On Endnotes

Agree, but Keating's invocation of Marx here doesn't make sense given how tough Das Kapital is to understand.

pannekoek2007

We need communist literature to be done in plain English. Period.

Translate: watered down

pannekoek2007

(words with anglo-saxon origins vs classical language words).

Sorry, I misread you.

Translate: dumbed down

Eh, use plain language to explain concepts when they are introduced. After that, use the concepts. Texts can teach people to understand more complex language, after all, people aren't idiots (and sadly, this kind of attitude is often in the minds of people who rail on about difficult language). Then again, in our society we have this ridiculous approach to texts that they are supposed to be read individually; get a group together and even so-called "uneducated" people can make sense of even a really complex text.

All I am saying is that there is a middle ground to be found between "dumbing down" and highly specialised academic texts.

pannekoek2007

American political rhetoric has for decades taught people understand ideas better when communicated in plain english (words with anglo-saxon origins vs classical language words).

This suggestion falls fully within the American anti-intellectual tradition:

Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent.

So ditch science and explain capitalism with nursery rhymes. As I said, you're suggestion means dumbing it down.

It is difficult to imagine anyone who doesn’t have a doctorate in advanced Marxoid studies reading Endnotes.

I think that's a bit hyperbolic - I have never been to college, I just have a high school education. I can usually get at what Endnotes is saying. I think the extent to which I was taught Marx on schools is that we were shown the "ten planks" of the Manifesto and told that's what communism is - complete government centralization and control, according to Marx. I think that having a good understanding of Capital is probably a prerequisite - I'm about halfway through the 3 volumes currently.

But I do agree that it's often difficult to understand, and these journals could really use simpler language. Troploin is far easier to understand than Théorie Communiste, for example, which is a shame, since I tend to side with TC.

I think the Engels quote makes sense - he regrets that Capital isn't easier to understand (which might explain his works that try to explain things in simpler language), looking back.

pannekoek2007

I believe if I remember correctly Otto Ruhle did a simple version of the first volume of Capital in the 1930's.

He didn't change the language, just shortened it: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/capital.htm

Khawaga

Agree, but Keating's invocation of Marx here doesn't make sense given how tough Das Kapital is to understand.

Compare Capital Vol. I to the Grundrisse. Marx definitely changed a lot about the presentation and language of the former in an attempt to make it more accessible, and he definitely harboured the hope at least that it would be read and understood by ordinary members of the working-class.

I agree. He aimed for that, but was largely unsuccessful. Then again, his lectures "value, Price and Profit" and "Capital and Wage-labour" are quite accessible.

Well, there's a question of perspective. Compared to the philosophical tradition he emerged from, Marx's work is eminently readable. I remember the first time I tried to read Hegel's Phenomenology, I felt like I needed a specialist dictionary to translate every other word from 'Hegelese' into plain English. The section on ethical life references the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles extensively, without ever directly referring to them. I don't know about you, but the comprehensive school I went to didn't teach me much about ancient Greek tragedy. Without contemporary footnotes the average reader would be totally lost.

There's also the difficulty that, past a certain point, making something simpler becomes a process of completely removing the actual content of a work. One of the biggest issues in the dissemination of Marx's work after his death seems to be the way in which it was often absorbed through questionable second hand accounts. IIRC Kautsky's book 'Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx', a book which among other things claims that wages would exist in 'socialism', was much more widely read in the SPD than the original article.

I think a lot of what Marx published in his own lifetime is actually in a very readable style - the Manifesto, Poverty of Philosophy, Wage-Labour and Capital, the 18th Brumaire and The Civil War in France all spring to mind. Apart from Vol. I most of the really obscure passages of Marx's work occur in unpublished works like the 1844 manuscripts and the Grundrisse.

Good not to forget that the more difficult texts in Marx's work (ie. also the ones that have a higher standing among academics and other lovers of difficult for the sake of difficult, as objects of exegesis etc.) are ones that Marx didn't prepare for publication at all. They were written for his own sake, for elaboration and development of his critique. Explains a lot of the 'style', or lack of consideration for any readers other than Marx hisself. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of very striking passages to be found in them.

That said I really agree that anticapitalists should make theories accessible by using language in non-jargonistic way, which doesn't mean to "avoid" concepts or their names, but by integrating those in more common language, making them common, useful, concrete. The academicism is mostly a matter of never arriving at that level, and delving ever deeper in the "complicatedness" of concepts. Impressive for fellow theorists but not very much for anyone else, and also quite pointless, if the concrete purpose is lost or not arrived at.

Carlo Cafiero's Compendium of Capital badly needs translating into English. Written by an anarchist, approved by Karl Marx himself.

