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marca

mononoaware@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 3 months ago

she/they

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2025 Reading Goal

Success! marca has read 23 of 20 books.

Lenin: What the "friends of the people" are and how they fight the social-democrats (1946, Foreign Languages Pub. House)

A solid sample of historical materialism of historical value

Lenin's unmistakable polemical style demolishes the common eristic tricks of a typical petty bourgeois philistine and his lack of decent reading comprehension. It is witty and incisive as is Lenin's writing in general. Not a dull academic lecture but a solid work of a prodigious mind. But aside from being a valuable defense of historical materialism, since there are better ones and a lot it's subject matter is not that relevant today (the circumstantial side of it at least), it is mostly of historical interest. It also has the Achilles' heel of Lenin's writing, namely very lenthy passages and paragraphs that even despite their captivating content can leave a reader overwhelmed and fatigued. Yet still in addition to all of that I'd consider it, at its core, a good example of demolishing the reactionary drivel by demonstrating it has got no actual arguments – so common among today's 'smart guys', …

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Taylor Anderson: Wage-Labor and Capital (2017, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)

Clarity

Quite good, accessible explanation of such mechanisms as automatization, speculation, reproduction minimum, crisis of overproduction, falling rates of profit, economic cycles, proletarianization, accumulation of capital, relative impoverishment – that the accumulation of enormous wealth on one end is accompanied by massive impoverishment on the other.

A solid choice for radicalizing people (it was literally written for the workers not as some academic discourse after all). If you're struggling with the first chapters of Das Kapital, read this and Value, Price and Profit or try the abridgement by Otto Rühle.

Especially since latey I've been developing a theory that Marx might be autistic to some notable extent, especially in the are of the theory of mind. Plus his inductive method albeit grounded in dialectical materialism did not prevent him from writing some of his works in a quite dense style. Luckily it is not the case here.