i swear to god, if i hear one more dumbass say a variant of "stupid-asses not reading theory" im gonna cum down their fucking throat.

like holy shit, slow the hell down queen. sorry that some of us don't feel like trying to decipher formal register bullshit, and would rather get their theory from people who don't sound like plantation owners.

"The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day, I call absolute surplus-value."

What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Is he talking about making long-ass workdays? Is he talking about creating extra value by overworking? What the fuck is it? Holy shit, the classism is rampant here and it's super fuckin' annoying to see.

If you tell somebody to read theory then you better be ready to help them fucking read it. Either that or don't tell them to at all, I could really give a shit what old generally-white guys said about a subject that I can understand by taking off fifteen minutes of my time to ask someone in a leftist discord. Ancient theory is useless in a modern domesticated setting, no-one talks like Marx nowadays.

/vent

  • Bob [he/him,he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Ancient theory is useless in a modern domesticated setting

    Pretty fucking stupid thing to say!

    If you're having trouble reading Marx, that's totally fine man. If you really want to try to get into it, it would help to read it in tandem with a good lecture or commentary series from a decent leftist. If it's still a problem then you can just find the most credible leftist sources you can to summarize various points. That'll never be as concrete as just reading Kapital and understanding it, but it's not like you're a bad person if you either don't have the time to do that or simply can't.

    That doesn't mean that the book itself is bad. I get that it's frustrating to be told to read something you are having trouble with, but nonetheless it would actually be good if large amounts of people read and understood Marx. That's just historically unquestionably true. From US radical black movements to the Chinese peasantry, reading and understanding Kapital has been pretty fucking important. It's a foundational and seminal piece of what is granted pretty involved work that is still extremely relevant to this day, and I'm not really sure why you're so upset about it beyond just feeling annoyed that you're being told to read it. There's nothing classist about that. The concepts in Marx's Kapital are extremely important and pretty fukn dense so it takes a lot of personal learning time to actually internalize them.

    There's other theory, too. Try reading some Lenin or someone like that if you're interested in that. It's vastly more digestible and just not as vast.

    I'm not an academic or anything I'm just some dumbass, so yeah it actually took me a lot of work to be able to get through Kapital. It's fukn hard. It's not so hard that it's impossible though, I just started with the assumption that what I think about the world is probably deeply ingrained, and if I'm going to learn anything different I'm going to have to do a LOT of work on weekends and nights and whenever I could fit it in. Helped to google things as I read it. It would have been pretty ridiculous for me to get mad at someone for not walking me through the entirety of it personally like my own personal tutor, and it would have been even more stupid of me to, having not read it at all, then proceed to call it ancient white man trash or something for classists that's irrelevant. Like, come man that's just pure cringe.