this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
47 points (100.0% liked)
philosophy
20217 readers
2 users here now
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
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.