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Is there any way I can study Marxism easily without losing focus, losing memory and not caring? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/marxism@hexbear.net
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I’m basically center-left and a market socialist who supports multi-party politics and democracy, and I wish to broaden my horizons on Marx. Sometimes I tell myself “I gotta study Marx”, but I can’t.

I also need help internalizing what I’ve studied about Marxism and incorporate in my political views.

Any answer is appreciated. Thank you!

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[–] 8 points 2 days ago (5 children)

We read the original works because the underlaying systems and logic of capitalism haven't changed since the 1800s, while in the intervening century and half we've had a concerted effort by literally every capitalist friendly org on the planet mystifying and distorting the science for political ends, leading to alot of inevitable backtracking and dead threads

Also if you're looking for a modern distillation of Marxism, Anwar Shaikh's Capital is the resource you're looking for

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Thanks for the source!! I'll make sure to check that out.

    While I agree that the underlying principles of capitalism haven't changed over time, it's definitely seen quantitative changes. Moreover, modern statistics and computing allow us to obtain, interpret and visualize data on scales incomprehensible back then. As an example, Paul Cockshott has published scientific articles numerically demonstrating the labor theory of value. That's something Marx inferred logically and supported with limited evidence, but now we have actual statistical evidence applied to entire sectors of the economy proving that law of supply and demand is mostly shit at predicting prices, whereas labour theory of value consistently provides great estimations, and this should be mentioned to someone learning Marxism: "this isn't true because Marx was very smart and you should believe it, Marx simply predicted it and further evidence has corroborated it beyond doubt".

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago* (3 children)

    Paul Cockshott has published scientific articles numerically demonstrating the labor theory of value

    it sounds like you need to make some posts to c/marxism

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Paul Cockshott has a YouTube channel where he explains his findings in much more clarity and rigor than I can. He's a bit of a queerphobe, probably due to him being ancient, and the format of the videos is a poor sound quality voiceover of a slideshow, but they're there if you want a more accessible entrypoint. His papers are very readable though, he's fortunately a good communicator in that sense who doesn't abuse jargon and high register. But if you're really interested, you can write a followup to this comment. It could be fun to summarize some of his videos in a series of posts to c/Marxism.

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