There's nothing wrong with reading Marx and Engels, of course, but when reading Marx, aside from his pamphlets Value, Price, and Profit; Wage, Labor, and Capital; The Communist Manifesto; and Capital, my experience was that drawing out points from his writing is a lot of extra work because he was just such a dense thinker, and you need to know about 18th century thinkers and currents that were popular at the time. If you don't have a lot of intimate knowledge about a wide variety of things that are by today's standards esoteric, it's difficult to make heads or tails of, for example, Marx's "On the Jewish Question". You open it with the expectation that he's going to have something to say about Jews, and then discover that he actually has many more thoughts about something else entirely. Also, again aside from the few things that Marx has published, a lot of his relevant writings are small excerpts found in private letters to friends or party members, or in rough drafts of things that were never published, stuff that is like finding a needle in a haystack if you don't know exactly where to find what you're looking for.
Anyway, the points I was searching for at the time are things that Lenin has already done the work for us on. He quotes at length and cites, so if you still feel itchy with suspicion, you can also more easily do the lookup for yourself while reading Lenin.
Engels I find overall a lot easier to read, something about Marx's style of writing also makes him very difficult to comprehend.
Very good points to keep in mind. I'm reading Marx semi chronologically through the Marx Engels Reader and just finished reading "On the Jewish Question" yesterday. You're right that it's very difficult to understand, I feel like I need to have an intimate knowledge of Hegel before I can even start comprehending it, haha.
The ME Reader is pretty good. It's organized into different sections like 'The Early Marx', 'The Critique of Capitalism', 'Revolutionary Program and Strategy', and includes the relevant excerpts from Marx and Engels on those topics. It also has good explanatory footnotes for each work.
The only thing is that it often only includes excerpts of the works, and the translations are sometimes a bit complicated (compared to the ones on marxists.org)
There's nothing wrong with reading Marx and Engels, of course, but when reading Marx, aside from his pamphlets Value, Price, and Profit; Wage, Labor, and Capital; The Communist Manifesto; and Capital, my experience was that drawing out points from his writing is a lot of extra work because he was just such a dense thinker, and you need to know about 18th century thinkers and currents that were popular at the time. If you don't have a lot of intimate knowledge about a wide variety of things that are by today's standards esoteric, it's difficult to make heads or tails of, for example, Marx's "On the Jewish Question". You open it with the expectation that he's going to have something to say about Jews, and then discover that he actually has many more thoughts about something else entirely. Also, again aside from the few things that Marx has published, a lot of his relevant writings are small excerpts found in private letters to friends or party members, or in rough drafts of things that were never published, stuff that is like finding a needle in a haystack if you don't know exactly where to find what you're looking for.
Anyway, the points I was searching for at the time are things that Lenin has already done the work for us on. He quotes at length and cites, so if you still feel itchy with suspicion, you can also more easily do the lookup for yourself while reading Lenin.
Engels I find overall a lot easier to read, something about Marx's style of writing also makes him very difficult to comprehend.
Very good points to keep in mind. I'm reading Marx semi chronologically through the Marx Engels Reader and just finished reading "On the Jewish Question" yesterday. You're right that it's very difficult to understand, I feel like I need to have an intimate knowledge of Hegel before I can even start comprehending it, haha.
How is the ME Reader?
The ME Reader is pretty good. It's organized into different sections like 'The Early Marx', 'The Critique of Capitalism', 'Revolutionary Program and Strategy', and includes the relevant excerpts from Marx and Engels on those topics. It also has good explanatory footnotes for each work.
The only thing is that it often only includes excerpts of the works, and the translations are sometimes a bit complicated (compared to the ones on marxists.org)
Thanks! I don’t know any German so I’ll have to make do with what they provide re:translation.
So why aren't you reading Hegel?