Wait, this whole time he could write clearly? Why didn't he do it in the shit you guys made me read?
Because he has to adhere to German academic writing tradition. Philosophers do the same thing, where the expound pointlessly on a subject for like three to four pages before getting to the point.
I really strongly disagree with the idea that Marx digresses at all often uselessly on a topic, especially in a work like Capital, his training in the German philosophical tradition enhanced his ability to deepen his conceptual analysis and preempt criticisms. He is also laying out a certain method of analysis in these texts. You might see it as useless, but there is a reason why is has been one of the most intellectually (and politically) fruitful bodies of though in the modern world.
preempt criticisms
"Hey this guy makes a lot of sense!" (ghost of Marx interrupts) You might not agree with me, let me go on for a few pages... :agony:
Lol yh I agree that can be annoying, he's also responding to criticisms he preempts in his time, rather than ours, so it's natural some of what he's referring to might not be clear to the modern reader. But this lack of clarity is an extrinsic rather thern an intrinsic issue he can't really be blamed for. That's an issue where the editor should be making clear with footnotes and endnotes what the context is so that the modern reader can understand wtf Marx is talking about.
Yh I mean Freud has his own problems but they're more due to the scientific status of his claims and issues with his methods imo than due to the clarity of his theory.
There's a difference between something being difficult, because it's densely but very systematically written, so that people are likely to not find it completely clear on first reading, and it being unclear due to the writer not making their terms, assumptions and the steps of their arguments clear. The latter is a problem they can be blamed for, while in the first case it is often possible for them to be clearer, but if it's because the content they are discussing is difficult, then it can't really be blamed imo. A text can be difficult and still intrinsically or internally clear imo, as anyone who studies mathematics finds out.
Some works are difficult and its unfair to demand that they make themselves clearer at the cost of not analysing relevant content.
I really strongly disagree
Same, I think Marx can be quite poetic when he wants to be. Hegel or critical theorists like Adorno are far more challenging to read than Marx, in terms of prose.
In his letters (I can't remember where exactly) Marx actually does mention at a point that he also considered Capital to be a work of art. It is definitely very literary, especially in certain sections with their descriptions of the experiences of the working class, but that literary quality definitely doesn't preclude it being scientific or relatively clear, if difficult, and even he could have been clearer (including by making it less literary, although then perhaps it might not have been quite as successful or moving).
Adorno imo is an actual example of intellectual masturbation. I tried reading Against Epistemology and I found it pretty impenetrable, even when you've read Hegel. Hegel is obviously not easy and I think could be clearer (Force and Understanding in the Phenomenology is something I've reread I dont know how many times and I'm still not sure what the argument is in fine-grained detail).
Holy fuck right? Have you seen his hand writing ✍ by the nines, marx if I ever meet you in the after life I will force him to rewrite capital with emojis as punishment for capital volume one. I will make that insurable hegal watch.
I honestly really don't understand the claims that Marx is unclear, unless we just mean difficult. He is clear and relatively unambiguous when he introduces, uses and develops concepts. He can write densely, but the concepts are fairly clearly defined or characterized in his texts, and his system(s) of thought hang together extremely tightly, and the latter virtue might have been reinforced by the emphasis on systematic philosophy in German idealism. While his syntax can be write complex at times, the main difficulty of the text is due to the fact that he's doing serious scientific analysis. He's not just batting out essays for intellectual masturbation. Marx is a a writer where the difficulty of the writing is, to a great if still incomplete degree, a reflection of their scientific depth of insight and rigor of analysis. That being said he also has far less scientifically dense texts, and those I think are extremely clear.
Hey, I get that you're defending your boy, but your post comes across a little as "you're just too stupid for Marx."
I think your post misses the point though. Lots of people are told to "read Marx" when they come into the movement. It is, like you said, a scientifically dense text. This makes it a challenge for most people. This is a frustrating experience. The meme you're complaining about is people venting a common frustration with a movement rite-of-padsage.
But also, Marx finds ways to be unclear in some of his less rigorous texts. There's a couple common sins:
run on sentences that cover whole paragraphs
Whole chapters where the evidence is laid out long before the argument and you have to read for pages without knowing where he's going.
Words that mean one thing in day-today speech and something else in Marx (reproduction, fetish, realization, valorize, sublimate, etc.)
Jargon that doesn't usually show up outside of Marxism: reify, proletarian, etc.
Marx is unclear for 99% of people and pretending it's easy makes you look like a big-brained elitist.
