when you read sci fi and fantasy they say you have to suspend your disbelief, pretending that the world is real so the speculative elements don’t put you off. otherwise the character gets to the other planet and you turn off the show because humans haven’t visited other planets yet

I was thinking about how that idea might apply to marx .

Marxists imo have the most accurate explanation for reality. but most people come to marx with very different ideas, based on a bourgeois framework

to get the most out of Marx, we have to make sure of two things. 1. that we don’t let our previous knowledge put us off or send us down too many dead ends. 2. that we do not turn off our critical thinking

To achieve this, we have to suspend our pre-reading-marx beliefs, for example about how the economy works and what it means to say something is ‘good for the economy’. let the new knowledge in with an open mind. and suspend our beliefs about what is wrong with marx - marx made mistakes and his work has some holes that others had to fill in . We each need to think of our own criticisms - the ruthless criticism of all that exists is part of the marxist method. we need to apply that method to marx etc themselves. to achieve that, we need to kind of ‘start again’ by forgetting some of what we know (or think we know).