Began my journey into communism by reading Marx and Engels strictly out of some suspicion of "the taint of the USSR". After I had read enough and was satisfied, and went on to get my feet wet with Lenin I discovered that if I'd just started with Lenin, I could've gotten a lot more relevant reading done in a much shorter period of time.
This.
Lenin is the means of understanding how to put any of that into practice, as well as a generally more readable writer. Plus more emphasis on the modern forms of liberalism and what social democracy would become, and an understanding of internationalism and self-determination that Marx and Engels never really managed. Keep in mind how Ho Chi Minh found the answers to every observation and deeply held feeling he had just by reading some Lenin. Lenin makes sense of it all in a way no one else does
Huh interesting. I'm starting to read theory and only sticking with Marx and Engels for the same reason as you did.
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)
Thanks! I don’t know any German so I’ll have to make do with what they provide re:translation.
what I've found is that Lenin makes a lot of sense and Marx isn't a prophet or anything even if Lenin and Marx disagreed on an issue there's no inherent reason to believe that Marx was the correct one
Lenin says, right at the beginning of State and Rev, that the only way to understand what he's about to put forward is to understand Marx and Engels and quotes them prodigiously. I think at one point he even apologises for all the M&E quotes because he knows they're kind of dense and hard to unpack in places.
