Reddit reviews Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown
We found 8 Reddit comments about Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
W W Norton Company
There's also this follow-up. I'll repost the comment I wrote on /r/fantanoforever.
>Political discourse in the 21st century: regurgitating existing American political narratives on YouTube. I mean, not to be a total apologist for vulgar Internet Marxists, but if you're going to be highly critical of Marxism, please take Anthony's own advice and read a book instead of speaking in discourses that only really reveal a profound lack of understanding of the subject. Kolakowski, I hear, is profoundly revealing here.
>>Read a book man, a book Marx wrote, not by anyone else
>Well that's not fair Anthony, Marxists are rather partial to Engels, Luxemberg, (if they're a tankie) Lenin, and others. If they are non-orthodox, you might also see some Debord, Lukacs, Adorno, Althusser, Jameson, Zizek, and others.
Socialism/Communism
A People's History of the World
Main Currents of Marxism
The Socialist System
The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)
Marx for our Times
Essential Works of Socialism
Soviet Century
Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)
The Meaning of Marxism
The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)
Of the People, by the People
Why Not Socialism
Socialism Betrayed
Democracy at Work
Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)
The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)
The American Socialist Movement
Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)
It Didn't Happen Here
Eugene V. Debs
The Enigma of Capital
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action
Capitalism
The Conservative Nanny State
The United States Since 1980
The End of Loser Liberalism
Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)
Economics: A New Introduction (must read)
U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)
Kicking Away the Ladder
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Traders, Guns and Money
Corporation Nation
Debunking Economics
How Rich Countries Got Rich
Super Imperialism
The Bubble and Beyond
Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents
Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
America's Protectionist Takeoff
How the Economy was Lost
Labor and Monopoly Capital
We Are Better Than This
Ancap/Libertarian
Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)
Man, State and Economy
The Machinery of Freedom
Currently Reading
This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)
He called himself a Socialist until the 2000s, joined the British Labour party in 1965 and was part of a "Rosa Luxemburgist-Trotskyist sect" as he called the IS (International Socialists) until the early 70s. He said of himself he was a "Marxist by training" and in 2006 "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist" as socialism had stopped to be a viable alternative and a global movement as it was in his youth, and degenerated to corrupt populism a la Hugo Chavez. In god is not great, Hitchens called Marxism his "own secular faith" that "has been shaken and discarded, not without pain." He referred to his period of Marxist faith as "when I was a Marxist."
After reading Hitch 22 though I think that he at least at that time was no kind of Marxist in the conventional sense. He did not believe in the tenets of Marxism (proletarian revolution, the inevitability of capitalisms downfall etc., those things that Marx actually believed in). He was in my opinion rather a post-Marxist intellectual who was still influenced by Marxist discourse, meaning training in dialectical and historical materialism and referring to inner-Marxist arguments, especially those by dissidents, renegades and ex-communists, but also only in very general and undogmatic ways. Maybe you should read "Letters to a Young Contrarian" to get the idea of what he wanted young people to learn from his political development.
Interesting is also what he wrote about Leszek Kolakowski, whom he knew and with whom you should be familiar with if you call yourself a communist. My tip: read Main Currents of Marxism and see if you still want to call yourself that.
Any chance you can give us a primer on the ideology & groups represented by each of these? What does the Russian Communist party today believe? (There were many currents in historical communism.)
Sources:
https://mises.org/library/capital-and-interest
https://mises.org/library/karl-marx-and-close-his-system
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1904/criticism/index.htm
Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393329437/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_hDaKDb5SZGER0
Well, I'm not a socialist or a communist by any stretch, so I can't answer from an insider's perspective (so to speak).
>But why?
If you've got the time and the inclination, this book is the best answer to your questions that I'm aware of. He goes into great detail about the roots of, influences on, and relationships between the various branches of Marxism: http://www.amazon.com/Main-Currents-Marxism-Founders-Breakdown/dp/0393329437
A lot of social justice type courses today aren't really academic so I wouldn't put too much faith in them, they mostly revolve around arts and crafts projects, watching movies etc.
Some books to consider:
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
The German Historicist Tradition
Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown
The Open Society and Its Enemies: Plato, Hegel, Marx
You can read a brief summary of them in the Epilogue of his book Main Currents of Marxism which is viewable on Amazon. (If that link doesn't bring up the reader immediately, it's page 1206-1215.)
(I don't endorse, or buy all of these claims, but I'm curious what others more familiar with Kolakowski have to say about them. 1. 4. and 6. are what I'm most interested in)
TL;DR: