What is your opinion on the most important philosophical mind of our time?

that's not a picture of heidegger...

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

Yes it is.

that's not a picture of plato

Wow Veeky Forums is literally a communist board. Wow just wow

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.

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

PURE

R E V I S I O N I S M

>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?

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

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

>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.

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.

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.

>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

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

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

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

Dumbass

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

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

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.

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

That photo isn't John Green.

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

That's a funny looking picture or Aristotle.

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

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

yudkowsky is looking old there

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

...

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.

>tfw when you don't fit into any of the cool Veeky Forums stereotypes

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

>He literally spent a lifetime inside a library

Yes, he knew more about books than people.

I'm alright I guess.

>What about human nature

Marx knew the nature of the working class very well.

>our time

marxism is opium for the lazy

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

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).

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

/thread/

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.

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.

isn't it awesome.