One reason I am highly dubious about Marxism is that the pitch for it always sounds a lot like the pitch for joining a church. https://twitter.com/babadookspinoza/status/1272934769622466562
We cannot say why you should read all of Capital for it is impossible to articulate. If you read you will know the Truth & weep. If you read and find no insight, you are a fool. You must read deeper. You must read more. Then you will Know. The clouds will lift. All will be clear.
If you say a negative thing about Marxism, or god forbid make fun of the man himself, you get deluged with people calling you illiterate, telling you that you must read the Book. They rely on shaming you into feeling dumb and poorly read rather than proving the case for the ideas
Be suspicious of those who claim to know secret truths that can’t be known without a long course of study of some particular dense text. If they were really scientific truths you would not have to read 1 particular text by a particular guy. CULTS are built around 1 person or book
I have great respect for Karl Marx as a sociologist, economist, and philosopher. Any honest person admits he excelled in each field. The problem is not Marx but Marxism, ie treating a single person’s ideas as excessively important. Insight is collective not individual.
The furious reaction of Marxists to such horrifying suggestions as “a person can understand economics without reading a particular 19th century economics book” truly tells you why we need to leave that tradition behind and have non personality-based socialism
Chomsky, by the way, says that to be a Marxist is to “abandon rationality” and the history of Marxism belongs to the history of organized religion. Note that in saying this Chomsky does not discount Marx as a thinker, though he does doubt that he discovered historical laws.
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