This is what Marx himself said about the difficulty of Capital. People demand that everything be immediately understandable and approachable. Marx talks about communism enabling an all sided development of the individual. Modern marxists find reading too difficult for them and will not do anything to rectify this.
My impression is that people want Marx to say something else, to confirm their own biases. This leads to "muh dialectical contradiction!" and Marx (and everyone else) suddenly becomes an incoherent schizophrenic, who needs to be explained by other morons. It doesn't help that leftist spaces are dominated by children online, college students and petty bourgeois weirdos who all demonstrably put forth their own middle class interests and everyone is just too lazy and stupid to read Marx and Lenin, their way of reading Marx being the exact same way that creationists will read Darwin. Not understanding the argument, not understanding the year or the context. The fact that Mao is considered easier to read than Marx even though he's nothing but retarded bourgeois platitudes and incoherent philosophical gibberish, just reveals their own class position and what they actually want to say.
good post and tyvm for posting it, i've ranted quite a few times about the obnoxious intellectual cattle that finds its way into every organization at a particular moment in development, when there's necessity for organized thinking (theory). then they go around trying to interpelate on behalf of the author via a secondary or tertiary author what marx/engels/lenin REALLY meant. and it's always a convoluted mess of opinions that avoids the questions of 1) what is to be done and 2) who benefits on whose behalf? (kto koga)
really, i've had a couple of hours to spare while on the bus and re-read the state and revolution. it's so fucking black and white it literally doesn't need any kind of interpretation, it's literally ALL THERE. and then i flipped around my marx and engels and looked around and sure enough, the popular, programmatic works are clear as day, the economic writings sometimes dense but by all measures understandable to a layman (me myself was a retarded marxist autodidact and i turned out fine)
it was stalin i think that even in discussion demanded some orderliness and conclusion, so it wasn't wasted oxygen. i agree with this. theory should always tells us what to do not how to think. this i think is the main contradiction between the intellectual and the party. the intellectual is a specialized stratum that does the thinking process in bourgeois society. a proletarian dictatorship thinks for itself, therefore it doesn't need the intellectual anymore.
p.s. there's been less and less marx and engels and more geopolitics and other bourgeois mud on the website. you know what lenin did after the terrible blow to the 1905 revolution? wrote materialism and empirio-criticism. sure, bourgeois historiography likes to paint this as an inter-party struggle where lenin attacked bogdanov (i think? don't really care for names) but it actuality shows of a higher organizational principle - namely that when disorganization is at its highest, it is necessary to return to rudimentary and elementary marxism, so that you are at a flexible position to try out new things, unburdened by the dead tumors of the past.
i urge all anons to again take a look at some classics because we need it in the upcoming battle against bourgeois mystification once the veneer of pleasant civil society is torn down and class consciousness and organization start developing again.
>>2650016>stalinStalin is crystal clear, beautiful writer. No bullshit
This is probably the silliest point ultras make and it outs you guys as overwhelmingly students. 54% of Americans read at a 6th grade level and the situation is not all that much better in Western Europe. Pick up a high school textbook from the 1910s and you'll see that it reads like at least an undergrad textbook of the same subject does today. The idea that your average prole is going to be getting anything out of Capital is ridiculous. Even in that cap of yours the translator has to explain a French term lol.
It's ahistorical too, even in Marx's own lifetime there were summarizations and simplifications of Capital that he himself approved of.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cafiero/1879/summary-of-capital.htm>>2650504
that adds to anon's point
Oh is a retarded leftcom
>>2650530marx was a pretentious nerd who made his writing needlessly complicated, like most intellectuals.
>>2650565he was a classics major and it really shows in the difference between volume 1 and the two Engels finished after he died
Marx never achieved anything, mao gave us socialist china.
Therefore, Mao > Marx
>>2652387mass tor baiter making up shit nobody said again
>>2650496Absolutely right about this. Language has changed wildly in 150 years. General literacy is limited. For someone like OP or FP to insist that Marx
must be read directly is impractical, inefficient and illogical. Pointless masturbation which delays or deters the communist mission.
>CafieroI didn't know about that copy, cool mention.
>The sincerest of thanks for the two copies of your work! At the same time I received two similar works, one written in Serbian, the other in English (published in the United States), but they both are faulty, wanting to give a succinct and popular summary of Capital and clinging, at the same time, too pedantically to the scientific form of discussion. In this way, they seem to me to miss more or less their principle purpose: that of moving the public for whom the summaries are intended.Do you happen to know what US publication Marx is referring to? Just so I can look out if it's ever recommended.