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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Thank you for making this point in a normal way
sure...as individuals. If you're doing Marxism by yourself, you're doing it wrong.
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?
nope, not seeing a joke in there.
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.