What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. Singer is a known person who can think and write clearly, and his book was just about the shortest I could find, so I jumped on it, hoping I would find a more sympathetic portrayal of someone whom my society has been trying to cast as a demon or monster.Īnd I don’t know if this is an artifact of Singer or a genuine insight into Marx, but as far as I can tell he’s even worse than I thought. The primary sources – especially when they’re translated, especially when they’re from the olden days before people discovered how to be interesting – just turn me off. It’s only after hearing a bunch of different people attack the same idea from different angles that I’ve gotten the gist of it. The clincher was that the rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me, even when I’d read them. I weighed the costs and benefits of reading primary sources versus summaries and commentaries, and decided in favor of the latter. I’m not embarassed for choosing Singer’s Marx: A Very Short Introduction as a jumping-off point for learning more leftist philosophy.
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