Where does one start in order to understand Marxist/Leftist theory?

Where does one start in order to understand Marxist/Leftist theory?
Calm down by the way, I'm already a reactionary, I'm just interested in alienation and the progress of economics and civilization.

Other urls found in this thread:

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm
socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/fustel/AncientCity.pdf
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/sw/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/sw/
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/decades-index.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/
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>Where does one start in order to understand Marxist/Leftist theory
At the muzzle of a loaded gun

start with hegel

Engel's Principles of Communism:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Probably not with a book.

I second the question. Where to start with Adorno and Gramsci?

Danke.

Don't

How should one know his enemy if he doesn't read his prophets?

Check out Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. It is about literary criticism, but it furnishes a sweeping introduction to the main concepts of Marxism as it relates to culture—reification, commodification, desacralization of traditional cultures by capitalism, and finally, alienation which is something like the sum total of all these, as well as the theory of ideology and a sketch of a hypothesis as to the overall structure of the mode of production as such. Just read the preface and the first and last chapters; you can get into the rest if you really like lit crit.

IF you take this route I would also pick up William Dowling's introduction to the same text.

also by the way, this is coming from someone who has studied this book for about a year straight as well as a lot of the marxist tradition in which it is enmeshed. i am growing increasingly skeptical of the political program behind marxism, but as for inquiry into culture it really can't be beat.

You start with and Capital.

>I'm already a reactionary
You say that like we want you. Hopefully you have intellectual honesty and will see the errors of your ways.

>2016
>Posting that pic
>Siding with sub-humans

Minima Moralia is basically a long, bitter rant about why the world is such shit. great book.

marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm

>Dialectics may not stop before the concepts of the healthy and the sick, nor indeed before the latters’ family relations, the rational and the irrational. Once it recognizes the ruling generality and its proportions as sick – and marked in the most literal sense with paranoia, with “pathic projection” – then it finds the cells of healing solely in what the standards of that social order portray as sick, absurd, paranoid – indeed, “insane,” and it is true as today as in the medieval era, that only fools speak the truth to power. In this respect it is the duty of the dialectician to help this truth of the fool to attain the consciousness of its own reason without which it would indeed perish in the abyss of that sickness, pitilessly dictated by the common sense of others.

Neo liberalism is the problem. Socialism is the cure.

>Marxism
>intellectual

The only one dishonest here is you, user.

>Subhuman posting his avatar

Marxism: Start with Das Kapital, it's very dense and requires some study but is the equivalent of The Wealth of Nations in strength of analyzing moral philosophy, specifically the field of resource management and distribution. It is important to note that both of these books are one third descriptive and the second prescriptive.

Marx largely failed to understand banking and it's relations to landholders and industrial managers.

Leftist Ideology: Start with Emile - Jean-Jacques Rousseau then Democracy and Education - John Dewey

so is Veeky Forums becoming reactionary/purple pill now?

But I don't support your masters.

>NO U
Well done.

>Leftist Ideology: Start with Emile - Jean-Jacques Rousseau then Democracy and Education - John Dewey

After this read The Theory of the Leisure Class - Thorstein Veblen

Among the Souther planter elites there where many who believed the contradictions of capitalism would be resolved by the enslavement of the proletariat, regardless of race

see, this is why i think the way forward is through reaction. adorno himself writes the best criticism of why marxism is bunk, even though he gets blamed for cultural marxism/sjw garbage. and that leads to derrida and all the rest. dialectics eventually just disintegrates into nothingness b/c people need gods

posting a serious tradcore writer. religion is on its way back gents.

socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/fustel/AncientCity.pdf

The southern aristocracy wasn't concerned about contradictions of capitalism because they didn't have the analysis to consider it had contradictions. They all did, however, set out to enslave the entire proletariat, white, black, and otherwise, and were successful in making the white proles willful slaves, to the point where to this day a great many of them are nostalgic for their enslavement.

tl;dr, John Brown was right.

>Where to start with Adorno and Gramsci?
You'll be severely disappointed when you realise they're not the subversives /pol/ likes to portray them as (let's be honest, nobody on /pol/ has read them.)

They come across as grumpy old men for the most part.

I'm not a polfag and wasn't expecting the project for destruction of the west.
Marxists are basically good boys who had nothing with the sexual revolution.

George Fitzhugh, who was probably among the first self-declared 'sociologists' in the Americas, did though, he was rather on the extreme side. His idea to rectify social inequality created by capitalism was to institute a system of universal slavery, based on his belief that "nineteen out of every twenty individuals have... a natural and inalienable right to be slaves."

I love this man.

He enslaves you.

with no power comes no responsibility

fascinating

That's really dumb.

hegel marx gramsci debord

This is what passed for intellectual in the antebellum south.

As a slave you have plenty of responsibilities. You have 12 hours of work a day.
Southern NEETs. Not so bright.

