it’s really easy when you imagine every delicate and bespoke part is a disposable piece of plastic designed to be interchangeable and taken apart and put back together in different arrangements then thrown in a box and stamped on by kids and pets and then to start again with nothing lost. nothing could go wrong with that analogy.

it’s absorbed through osmosis by people living in capitalism and being surrounded by bourgeois media of all types .that and not being taught to think critically or creatively about anything. so people think population increase = more people within their personal space and possibly taking their resources.

the main referent is immigration and you know how that 's spoken about. unfortunately people would rather imagine themselves being a little fascist than imagine themselves challenging their hoarding employer / landlord / utility company / etc

you’re welcome. I’m thinking of taking a look at the reitter translation. if I can find the time, I’ll read it this year (assuming I’m not the only one who is treating 2025 basically to have started already-i don’t think I’ll get around to it in '24). I’ll make a post about it if I do

likewise , let me know what you think if you go with that version or read it later ; there’s a strong chance that you’ll read it before me lol (my reading list is always far too ambitious).

thanks, comrade, that’s a lot of mods!

Looks like this adds in a lot of nuance that isn’t in the vanilla game. I have enjoyed the vanilla version and never used mods . i should have a bit more time in 2025 and plan to play a bit more civ vi . I’ll give some of these mods a whirl

if i were to start with one or two mods, which of your list give the most oomf to a game? (If it helps, I don’t always have time for super long games .)

I read the Ben Fowkes penguin edition. It’s good. Some of the footnotes are a bit… meta - where you have footnotes from Marx, BF and Engels. This version is my preference , as I like to hold the book, especially if I have to study something carefully.

IMO it’s better than the Marxists.org copy because the online version contains errors. only minor typos, formatting issues and unclear footnotes but they are there. I do refer to that version and have skim read most of it because it’s handy to have an online, always-accessible, searchable version.

but for closely studying, i would go with the physical penguin version if you can afford it and can get along with handwriting notes, etc (if you work better online, the Marxists.org version will be fine.)

As for the reading order, you don’t have to read it from start to finish. Pick a later chapter that looks interesting and think about the general concepts that you already know about while you read it. . Once you see how Marx deploys his concepts in one of the…juicier chapters, you might find chapters 1-4 a lot more engaging. because you will know where Marx is going with them.

(I would suggest then eventually re-reading the later chapter when you read from chapter 1 chronologically - you’ll be able to re-evaluate it knowing Marx’s notion of commodities in more depth and things will start to make a lot of sense).

volume I penguin edition isn’t as long as it looks. the first 100, maybe 150 pages are an introduction by, iirc, Ernest Mandel.

The very last ‘chapter’ is a summary of the whole book intended to prepare readers for volume II but not really ‘part’ of capital vol I; it’s also about 100 pages.

If you focus on Marx’ s words, it’s still long but much more approachable. I would recommend reading the Marx and Engels front matter carefully, though - there’s a lot of important and concise detail in those (the postfaces, prefaces, afterwords to different editions, etc). that said, these might be better to read at the end.

you’re welcome. he mentions Klein’s book. i prefer some of the more theoretical work by e.g. John Bellamy Foster but Klein’s book is a good place to start. it’s full of detail and facts and relatively easy to read . if you don’t get as much as you like in the sense of ‘capitalism causes climate change’, take a look at Bellamy Foster or Hickel. Hickel is in some ways now specific . like , he will go into the details of carbon emissions and he has a lot on his website, including short blogs et c.

maybe this list will be useful : https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/ecology-marxism-andreas-malm/

ooh what mods and how do they make it interesting?

hmmm i have to admit i used to read more fantasy than sci fi and watch and play a little more sci fi than fantasy . not much time to do either now 😔

I enjoyed ‘the gods themselves’ by Asimov. i did read and enjoy a lot of kids sci do books but I can’t remember the names, except Halo . I only ever played a few matches at my friend’s place as I never had an Xbox but I read the first three books of that series and loved them. tried to read them as an adult and did not get very far into the first one. Maybe they pick up a bit. I might have time over Christmas to read a bit more of them if things go to plan (they won’t go to plan, though, lol, i already know it! )

what about you? Any recommendations?

yo!