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Well, if you take the elections to the Constituent Assembly as a barometer, most of the population clearly supported the Social Revolutionaries over either the Bolsheviks or the Anarchists. So if that's our criteria for contemporary politics I guess we should all start singing the praises of peasant socialism.

spacious

Good not to forget that the more difficult texts in Marx's work (ie. also the ones that have a higher standing among academics and other lovers of difficult for the sake of difficult, as objects of exegesis etc.) are ones that Marx didn't prepare for publication at all.

Well, Das Kapital is not exactly bed-time reading even though Marx prepared and re-prepared it for publication.

Khawaga

Well, Das Kapital is not exactly bed-time reading

Nonsense. It's just the thing when you have trouble sleeping. Whenever I can't get to sleep, a couple of paragraphs from chapter 1 is always guaranteed to knock me out. Admittedly, while it never becomes a page-turner exactly, it does pick up a bit a few chapters in.

Point taken ;)

Having said all of that, I find Das Kapital to be a really exciting book. One of the few ones I've bothered to read more than 2 times.

I don't know of much books which have a countless number of books attributed it to help you read it. It would be awesome if some one did "translate" it to "plain language", I'd read the fuck out of it if that was the case. Frankly though, I always cringe when political groups publish newspapers and books nowadays. The most relevant format is video. There is a great channel called libertarian socialist rants, who does videos based on the AFAQ and such.

https://youtu.be/pI6a7WySFsU

More of this needs to be done

deleted

they aren't comparable no, and it's not that I don't see the value in books or that I don't read. I think we've just to come to people where they are at. It's like anarchism is a band and we're trying to distribute our propaganda on sheet music or gramophones. People like to say its not about a battle of ideas, but the revolution needs to be popular to happen, so until there is a large amount of class consciousness, part of it very much is. Did you watch the video I linked? I think you'll find he doesn't have to water anything down, in fact he quotes a lot more studies than I have ever read in any political theory books.

I agree with Croy; you have to mix it up. Leftists organisations are way, way too obsessed with the written word, with no small amount of impersonal power granted to those who can and do write a lot (these folks are often seen as more important or more intelligent than those who do not write). Of course, it is important for an org to publish statements, longer articles and so on, but you simply won't reach quite a lot of people. Publishing a video or a podcast with more or less the same content should go hand in hand with written pieces. A benefit of videos and podcasts over written pieces is that sound and video is something that can be heard and read together and everyone will be done at the same time; a written piece is always read in silence, at different speeds and as individuals. There are benefits and drawback to writing, just as there is to any other medium that you use.

Of course I've seen the video, I've followed Cam since he was CammehYaBams. But his political theory is not that good and watered down. It's the usual pop anti-capitalist rhetoric about profits. It distorts what is really at the center of capitalism; generalized commodity based production.

The main problem with your argument is that you are turning radical politics into a commodity to be marketed and sold. You are also assuming that proletarians need us communists to sell them our politics to become "class consciousness", which is just deft opportunism. Class consciousness is not something to be spread, it is not butter. Proletarians become class consciousness through their own material struggle, they learn to use their power by using their power. No revolution has started with it just being popular because an idea was sold hard enough, it starts with spontaneous struggle by the masses. Radical politics will never be "popular" because the ruling ideas of a society will always be the ideas of the ruling class, as Marx would say.

Also, not everything has to be agitation material. Nobody is bringing Endnotes issues to sell at events. What you can get out if is an understanding of historical and current movements and their development.

ComradeEmma

Class consciousness is not something to be spread, it is not butter.

That is a great line, I may borrow that in the future.

ComradeEmma

Proletarians become class consciousness through their own material struggle, they learn to use their power by using their power.

Yes, but in many cases, people may want to struggle, but just don't have any idea how to actually do that. A somewhat common question on libcom is: boss is stealing wages, forcing overtime, being racist/sexist etc. How do I go about combatting that? How do I get my fellow workers to struggle with me? How do I avoid getting fired while struggling? Answering these questions does require some butter. And after struggling for some time (successfully or unsuccessfully), the questions may be: Why is this happening? Why, after we thought we won, have we come back to square one? Why is the boss sowing racial/gendered discord? With these questions, you need something more in-depth, like Endnotes or Capital. But surely, that material can be presented not only in text form? Putting something on video does not automatically mean watered-down, "commodification" (in the sense of aping after the aesthetic form of things that are sold) etc. And if the first video/text a new class conscious worker is told to read/watch, bleats on about surplus-value, exploitation, generalised commodity production, it may be a turn-off due to this specialised language. Talking about profits vs. you not being able to put food on the table may then be the first step; all the Marxist lingo can come later and can, even, be explained much more straight forward (like Prole-Info did in Abolish Restaurants; I've yet to encounter a restaurant worker that did not understand and even agree with that text).

deleted

What I called commodification was not the idea of distributing theory through videos but the band analogy, the idea that radical politics is something that needs to be "marketed" in some sense on a market of ideas

I understood that, hence why I wrote "commodification (in the sense of aping after the aesthetic form of things that are sold)". In other words, I agree. While it is easy to try to sell something with simple slogans, it is impossible to explain that capitalist social relations are enslaving us in that way. But the problem is that many people become accustomed to the 15 second to 3 minutes marketing video and anything that is longer than that may be an immediate turn off.

