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.
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.
sure...as individuals. If you're doing Marxism by yourself, you're doing it wrong.
Americans read at a 7th grade level lol
deleted by creator
Thank you for making this point in a normal way
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.