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I'm reading a really good biography on Marx atm, it's called Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. http://www.amazon.com/Karl-Marx-A-Ni.../dp/0871404672
It's the only detailed biography written after the publication of MEGA.
It goes into a lot of cool detail about his Hegelian roots and how he changed his outlook in later life with the rise of positivism.
I have it in epub format, PM me if you want a copy.
http://ppe.mercatus.org/
Hello Liberlict,
I'd be wary about implying you would illegally distribute copyright material on a forum like this one.
I have 2 ereaders and a computer and have licenses for all my software and ebooks. Just because we don't agree with the law doesn't mean we get to advertise we're flaunting it unless it is done in the context of civil disobedience and protest.
You strike me as being a very sharp fellow, and I'm a bit surprised you said the above. Please be careful, my friend. Assume the authorities look at everything you write here and act accordingly.
Right now I'm swamped with reading. I might purchase and read that book at a later time.
**************
By the way, if you notice, there is no cult around Marx. Most Marxists are not overly concerned with his personal life. We know he was not a perfect human being, and like us all, he had his personal faults. What we're most interested in is his thought, his ideas, his analyses. He was was one of the founders of modern economics and modern sociology. He was master of German, French, English, and ancient Greek literature and read most of the European languages. He was a careful scholar and attempted to learn as much as he could, even from those who saw things much differently than he did. For example, he took voluminous notes from his study of the mercantilist and physiocratic economists, as well as people like Adam Smith, George Say, and David Ricardo. There are 30 filled volumes of his handwritten notes on these economists.
He forgot to pay his bills and sometimes got into trouble, having to be rescued by Engels. He changed his views throughout his lifetime. There were rumors of a mistress, the truth of which I do not know. Here's an account of a contemporary, Marian Comyn, of an encounter with Marx and his family
What I take away from him is a materialist approach to history and political economy and my revolutionary socialist outlook.
Regards,
Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living--Socrates
Marx was a brilliant thinker, there's no doubt about that. And you're right that his theories stand distinct from his personal life. Nevertheless, I find you can gain a lot of insight by studying how he came to hold his ideas. He was a product of his times like the rest of us; a human being, like you say.
The mistress thing is true apparently, it was his maid. He fathered a kid to her and Engels took the wrap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Demuth
I would like to know more about what happened to Marx's son .. nothing extraordinary apparently.
http://ppe.mercatus.org/
Alan, the user Q has uploaded numerous e-books (albeit ones he converted himself from a PDF file, but the point still stands). I apologise for the off topic post.
Marx "turned Hegel's dialectics on its head" and 'combined' (a rather inappropriate choice of words, but I'm tired) it with Feuerbach's materialism, this giving us what we now know as dialectical materialism. Marx even criticised Feuerbach for being not materialistic enough. It's often said that classical Marxism is a combination of English works on the economy, French socialism and German philosophy, so we have Ricardo and smith to thank as much as Marx and Engels.
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
Responding to the original post, "why should you die for Marxism," the answer is that you shouldn't. You're missing the point. Marx critiqued capital and called for revolution. He also said that he wasn't a Marxist. Marx's writings should be used. Revolution is what you should die for. And as for Marxism as a science, it should be noted that today's definition of science is a mere justification of petty formalism. Dialectical materialism is a combination of being correct about what exists, in the broad sense (materialism) and agitating revolutionary change to degrade/negate the stupidity of what exists (dialectics). The fucking scientific method or statistics or whatever miss the point. It isn't about whether or not you can replace a hip or whether or not a solution turns blue in a certain kind of chemical, its about much, much, more than that - the enlightenment era fascination with formalist science is completely irrelevant to Marxism.
