What are you reading?

[Motorway to Roswell]

and old

?

[Today]

err.. the dialect is like really old fashioned
i dunno
i'm not loving it so far

[AllNightDayDream]

@AllNightDayDream

What you recommend as the best starter/introduction to Marxism. I've always wanted to read into it but I'm never quite sure where to begin.

Well the manifesto gives you a fairly decent overview of what Marx's method arrived at for his own time. But in the totality of things, it's a bit shallow, and very much a time-sensitive piece. But you can see bits of vindication for him in it because a few of the policies he lays out in it are now commonplace in developed countries (graduated income tax, national bank, centralized communications & transport) because they were entirely legitimate criticisms of the system as it existed. But what lies underneath that Marx really brought to the table was his historical materialism, his no-bullshit analysis of history, that in many many ways stems from the philosophy of Hegel, his teacher in germany.

You can read him using such analysis in publications like the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and he's got at least 2 dozen articles on the american civil war, more on british politics of the time, crimean war, etc. He was a busy writer. Most if not all of his material can be found here.

But if you want to dig deeper into how his method works and where it came from, you're going to have to dig into hegel. There's a lot of secondary works on him, which you should definitely read first if you ever decide to read hegel at all, because you have to get used to the terms he uses and what they mean. For the period of Marx's life before and up to the manifesto, he paid attention to philosophy and wrote commentary on it. He sympathized most with Hegel's views on history and his use of the dialectic. Should you decide to make the jump into the philosophy of it, I'd suggest reading the phenomenology of mind (or spirit, depending on translation) by Hegel and to bear with it. It's the first work and exposition of hegel, where he lays the starting point for his whole philosophy and the dialectic.

Once you get an understanding of hegel, you should read marx's criticisms of his works including On the jewish question and ultimately the german ideology, which is his thesis on german philosophy, its directions, its flaws, his main points of contention with hegel, and a fairly complete expression of marx's version of materialism. Don't try reading it unless you've got some hegel in you, or you won't understand what he's talking about. In a bare kind of way, marx takes hegel's thought and runs with it. A good way to express it is that Marx believed Hegel's philosophy to be accurate, but stuck in the clouds.

The holy grail of understanding Marx, however, is his Capital: A critique of Political Economy where he gets into the nitty gritty and tirelessly lays out the material relations we live in, and exposes their contradictions and absurdities. I'm waiting to get a full background understanding before I finally dig in, but this was his life's work and he kept trying to finish it till he died. The first volume I hear is put together beautifully, especially if you get past the first 3 chapters which they say are the most difficult, where most people (including myself) give up. Volumes 2 and 3 however were never completely finished by Marx and are compilations of his notes, not presented as cleanly as the first volume.

EDIT: For a more analytical presentation of marx, read G.A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History, as it is a bit more palpable. It's a slightly less marxist presentation of marxism. For a more involved work using his method, check out esteemed George Lukac's History and Class Consciousness.



On another note, I asked a friend of mine who's big into literature if I should read Gravity's rainbow, and he told me I shouldn't since i'm not acquainted with fictional literature at all really, and wouldn't get most of the references he makes. So more non-fiction it is for me, then. Got this in the mail yesterday

[antipode]

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Watched the latest film adaption and really enjoyed it, and apparently the book is 10x better (but that's always the case isn't it?) enjoying it so far.

[kruptah]

Going to give this a go once before I move onto the next installment of A Song of Ice and Fire...



Am halfway through this also....



Need to finish this up also from some time ago...



My ADHD is showing.

[ehbes]

just finished Ibsen's Ghosts.
Its great because his play before ghosts people found so upsetting that they made him change the ending. so then he write ghosts as a fuck you and make it as twisted as possible

[cosmic_surgeon]

Currently re-reading this which every UK citizen needs to have read if they haven't yet! As the book itself goes great lengths to demonstrate, trying to figure out what's even going on in UK politics nowadays is farcical and far more fractured with misinformation and deceit than I had dared think. For that very reason a well laid out, well-researched, and most of all approachable book like this is an absolute gem (read it once then keep it as a reference book). Some of the things which don't get covered in the news or even debated in parliament are shocking.

[kay]

Just finished reading this:


One of the best books I've read in recent memory.

[_TraX_]

Boneshaker - this wicked steampunk novel, really good.

And the Hobbit of course.

[JBoy]

Just read the road, again.

[apmje]

[antipode]

Just read the road, again.

great book.

[leyenda]

Finished Wuthering Heights. The copy I picked up looks like it was meant for academic use as it has 5 critical essays at the back so I'm working through those now. Absolutely loved it. From what I can make out the main criticism a lot of people have with it is it isn't like a Jane Austin novel with your Mr Darcey characters and a typical idea of romance. Sounds like a bullshit reason to dislike something to me. I can understand more that many people say they just don't like any of the characters so they don't care about what happens. But I mean look at something like Taxi Driver. How many people think Travis Bickle is a nice guy?

[hifi]

catcher in the rye

[hifi]

Finished recently:

the great gatsby plus 1

[Fused Productions]

[ehbes]

catcher in the rye

[kay]

Just started reading this:



2 chapters in, good read so far!

[dubluke]

Dipping into this on and off (can never seem to stick with the book I'm reading unless I'm on holiday)! Very good!

[BNanni]

Just started reading this:



2 chapters in, good read so far!

Fantastic book!
Brian Cox