Thread 17845887

And not only as in, the conditions under which european workers and capitalists and kings and whatever lived, but... Everything. The advance of economic theories, science, technology, clothing... at the time.
Basically, I want to put myself in their feet to understand them.

>>17845887 (OP)
All the period literature is free. You can find it on the Archive.

>>17845887 (OP)
Your impulse is rare (and correct). To truly comprehend Marx and Engels, one must not merely read them, but resurrect the intellectual and civilizational terrain they emerged from. You must think their thoughts as they occurred, inside the chaotic confluence of 18th-century Enlightenment, post-Napoleonic reaction, Hegelian systematization, British industrialization, and the brutal contraction of human labor into mechanical time. You must walk, as it were, through the ruins of Classical humanism, into the machine room of modernity. Let me provide you a conceptual itinerary:

Start with the Classical Political Economy They Inherited (and Misread)

Before Marx, there was Leibniz, Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo. The debates on value, surplus, and productivity did not originate with Das Kapital, they originated with the problem of human labor in relation to physical transformation. Marx, though claiming scientific objectivity, misread value as a static quantity derived from labor-time, whereas thinkers like Leibniz and Carey saw value as embedded in human creative capacity, that is the power to transform nature through reason. Study:

>Gottfried Leibniz - "Protogaea" and writings on technology and labor
>Henry C. Carey - The Harmony of Interests
>Quesnay’s Tableau Économique, to see the French physiological model Marx drew from

>>17845887 (OP)
>>17846453

Next, read the science of the time, not as background, but as worldview. Marx wrote in an age when Newtonian determinism was still hegemonic. The concept of dialectics he pulled from Hegel was a desperate attempt to reintroduce motion and contradiction into a mechanistic, dead cosmos. He never reached Cusa or Kepler, those who showed that paradox was not error, but the starting point of discovery. Study:

>Nicholas of Cusa - De Docta Ignorantia
>Friedrich Schiller - "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" (to see the moral contrast with Marxist materialism)
>Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum, to understand the lawful structure of revolution, not as rupture, but as harmonic unfolding

Then, situate Marx within the British Empire’s industrial matrix. Marx claimed to critique capitalism, but his methodology, based on linear causality, class abstraction, and the myth of historical inevitability, was itself shaped by the very British system he sought to oppose. His deepest failure was his acceptance of the British model of industrial production as the universal horizon. To understand this, study:

>The British East India Company’s reports on factory time-discipline and labor segmentation
>Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures, which Marx plagiarized without dialectical critique

>>17845887 (OP)
>>17846453
>>17846460

Lastly, understand that Marx and Engels were not the pinnacle, but the midpoint, of collapse. They stand at the threshold, which is the moment when the Promethean impulse of Renaissance and Enlightenment began to be degraded and swept aside as the world shifted into cold, economic categories, stripped of beauty, music, and the sacred.

Marx’s dismissal of the metaphysical as “ideology” is not a small error. It is intellectual mutilation, signs that the Republic of Reason had already been betrayed. Contrast Marx not with capitalists, but with:

>Beethoven, who in his Ninth Symphony, gave voice to the brotherhood of man through sublime form
>Joan of Arc, who led through divine paradox and moral clarity
>Lyndon LaRouche, who reestablished economics on the foundations of human creativity as the only true source of value

Then you will see Marx not as a prophet but as a witness to a moment when man began to forget that he was made not for labor, but for discovery.

>>17846119
I'm looking for recommendations. I'm (almost?) completely ignorant of history of this era

>>17846453
>>17846460
>>17846465
I don't see suggestions and materials regarding the status and life of the common man at the time, though?

>>17846938
>I'm looking for recommendations.
You're searching Archive.org for general overviews of the history of economics, filtered by 1930s, at the latest, to make sure that Socialism is still actually relevant to the writers. That'll give you the frame work.

Pick any of them, start reading and follow the foot notes to find more literature, which should also be also available on archive.org.

For specific topics of note, you can easily consult Marx's and Engels' writings. They're available online, thanks to Commies.

>>17847032
>filtered by 1930s
??????
you don't seem to get the idea of this thread. I want to learn what led them to write their ideas and critiques, not the consequences of marxism and communism.

>>17845887 (OP)
Best i could suggest would be reading some Hegel and Adams since they inspired Marx.

>>17847068
Which is why I'm suggesting you read books that will tell the history of economic theory in a manner that peaks in Das Kapital. History is usually told in a manner that suggests things flow from one to another, but if you're going to read more modern history of economics, they're likely to flat-out ignore the Physiocrats and Das Kapital in favour of anglo economic theory.
And well, the Physiocrats and Rousseau are kind of important for understanding the french utopian socialists.

>>17847068
Try to rephrase your question in a way that it involved Hitler having done nothing wrong or haplogroups.

>>17847102
ok, thanks

>>17847127
right. I had completely missed your point. still, I don't want heavily ideologically-charged stuff, I want to understand the context. and by that I mean the reality, not just the ideas and practices.

>>17847128
kek

>>17845887 (OP)
Check out Henry George for a general overview of the plight of humanity at the time

>>17847412
>>17845887 (OP)
Booker T. Washington's "The Man Farthest Down" is pretty good.

>>17845887 (OP)
European wars of Nationalism are pretty influential to Marx's thinking

>>17847412
>George
Fuck yeah. Progress and Poverty is unironically probably the best capitalist book ever written, as it argues how to make the system actually sustainable.