I love Marx's writing but I wanna agree with you. Most of what he wrote was intended to be German academic writing. That is, solid, obtuse, and hard to poke holes in. He was actually a little more loose than the typical German philosopher of the time though, like he'd put in little characters like Mr. Moneybags or he'd talk about werewolves. I get a kick out of when he does that, he was pretty funny sometimes. He was also kind of a pedantic asshole and would preemptively try to anticipate contrary arguments and spend full paragraphs arguing with imaginary liberal economists.
Other times he was responding to other intellectuals in the newspaper, like his years long feud with Herbert Spencer. They also had a particular style.
He did write for a general audience sometimes, like the Manifesto is probably the clearest example. He also worked as a journalist for the New York Tribune. I can recommend reading his articles about the Crimean War as it was happening, they're pretty standard and easy to follow.
This makes it a challenge for most people
sure...as individuals. If you're doing Marxism by yourself, you're doing it wrong.
your post comes across a little as "you're just too stupid for Marx."
Americans read at a 7th grade level lol
Most of those things don’t make Marx unclear, IMO. Using philosophical jargon is not unclear, it only makes it less accessible — there’s a difference.
The way Marx uses words like valorize and realize are not unclear nor unreasonable. In fact their usage is exactly accurate, in the full sense of the words rather than the typical partial sense. And really some of that just comes down to translation, so you can’t fully blame Marx for the particular words used.
I don’t think he actually talks about dialectical sublation in Capital or the Manifesto or any of his “layman” texts.
The problem is not at all clarity, it’s just exacting and dense, like reading a textbook. If I handed someone a calculus textbook, they probably wouldn’t be able to grasp all of it in an afternoon. It’s about managing expectations, the text is fine. Repetitive might be a valid critique, but then again one has to decide if it was necessary — I would say so.
Hey, before I engage in an argument over semantics, did you get the joke?
Okay, so, that explains your response. The joke is that Marx can write in a way that's accessible to modern laymen, but didn't in texts like Wage, Price and Profit, but no one in communist spaces tells to read his letters about life in London, people only tell me to read his economic lectures.
The joke is that I'm angry at Marx for being hard for me to read (a common experience) and expect him to write the same way in his economic lectures (which is funny because it's an unrealistic expectation on multiple levels.) The joke is also that I'm mad at this website for telling me to read the economic stuff instead of the fluffy stuff, as though the fluffy stuff has just as much utility as the economics. The joke is that I've misunderstood the utility of reading Marx.
century old translated complex scientific text: "how could this possibly be unclear???"
I think there are some possible critiques to be made of the presentation of Capital, in terms of how he orders the presentation of material. But yh it is a work of social science, political economy and philosophy of revolutionary importance, and he is emphatic that it should be a keystone of scientific socialism. And yh translation can sometimes not help, especially from German-idealism inflected German.
Long sentences make my head hurt when I am not fully there. For example after Covid Brain fog it was incomprehensible to me, maybe other people feel like that more often?
Yh there are also other conditions like the reader's health, whether they're getting enough sleep, eating healthily, and so on. People should ofc not be criticized for not having the time, energy, or inclination to read 3 enormous tomes of polical-economy, sociology and philosophy, which is simultaneously a work of politcal economy and a critique of political economy. My main criticism of Capital actually has to do more with the overall macro-structure of the book. The arguments in themselves, when reflected on, I think are clear, albeit difficult. I've also been in the situation where I am reading it with brain fog and it feels like I'm bashing my head against a wall made of cotton.
You don't need to read Capital to be a Marxist, or to understand the core of Marxism, or even to have a sophisticated Marxism. But it is a key part of Marxism, and it's not fair to demand than something which might be intellectually challenging should be simplified at the cost of the scientist distorting the meaning or argument of what they're saying, or by sacrificing content.
Tbh tho, I think that the core, most important argument of Marx are not difficult for people to understand. It depends on how it's presented and Marx could, I agree have made it easier on us, though that's why we also have popular expositions and simplifications that only present the core arguments in digestable form. This is why it's important to have other political-economists who can produce more streamlined, digestible, popularized versions of the arguments for people to get a decent grip of the main points. If people want to see the arguments in all of their detail, then there are technical expositions by other political-economists or interpreters of Marx, or they can try read the original text.
Another issue is that Capital was unfinished, though this is not a defence for Vol. 1 which had been published during his lifetime.
Just imagining him going
"Oh you're Bismark's niece?? Funny..." in an ice cream shop lolnah he's too much of a wife guy for any romcom who's plot doesn't involve jenny
this is one of the reasons I just can't believe Marx had a love child with the housekeeper
My rabid Christian fascist in denial libertarian co-worker preaches all day about Marx being a Demon worshiper who cheats on his wife willy-nilly and cites that dubious claim as historical facts.