It’s as good a place as any to look for some

hello Oppo. Have a good week!

the first is harry cleaver. he calls himself an Autonomous Marxist. He’s not an ML (Marxist-Leninist). See his website - https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/

Cleaver wrote a book called 33 Lessons. each lesson explains the corresponding chapter in capital, volume I and what we can learn from it. He wrote the book based on his teaching. he published an updated version in 2019 with Pluto. I’m new to Cleaver so I can tell you he wrote this book but I can’t recommend it as such as I’ve not finished it yet .

The second is david Harvey. he’s also an academic marxist. Not an ML. He also taught capital for years. his lecture series is available on YouTube. he published a written version of his lectures with Verso. There’s a volume one and volume two, corresponding to capital, volume I and II. the one that kind of corresponds more to Capital, volume III is different - it’s called The Limits to Capital.

His website is https://davidharvey.org/about/ . I can recommend Harvey. his work really helped me to learn about marx .

these aren’t the only two who have written guidebooks to Capital but they’ll give you a flavour of what is available

when you read sci fi and fantasy they say you have to suspend your disbelief, pretending that the world is real so the speculative elements don’t put you off. otherwise the character gets to the other planet and you turn off the show because humans haven’t visited other planets yet

I was thinking about how that idea might apply to marx .

Marxists imo have the most accurate explanation for reality. but most people come to marx with very different ideas, based on a bourgeois framework

to get the most out of Marx, we have to make sure of two things. 1. that we don’t let our previous knowledge put us off or send us down too many dead ends. 2. that we do not turn off our critical thinking

To achieve this, we have to suspend our pre-reading-marx beliefs, for example about how the economy works and what it means to say something is ‘good for the economy’. let the new knowledge in with an open mind. and suspend our beliefs about what is wrong with marx - marx made mistakes and his work has some holes that others had to fill in . We each need to think of our own criticisms - the ruthless criticism of all that exists is part of the marxist method. we need to apply that method to marx etc themselves. to achieve that, we need to kind of ‘start again’ by forgetting some of what we know (or think we know).

later on it could be a good idea to quickly look through For Marx by Althusser. this will give a good idea about how much someone can get out of Theses on Feuerbach if they study it carefully and research around the topics.

if you’re reading something as big as capital you can also read someone like Cleaver or Harvey, etc, at the same time. They don’t always go in the same chunks or pages as you want to but there are a few guidebooks that match the main chapters and sections

main thing to watch out for is the anti-marxist intros like Singer. they can be useful but you can’t let their criticisms put you off because the criticisms are weak

this seems true if others are looking to op for the answers. there’s still value in encouraging people to read marx even if people are a little bit wrong. correct understanding will come later. It takes time. i did my first book club with an established marxist and their ‘correct’ explanations often went over my head. I think the key thing is setting everyone’s expectations.

if it’s a party and the person in charge of educating the recruits doesn’t know their stuff, that might be different

is there some trick I can use to understand more?

start a book club lol

Serious take: be humble, honest, and treat this as the opportunity to learn more. Knowledge is dialectical. coming to an understanding through discussion with other people will do often speed up the learning process.

explain and see the club as a chance to learn about marx and marxism from the horse’s mouth. the idea is to suspend your beliefs for long enough to know whether there is anything marx and company said that is worth listening to, and why. still be critical.

This is how I did my first one. I had no intention of being a marxist. I thought it was important enough to need to know. i didn’t know that if you read marx or marxists this way, you inevitably become one.

if you only did book clubs of materials that you already had fully informed opinions about, the others might ask if this is a book club or a lecture series. don’t worry about not knowing everything. You will understand something that the other members didn’t understand and they will get something that you didn’t. you learn together and by asking each other questions. don’t forget to look at the passages again after the session. You will probably find that this is when things pop as you notice details that others highlighted

there are tricks for increasing understanding. Don’t be afraid to re-read difficult passages. Don’t be afraid to skip over incomprehensible passages - come back to them later and many of them will make more sense without much more effort because you know what’s coming up. Ask questions as you read, like

• what is marx arguing?
• who is marx arguing with - what to they say?
• why is marx saying this - what is the main argument?
• what is marx just explaining - what is he adding to what people already knew?
• if you don’t understand a word or concept, you can try five things - 1. keep reading to see if the context makes things clearer 2. search the whole text for the same word because usage in another sentence might make it clearer 3. search the internet or marxists.org or their glossary for a description 4. make a note and come back to it later, trying one of the above three things 5. forget about it - if it’s important you will come across it again and the new context might make the meaning pop without effort.

hello everyone, nice to meet you all