Both 'reaction' and the socialdemocratic illusion or 'progress' should be swept up and trascended by the tide of critical reason to make way for world of ever increasing freedom and potentiality. The day after the revolution is as incomprehensible to the bourgeoisie mind as the glittering city by the sea is to the crab crawling by the seafloor a mile off its shores. Think the NGE scene where everyone turns into orange goo, but good.

interesting, and wonderful prose.

question tho: does critical reason really lead to ever-increasing freedom and potentiality? to me all it seems to do is create an ever-greater schism between those with the money and those who don't, and to infinite back-and-forth between them: the ones who have money accuse the ones who don't of being lazy, and the ones who don't accuse the ones who do of being victims of ideology

really trying not to shitpost. am genuinely curious. to me critical reason seems like the problem, not the solution. honestly i think some form of sublimated religion is what is required - whether Eastern stuff or California Heidegger or a red maga hat. whatever. but i feel like critical theory just manufactures disaster everywhere it goes. could just be me tho

enlighten me user. i like reaction a lot but i'm open minded

Marx and 20th century communists where still under the spell of 19th century positivism and monolithic reason. The absolute is an infinite process of creativity and potentiality, not a concrete 'goal' you can ever 'reach'. Reactionaries, on the 'left' and on the right, seek to limit creativity, impose an unchanging and unchangeable reality on everyone else, they tell you ''this cannot be''. It's an ideology driven by ressentiment, on dogma, on imposing limits on oneself to spite the other.

The short term goal: liberation from the commodity form and the tyranny of the sovereign political economy. Capitalism is a sublimated religion, but one that denies magic and the radical imaginary, it claims to stand for pure instrumental reason, but in reality its as arbitrary as the mythologies of the god kings of old

Start with Adam Smith since he planted the bud that liberalism, anarchism, communism and every other 19th century ideology grew out of as a successor or reaction

That's a quite young and immature Engels, it's a very bad representation of either Marxs or Engels mature thought

>Marx largely failed to understand banking and it's relations to landholders and industrial managers.
Did you just give up after reading volume 1 or something? Banking and land-rent is dealt with in volume 3 as it doesn't occur immediately in the production process but is a function of the distribution of surplus-value at the social level and averaging of the rate of profit.

If you're reading Marx as a positivist your doing something wrong. He shows there exists quantitatively distinguishable social evolutionary epochs and modes of production but the qualitative elements of all "social production" the actual process of how humanity is making itself and capital producing capital can only be dialectically understood.
Engels was definitely a quasi-proto positivist in his writings and Lenin was probably more under the spell of 18th century French materialism than even 19th century positivism. Engels/Lenins reductionist writings were the central driving force of the idiocy of the 20th century communist movements

so where are you on the political spectrum? or do you really believe it is possible to be nowhere, to be sincerely apolitical?

i think you're being unkind to the reactosphere. they are reacting, but not in the way you think (unless i am misunderstanding you) - they are against change, but my own feeling is not because they want to impose a vision of their own in its place. it's merely because 'progress' has gotten completely out of hand, and feels like - to me anyways - crowned anarchy and unbridled and unimpeded (and valorized!) total desire. it's obviously craziness but it just feels like distilled and machine-tooled boomer ideology cranked up to 11. we can't all live like that, but lib-dem globalism is obviously superior to everything else so long as you are rich enough to enjoy anything you want

these are just things i think about. thx for responding

>so where are you on the political spectrum?
as far left as you can get.

'progress' as you understand it is actually a process in which human beings are molded to fit the needs of capital. Nrxers like HH Hope are spooked as hell, with their libertarian, muh property, kantian autism. It's Californian libertarianism LARPing as reaction. This is why I hate nerds. The reactionary exists in response and in relation to the campus activist, towards which he feels infinite ressentiment. Your neurosis is the neurosis of the other.

Nick Land is the only interesting one in the bunch, but in the end, he is too limited by machinic framework. The Machine as model for thought is a product of human creativity, one among many, and a pretty recent one at that. Nick Land claims to speak for the machine, but in the end he just speaks for Nick Land.

Why a machine-for-death, why not build a machine-for-life?

>'progress' as you understand it is actually a process in which human beings are molded to fit the needs of capital

this is indeed exactly what i think, sadly.

>the reactionary exists in response and in relation to the campus activist, towards which he feels infinite ressentiment. Your neurosis is the neurosis of the other

this also, although you have actually said something that i wouldn't have thought myself. you're a smart guy user. for whatever that is worth

>everything Nick Land
I agree.

>Why a machine-for-death, why not build a machine-for-life?
Because life = capital to me right now. I wish I didn't feel this way but I do. I didn't always feel this way. But I took a shot of Nick Land's neurotoxin - after a scenic/dystopian tour through some other philosophy - and now I can't un-take it except by recourse to absolutism and the old-time religion.

I think the attraction to absolutism/purple pill for me is that it posits a concept of order which is different from progress. This is what I meant above by saying that reaction to me doesn't signify right progress, it signifies antiprogress. I will wholly grant you that this too is an imposition on the person next to me. My argument is shot through with logical fallacies left and right but this is not why I am talking to you. I'm curious about how you see things.

