economics, hegel and the young hegelians

>> No.19779825

>>19779810
reddit

>> No.19779843
File: 1.48 MB, 828x837, Capture.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19779843

>>19778200
The Square

>> No.19779852

Try reading Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Lukacs' essay Orthodox Marxism, Sidney Hook's "The Meaning of Marx" essay and Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx book, and as much as volume one of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism as you can handle. Maybe Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy? too. Basically the Western Marxist current.

It is semi-consensus nowadays that the Marxism of the Second International was more Engels than Marx. Most people did not read Marx, they read summaries by Engels and Kautsky, or summaries of their summaries. Engels was read far more than Marx was in particular. This should tell you there's a problem.

Lenin was a good Marxist but of the two unreconciled poles of Marx's thought, fatalism and voluntarism, Lenin leaned heavily on voluntarism and thus vanguardism, and he is rightfully accused of "blanquism." Subsequent Stalinism conversely elevated Engels' crypto-bourgeois "dialectical materialism" over Marx's critical "historical materialism" by emphasising the fatalist over the voluntarist stream in Marxist thought.

The two waves of Western Marxism or Marxist humanism came in the '20s with good Leninists like Lukacs and Korsch first "rescuing" Marxism from its crypto-bourgeois sclerosis (which caused Bernstein's supposed heresy), and then in the decades after WW2 as exiled intellectuals and leftists disillusioned by the USSR being just another totalitarian bureaucratic state tried to rescue the actual thought of Marx from "Marxism." This led to a long process of scholarship which, as I said above, basically created the modern consensus that Marx has unreconciled antinomies in his thought and is far more indebted to Hegelianism than either the vulgar Marxists of the Second International or Stalinism were willing to concede, but which Lenin and good Leninists correctly surmised.

This obviously also led to a partial naturalisation of Marxism to bourgeois thought, as it enabled non-Marxist leftists (and rightists) of various kinds to "enter into dialogue with" Marx's thinking without necessarily following it to EITHER Leninist or Stalinist conclusions. This contributed to what was already a self-consciously "post-Marxist" era of leftism and critical theory (French poststructuralism, second wave critical theory like Habermas, etc.).

Unfortunately the long post-Marxist era has also led to a lot of atavistic and uncritical variants of Marxism so you are likely to encounter relics of the 1890s screaming at you that Marx has no Hegelian component and recommending three different theorists as canonical even though those theorists all hated each other or belonged to different schools.

>> No.19779987

>>19779852
>Lenin was a good Marxist but of the two unreconciled poles of Marx's thought, fatalism and voluntarism, Lenin leaned heavily on voluntarism and thus vanguardism, and he is rightfully accused of "blanquism." Subsequent Stalinism conversely elevated Engels' crypto-bourgeois "dialectical materialism" over Marx's critical "historical materialism" by emphasising the fatalist over the voluntarist stream in Marxist thought.
This is interesting. I've always been annoyed with Marxists because of their voluntarism. You can not advocate revolution, and then hold diMAT/HisMAT as a worldview. Its not logically possible.

>> No.19780041

If you don't read and understand all of Hegel, you can't read Marx. Anyone that says otherwise is full of shit.

>> No.19780051

>>19778200
Capital is accessible it doesn't need prerequisite reading imo. Maybe read Heinrich's Introduction.

>> No.19780055

>>19780041
It would be much more profitable to read Hegel after Marx.

>> No.19780061

>>19779781
Hegel's system catastrophically failed at everything it set out to do.

>> No.19780075

>>19780055
You're a retard. Lenin says you won't understand even the first chapter of Capital if you haven't read Hegel's Science of Logic, and he's right. That's self-evident if you've read Hegel.

>> No.19780091

>>19780075
Lenin is wrong

>> No.19780096

>>19780091
Kill yourself

>> No.19780100

>>19780096
No

>> No.19780197

>>19779852
great post

>> No.19780205

>>19779987
>You can not advocate revolution, and then hold diMAT/HisMAT as a worldview. Its not logically possible.
why

>> No.19780432

Read Hegel if you are totally into it and want to crack your head.

