Juice

Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.

Here's a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

To the hard deterministic explanation that "something always came before," it asks "what is the role of the individual in history?"

This excerpt isn't a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:

But let us return to our subject. A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.

Wouldn't that be convenient, if your dehumanizing worldview turned out to be true. Just a step away from "cut down the tall trees."

How does it prove anything? I was being sarcastic you paranoid weirdo. You want my LinkedIn? A copy of my passport? What exact proof would you need? Or is the burden of proof irrelevant because it would conflict with your worldview? Lmk slick

Exactly the point I was trying to make

Healthcare please

I didn't mean any disrespect. Just trying to provide some context to the "everyone who disagrees with me is a Russian bot" crowd. In my experience most people who subscribe to radical politics are younger, since I'm twice the age as probably half of the people I organize with, but I do have a few comrades and fellow travellers in the 50+ demo. However I usually don't use the term "kid", preferring the less dismissive " young person" but I guess old habits die hard. I'll go back and make an edit

More victims of wokeness, smh /s

Yeah I read WL&C after a failed attempt at reading Capital (I had never read much Marx other than the manifesto at that point) and realized I needed to understand his economics first, as I felt completely out of my depth. Turns out reading Capital v1, the first few chapters are just like that! But I'm glad I read WL&C, like you said its short and gave me something to chew on for a year or so before diving back into the big book.

I edited my comment above about CotGP. All solid recommendations, for exactly the reasons you state.

People should read Value Price and Profit because Marx proved that inflation is just companies raising prices, thoroughly debunks all the lies about causes of inflation that economists have been using to protect profits since before even his time.

All solid suggestions.

Wrt critique of the Gotha programme, it's interesting to me that Marx was such a critic of Lassalle, so much so that Engels actually apologized for Marx's harsh criticisms of the social democrat. Marx had called Lassalle a would be petty dictator or something like that. Except he was right, Lassalle was secretly plotting with von Bismarck on a plan to unify Germany under a bourgeois led social democracy, which von Bismarck could later seize absolute control over. Marx didn't know about this conspiracy, he just reasoned it out.