There is of course value in some form of agitation but one problem I think that comes with this form of agitation with watered down material is the lack of theoretical discipline. There is no point in just teaching something the wrong thing because it's easier, proletarians are not daft.

But it is not about being easier, but presenting it in a different form (a video). With a video you can do different things other than just fucking read out a script; you can show and visualise phenomena that are hard to explain purely with words. The problem with your comment--even though I agree that working class people are not dumb (see my comment #8)--is that you seem to believe that someone, anyone, will just readily accept our worldview and analyses. That's just not the case; it takes time and often a different type of language before the "theoretical discipline" can come (and tbh, this strict adherence to this notion is why the left is often being labelled as too academic; and I say this as an academic). Do you give a 14 year old, Das Kapital and the latest issue of Endnotes or Lettersjournal or, for example, something by Prole Info or Tintin spoof Breaking Free.

I'd also like to add that I think cory is going about it from the wrong direction; you can't start with agitation by itself. You can't just throw watered down theory on people and have them go "now I get it". They learn from their own spontaneous struggle, like strikes or anti-gentrification struggles.

Chicken and the egg. Sure, people learn in struggle, but the first example is rarely a strike (in North America, the number of days of productivity "loss" due to strikes is at an all-time low). And I agree that actual struggle is the only foundation, there are many people (myself included when I started being interested in politics at the age of about 12) that observe that the world is fucked up, that you mom struggle to put food on the table and so on, but without being able to explain why the world is in this way or, if you wanted to do something, what can and should be done.

As I said in post #6

All I am saying is that there is a middle ground to be found between "dumbing down" and highly specialised academic texts.

comrade_emma

They learn from their own spontaneous struggle, like strikes or anti-gentrification struggles.

This is empirically false isn't it? Every revolution I know of was preceded by long periods of propaganda.

If ideas didn't matter there would be no fascism. No one has read endnotes without being somewhat radical or academic. It would be insane to sit through that with no previous insight.

deleted

'Watered down' is correct. You also have to be cautious about what cultural trends you emulate. People are used to 'sound-bites' and capitalism's 'bread and circus,' so a modern work has to be careful not to fall into that. People aren't averages, as well. If a work is written, involving your view of complex concepts, then to change it like this is to dilute it.

Zanthorus makes this point very well:

There's also the difficulty that, past a certain point, making something simpler becomes a process of completely removing the actual content of a work. One of the biggest issues in the dissemination of Marx's work after his death seems to be the way in which it was often absorbed through questionable second hand accounts. IIRC Kautsky's book 'Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx', a book which among other things claims that wages would exist in 'socialism', was much more widely read in the SPD than the original article.

If you keep hawking an idea, then it can become something really different...

I don't think 'intelligence' should come into this either: the saying says that an idiot will drag you down to their level and defeat you with experience. You don't want to help! So the question is style, not the intelligence involved in a text!

Zanthorus

Khawaga

Agree, but Keating's invocation of Marx here doesn't make sense given how tough Das Kapital is to understand.

Compare Capital Vol. I to the Grundrisse. Marx definitely changed a lot about the presentation and language of the former in an attempt to make it more accessible, and he definitely harboured the hope at least that it would be read and understood by ordinary members of the working-class.

Das Kapital is oftn far too "simplified," compared to the depth of the Grundrisse. People often just dismiss it, because it treats its ideas with far too much brevity. Nonetheless, it is also organised into a clear 'format,' which isn't the same thing as simplification. It's hard to call it highly 'simplifieed' when it has to go through so many different things. In addition, much of 'why' Das Kapital is 'organised' is allegedly due to drawing on the works of Marx's 'predecessors' like Hegel; so to compare them like this seems uncalled for.

Das Kapital isn't easily understood, but people can pretend that it is......

The section on ethical life references the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles extensively, without ever directly referring to them. I don't know about you, but the comprehensive school I went to didn't teach me much about ancient Greek tragedy. Without contemporary footnotes the average reader would be totally lost.

I mean, the point of that is mostly to cover all of these developments! They couldn't just exclude some... It explains the subject if you're into that, if you're nnot then that's not because it can't be read.

Serge Forward

Khawaga

Well, Das Kapital is not exactly bed-time reading

Nonsense. It's just the thing when you have trouble sleeping. Whenever I can't get to sleep, a couple of paragraphs from chapter 1 is always guaranteed to knock me out. Admittedly, while it never becomes a page-turner exactly, it does pick up a bit a few chapters in.

LOL...

I understand that view!

Still when it picks up the important groundworks have been laid! Then it can develop them .