/lit/ - Literature

No, most of the young Marx is very worth reading. If time and dedication were no issue, I'd say read Marx completely chronologically. I also recommend reading the first volume of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism first, since he will give you a decent introduction to Marx's intellectual and spiritual milieu and the currents of thought Marx was reacting to / working with.

Marx is an absolutely fascinating figure. Ultimately I prefer the German historical school of society and economics like Max Weber and Werner Sombart, but every time I go back to Marx I find something new. He's great. Heil Hitler btw, not a Marxist.

>Asks if a novel is worth reading, on a board dedicated to reading.

Yes. Length of a novel is irrevelant to the quality of it's contents. However reprehensible the results of said contents are when applied to the real world.

>>14350666
>novel

>>14350660
>>14350666
>Heil Hitler
>novel
>reprehensible the results of said contents are when applied to the real world
>novel
Reminder to ignore all pseudointellectual rhetoriticians and instead go and read the complete works of Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Sappho, Plutarch, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Arisoto, Horace, St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Rabelais, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Leopardi, Machiavelli, Luther, Cervantes, Chaucer, the Beowulf poet, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Sterne, Burton, Browne, Wyatt, Sidney, Percy Shelley, Tennyson, Donne, Pope, Dryden, Bacon, Novalis, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Pascal, Lichtenberg, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dickens, Marlowe, Diderot, Jonson, Goethe, Bunyan, Gibbon, Addison, Smollett, Milton, Johnson, Boswell, Emerson, Quincey, Burke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Racine, Baudelaire, Valery, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Moliere, Montaigne, Browning, Gray, Holderlin, Schiller, Shaw, Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Colette, Duras, Dumas, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, Mallarme, Malraux, Chateaubriand, Artaud, Poe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, Arnold, Pater, Walter Scott, Swinburne, Rossetti, Carroll, William James, Henry James, Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Dewey, Bergson, Whitehead, George Eliot, Williams, Frost, Cummings, Crane, Stevens, Whitman, Plath, Trakl, Rilke, Celan, Montale, Neruda, Lorca, Tagore, Manzoni, Peake, Murdoch, Wharton, Wilde, Updike, Faulkner, O'Connor, Passos, Nietzsche, Marx, Adorno, Bloch, Lukacs, Bakhtin, Hamsun, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Andreyev, Bely, Bulgakov, Gonchorov, Camoes, Pessoa, Queiroz, Saramago, Paz, Borges, Bloy, Pirandello, Huysmans, Lautreamont, Schwob, Casares, Bolano, Cortazar, Lima, Donoso, de Assis, Carpentjier, Celine, Marquez, Unamuno, Gracq, Gide, Jarry, Camus, Conrad, Wells, Hardy, Salinger, Lawrence, Forster, Hrabal, Swift, Bronte, Woolf, Bachelard, Roussel, Beckett, Proust, Nabokov, Joyce, O'Brien, Yeats, Waugh, Heaney, Auden, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Musil, Broch, Zweig, Bachmann, Jelinek, Lessing, Laxness, Simenon,Svevo, Levi, Buzzati, Quasimodo, Llosa, Walser, Kafka, Babel, Schulz, Transtromer, Kertesz, Pavic, Andric, Grossmann,Sillanpää, Linna, Mahfouz, Boll, Grass, Canetti, Pavese, Robbe-Grillet, Blanchot, Perec, Queneau, Calvino, Bernhard, Gass, Barth, Gaddis, Vollmann, Vidal, Hawkes, DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, McElroy, Soseki, Murasaki, Shonagon, Kawabata, Mishima, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, Dazai, Oe, Xingjian, Yan, Kosztolanyi, Gombrowicz, Ishiguro, Eco, Coetzee, Auerbach, Benjamin, Barthes, Pasternak, Derrida, de Man, Kristeva, Deleuze, Bateson, Foucault, Lyotard, Mcluhan, Eichenbaum, Steiner, Munro, Carson, Handke, Theroux, Patrick White, Alfau, Marias, Enard, Claude Simon, Elizabeth Bishop, Markson, Lowry, Bellow, Dara

>>14350643
Yes, you must read Marxist theory to understand Marx. If you still disagree after that, you clearly didn't understand and need to read more prolix, overwrought, jargon filled texts until you reach the same opinions as the rest of us. Remember that true communism has never been attempted, and everything bad is capitalism's fault or that of the bourgeois and/or neoliberals.

My mom is getting me all 3 volumes of Das Capital for Christmas. Excited.

>>14350704
>The Beowulf poet

>>14350717
Based

>>14350643
Use a reading list like https://anarchopac.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/marxism-reading-list/ or start with a Marx-Engels reader like https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52184.The_Marx_Engels_Reader

>>14350768
The irony

>>14350768
Read the part on Commodity Fetishism first.

>>14350717
this but unironically

>>14350643
read the german ideology, wage labour and capital, 18th brumaire too

>>14350643
Been meaning to read Capital for a while now. I hate philosophy, but I wanted to read Capital. Tell me, do I need to know any philosophy before reading it?

>>14351289
Capital is economics.

>>14350768
based Engels

>>14350643
Nothing from Marx is worth reading.

>>14350643
You only have to read the first 1-200 pages of Capital, where he sets out the Labour Theory of Value as his foundation. If you agree with that part, you'll probably like the rest. If you don't, there's no point because you disagree with the basis for his other arguments.

>>14350768
>My mom is getting me all 3 volumes of Das Capital for Christmas.
lmfao

>>14350643
No, except don't read any garbage not written by Marx or Engels like the stuff listed here >>14351032
The best entry point is "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", but Capital should be a high priority.

>>14350717
All true, except the last part where you try to paint him as a moralist because you never read him.

>>14351289
No, but you should read "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", "Wage Labour and Capital" and "Value, Price and Profit".

>>14351324
No it isn't, it's a critique of economics, says so on the cover.

>>14351289
>>14353173
Also, Capital is not philosophy. Marx rejected philosophy with his critique of it titled The German Ideology, just like he rejects political economy with Capital.

>>14350643
These two volumes are also very insightful:
"The German Ideology" (1846)
"Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844"

>>14353173
I haven't read Marx, but if he rejected morality but still wrote the Communist Manifesto it can only be because he wished for a world not ruled by Capital and the means to achieving that was through the uprising of the exploited workers since the upper class wouldn't want to change it because they are the rulers. So he just wants a world better even for the previous rulers, not egalitarian. He doesn't defend Slave Morality but he uses the oppressed to bring a new better world.
Is that so? If I am correct with this assumptions he seems far more interesting than what I had been presented before. That would make sense taking the Dialectical materialism into account.

>>14353256
His personal motivations are completely irrelevant to the content of his work, which is critical-scientific and explicitly rejects all kinds of utopian wishful thinking ("we ought to come up with a better world and then bring it into existence"), eternal metaphysical categories ("we ought to discover what's good/just and then bring more of that into the world"), etc. He definitely had personal desires or even moral convictions, like anyone, but they were as relevant to the content of his work as Einstein's were to the content of his.
Marx grew up in a time and place where thinkers were contemplating the question of human emancipation, and at the same time there already existed a class movement of the proletariat fighting for its own liberation.
He engaged in a critique, through which he discovered that the question of human emancipation is not a question of pure theory but one of praxis, that human emancipation is one with the liberation of the proletariat as a class, and he sketched the historically viable path to the latter. He wasn't creating a new aim for the proletariat, but just elucidating what exactly it is that the proletariat is already doing.
Again, none of this was based on any personal moral convictions, but on a critique of philosophy, political economy, and on an examination of human history.