Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
It’s all good stuff. I am more partial to Engels writings on the whole, but Capital is a seminal work for a reason.
shits too long… marx was cookin with the manifesto. my baby brain can wrap around that. Volume 1 is already more information than the average econ 101 course covers in the US.
I instead will simply recreate all of marx’s texts through my lived experience, as his words are pretty damn true so I dont even need to read that shit to experience it.
Ehhhh … the manifesto was a pretty slapdash editorial work for a magazine. Definitely a decent summary, but idk if it actually captures the nuances that exist within Marxist theory. Primary reliance on it tends towards a kind of vulgar Marxism, imo.
Without reading it, how would you know you are experiencing it? Feels abit backwards imo. For me, Marxism allowed me to better articulate my experience of the world around me. It’s not about ‘recreating Marx through my lived experience’, it’s about utilizing Marxist systemic thought and heuristic practice to better explain my lived experience, which requires me to actually read theory.
Maybe I am simply the 2nd coming of Marx, but every time I feel like I have a novel thought I find some critical theorist that has formulated it into far better words than I ever have. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and various works of Baudrillard seem far more relevant to modern life than what Marx was talking about during industrialized society. Those works are obviously deeply rooted in Marx, but Marx simply did not predict how society would turn out.
How would you know this if you don’t read theory?
He very clearly laid the groundwork for all of this in Capital. We are the primary traded commodities now, our very time and attention is the last remaining commodity and frontier to extract potential profit from. Marx ‘simply didn’t predict how society would turn out’ because Marx didn’t make predictions or prognostications like that.
Anytime someone is like ‘we need to move past Marx’ I know it is because they haven’t actually read Marx. It’s like people saying we need to move past Newton because Einstein’s theory of relativity exists.
All of the dynamics that Marx describes are still present because he was describing our modern system in it’s infancy, and as much as everyone wants to claim that we are now in a post-modern state, that is simply false, we are in ultra-modernity, where everything has been commodified.
I read theory dawg… just not all of capital cuz its long :X
I’ve read plenty of Lenin, Marx, Baudrillard, Debord, Leslie Feinberg, etc… I am not post marxist… I am simply post-Marx since he was 200 years ago. He wasn’t wrong, he simply just didn’t predict the completely corrupting nature of capitalism as emergence is basically unpredictable…
Marx is great at diagnosing the problem with Capitalism during industrialization. He was incapable of predicting the “Spectacle” as Guy Debord puts it as it emerged from modern media.
Dont discount modern thinkers! They love Marx. They utilize Marx to help us identify the contradictions of today because Labor Theory of Value doesn’t apply to the average worker who has literally zero tangible labor output.
Disregarding EITHER is dogmatic and ANTI Marxist in principle!
Lol He literally does describe the corrupting nature though! In the work that you said you read!
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” - The Communist Manifesto
I don’t disregard modern authors, but they are often just describing aspects of what Marx was able to coalese into a fairly comprehensive whole. I have read all of them as well. I don’t reject their conclusions, but if you think that the ‘average worker’ has zero tangible labor output, you are being very myopically first world to the international economic system.
Please don’t throw around words like ‘dogmatic’ if you haven’t actually read all of the supposed ‘dogma’.
Thats fine, maybe modern authors put Marx into Modern English. What you wrote does not really seem to encapsulate the full message found within the Society of the Spectacle. The idea of alienation from the idea of labor itself. Yes the we rest on the laurels of the entire “third world” that actually produces what we consume, but white collar workers in the first world are literally alienated from doing productive labor to begin with. Its a complete non starter. We humans yearn to labor, and we Westerners are prevented from laboring toward anything productive.
There are plenty of factory jobs in the U.S.
They suck, are mostly second and third shift, and do not pay very well, but they do exist. I know because I have worked them most of my life. Labouring towards anything productive is not possible under capitalism, as you will always be laboring to buy porky another yacht.
The Society of Spectacle goes into the modern formulation of Marx’s principles of alienation, and what those dissolving ties look like, as we literally dissolve our ties with reality itself in order to propagate capitalist accumulation.