If your position is that socialism hasn’t taken root anywhere, that makes Marx more “wrong,” not less.
What does this even mean? Did Marx make some kind of prediction like "we wiill have socialism in 50 years" or something?
Do you honestly think this approach is going to get anything done? We need tens of millions of more leftists to bring socialism to the U.S. Are tens of millions of people going to respond to “look, I know you’re lazy, but buck up and read this 150-year-old econ text and that will totally address your immediate material needs”?
It's a simple fact that you can't be a Marxist without reading Marx. That's what the argument is about. It seems you are ready to write a million excuses instead of just reading. And yes, laziness definitely plays a part here. I'm not expecting you to lead the revolution, and my version of praxis isn't forcing people to read Marx. You started the argument that reading Marx is not important. I simply said that means you're not a Marxist. This seems to bother you for reason. You want to call yourself a Marxist without doing what is possibly the most basic thing to call yourself a Marxist. The reason is that Marxism has a privileged position in the Left, so people use Marx to give weight to some of the dumbest ideas ("China will be socialist by 2050 because Marx said to develop productive forces" or "we need the state to control all production") . I'm going to keep cajoling people into reading Marx, because it always ends up with that person developing a better and more nuanced understanding of capitalism and socialism. It also tends to cure people of their whatever -ism they identify with.
What does this even mean? Did Marx make some kind of prediction like "we wiill have socialism in 50 years" or something?
It's a simple fact that you can't be a Marxist without reading Marx. That's what the argument is about. It seems you are ready to write a million excuses instead of just reading. And yes, laziness definitely plays a part here. I'm not expecting you to lead the revolution, and my version of praxis isn't forcing people to read Marx. You started the argument that reading Marx is not important. I simply said that means you're not a Marxist. This seems to bother you for reason. You want to call yourself a Marxist without doing what is possibly the most basic thing to call yourself a Marxist. The reason is that Marxism has a privileged position in the Left, so people use Marx to give weight to some of the dumbest ideas ("China will be socialist by 2050 because Marx said to develop productive forces" or "we need the state to control all production") . I'm going to keep cajoling people into reading Marx, because it always ends up with that person developing a better and more nuanced understanding of capitalism and socialism. It also tends to cure people of their whatever -ism they identify with.
How is this any different from "you can't buy into Newtonian physics without reading Newton's original papers"?
What textbook have you read that explains Marx's ideas? Practically all books have some kind of revisionism or inserts the authors own ideas into it.