Not to minimize how fucked the US is, but this is true to some degree. There’s a lot of ways to get a mortgage with lower credit, with or without federal and state grants. Most people could probably get approved for a mortgage.
Now, getting approved for a mortgage that’s large enough to afford anything near your work is a bigger question. But if you can afford to live in a cheaper area and have consistent income, it’s worth checking to see if escaping the rent trap is a possibility.
Lol what???
Marx is either gonna be number one, or the list is assuming you’ve already read the manifesto.
Capital should absolutely be in the top 80, and the only reason it isn’t usually top 10 is because anglos are too lazy/illiterate/overworked to attempt it.
But many lists will have Wage Labor and Capital as well as Value, Price, and Profit as easier alternatives to Capital.
Most of his stuff is essay-length and wouldn’t necessarily show up on a book list. But Essays on Feueurbach, the German Ideology, and Critique of the Gotha program are commonly recommended, for example.
Also bourgeois/liberal democracy is the quintessence of adopting democratic aesthetics, forms, and language without any actual democratic function. No one can vote according to their interests, and no one’s votes actually influence policy.
The reason most modern imperialist states have evolved their own form of liberal democracy is because of how effective it is at mediating domestic capitalist contradictions so they can be externalized.
If the US were somehow a true functional democracy it would have evolved beyond capitalism decades ago.