Or just read Adam Smith's stuff especially Wealth of Nations, and then about the French revolution/Jacobins.
Read Communist Manifesto and then Capital

After that you can read both anti-communist and communist lit stuff like Masters of Deceit by Edgar Hoover or just any of the writings of the Marxists you are interested in on marxists.org

>> No.19780454

>>19779852
Sounds like early church history. Wonder what they have in common

>> No.19780637

>>19779781
What are the important texts of Hegel and Descartes?

>> No.19780685

>>19779825
>>19779810
>bro don't read this text because its red team and this site is blue team
Anti-intellectual losers. You don't have to be left-wing to want to read Marx, why is that hard to understand?

>> No.19780696

UNIRONICALLY you MUST start with the Greeks. You can read everything of value in Ancient Greek philosophy in like a month. Just do it.

>> No.19780798

>>19780696
What's a good reading list for the Greeks?

>> No.19780863
File: 1.38 MB, 3672x3024, Start_with_the_greeks.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19780863

>>19780798
Not that guy but here

>> No.19780903
File: 33 KB, 300x300, 1620925811071.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19780903

I was at a bookstore the other day and had to listen to some micro brew enthusiast looking faggot talk to the store owner about communism in his low gay sounding voice while I was browsing.

>> No.19780940

>>19780061
same with marx though

>> No.19780965
File: 43 KB, 644x800, 1642440999433.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19780965

>>19780685
>oh you don't like chomsky? must be because you are le anti-intellectual

>> No.19780983

just read the manifesto retard

>> No.19781088

>>19780965
>Chomsky
Who said anything about Chomsky?
>le wojak
Thanks for proving me right.

>> No.19781130 [DELETED] 

People recommend Adam Smith and Hegel but desu I'd say you don't need to. You're better off reading about European history from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the 1848 revolutions to get better context for Marx.

>> No.19781172

Why would you read the entire canon for a guy who says “fuck all that shit, materialism nigga”? How retarded do you have to be to not grasp from a summary all that you need to be able to judge his words on his merit. You’re not constructing a mental Mount Rushmore, you surely already have an idea on why you would want to read him? So stop listening to history of philosophy elitist fags and get on with your shit.

>> No.19781179

>>19778200
have sex but lets be honest that would be unrealistic for you

>> No.19781207

>>19780454
JEWS

>> No.19781666

>>19778225
You are retarded. Just that.

>> No.19781886

>>19781666
This

>> No.19782050

>>19778225
Peepeepoopooism is the idea that if you peepee and poopoo on enough people, shidding and farding will emerge.

>> No.19783309

bummp

>> No.19783435

>>19778211
cope

>> No.19783628

>>19779843
Wnos bottom right?

>> No.19783653

reading Marx just made me hate him even more, just saying. Maybe it would have some affect if I had never read a single book before, or I was completely unconscious of my surroundings

>> No.19783667

>>19783653
Just stop lying fag, you haven't read a word he's written.

>> No.19783669

>>19783667
I did tho, and I don't really feel special or like its necessary to give all my stuff to someone

>> No.19783675

>>19783669
>I did tho

No you didn't and the next sentence in your post demonstrates exactly that.

>> No.19783678

The only thing you really need to understand before Marx are general liberal ideas of political economy, and Hegel's dialectic. You don't even need to understand these things on a very complex level to get what Marx is saying on most topics.

>> No.19783849

>>19778211
this, marx is a waste of time, especially since everything in it has been disproven.

>> No.19783854

>>19779810
bunkertranny raid. It's been popping up in the last 2 weeks

>> No.19783940

Read everything on that picture. Don't listen to these degenerate americans

>> No.19784048

>>19783675
>IF YOU DIDN'T LIKE WHAT MARX SAID YOU DIDN'T READ HIM!
Marxism isn't a cult btw

>> No.19784274

>>19783628
Michel Clouscard

>> No.19784300

>>19783675
I especially loved when marx said that capitalism was Jewish and as long as jews are in a society the workers can never be free

>> No.19784323

>>19778225
this

>> No.19785112

>>19783435
Kill yourself.

>> No.19785542

Assorted lefty/left-adjacent lit (not Marx related):

The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
Colonialism and Neocolonialism - Jean-Paul Sartre
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paolo Freire
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah
Caliban and the Witch - Sylvia Federici
A World Without Cops - Geo Maher