[lisper]

> Such overwrought prose. Such "forcing everything into a Marxist framework."

One of the reasons Marx is so popular is that his writing is vague enough that people can read a very wide range of meaning into the words. Religious leaders and politicians often follow the same playbook to great success.

[imtringued]

Marx is popular because his first volume divides people into the good guys and the bad guys by cleanly separating classes so everyone who hates their boss or landlord is quick to agree with Marx. Even Marx himself doesn't believe everything he wrote in the first volume, in fact, most of the good answers and thinking are actually in the third volume which nobody including me has read. The parts that I have read could have come out of my mouth with only minor modifications.

Stalin had only read scraps of the first volume, the one that divides people into good and evil, the one that doesn't actually try to find the underlying problem, it was only natural that he was doomed to failure. Imagine being wrong while fully believing your cause to be infallible.

The problem with Marx isn't that he is vague, it is that you have to read 2700 pages of difficult to read text which nobody, not even the staunchest supports have done. Why? Because it would take more than 160 hours to both read and understand what he has written. You may have to reread it twice because the third volume gives you a new context for the first and second.

Marxism is doomed due to bounded rationality.

[lisper]

> most of the good answers and thinking are actually in the third volume which nobody including me has read

If no one, including you, has read it, then how can anyone, including you, possibly know whether or not it contains "the good answers"?

[bsenftner]

My art school friends used to point out "artful ambiguity" as a key success factor beneath religious leaders, political movements and pop music.

[kqr]

Sure, also "early access" video games. People are willing to pay a lot for them because it is still ambiguous enough that everyone can imagine it will turn out into specifically their future vision.

[claudiawerner]

>One of the reasons Marx is so popular is that his writing is vague enough that people can read a very wide range of meaning into the words.

I don't think this is true, and I say this as someone who's read Marx (almost) back to back. The ambiguities are sometimes mathematical, and there are debates as to meaning in some places, but the overal thesis and critiques are anything but vague, whether you agree with them or not.

[eternalban]

https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/cap1.pdf

For those interested, I recommend Michael Heinrich's biography of Marx ('Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society'; volume 1 covers the young Marx up to the end of his studies and delves deep into the intellectual and political context of that time in Germany and Europe. Very informative.)

His 'An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital' is on my to-read list:

https://files.libcom.org/files/Karl%20Marx%20and%20the%20Bir...

https://files.libcom.org/files/Michael_Heinrich,_Alex_Locasc...