/lit/ - Literature

>>13721922
>accessible critique of capitalism
that's the problem, even marx's most accessible work (wage labor) that he tried to simplify so poor uneducated workers can understand is full of gibberish rambling, just get to the point dude no one cares about your yarn and shillings.
for the masses an argument like "you eventually run out of free money" is more acceptable and agreeable than walls of text that deconstruct the very concept of society , economy and individual to prove capitalism is shit.

i mean it's a better explanation than 'it's just like that" or "they thought of doing this" but marx >implies a lot when he tries to make a patterns out of historic events

>>13033857
Invert Hegel again.

>Hegel achieved the most miraculous things. A master logician, it was child's play for his powerful dialectical methods to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical silk-hats. Thus, starting from Plato's Timaeus and its number-mysticism, Hegel succeeded in 'proving' by purely philosophical methods (114 years after Newton's Principia) that the planets must move according to Kepler's laws. He even accomplished the deduction of the actual position of the planets, thereby proving that no planet could be situated between Mars and Jupiter (unfortunately, it had escaped his notice that such a planet [Ceres] had been discovered a few months earlier [Hegel was trying to refute "Bode's Law", a simple mathematical progression which implied that such a planet might exist]). Similarly, he proved that magnetizing iron means increasing its weight, that Newton's theories of inertia and of gravity contradict each other (of course, he could not foresee that Einstein would show the identity of inert and gravitating mass), and many other things of this kind. That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J.F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus,' would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia'... [p. 27]

>In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel's bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel's Philosophy of Nature as faithfully as possible; he writes: '§ 302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; -- merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e. -- heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.' There are some who still believe in Hegel's sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence -- the only intelligible one -- of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: 'The heating up of sounding bodies...is heat...together with sound.' [p. 28]

His only useful contribution to the world was giving us Marx

How do I into Hegel.

Which work should I start with? What's the best translation? Are there any annotated versions?

phenomenology of a spirit by Hegel

These are some pretty great tips.

One thing I would warn people of is to put any criticism against Hegel from the point of few of Marxism. Don't talk about turning Hegel upon his head or any of that, because then you run the risk of somebody calling you out on it or defending Hegel as a materialist. In which case, you're going to be shown to be a complete fraudster concerning your knowledge of Hegel. The trick I always use is to say that I've started reading Hegel so that I can "improve" my knowledge of the dialectic, by looking at it from Hegel rather than Marx. It's better to play the novice with expertise elsewhere than to risk playing at an actual expert in Hegel.

Was Marx right to turn Hegel on his head? What do you all think of dialectics? Are you an idealist or materialist? Will we ever reach a final synthesis or is that contradictory to the nature of dialectics?