I personally think it's more likely Engel's kid, not the child of someone else outside of Marx's household alltogether since all historical evidence that surrounds the man points towards him being a serial monogamous wife-guy with a bad case of loving his wife a huge amount.
The claims you hear from these Christian fascist libertarian types as you mention are often:
#1 Marx had a secret love child with his housekeeper
#2 Marx was bad with money
#3 Marx was a devil worshipper
For #1, all we know is Marx’s housekeeper had a child. There is zero evidence Karl was the father, other than some extremely spurious claims by a descendant made a century later during the height of the Cold War.
For #2, no Marx was never rich but that was largely due to being a political exile and radical who for obvious reasons, no capitalist wanted to hire. No reason to think he was actually blowing through a lot of money.
Now when talking to these Christian fascist libertarian types, I have asked them who their political hero is; and invariably they always say “Thomas Jefferson”. And when they do, I will say something like “ok, let’s say #1 and #2 are true. Marx had an affair and had a hard time making ends meet. But JEFFERSON, that guy, we know for a fact he forced himself on his slaves and was almost comically bad with money (he would blow money on wine and books to the point of bankruptcy despite living on the free slave labor of others)”. So if we’re going to judge the political thoughts of people based on their marital fidelity and ability to manage money - even assuming the worst about Marx - your hero really fails that test way worse than Marx. Even bringing up morality in general, Jefferson owned human beings as property, that kind of overshadows anything Marx did anyway.
And while #3 isn’t really relevant, Marx wrote some horny letters to Jenny when he was a teen that invoked satanic imagery, which was apparently kind of a fad at the time. Reading literally anything else Marx has written clearly shows his atheism. But then again, lots of Christians think atheistic Satanists actually believe in a real Satan, so…
Now when talking to these Christian fascist libertarian types, I have asked them who their political hero is
My brainwormed coworker says Milton Friedman or some shit, like an actual libertarian ideologue. Which is a fun alternative to hearing Tommy J.
cheats on his wife willy-nilly
CEOs swapping their sex slave wives is totally not satanic capitalist ideology
I've recently been thinking the kid might belong to August Willich. The time frames match up too neatly. Could have been anyone though.
I'm of the opinion that people obsessed over this minutiae of history are woke moralist scolds obsessed with idealism.
Lol maybe I should call my co-worker a woke moralist next time he brings up Marx and that kid In a conversation
I like how this meeting is described like it's happening in a Visual Novel.
I am on a quest to find the best Marx biography myself. Haven’t found it yet, seems like there isn’t one definitive one out there. Michael Heinrich has apparently written a great one but he’s only done one of three volumes (or the others haven’t been translated into English yet, I don’t remember).
I'll check that out, the translation of vol 1 is published by Monthly Review, so I'll take that as a good sign
What's that one phrase mean? "Black and white to the tip of her nose" Is he saying she's very rigid in her ideology? Like that she only sees things in black and white. Or is it some kind of phrase meaning she's got an upper class affect?
Well, yes but!
The flag of Prussia is black and white and Marx might do a slight pun on it, that she is very National and Prussian (which makes sense for Bismarck's niece), but the understanding was also that Prussia was rigid and black and white, so it does work on two levels (flag and associations with Prussia in addition to rigid black and white thinking). To the tip of the nose is likely a translation of a specific phrase which is "very much". There are a couple of bad children's stories about something like that, however the phrase is more common in military context.
It wasn't uncommon and remains common in 1930 and even sometimes today to use the colours of flags to describe people's actions. In the last decades though it is rarely found in the wild and mostly confined to some circles. My grandmother though, for her it was a common colloquium, i.e. call someone black red white would label them monarchist or reactionary, those people would label republicans with black red mustard (black red yellow/gold being the republican flag version).
One example of Prussian rigidity (though only one aspect of it, not so much the morality) is the Hauptmann of Köpenick/the Captain of Köpenick a person creates a uniform for themselves commands a group of soldiers and orders the soldiers to squat a post office/bank and give him the money of the bank. All people including the boss of the squatted building complies.
i believe ur correct. she sees the status quo as unquestionably good and any threat to it as an absolute wrong. this is demonstrated later when she is “astonished to learn that she had fallen into ‘red’ hands”
"Black and white to the tip of her nose"
This is a modernist interpretation and not a dive back into the historical period to figure out context, but I'd agree with each possibility you chose as an "all-the-above" answer.
Wow, the train situation has actually improved since then. I couldn't find even a historical North Western station, but starting from Paddington, there'd be a train in 3 minutes, half an hour and an hour.
You can imagine what an uproar this would cause with blind or other vulgar democrats - my conspiracy with bismark
Shit never changes, does it.
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