this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Disagree with Dad Kapital. That shit is way too dense for someone that needed a bet to read theory. Marx Madness or some other synthesis could be good, but I still find Kapital to be pretty unimportant for how hard it is to read. Kapital is pretty much communism's versions of mathematical proofs. There's nothing in Kapital that Lenin or Mao don't say in 1/10th of the time.
Speaking of shit that's way too dense Simalcra and Simulation by Baudrillard is fire. Bro definitely caught his pen on fire
If you don't read Das Kapital, you don't understand Marxism but are instead gleaning it from other sources that only partially cover it, generally for the purposes of their own applications. A lot of people do just go with Lenin or Mao and then constantly fuck up because they do not in fact live in conditions where there's a substantial peasantry or a monarchy. Once they realize this, they don't know what to do - how to "update" Marxism, as well as how to criticize it. IMO this is also why Trots and Gonzalites and so on can proliferate so easily. I have yet to see a Trot reading list that includes Das Kapital, but they all call themselves Marxists. A large number that I've interacted with don't even know the basics.
It's also not very dense, it's just tragically German. Once you get used to the writing style and maybe a little Hegel it's a fairly quick read. The real barrier, to the extent that there is one, is just to set aside reading time at all.
This is where I like Carlo Cafiero's summary of Capital. Endorsed by Marx himself! Yeah, Das Capital is literally a from-first-principles philosophical work, reading it is basically a semester worth of work https://www.marxists.org/archive/cafiero/1879/summary-of-capital.htm