Status Updates From The Marx-Engels Reader

The Grundrisse is a frustrating text, being the collation of jottings that it is. But if anything it shows the centrality of the analysis of value and labour to Marx's political project, as well as his hegelianism. I will have to return to it (and probably read the whole thing) after Capital. The difference in maturity of thought between Grundrisse and Capital is evident, but it reveals some of his thought process

"The production of the relation of the reproduction of historical relation of production relates and produces precisely this relation of production to production which it reproduces as such in the form of a relation of production relating itself to itself as a reproductive relation of production. Historically speaking."

- Karl in the Grundrisse, probably

Continuing in the manuscripts, Private Property & Communism is a fantastic follow-up to Estranged Labour, describing the different methods in which private property as a relationship between labour and capital comes to be annulled negatively, incompletely, and positively, and what this means for humanity as a social being.

Estranged Labour is one of my favorite early Marx writings - it’s fascinating to read the groundwork for what he’d develop into Capital but in such distinctly philosophical terms.

“Though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion”

Intro to Critique of Hegel sets up why 1840s German society is absolutely cooked in practical life compared to the rest of modernizing Europe despite having maintained pace with its theory, and why the only real possibility of emancipation in Germany is through the proletariat, defined by artificially produced poverty, whose development is actively dissolving said cooked social order.

Started the 1844 manuscripts

Onto the intro to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right… and I never feel like more of a big dumb dumb than when Marx is talking about Hegel.

IT'S SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM SUMMER!!!

Some might read On the Jewish Question as anti-Semitic; it seemed more to me to use the contemporary anti-Semitic framework to demonstrate the contradictions present in society. If Judaism is greed, and greed is anti-Christian/anti-social, then how has it become the basis of civil society? If the goal is the emancipation from greed/money, it’s not just Jewish people but all of society which must emancipate itself.