Agreed haha, as Castro would say, it’s historical simplism.

The second but a lot of emphasis was out on who came up with it.

Can you believe Newtonian physics is a useful model without having read Newton’s original work? You can – everyone here probably does – and you can just as easily be a Marxist without having read Capital.

If only it were that easy. You have people saying China or North Korea or Cuba are either already socialist or on the path to socialism. You have people whose idea of praxis is “community building” or “protesting”. You have people talking about science fiction shit like FALGSC in an unironic manner. You have people claiming “worker ownership” is the goal of socialism. And this is just Chapo, where people are nominally better read. In real life, most socialists are just liberals of different flavors.

You absolutely need to read Capital to understand Marxism. It’s ok to admit you’re not a Marxist socialist. But my issue is when people call on Marx for their arguments without ever actually understanding Marx (MLs being a major culprit of this)

And of course Marx was wrong about some things (to the extent “wrong” even makes sense when you’re talking about non-falsifiable predictions of the future of humanity). He was not a prophet, and his writings were not handed down by some unerring divinity. He got a lot “right,” which is why his ideas are still so useful, but it’s those ideas that are important – not their original textual packaging.

Great! And it’s time to read those important ideas. Why read someone else’s interpretation of Marx, when you literally have the original writing available for free? I can guarantee if people actually read and understood Marx, it would be impossible to still be an ML or an anarchists, at least for those who are intellectually honest.

Yeah, but it’s not harmful to read the book lol. I’ve only ever skimmed Das Kapital because I have terrible patience when it comes to reading and Marx is definitely not a light read.

Stuff like Black Shirts and Reds, the Manifesto, even State and Rev are a lot more approachable and you can infer the important points Marx makes from them. The idea that Kapital is the end all of leftist literature is dumb, but it’s still something you can learn a lot from if you read it.