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posted 02-07-2008 17:26
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Apparently Bob Crow has one of these. Sounds to me like a most useful thing. How does one get a quick introduction to Marx? I'd like a class of some kind. Any ideas?
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posted 02-07-2008 17:48
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You could never specialise like that below degree level in my day. O level in politics, certainly, but you'd have studied everyone from Plato to Marx and beyond. Sounds like complete bullshit to me.
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posted 02-07-2008 17:59
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sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at the School of Hard Knocks.
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posted 02-07-2008 18:16
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Tubby Isaacs wrote:
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How does one get a quick introduction to Marx? I'd like a class of some kind. Any ideas?
There are a few lectures in this course from UC Berkeley on Marx, but it's on law and society and not economics.
I've taken two classes on Marx (undergrad and grad), and I found that Terry Eagleton's book on Marx, part of a Routlege series of pocket-sized introductions to philosophers, was handy.
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posted 03-07-2008 01:32
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Eagleton's Marx is brilliant, if (obviously) more to do with Eagleton than with Marx...
O-level Marx is all too common an affliction, I reckon.
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posted 03-07-2008 07:42
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Apparently you get marks for writing nothing but 'fuck off' on your exam paper. Just think how well you could do if you wrote 'fuck off you motherfuckin asshole u r just a drivelling wankstain on the sheet of humanity'
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Last Edit: 03-07-2008 07:43 By Lyra.
Reason: stoopid
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posted 03-07-2008 07:52
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I'd be amazed if there had ever been an 'O'-level in Marxism. An introduction to Marx was included in Sociology 'A'-level when I did it in 1991, but I think that they might be talking euphemistically there.
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posted 03-07-2008 08:03
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Lyra, they would have lost marks for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors with your proposed text.
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posted 03-07-2008 08:14
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An O Level in Marxism is no more ridiculous than an O Level in fucking Scripture, and that does exist.
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posted 03-07-2008 10:59
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Spearmint Rhino wrote:
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An O Level in Marxism is no more ridiculous than an O Level in fucking Scripture, and that does exist.
What? As in " Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;"?
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posted 04-07-2008 00:16
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I try and avoid true believers when I'm learning about something. For the same reason, I'm looking for some decent secular Bible classes.
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posted 04-07-2008 07:08
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I'll be at Marxism on Sunday, though I've not yet decided which meetings I'm going to. Sunday's the only day I can make, which is a shame as I fancied John Rees on the dialectic. Buying the mp3 from Bookmarks afterwards just isn't the same.
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posted 04-07-2008 11:08
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Tubby Isaacs wrote:
QUOTE:
Apparently Bob Crow has one of these. Sounds to me like a most useful thing. How does one get a quick introduction to Marx? I'd like a class of some kind. Any ideas?
The only class that will give you an introduction to Marx is the Working Class, ho ho ho.
Or, you wouldn't want to attend any class that would have you as a pupil, etc etc.
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posted 05-07-2008 20:22
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John Molyneux is one of those who regularly speaks at Marxism. He has written this thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on the subject of Marxism and Religion, in the new International Socialism Journal (quarterly journal of the British SWP).
QUOTE:
I should say at the outset that I do not at all share the apparently widespread admiration of Dawkins's style and intellect. Reading Dawkins after Marx is like going from Leo Tolstoy or James Joyce to Kingsley Amis or Agatha Christie. Where Marx packs a book into a paragraph, Dawkins expands a short essay into a large book.
In fact all 460 odd pages of The God Delusion do not take us intellectually beyond what Marx summed up in the first sentence of his analysis in 1843, namely that the criticism of religion is essentially complete.
What Dawkins offers is an "Enlightenment", empiricist, rationalist refutation of religion—a "scientific", ie positivist, demonstration that there is a complete lack of factual evidence to support what he calls "the god hypothesis" and that, on the contrary, the evidence makes it almost (if not absolutely) certain that god does not exist. This is supplemented by logical refutations of the various arguments advanced for god's existence ranging from the venerable "proofs" of Thomas Aquinas and "Pascal’s Wager" to the bizarre recent speculations of one Stephen Unwin, and numerous examples of the follies and crimes perpetrated in the name of religion.
I suppose there are some people for whom this will be revelatory and others who may enjoy it because it makes them feel smarter than the ignorant masses who swallow these superstitions, but theoretically there is nothing new here, indeed very little that is not at least 200 years old.
One of the meetings I do plan to go to tomrrow is the one on "Ireland after the referendum", with Richard Boyd Barrett.
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Last Edit: 05-07-2008 20:28 By TonTon.
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