this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
Short Attention Span Reading Group: summary, list of previous discussions, schedule
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Maybe I am simply the 2nd coming of Marx, but every time I feel like I have a novel thought I find some critical theorist that has formulated it into far better words than I ever have. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and various works of Baudrillard seem far more relevant to modern life than what Marx was talking about during industrialized society. Those works are obviously deeply rooted in Marx, but Marx simply did not predict how society would turn out.
How would you know this if you don't read theory?
He very clearly laid the groundwork for all of this in Capital. We are the primary traded commodities now, our very time and attention is the last remaining commodity and frontier to extract potential profit from. Marx 'simply didn't predict how society would turn out' because Marx didn't make predictions or prognostications like that.
Anytime someone is like 'we need to move past Marx' I know it is because they haven't actually read Marx. It's like people saying we need to move past Newton because Einstein's theory of relativity exists.
All of the dynamics that Marx describes are still present because he was describing our modern system in it's infancy, and as much as everyone wants to claim that we are now in a post-modern state, that is simply false, we are in ultra-modernity, where everything has been commodified.
I read theory dawg... just not all of capital cuz its long :X
I've read plenty of Lenin, Marx, Baudrillard, Debord, Leslie Feinberg, etc... I am not post marxist... I am simply post-Marx since he was 200 years ago. He wasn't wrong, he simply just didn't predict the completely corrupting nature of capitalism as emergence is basically unpredictable....
Marx is great at diagnosing the problem with Capitalism during industrialization. He was incapable of predicting the "Spectacle" as Guy Debord puts it as it emerged from modern media.
Dont discount modern thinkers! They love Marx. They utilize Marx to help us identify the contradictions of today because Labor Theory of Value doesn't apply to the average worker who has literally zero tangible labor output.
Disregarding EITHER is dogmatic and ANTI Marxist in principle!
Lol He literally does describe the corrupting nature though! In the work that you said you read!
"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." - The Communist Manifesto
I don't disregard modern authors, but they are often just describing aspects of what Marx was able to coalese into a fairly comprehensive whole. I have read all of them as well. I don't reject their conclusions, but if you think that the 'average worker' has zero tangible labor output, you are being very myopically first world to the international economic system.
Please don't throw around words like 'dogmatic' if you haven't actually read all of the supposed 'dogma'.
Thats fine, maybe modern authors put Marx into Modern English. What you wrote does not really seem to encapsulate the full message found within the Society of the Spectacle. The idea of alienation from the idea of labor itself. Yes the we rest on the laurels of the entire "third world" that actually produces what we consume, but white collar workers in the first world are literally alienated from doing productive labor to begin with. Its a complete non starter. We humans yearn to labor, and we Westerners are prevented from laboring toward anything productive.
There are plenty of factory jobs in the U.S.
They suck, are mostly second and third shift, and do not pay very well, but they do exist. I know because I have worked them most of my life. Labouring towards anything productive is not possible under capitalism, as you will always be laboring to buy porky another yacht.
The Society of Spectacle goes into the modern formulation of Marx's principles of alienation, and what those dissolving ties look like, as we literally dissolve our ties with reality itself in order to propagate capitalist accumulation.
I dont even know what we are arguing about man. I am probably one of the most dogmatic marxists you can find, I just dont think dogmatism is virtuous so I try to avoid it in my arguments. I love hexbear, nowhere else on the internet would I have this conversation and it reminds me of my demsucc days lol
I am arguing that you need to finish reading Capital lol and not just vibe it out, because the principles that exist within it are still incredibly relevant to the modern economic formation. That's it.
I think the end result is the same if I end up just telling everyone to read Capital anyways.
I think it is hypocritical to tell someone to read something you haven't read yourself imo, but this conversation has started circling and I'm not a strict Maoist so you do you I guess.
I read Capital (in laymen form) when i was in my teens and have internalized it into my later years. Sure I could've internalized it better, but "look toward some form capital" as some form of disbelief has worked for me for many years.
