Socialists helped ruin the earth in a mere 200 years and are now subscribing to the Elon Musk death cult delusions of "sustainability and clean energy". I wonder why???
Will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a "war of conquest", which, although it deals with a severe blow to his theory based on "justice and humanity", was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization? Or is it perhaps unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give the world trade a new direction? The "independence" of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in someplaces "justice" and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?
When middle class failsons like Will Menaker talk about "socialism or barbarism", this is what they mean. They literally identity more with the Roman slave oligarch empire instead of the indigenous "barbarians" who were subject to their "civilization"
Stuff like this is a great argument for why the original works of Marx and Engels should be held to no more reverence than the original papers of Newton. This stuff isn't holy scripture, not every line they wrote was 100% correct, and you can understand socialism without reading Marx and Engles the same way you can understand physics without reading Newton. You still need to read about the ideas these thinkers put forward, but there's no reason you absolutely must read the stuff they wrote personally.
You learn physics from a modern physics textbook and you should likewise learn socialism from modern socialist authors.
I agree that theory isn't scripture and should absolutely always be read with a critical eye, but I don't think not reading Marx and Engels is such a great idea lol. When you read modern Marxist thinkers, you're reading somebody else's interpretation of Marx, which might or might not be accurate. For sure, we don't need every person to read and memorize Capital back to back, Mao himself said even illiterate workers can grasp Marxism pretty well. But you also don't want it to be a giant game of telephone, where you learn about Marxism from a dude who learned about Marxism from a dude who also has thirdhand knowledge of Marx, and end up with shit like Pol Pot lol. If you have the time and the means, best thing you can do is form a solid understanding of theory by getting it straight from the horse's mouth, and then applying it to your present conditions and educating others.
What does "accurate" mean in this context? The goal isn't to get an uncut understanding of what Marx personally thought -- the goal is to get an understanding of what socialism is and how we might bring it about. Marx made great contributions to the latter, but those ideas exist independent of his writings.
Again, think about Newton's relationship to physics. A modern physics textbook is exactly that game of telephone you're describing: contemporaries of Newton read his original works, these ideas were later summarized in other works, and then today you have textbook-taught physicists writing modern textbooks that both summarize Newton's ideas and add updates on subsequent generations of thinking. A modern textbook might not have an uncut version of what Newton himself thought about physics, but it's superior to Newton's original works in terms of accessibility and incorporating recent developments in the field.
Another example is the law. Say your car gets rear-ended and you want to sue the other driver. You can go back and read a bunch of English cases to distill common law tort principles, or you can look up a modern practitioner's guide that will be more accessible and will update you on subsequent modifications to tort doctrine. There's some value to looking at foundational documents, but the emphasis should be on the newer material.
I don't know if the Newton comparison is apt, considering that, maybe barring Marx's critique of political economy, Marxism is mostly philosophy. It's not a precise and clear-cut field like physics or mathematics, you could absolutely get two people to read the same text and get two different interpretations. Both Lenin and Khrushchev are technically Marxists for example, right?
If the goal is just to get a clearer understanding of what socialism is, then I agree, you could absolutely understand a lot of it without ever reading Marx. But, just like you wouldn't become a expert on dialectics by watching a 5 min video on Hegel, if you're looking for a better understanding of Marx's ideas in regards to socialism, the best explanation you could get is from Marx himself. Some things just take more clarification than a couple formulas on a page, especially extremely abstract concepts that require a lot of historical context like dialectical materialism, and I sure as fuck wouldn't want the vanguard party of the 21st century to be educated solely through Breadtube vids lmfao.
With that being said, I wholeheartedly agree that it should be like what you're describing in your second paragraph. I don't think we've reached that point yet where you can ignore Marx entirely, but it should be our jobs to bring his ideas into the modern era and summarize and distill them to the point that it would make reading Marx obsolete. Imagine a collectively-written, dumbed-down, illustrated version of Capital, for example. For that to happen, though, some of us are gonna have to do the reading.
Amen, comrade hog!
deleted by creator