What is your opinion on the most important philosophical

he should have distanced himself from engels, then we could have intelligent discussions about him without spergs constantly shitposting

>>9552094
what was bad about engels?

>>9552088
I'd consider myself a Marxist in the sense of "he was right about enough things to be worth serious consideration", wouldn't necessarily go as far as "the most important philosophical mind of our time". The biggest gap in applying his works to the present day is he failed to predict how important mechanization/automation would become.

Marx was a crackpot

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>>9552088
he's a materialist faggot

Managed to become such a powerful pseud he ruined the 20th century.

>>9553264
He actually did say in the Gundrisse of a world where the only valuable commodity is information due to everything becoming completely automated (which would cause another contradiction because information is infinitely replicable). The biggest thing he got wrong was that he thought that the workers had inherent revolutionary potential and would spontaneously have uprisings and shit. I think we can all agree he was totally wrong, workers have become more and more complacent not more and more pissed.

>>9552362
Marx was an absolute bookworm and a huge Hegelian Scholar. He literally spent a lifetime inside a library. Without the revolutionary tendencies of Engels (who was even a damned journalist if I recall), his ideas pm conflict and capitalism would be largely untainted by the working class point of view, and would be broad enough to engulf left and right back then before a lot of the mess we had up until now.

Can we stop having political bait threads every day please.

t. Marxist

that's not a picture of heidegger...

>>9552088
Wittgenstein was closer to 'our time' and he's also more relevant in the post-linguistic turn era

I've said it before but I agree wholeheartedly with Marx's diagnosis, but not his prescription

>>9553393
Yes it is.

>>9552088
that's not a picture of plato

Wow /lit/ is literally a communist board. Wow just wow

>>9553295
That was the main thing that made me an accelerationist/mostly apolitical. When I got my first job in a factory setting I realized the proletariat doesn't care about their oppression very much. Enough to complain endlessly but never enough to do anything.

>>9553500
It's always been heavily Catholic and Marxist, with a few outlying fedoras and Nick Land acolytes.

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>>9553302

PURE

R E V I S I O N I S M

>>9553264
>he failed to predict how important mechanization/automation would become.

so did you just completely skip the 200 page chapter of Capital devoted to explaining precisely this or did you miss the fact that mechanization is one of the firmest concrete determinants of the falling rate of profit?

>>9553295
>information is infinitely replicable
known information is infinitely replaceable, coming up with the unique information itself is not.

>>9553277

materialism will always be offensive to Philosophers™ because it asserts that the determinants of philosophy lie outside of philosophy itself

>>9553295
>The biggest thing he got wrong was that he thought that the workers had inherent revolutionary potential and would spontaneously have uprisings and shit

but that is totally wrong, because it relies on ignoring the drastic changes in marx's thought between the 1844 manuscripts/the manifesto and capital, changes largely documented in the grundrisse which you cite. there marx works out the theory of surplus-value which no longer requires alienated labor (an idealism) or the absolute immiseration of the working class (not empirically verified even in marx's time) for an explanation of capitalist exploitation.

>>9553521
Yeah Bookchin had similar insights about the disappearance of the great workers movements. He realised that factory work actually did the opposite of what Marx thought it would and regimented people over time. This eventually lead to a mass ending of all the revolutionary potential the workers once had. The fact that people in this day and age still are still soviet LARPing and talking about 'muh vanguard' and how the streets will run red with capitalist blood is completely fucking ridiculous.

>>9553295
>>9553829

point being that by the time of capital marx no longer holds up the inherently revolutionary character of the working class. that explains the largely historical chapter on the working day, which if anything demonstrates that even when they are fighting for the amelioration of their own conditions, the proletariat still end up playing into the hand of capital by forcing innovations in production that would not only compensate for the limited working day, but would in fact lead to greater rates of production than ever before.