Googling "If Marx was correct about LTV then what prevents marketing people from getting paid" is basically Vol 2. I don't need to have read all several volumes of Capital, for the some reason. Marx didnt have Marx when he was writing capital: for the human condition, Capital is blatantly correct. At least to myself that is true.
I concede I am too far drunk to elaborate though
BECAUSE OF CAPTALISM
gottem
just want to say i enjoyed eavesdropping on this
hope you both have a good night
Lol. Look, none of what you just said made any sense to me, but enjoy your night.
I will say one thing, correct, Marx didn't have Marx when writing Capital. However, that doesn't mean we have to reinvent the wheel. Stand on the shoulders of giants.
Imagine if Lenin decided to stand on the shoulder of giants instead of trying to make himself a giant. Idk seems like we can take what's work and try to improve it.
To never imagine yourself as a giant is selling yourself short. I am just as capable as Marx, as Marx was simply describing reality.
Please tell me you are trolling.
Lenin constantly references Marx and Engles throughout his works, with most of his critiques of his opponents stemming directly from what he believed to be misinterpretations (revisions) of Marxist thought. Lenin was always, always, sure to tie his particular analysis of the material conditions within Russia back to Marx's original observations, littering his works with direct quotations from Marx that would refute his opponents. He literally wrote one of the most comprehensive known biographies of Marx.
You don't understand the metaphor. You can be giant while standing on the shoulders of giants. If there was ever a giant that stood on the shoulders of a giant, it was Lenin. If you want to be Lenin, then you have to read Marx.
You act as if Baudrillard, Debord, Sartre, or Beauvoir don't literally cite Marx directly constantly. Same is obviously true for Lenin.
Marx took someone else's Labor Theory of Value to prove his point about surplus extraction, do I need to read Adam Smith and Ricardo before I read Marx? No. They're baked into what Marx wrote. Would I understand more if I did? Sure, that's true for literally any damn pursuit of knowledge.
I legit don't understand what you're saying. I've read Vol 1. I've read various passages from the other volumes of capital, ive read critique of the gotha program, I've read Gundriss. I've done all of that and have defended Marx and Engels work to prove they did not sneak in teleology, in an academic setting.
I still think you're missing a whole world of philosophy by thinking Marx had everything figured out. He was clearly very bad at predictive history to say the least.
And you are stubbornly saying that for some reason philosophy only starts when modernity begins. You are literally placing your trust in liberal self-selected interpretations of Vol. 2 (or hell, other Marxist interpretations, including my own, of Vol. 2) rather than reading it yourself and forming your own opinion to compare to these modern authors. You want to be a giant but all of these giants before you did every bit of reading, writing and research they could get their grubby little mitts on. That is imo, what creates a giant.
I 100% recommend that you read Adam Smith and Ricardo as well, so you can even argue with Marx on his interpretation of it. Hell, I 100% recommend that you read Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, etc. We live in an age with access to archives of knowledge Marx would have literally killed for. Excersize it.
Marx was pretty clear. It was socialism OR barbarism. If the system is rational, it will proceed towards communism and the freedom and betterment of mankind, if the system remains mired in irrationality, it will inevitably collapse under the weight of it's own contradictions and revert back towards the feudal economy, or some other formation that values protection of accumulated wealth over the common interests of those that create it. He was also clear that without active and organized party and labor movement with the means to defend itself and the revolution, the system will never naturally bring itself towards rationality. You clearly get this if you are arguing that Marx didn't have teleology.
Men make history, but they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing. And he was correct. If anything it was Lenin who really fucked up his analysis, thinking that if Russia fell then there would be nothing stopping Germany and the entirety of industrial Europe from becoming communist. Without a communist revolution occuring in the most industrialized nation in the world after WWII, the capitalists were able to essentially dictate the course of modern history, and we now live in an incredible state of being where two countries at war with each other can still be their greatest energy partner and provider for most of it. A fully irrational system for the betterment of humanity. And it may take another couple 100 years, but eventually, the oil will run dry, the mines will be empty, and for what? So that .001% of humanity never has to work another day in their life? To go forth and strip the light from the stars for the sake of number go up?
