Making important texts easier to read

Apparently in the 19th century, Wage, Labour and Capital, and Value, Price, and Profit were relatively easy for the average worker to read and understand. However,when trying to read it, these books seem incomprehensible for someone living in the modern day who hasn't read anything before the 1960s….
Is there anyone who has ever tried to simplify Marx's works to better be understood by the masses of today? I mean, wasn't that the point? To have texts be easy to understand for the masses to gain class consciousness?

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marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
marx2mao.com/Stalin/FL24.html
marx2mao.com/Stalin/MNQ12.html
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Beware the oversimplified.
The oversimplified creates misery and confusion.
The oversimplified is the doom of a movement.
Beware the oversimplified.

I have an American high school education (FROM THE SOUTH) and no college. I read Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. with no problem. They are very simple to read & they explain things step by step usually.

Ill punch you in the face if you use "complicated" as a synonym for "I dont get it" and "simplified" to mean "I can get it ezz like"
if it was easy for workers to understand its already simple you just dont understand the dialect of english and the ways of expressing things
let me rephrase this for you to be less retarded:
has anyone translated marx into modern vernacular so it can be as comprehensible now as it apparantly was when it was written?

Just tell people to read Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, then. Easy stuff.

tbh there is actually very little in the existing translations that is archaic, mostly he just uses specific philosophical terms that are still in use today. you can't translate that stuff out of his works.

then, the average worker in the 1800s knew about those?
either marx was never easy or OP is a brainlet, im thinking

Can confirm, I am a brainlet, that is kinda the issue, I want a version of Marx that's understandable by brainlets

Doubt it, but,
1. In Capital, Marx builds up his abstractions from the most basic level. I'm pretty literate, but I still didn't know what he meant by "value," "commodities," "capital," etc until I read it. Since he gradually builds up the definition of each abstraction, you always know what he's talking about.
2. The other terms he uses, such as "forms," and similar philosophical concepts, are also just normal words that are commonly used in English. It's pretty easy to infer what he's talking about and get accustomed to the more specific usage of the terms.

Something else to consider: a major part of the process of bringing the proletariat into political activity is actually educating them! I think Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. are really excellent educators. A prole with medium-low literacy who gets inducted into communist activities and is given reading assignments on these authors (starting with the most important pamphlets and booklets) will not only learn about Marxism, but will actually become more literate and articulate in general. Our goal is to raise up the level of proletarian consciousness, not just talk down to them and give them Das Kapital With Emojis or whatever the fuck.

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.