Hubes’s Reviews > The Marx-Engels Reader > Status Update

"To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune" (418).

Truly closing in on the end of the Capital Vol. 1 section which is so exciting and also not nearly as bad as I feared. There's just a lot of new terms (at least for me) that are frontloaded. Can't wait to be moving on and then, soon after, moving on to Part 3 of the reader !!

Still have a ways to go but "Part 3. The Production of Absolute Surplus Value" has been quite great !

Actually getting through Capital V1 this time which is gr8, but really struggling to know if parts of the argument feel simple because they are or if they feel simple because I'm missing hundreds of pages of context 😣

"The worshipped capitalists will never want for fresh exploitable flesh and blood, and will let the dead bury their dead" (Wage Labour and Capital, p215)

Damn The German Ideology is fantastic!!! (But suffers from a total refusal to acknowledge actual slavery)

I appreciate the detail Karl but I absolutely will not care about Hegel. You cannot make me!! Also, stop comparing workers to slaves when there are literal slaves living at the same time. This makes your analysis bad!!

There's still some good stuff, particularly about money, the objectification of labour, and private property. "[Money] is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace." (105)

On the Jewish Question was bad. But I like this quote from Contribution to the Critique: Introduction, "Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses... To be radical is to grasp things by the root" 60)

Anyways I'm on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 now and enjoying it so far. Excited to drop Hegel, ~eventually~

Gonna make updates w/ fav quotes n takeaways as i go. anyways, "Engels wrote to Marx: 'What a disgusting title - The Social Democrat!...' Marx answered: 'Social Democrats is a bad title. Yet one shouldn't...use the best title for something which may turn out to be a failure. (Intro xxxv)"I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me" (Discovering Hegel, 7) and "