Making important texts easier to read

What does he mean by "Value", "Commodities", and "Capital"?

Just add a glossary or footnotes if you have to for terms that are "antiquated" or depend on reference to other material.

OP, if you are struggling, just ignore the economic stuff and read some of the more practical booklets and essays of these authors. And feel free to read Stalin, seriously, he is extremely easy to read. He does a great job explaining dialectical and historical materialism, which is actually the core of Marxism and should be understood BEFORE reading Marxist economics:
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

also foundations of leninism
marx2mao.com/Stalin/FL24.html
marxism and national question
marx2mao.com/Stalin/MNQ12.html

Use your browser's reader mode if these webpages are too ugly for you.

Marx usually talks about two types of value, "Use value," and "Exchange value." Use value is what you use a commodity for, and exchange value, or just value, is how many hours of labor it took to make the commodity.

Commodities are things that have both a use value and an exchange value. Stuff that you produce for your own use and don't exchange (IE trade) with other people isn't a commodity.

Capital is money that is used to make more money. Capitalists use their money to buy commodities and then (after some stuff happens) they sell commodities back onto the market to make more money. Generally speaking, the true source of their profits is the fact that they buy "labor power" as a commodity, but labor power, IE your ability to work for a certain amount of hours, has less value than the actual product of your labor. So your labor power might cost $60 to maintain in a single day (your food costs, rent, clothes, etc), but in that day, the work you do is actually worth $80 or $90. This is because the labor needed to produce your food and rent is less than the amount of labor you can actually perform in that day.

Marx is a useless author to read. His work is not relevant for workers' challenges in the 21st century.

t. Hasn't read Marx

t. Hasn't read Marx

Explain how Marx's analysis of capitalism doesn't hold up in the 21st century.

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Marx is easier the understand the more you familiarize yourself with the language, but I agree that it would be nice for a translation that uses more modern English that brainlets could digest.

We need this, but with Marx.

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This is absolutely untrue, and so is the idea that Marx and Engels usually wrote for the "average worker" to understand them (newspapers aside)

And yes, people try to simplify Marx all the time, and although on isolated cases they might do a good work, as a codified trend that has endured decades and penetrated into schools and academia this has only damaged our collective understanding of Marxism

There *is* a 1990 English translation from Penguin that's much easier to read than Engel's original. I suggest you pick that up if you're having that much trouble. I wish this board would do more to publicise that version because while it's not available for free like the one on Marxists.org it's a much better read imo. As for Marx's other work, they're often so short I don't think the clumsy prose is really that much of a problem so long as you understand the ideas.

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please tell me that's fake

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of course it isn't, books like that have existed since IRC started being a thing in the 90s. I remember it peaking under AIM in the early 2000s.

For starters, very few people are working in factories or in agriculture. Most people now have bullshit jobs, ie, service and programming. I don't think there's a lot of relevant info for Uber drivers or walmart cashiers in the communist manifesto.

You're right, capitalism has transposed its class antagonisms from domestic to global.

Aaand? Are "first world" supposed to say thank you boss to their abusive managers?

First world workers I mean

There was a hidden insinuation that factory work was on its way out, when in fact MORE people are probably working in manufacturing globally than ever before.

Teaching people how to read something like WLC would be a better expenditure of effort than dumbing-down important and carefully constructed texts.

agreed, like I said here

Are you suggesting we need to have a Communist Manifesto for the First World, specifically for this Digital Age?

Not really. It's more that today's society has such dispersed industries that maybe the Communist Manifesto is not the most suited to build solidarity for the most vulnerable.

Just become Maoist-Third Worldist. Capitalism is now on a global scale and the average first world workers basically live comfortably and would not risk their life for revolution while the third world is starving.

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I struggled reading just the manifesto. I was looking up a word in every sentence. I rad a lot and mostly non fiction, everyone says Marx is easy to read, how can that be, I’m not a brainlet and I really struggled.

"Easy to read" is really a relative statement. Marx was easy for me because from previous readings in literature and my studies in philosophy. Other writers have been difficult for me for one reason or another.

But reading them is how you make them easy. Keep reading and looking up words. That's what you should be doing, followed by using them.