It always confused me that adults, who presumably should be pretty smart, had failed to do this. I would label it with notes like “engine goes here” and “power source here” and then rest on my laurels, satisfied that I had invented interstellar travel at age seven. The way I would invent something – let’s say a spaceship – was to draw a picture of a spaceship. When I was really young – maybe six or seven – I fancied myself a great inventor. It seemed like a pretty big gap.īut I’d always dismissed this as an excusable error. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. 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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