Sometimes I feel like telling people to read Marx is setting them up for failure. Idk maybe I'm just not smart but I find the way Marx writes to just be... so obtuse. I read Engels and the difference was like night and day, so much easier to understand.

Are there people who have rewritten e.g. Capital to be not awful? Because if I struggle with other works of Marx, I don't think there's any hope of me reading Capital.

[–] duderium@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago

The first three parts of Capital are hard, after that it’s just hundreds of pages of examples packed with dialectical materialist theory and is generally a lot easier to read. I’m thinking now that I’ll finish Capital and then start reading it from the beginning again. I also use VoiceDreamReader to read it to me.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago

I fully concede that reading won’t work for everyone. Only some types of people, I suspect especially (but not exclusively) college educated types, which describes many liberals.

Anyone is susceptible who genuinely works at developing their political thought. Even if right now they are obsessed with Libertarianism or some other vulgar economics, someone who is already book-smart will be more likely to grasp Capital.

People not matching the above description might be better swayed with direct organizing. I think that the vast majority of Marxists across the globe, historically, have understood the basic conclusions of Marxism intuitively from their own experience and not from reading a book.

Anyway, perhaps your issue with the style of Capital is due to the translation you read?

Any book translated from the original language has to trade off between precision and flow. I personally like the style of the original Aveling and Moore translation that is free on marxists.org, but I think many people prefer the more modern English of the Penguin edition (Fowkes). I haven’t spent enough time to know if one is objectively “better.”