Read Marx

...

read Rafiq

don't read Bordiga

i dont want to feel this anymore

you forgot >read DeLeon

It's pretty crushing. It's like you realize almost any of it seems like a better philosophy than what's current but so much of it makes good points individually that it's hard to settle on one.

its even worse when people start talking about killing each other over this shit.

If you feel confused about what you read, consider this:

First you must ask: Why do you want to learn these? That is crucial. Asking and stimulating this question, critically and incessantly will lead you to the knowledge you seek -so long as you don't cut it short. If you answer your own question with "Because I want freedom, because i want a just, moral world" then you are cutting the process of knowledge-acquisition short by reducing it to uncritically held premises.

To begin: Begin with the ruthless criticism of everything and anything and hold every single thing to questioning. Including yourself.

Now we must ask: What it is about them, drawing from the first question, that you would like to know? Neutral knowledge isn't possible. You must relate these ideas even to your life and yourself, spiritually - what they mean at that level. Continuing to do this will lead you to the knowledge you seek.

Introducing Communism today is difficult. The meaning of works in relation to their time do not automatically register the same meaning today when they are read. The true and essential meaning must be translated to make sense given our ideological, etc. predicimant.

I would say read and struggle to understand Zizek: I recommend as an intro 'In Defence of Lost Causes' or 'Living in the End Times', both are easy reads. You will not understand everything at first. Nor can you be expected to. But the key is to keep on moving. To keep struggling.

Do not EVER cease thinking critically. If you do not understand something, isolate what specifically about that something you do not understand and hold yourself to it: do not assume the author is confused like you are.

If I understood this when I first began reading Marx, I would have saved myself a lot of time.

I have been a Marxist for over five years. And the true, full meaning of Principles of Communism I have only recently grasped.

There is a key ingredient you're missing in your recommendations, and it's relavence. When those texts came out, the language they used in its full, substantive meaning, the 'spark' certain words had, were entirely different than today.

Diving head in to classical Marxism is a catastrophe. They can only be fully understood retrosprectively or they won't maie sense, and their relavency won't be grasped (and if it is, only superifically).

Sorry to say but there is no easy guide to the meaning of socialism today, because there exists no meaningful socialist discourse. When Engels wrote Principles of Communism, he and Marx had already gotten a lot of shit together. We haven't yet. I don't even think Zizek had completed this proceds: Until we start engaging cybernetics, do what Marx as a newtonian for a critique of political economy, with quantum mechanics, until we are able to in a materialist fashion fully critique the entire world as it is, Marxism will remain a perverse, outdated school that never completes itself and remains confined to a single layer of life (industrial capitalism) long subsumed. I just want to point out how naive it is to think there is some easy introduction to socialism. There isn't.

Finally, appealing to current levels of understanding will disallow individuals to learn, which includes huge epistemological shifts in the process. When I first read the two books in question, I didn't fully understand them. But I kept TRYING to understand and eventually I got it. Learning must be a struggle or there will be no learning. The two texts are very good introductions to the present.

what are you actually talking about

I think it's a copypasta.

Friendly reminder that the supermarket of ideology is only fit for looting.

That was a genuinely good and helpful post. What the fuck are you, retarded that you're convulsed to say something reddit-tier?

What are you talking about? The post had absolutely nothing to do with what the posts it was responding to. Just because it's long doesn't mean it's helpful or good, in fact it may as well have been just spam.

you've posted this same exact thing before

What the fuck are you talking about? How about you reread it and rethink saying all that shit just to try to trivialize something meaningful and relevant?

New situations call for reposting.

So it was a copypasta, and you wonder why people giving you shit for it?

Now your problem is that it's not just a bunch of text that you can't understand the simple relevance of, but it's also a bunch of text that's actually related to the very core problem of UNDERSTANDING these works by committed Marxists, but, holy shit, the main problem now is that it's not original?
Give me a fucking break. That's a stupid as shit objection to bring up.

No one ever reads themselves..

...

...

Read Mao

Am I a pleb if I approve of all those people?

Is this a new meme?

read the book where he talks about the USSR's many commodities

If one mentions the name of the man who constructed that text, many of the people on this board will screech as if the board were being invaded by the likes of Holla Forums. Yet that man is Rafiq, a committed Marxist.


If something is worth reposting then it is fine to repost it, especially if it is so powerful. The fact that you don't wish for it to be posted despite people moaning in this thread about how 'crushing' the matter of philosophy (i.e. understanding the world) is means that you aren't looking for people to make serious endeavours.
So? For once, this is a shortcut which can be taken for it is about helping others to understand.

Read Stephen Kotkin

bump

the problem isn't that i don't *understand* the works, jackass. the point is that they all contradict each other but all sound correct in a vacuum.

Just read the talmud

Have some humility, idiot. You have no idea what ground you're standing on when you think of Marxism but not its history of difficult and unforgiving debates that it has had.

A requirement of finding useful truths is to understand and perform research regarding the texts and arguments. At best, you understand them in isolation. Learn how the authors of various works define things.

Baka kami.

All those disgusting Jew names. Yuck. You read all that and still didn't realize they're the bad guys? Sad.

read Joseph Smith

nice

reddit

spacing

thanks

for

breaking

it

up

for

us

Don't act stupid. It obviously helps with readability to have text at that length spaced like that. Rafiq himself intended that post for beginners which is why he formatted it as such as opposed to his more argumentative and difficult posts.

DA REDDIT IS OUT TO GET US WHAT DO WE DO
The mindset of a typical consumer.

This nigga is so mad people tl;dr'd him that he made his own thread.

You characterise this nigga but show no indication that you can analyse his words well. Your input was unneeded; don't make me use the present tense.

