Oops, yes, I meant prologue

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We've not read it but it was one of the choices in the votes once

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Do you think it brings anything new to the analysis of neoliberalism?

Capital volume 1 by some guy named Carl Max. Still slowly working my way through this one. It’s a bit faster now that I have decided that I don’t have to read all the footnotes, but I will not be speeding through this one like a work of fiction.

You can do it, I believe in you! :Care-Comrade:

I thought the first chapter was really good. Davis gives us some background on the ideas of Marx and Engels and the time periods that they were writing in, then he gives us some summaries of a lot of Marx and Engels' arguments that people might not be immediately aware of without having read them or any of the many authors Davis cites that analyse their works. He also goes beyond the two theorists to examine the histories of left wing movements across Europe and America and presents us with a range of theses he develops out of this examination. I think he hits on a lot of things that the left needs to be thinking about a lot more, such as organising and strategies for building power and growing left wing movements.

This chapter is very big though, it should've been its own book. By the time you get to chapter 2 - on Marx's ideas on nationalism - it just feels really out of place and I didn't really feel like I got all that much out of chapter 2. Chapter 3 was interesting, looking into early ideas about the warming planet and the theories as to what might be causing it, ranging from those who correctly predicted the effect of greenhouse gases to those absolutely batshit theories that canals supposedly seen on Mars proved that there used to be Martians but then the planet got hot and they all died and now that's happening to us lol. Chapter 4 I'd already read as an essay before, its really doomer in the first half giving all the details of how fucked we might well be when it comes to climate change, before shifting tone and presenting some of Davis' ideas on green urbanism and city building that might help to address the crisis. This final chapter definitely finishes on a more inspiring note than it starts. That said, I'm not sure why these other three chapters were added to the book - they're all about different topics and not really connected and leaves it feeling disjointed and kinda like Davis wrote the first half of the book and was done but then needed to tack on three essays to get to the number of pages he wanted.

Still, I thought the first and last chapters were both very good.

We'll be putting the next vote up sometime next week, and since its October we've decided to go with a spooky selection of horror books.

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The "condescending saviors" being referred to were the utopian socialists. The utopians would be those like the followers of Owen, Cabet, Fourier, etc. where these writers would basically come up with visions of what an egalitarian society would look like and then, based on these designs, they'd go off and start their own projects/towns/cities/whatever. In a nutshell, the idea was that everyone would see how wonderful the communities were and then decide to do that instead of capitalism. Its also referring to the followers of people like Babeuf or Blanqui who thought the revolution should be carried out by a small group of people basically staging a coup and then using the power of the state to bring about socialism.

Marx, on the other hand, sees the necessity of class struggle to overthrow capitalism and bring about socialism. In the Theses on Feuerbach, which Davis talks about in this section, Marx argues that people are shaped by the world, by their circumstances, but at the same time people also shape and change these circumstances - and therefore also themselves - through the activities they engage in. Learning through doing. So, rather than socialism being brought about by some dude theorising about it, Marx says that it will be brought about by the self-emancipation of the working class. Its basically the whole "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it" thing. The working class are exploited by capital, they will inevitably look to resist their own exploitation, and the ultimate emancipation from this exploitation lays in the abolition of private property.

As for differences between Marx and Lenin with regards to organisation: As far as I understand it, Marx's view of the party was essentially that communist associations were to be formed all around the capitalist world which the radicalised members of the working class would join. The workers would then elect representatives who would attend an international congress where problems and suggestions would be discussed and then a formal program would be agreed upon. This would be overseen by and the program carried out by a central committee who were answerable to the congress. For Lenin in What is to be Done, he doesn't see an open party or democratic structure as a workable possibility in Tsarist Russia as it would be too easily infiltrated by spies and supressed by the police. Instead, as you mentioned, he proposes a smaller, secretive group of professional, experienced revolutionaries who would advise and direct a broader and more informal base. Basically, Marx's ideas focused more on a bottom-up kind of organisation, whereas Lenin focused more on a top-down kind of organisation. Or that's my interpretation of things anyway.