>>9553831
>people in this day and age still are still soviet LARPing and talking about 'muh vanguard' and how the streets will run red with capitalist blood is completely fucking ridiculous.
you just described /leftypol/

how do i into Marx? What should I read beforehand and what are the best secondary sources? thx

>>9552088

didn't this get deleted earlier
automod deletion would be pretty sweet
or maybe that 9k gimmick
but mostly more banning

>>9553895

it really depends on what your current specialty is. there are marxist historians, sociologists, literary critics, philosophers, art historians, economists, etc, all of whom likely would be able to point the way to good introductions that can bridge the gap between what you already know and what you can get out of reading marx. from there you just dive into marx, desu. capital was written to be an extremely legible and useful text, and the penguin translation available everywhere is as close to perfect as you can get.

for literature, what was really helpful to me was reading Dowling's book Jameson, Althusser, Marx. it's framed as an introduction to Jameson's text, The Political Unconscious, but also very broadly surveys Marx and Marxist problematics. You can't go wrong with the Cambridge companion to Marx.

But if you're somewhat familiar with german philosophy I would honestly suggest being confident and reading Capital. Marx guides you along very carefully, and does not really mince words. following along with Harvey's lectures will be useful, because he reviews the chapter in itself and in terms of the whole, a whole which is so bafflingly comprehensive that it is easy to lose track of why he's talking about x y z. his book The Limits of Capital also usefully introduces Marxian theory of capitalism, and if you want a really great compact introduction to Marxism as economic analysis, check out Desai, Marxian Economics

>>9553809
Oh so that's why no philosophers ever besides Marx have been materialists!

Dumbass

>>9553925

i didnt think i needed to specify historical materialism in a conversation about marx but that's my mistake assuming you knew anything about history of philosophy. philosophical/ontological materialism =/= historical materialism

>>9553912
much appreciated. I don't have much experience with Hegel, though. Is this unnecessary?

>>9553953

in a kind of paradoxical way, yes. you need to know enough hegel that you wont make idealizing interpretations of marx. you need to know what the hegelian dialectic "feels" like if that makes sense, so that you can figure out marx's divergences on that count, figure out what he means by extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell of dialectics. a really good essay on this is Nicolaus, Martin. “Proletariat and Middle Class in Marx: Hegelian Choreography and the Capitalist Dialectic.” Marx: Sociology / Social Change / Capitalism, edited by Donald McQuarie, Quartet Books, 1978.

>>9553953
>>9553985

but to say that hegel is "strictly" necessary for reading Capital, the answer is no.

>>9552088
That photo isn't John Green.

>>9553500
It's full of jews, what do you expect? Any non-jew who claims to be a communist is the usefulest of useful idiots.

>>9552088
That's a funny looking picture or Aristotle.

>>9552088
economics isn't a real field of study, no is it a philosophy

>>9553985
Thanks for this, that essay was fantastic. Are there any other supplementary materials you would recommend about Marxist economics in general?

>>9552088
yudkowsky is looking old there

>>9553302
marx and engles wrote the manifest 20 years before das capital doe

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>>9553393

>>9552088

If it weren't for his position on religion, I'd agree with just about everything he said.

I'm much too humble to talk about myself, so you all can proceed.

>>9553751
>tfw when you don't fit into any of the cool /lit/ stereotypes

I don't even read books or go to /pol/

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>>9553302

>He literally spent a lifetime inside a library

Yes, he knew more about books than people.

>>9552088
I'm alright I guess.

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>>9555295
>What about human nature

Marx knew the nature of the working class very well.

>>9552088
>our time

>>9552088
marxism is opium for the lazy

>>9553751
It's my first day here and I'm both. That's good to know

>>9552088
Like him or not, it is probably Chomsky. He is the most important linguist ever, the most important leftist political philosopher of our time (perhaps tied with Habermas), and one of the the most influential foreign policy thinkers of our time (along with Huntington, Fukuyama, Wendt, and Mearsheimer).

>>9556807
Chomsky is def the most important intellectual of the late 20th, early 21st century

>>9553329
/thread/

>>9552088

His philosophical program would have benefitted greatly if he had simply jettisoned the compulsive and misguided need to couch his argument in scientific, historical materialism a la Hegel etc (these things will inevitably happen over time...) and instead have made /simple normative, moralistic statements/ along the lines of "Here's the way thing are now and here's why it's bad. Society OUGHT to be xyz Marxist because abc. Let me convince you." The historical materialism is a regrettable and unnecessary theoretical superstructure on his whole program, theory and praxis.

Marx was quite capable of making normative statements which ring true; even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Simply see the final thesis on Feuerbach.

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He was spooked but no one gave a better run down of Capitalism. He was redundant as shit, though. He's probably one of my favorite writers, though.

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>>9553500
isn't it awesome.