Literally just start reading whoever, and once you've got the most basic of the basic down, most of Holla Forums will start to engage with you. Plus, just fucken' read anyway. Don't be a willful idiot.

wtf this shit is for fucking nerds

That's straight math, though

Here is the non-plebbit spaced version.
If you feel confused about what you read, consider this:
First you must ask: Why do you want to learn these? That is crucial. Asking and stimulating this question, critically and incessantly will lead you to the knowledge you seek -so long as you don't cut it short. If you answer your own question with "Because I want freedom, because i want a just, moral world" then you are cutting the process of knowledge-acquisition short by reducing it to uncritically held premises.

To begin: Begin with the ruthless criticism of everything and anything and hold every single thing to questioning. Including yourself.
Now we must ask: What it is about them, drawing from the first question, that you would like to know? Neutral knowledge isn't possible. You must relate these ideas even to your life and yourself, spiritually - what they mean at that level. Continuing to do this will lead you to the knowledge you seek.

Introducing Communism today is difficult. The meaning of works in relation to their time do not automatically register the same meaning today when they are read. The true and essential meaning must be translated to make sense given our ideological, etc. predicimant.
I would say read and struggle to understand Zizek: I recommend as an intro 'In Defence of Lost Causes' or 'Living in the End Times', both are easy reads. You will not understand everything at first. Nor can you be expected to. But the key is to keep on moving. To keep struggling.
Do not EVER cease thinking critically. If you do not understand something, isolate what specifically about that something you do not understand and hold yourself to it: do not assume the author is confused like you are.
If I understood this when I first began reading Marx, I would have saved myself a lot of time.
I have been a Marxist for over five years. And the true, full meaning of Principles of Communism I have only recently grasped.
There is a key ingredient you're missing in your recommendations, and it's relavence. When those texts came out, the language they used in its full, substantive meaning, the 'spark' certain words had, were entirely different than today.
Diving head in to classical Marxism is a catastrophe. They can only be fully understood retrosprectively or they won't maie sense, and their relavency won't be grasped (and if it is, only superifically).

Sorry to say but there is no easy guide to the meaning of socialism today, because there exists no meaningful socialist discourse. When Engels wrote Principles of Communism, he and Marx had already gotten a lot of shit together. We haven't yet. I don't even think Zizek had completed this proceds: Until we start engaging cybernetics, do what Marx as a newtonian for a critique of political economy, with quantum mechanics, until we are able to in a materialist fashion fully critique the entire world as it is, Marxism will remain a perverse, outdated school that never completes itself and remains confined to a single layer of life (industrial capitalism) long subsumed. I just want to point out how naive it is to think there is some easy introduction to socialism. There isn't.
Finally, appealing to current levels of understanding will disallow individuals to learn, which includes huge epistemological shifts in the process. When I first read the two books in question, I didn't fully understand them. But I kept TRYING to understand and eventually I got it. Learning must be a struggle or there will be no learning. The two texts are very good introductions to the present.

What's that, Aqua? Too retarded to read a book?

Read Camatte.

Read Marx, read Engels, Read Lenin, read Althusser, read Foucault. Lukács has some good texts, give a read to some of that.
Do not read any frankfurt school.

...

Victim mentalities are the hidden virus of the mind

READ

C O C K S H O T T
O
C
K
S
H
O
T
T

Why no Frankfurt school?

Do you not know how to fucking spoiler an image

...

The image is an incredible testament to human medical advancement, why would I spoiler it?

So the new meme is marxists being more intelligent than everybody else in human history? This shit reminds me of the rick & morty copypasta.

Were you were ass-raped by the sexy functions and equations?

READ POSADAS

This is the proof for left unity, because we are all equal wrong/right.

What happened to him?

simplified that list 4 u

also

I was going to make a joke post listing a bunch more philosophers, but more than anything else, we need to
I'm inclined to believe that we are in a period of heightened proletarian agitation that has potential. AS of now there have been a few revolutionary periods already, and the history they've left us is very valuable so that we can learn from past mistakes. So yes, read the theorists, but also read the history as well!

Everytime I google Rafiq it give me nothing, what's his full name?

Read Johnny Spaceboots

Rafiq is just some dude on RevLeft who has written a lot of long effortposts on the site. There are some screencaps of them on the booru. You can also go to RevLeft and check out his posts.

...

How come nobody ever mentions Korsch?

...

Yeah, reading is good, and leftism is the category of intellectuals.

That list is incomplete btw.

Because he didn't get memed into relevancy, either IRL or on Holla Forums
Be the change you wish to see in the world, Bookchin and Dauve could do it, then so can Korsch

but seriously do I need to actually read all that shit or can I look at the Cliff Notes version for half of them and then read the Wikipedia entries for the other half?

Yeah I'm sure it's inadequate compared to spending 50000 hours trudging through dense theory prose but maybe I can do something else with the 49900 hours I've saved

read Dr. West

I genuinely want "reddit spacing" posters to be permanently banned. With all the virtual space their posts take up we could shave an entire page off the board.

The more people say this the less I want to read.

see

bump

yes indeed we draw from a long tradition of revolutionaries, reformists, and philosophers not all of whom were our friends

>da Greeks

here's a good one

Read my lips

No new taxes

bump

Is it possible to determine from his writings the point when the turks finally broke him and he gave up ML for socdem?

Read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Zizek, Althusser
There you go, you are now ready for leftist paralysis

Read Henry George.

Proof you are a neet.
That's reddit spacing, it's how people communicate via text in the 21st century. Go get a job where you need to email people frequently and you'll find it's the norm.

...

Read me, I'm literally a genius.