Machine-for death/Machine-for-life both speak to the same thing: get machinic. Get technological. And all of this points back to Land and through him everything else in Reactoria

I have to make some food, but I'll check back on this later. Thanks for the conversation

>far left
not that guy but nick land and nrx is far-right?

>Think the NGE scene where everyone turns into orange goo, but good.

>implying that orgasmically experiencing disembodiment as your consciousness and sensuous/homuncular body-as-lived merges with the antimind of total humanity isn't "good"

>>implying EoE isn't the tragic ending, the only two characters we still care about being unable to join the rest of the species, left behind to gaze at what their jealously guarded egos kept them from

>Engels/Lenins reductionist writings

yeah, this. diamat is literal sorcery lol

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

-Adam Smith

>Did you just give up after reading volume 1 or something? Banking and land-rent is dealt with in volume 3 as it doesn't occur immediately in the production process but is a function of the distribution of surplus-value at the social level and averaging of the rate of profit.

I didn't say he ignored banking but that he was wrong. Marx thought landholders would be supplanted by bankers who would be supplanted by industry which would be seized by the workers. What happened is that landholders married the bankers and bought the businesses which consolidated their power to a degree that Marx did not predict.

"There's an invisible hand that magically shunts prices to the level at which capitalists will most easily derive a profit, and it never fucks up when unchecked."

- Adam Smith

Marxism isn't dogma. Check out Lenin's essay on Imperialism as well as Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism

For Marx, David Harvey's Youtube course (also available in a book) is good. The hardest part of Marx is the first volume of Capital, and after that it's all downhill. You could also check out Moishe Postone.

I would also read some of the major classics on the history, nature, and origins of capitalism from before 1950. Use Oxford Bibliographies or just google around until you find some list that has Schumpeter and similar things.

I'd start with Moralia or that Culture Industry anthology before reading Dialectic of Enlightenment.

For Gramsci, just get the old 1971 edition of the Prison Notebooks and that recent intro book on him by Hoare and Sperber to order your reading of it. Other selections from the notebooks, called like Further Cultural Readings or some shit like that, are easily pirated online.

Before reading Gramsci I'd look up his essay on The Southern Question and read that. Hoare & Sperber will tell you to do this anyway because they tie Gramsci's insights into his linguistics training.

Also, neo-Gramscianism is now very popular among right wingers, making up one of the base ingredients of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe. For obvious reasons - same as Sorel's Reflections on Violence, which you should also definitely read if you're a reactionary/right winger.

>Claims to be an intellectual board
>Posts explicitly anti-intellectual Nazi memes un-ironically
>Complete disconnect between the board's posturing and actual knowledge of political and philosophical thought

KEK

Go back to RevLeft, tranny.

>Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. ... Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
- Adam Smith

Where does Marx anywhere say that land owners would be "supplanted" by bankers? Just to let you know though real-estate IS the prime collateral loans are issued against today by banks.
Land-lords and bankers are hardly the prime movers today in our stock-market centred society.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

Resources:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/sw/
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/sw/
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/decades-index.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/

Slavery was fought over tariffs and the north wanting to compete with British manufacturing. Ending slavery was just something Abe thought would be useful for him.
The single text you want to be reading for this is Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx.

You may also want to read Debt by David Graeber and The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi.

Why do you assume that Smith thought this was a good thing?

He quite clearly thought it was a bad thing, and it was only a recent development in human society that things were this way.

You should read Hegel before you read Marx.
You should read Fichte and Schelling before you read Hegel.
You should read Kant before you read Fichte and Schelling.
You should read Descartes and Hume before you read Kant.
You should read Aristotle before you read Descartes and Hume.
You should read Plato before you read Aristotle.

>Where does one start in order to understand Marxist/Leftist theory?
>Calm down by the way, I'm already a reactionary, I'm just interested in alienation and the progress of economics and civilization.

>Calm down by the way, I'm already a reactionary

How strange it is to assume the other will be angry at you for seeking what you seek, even to the point of excusing yourself for it, protecting yourself from criticism, telling people to calm down before they even have the chance to be mad at you.

And then by saying you're "already" something, an imaginary pre-requisite that you want to assure us that you fulfill. Making sure that it is clear: you are not really into this thing that you say you don't understand. Not only that, you are already past it. Except you want to start there in this imaginary order that you suppose leads to understanding it.

You are indeed putting a lot of interest in alienation, investing a lot of yourself into it.

Read it again:
>Calm down by the way, I'm already a reactionary
Ideology at its purest.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is where you should start out.

Actually read Adam Smith and Ricardo tbqh, nobody else does.
Wallstreet traders celebrating an Adam Smith anniversary ringing the bell etc.
Cringe. He'd have spat in their faces. After all, he spent a lot of time calling them names before they even really existed.

underrated

He clearly thought it was a clever insight. The thing is he didn't really understand the nature of a monetary economy, he's largly conceptualizing things in terms of a quasi-barter economy of producers who own their own means of production and without money mediating exchange relations.
Butchers and other simple commodity producers didn't sabotage public utility like financial parasites (capitalisms real main actors) by maximizing exchange-values at the expense of public use-value.