No but the title does sound interesting.
I just finished the first volume of Main Currents of Marxism yesterday and wow my brain hurts. It is completely packed with thick detail and explanation concerning not only Marx and Engels but at least a dozen different philosophers of various schools. It is extremely impressive and very technical. A great work. I’m about to move onto the second volume after I finish The Social Contract.
Book review, please.
It is perhaps the most technical look at Marxism that I have ever read. Even more technical then the works by Rothbard and Mises. It starts from discussing the origins of dialectical thought then onto the young Marx. It explains all of his works and the context in which they were presented. He also explains other socialists before Marx. There are a lot of chapters on how the Hegelian dialectic works and the dehumanization of capitalism. The last chapters are on historical materialism, dialectal materialism, how Engels thinks knowledge is acquired and the differences between Marx and Engels. It was only 420 pages but it was just so detailed that it took me awhile to get through it. It is definitely not a book for people who are just starting to understand Marxism.
Yeah, cuz this is the real shit. I’d strongly discourage anyone from reading or trying to make sense of Marx, as he was the cause of untold misery for millions of people. Reading Marx is the equivalent of reading Mein Kampf and trying to “understand” the same statist bullshit. Its evil and makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
You can’t be a critic of Marx without having read his material.
Let’s have a book burning and get rid of anything that could taint our fragile little minds.
The list will include:
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Das Kapital
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General Theory
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Mein Kampf
Once those books are burned, we will never have to worry about their ideas again.
What is ‘the real shit’? Marxist theory makes sense in a way. I mean it is not illogical. Daniel is right though, you can’t criticize something you are unfamiliar with. In fact today, many supposed Marxists actually don’t read Marx’s works or read just the Communist Manifesto. They say ridiculous things like how they are Marxists but are for reform in government. They don’t know Marxist doctrine, they invent it.
Book burnings are the actions of simpletons too self-conscious to read an opposing opinion and too moronic to refute it.
Is that sarcastic or what? Ideas don’t burn.
And can anybody say: thought-police.
Wake up!
no doubt the key to the longevity of ‘Marxism’.
Absolutely. I would say his ambiguity concerning the future and the fact that many of his ‘humanist’ pieces only came out at the beginning of the 20th century, had they not then I think Bohm-Bawerk would of been the nail in Marx’s coffin.
There’s nothing wrong with book burning… if you own them. [;)]
Daniel,
I was simply responding to the vein of this particular post and the ambivalent insults and charges of ignorance when nothing was being cited. Anyway, I saw the post that you just left about reading about Marx transcending phases from philosopher to political economist, and then your response saying that you must understand or be knowledgeable about Marx in order to argue against him. So thanks for reaffirming my original point and undermining your own about Marxists and their logical fallacies.
Don’t forget that the Humanist Marxian philosophy led to Gramsci who heavily influenced Foucault, Fanon and Said. Marx is no one-trick pony. He was the catalyst of a a revolutionary geneaology of thought in Western and postcolonial philosophy.
The best of luck to all. See you on the outside of the academic mainstream.
You said that none of us had read Capital, what does that have to do with the book Andrew Cain read?
…
I’ve read your post about 15 times already, and have tried to make sense of it in the context of this thread. I do not understand how I reaffirmed your original point and undermined mine. Please explain.
I have a question for you: Are you a Marxist, and if so, have you all Marxist material?
Great to know.
Well its not like there is ‘Humanist Marxian philosophy’ and ‘Economic Marxian philosophy’ there just is ‘Marxian philosophy.’ How much of it is actually conceived by Marx is debatable. Much of what his philosophy contains is from other theorists. He didn’t discover class conflict, alienation is obviously Hegelian in nature, his economic theories are largely Ricardian. Really what Marx did was connect all of these theories and tweak them to a degree.
"Marx, in fact, has been hailed by the hermeneuticians as one of the grandfathers of the movement. In 1985, for example, at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Las Vegas, virtually every paper offered in political theory was a hermeneutical one. A paradigmatic title would be “Political Life as a Text: Hermeneutics and Interpretation in Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Foucault.” (Substitute freely such names as Ricoeur and Derrida, with an occasional bow to Habermas.)
I do not believe it an accident that Karl Marx is considered one of the great hermeneuticians. This century has seen a series of devastating setbacks to Marxism, to its pretensions to “scientific truth,” and to its theoretical propositions as well as to its empirical assertions and predictions. If Marxism has been riddled both in theory and in practice, then what can Marxian cultists fall back on? It seems to me that hermeneutics fits very well into an era that we might, following a Marxian gambit about capitalism, call “late Marxism” or marxism-in-decline. Marxism is not true and is not science, but so what? The hermeneuticians tell us that nothing is objectively true, and therefore that all views and propositions are subjective, relative to the whims and feelings of each individual."
So why should Marxian yearnings not be equally as valid as anyone else’s? By the way of hermeneutics, these yearnings cannot be subject to refutation. And since there is no objective reality, and since reality is created by every man’s subjective interpretations, then all social problems reduce to personal and nonrational tastes. If, then, hermeneutical Marxists find capitalism ugly and unlovely, and they find socialism beautiful, why should they not attempt to put their personal esthetic preferences into action? If they feel that socialism is beautiful, what can stop them, especially since there are no laws of economics or truths of political philosophy to place obstacles in their path?" - MNR, The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics
hey. i just got done reading that paper today Conza. good paper.[:)]
Rothbard seems to have always got there first… [:P]
If you can’t catch my sarcasm I don’t know what to tell ya.