ngl thats kind of similar to me, though i came to hexbear at age 17 as a repressed gay teen stuck in a very right wing reactionary area of the UK, it was around about the time that george floyd got murdered on camera, britains left had been succesfully couped in front of our eyes and TERF stuff was really starting to take off here, generally just bleak all round. I remember posting dumb shit here, getting told it was dumb and what to read to stop being dumb, even though i dont use the site much anymore in the long run it was good for me imo.

to your credit you've always sound a lot more coherent than i did 5 years ago.

Read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris I think you will like it.

Don't forget to do lots of grass touching with friends Its more important than reading theory

I strongly recommend that you carry yourself here like any comrade, because some of the capitalists that rule over us are among the most childish and ignorant people on the planet are more than three times your age and you already have insight and awareness that they never did.

As a former educator that was always relieved to have students that were bright and perceptive and actually wanted to learn (not that I can blame those that didn't, considering how miserable the testing-industrial complex has gotten in my lifetime), I extend a hearty formal welcome. Glad to have you here!

So naturally, as any dumbass 14 year old socialist does, I downloaded a PDF of Capital and gave up immediately, eventually just reading wikipedia pages about different micro ideologies and watching Hasan Piker. Now, I was still an Amerikkkan, so my anti-AES and brainworms were still deeply rooted, and my 'one of the good ones,' Stalin was ebil, brainrot led me to be a Trotskyist. I read the permanent revolution, a bit of the manifesto (I wasn't much of a reader, if you couldn't tell by me being a trot), and got very zealous. Like, VERY zealous. I almost lost some friends over it.

Yep, sounds like me years ago

That being said, if you are going to read a book like Capital, why not read some other shorter texts to get used to the vocab, like Value, Profit, and Wages, by Marx, and Principles of Communism, and Socialism: Scientific and Utopian by Engels (that's how I got into it, online, if you can't buy books)

Then, you take a google doc or a libre doc, copy-paste a whole chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, or more, into one much more manageable docs to underline, take notes under, or ctrl + alt + 1, 2 etc. to bookmark it as a title or quote

(An ideal maximum to divide them would be 100 google doc pages, or less)

(Assuming you have a computer)

Welcome, again? I guess? Lol. Howdy!

Hello nerd

If you have trouble reading texts online you can find audiobooks of most of the popular marxists books on youtube, plus Capital is a very dense book

for what it's worth I always thought you sounded like an adult

hello

I would recommend starting with simpler things than Capital. for the economics there's Wage Labour & Capital and its complimentary text Value, Price, and Profit. For the grounding and connection then to Marxist analysis of history and society, and lessons on the development and evolution of class society and emergence of capitalism and how it all relates to historical and dialectical materialism, I recommend Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (and re-read the dialectics section a bunch).

Then for developing the philosophical methodology just the first chapter of the first Volume of The German Ideology (If your copy has an abridged/abstract version of the 3rd chapter of Vol 1 like this has that can be good too, but the full thing and other chapters and volume isn't really too significant for us imo, just debunking long-forgotten dead people and their now-fringe ideas; the first chapter is most important); and then maybe Marx's Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. These would help give you some very strong philosophical grounding and connect things all together into a framework along Marxist lines of historical and dialectical materialism and class struggle as opposed to bourgeois Liberalism in its lines of idealism, individualism, and great man history; and give you the tools of Marxist methodology to analyze things today. Without the philosophical methodology, you're only stuck on the dead past and 'vulgar materialist' copy/pasting of old analyses from bygone eras as they were onto the circumstances of today, rather than accurately and critically discerning the true nature of things and the forces which make them up as they are, in the moving living unfolding present and future

From that point even without yet delving into Capital much would be opened to you. Lenin's State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism would provide you no issues from this point here.

I am not a child but I was once not so long ago and would not have been half as coherent as you tbqh