I’m planning on starting a Marxist book club at my university, but I’m kind of dumb and have trouble understanding stuff, is there some trick I can use to understand more?

  • Cuervo@lemmygrad.ml
    11·
    13 days ago

    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.
      • Cuervo@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        13 days ago

        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).

          • Cuervo@lemmygrad.ml
            1·
            7 days ago

            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?