I'm not saying he had everything figured out, but I am saying that the principles of capital reproduction that are laid out in Capital Vol. 2 are the foundations for a real understanding of modern political-economy and you are insisting that you don't have to read it because you are just so good at this analysis, but others should. It's maddeningly absurd logic.
Argueably Vol. 2 is even more important than Vol. 1 because it is where he gets into the most important parts, how capital is formed, accumulates and is in-of-itself vested with power in a way that never actually existed prior to modernity (which, argueably it did, just not in the kind of concentrations that divorced it from the polity as an independent entity. Even Crassus was still a creature of Rome. But one could also argue that Marx is pretty clear about a development period being about the overall tendency in the period, not if something was 100% one thing or the other, but I digress).
Look, you can do whatever you want, read whatever you want, tell people to read whatever you want. It's not your job to live up to my standards. You can respond however you wish, but know that I am considering this conversation finished for my own sake.
Right. Again, I don't really know what we are disagreeing about. I acknowledge their is knowledge to be found in Vol 2. I am simply stating it isnt really that important to me right now, which is why I am posting about consciousness and trans liberation instead. I personally want to write a paper on Labor Theory of Value and the implications AI has on labor but I don't have the time or energy to do that so I focus on more frivolous shit.
Yeah I hope to get to it someday. There is infinite to read and not infinite time. I can either learn lots of small things or deep dive into Vol 2 and probs be scratching my noggin for the next several months as I have to read supplementary works to make sense of what Marx was talking about, because that mother fucker used some very pretty language that doesn't translate too well to English all the time.
I still don't think Vol 2 is gonna teach me about Love like Sartre or Beauvoir...
When I say I've read enough Marx, what I mean is I have read enough Marx to get the gist and now possess the ability to use his works as a resource whenever I run into a question that stumps me. Basically like a Bible. I may not know everything in the Bible, but it has now transitioned from a roadblock to a stepping stone. Thats the important part.
Ugh fuck I literally cannot help myself.
I don't know if you want to learn about love from people who notoriously groomed their female students for Sartre's pleasure. Like, maybe it is a French v.s. American cultural difference, but the fact that they would usually completely abandon their protege professionally when the sexual relationship was done speaks volumes to what they actually cared about.
Not that either of them don't have interesting things that they have written about, but taking their writings on love seriously without considering their actions is like taking Chomsky's political philosophy seriously after the revelation of his close association with Epstein. These things must exist in context to the material world around them. The author may be dead, but I can still smell their corpse rotting.
Idk, I never even know what questions I actually have until I actually read something.
Sartre in particular is obviously a giant privileged, anxiety ridden, piece of shit and you realize that the moment you read a single thing he has to say about love. That's actually kinda why I like reading his work, it's like defining the color red by defining every color it's not.
Like... The Chomsky point is great. I've read a lot of Chomskys political theories and knowing they're all wrong while I was reading them gave them an entirely different meaning. I can logically follow some of Chomskys points but then have to contend with why they were inaccurate, which is useful philosophizing.
Like... Beauvoir was obviously more good faith with their approach to love and feminism but they were also a pedophile... That means somewhere in her writings is something that will maybe try to convince you to sign a French petition in 1977. Knowing that before engaging with their work lets you keep your guard up and actually intellectually engage with the material instead of subsuming your brain to it after you agree with them enough in the first chapter. You'll be critical throughout because you know they're a fucking pedo. And French.
That's a pretty good point. Idk, I guess if I was going to read stuff from a pedophile I would rather it be from ancient Greece, guess that is where my bias lies lol.
You should def check out at least a lil Pre War Sartre. Its nuts. He basically makes the determination that almost ALL love is Bad Faith and both lovers are reducing the others freedoms... He basically sees Freedom as the one good thing humans should aim for because hes a privileged French fuck who skipped several steps on the hierarchy of needs. Post War he changed his tune realizing that, in fact, society is pretty impactful on determining ones freedom... Dipshit. Took an entire war to realize material conditions matter.
and honestly the fact that all these french fucks were morally justifying the grooming to themselves through their writings makes them even more interesting to read. You can really see where they went wrong.