/edu/ - Education

>>21299
It’s on Verso books iirc but I found it at my local library. Found it: https://www.versobooks.com/products/772-neither-vertical-nor-horizontal

>>21299
It’s also on libgen

Finished The Knowledge Corruptors by Colin Crouch (2016). Timid criticism of privatizing and treating citizens as customers. Crouch writes like a robot.

>>21362
The Knowledge Corrupters

Looking through OneFile for various names the Mercator Institute might go under, but coverage of the founding of the Mercator Institute for China Studies is markedly absent. Likewise, for their current director(Nis Grünberg) I can't find any google results prior to 2015, which immediately susses me out. Looking for connections he may have made in his schooling years will be difficult.

Started to look into the outsourcing and Google Books is producing very little in the way of history and more so in the way of management babble. Frustrating, but necessary background.

Transferring the pdf of this piece of writing https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/ to the reader for later.

Thumbing through books on pre-A.F.L. steel labor and organizing(Brody's Steelworkers in America, Mackaman's New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, along with Bonnell's Roots of Rebellion.) I like Brody the best because there's little parts where you can clearly pick out oh, just according to [composition of capital/centralization/etc] and it makes Capital feel a lot more real, the same way organic chemistry doesn't feel real until you understand orbitals. I'm an NYCanon so I obviously have an interest in local labor but haven't found much better than this bourgeois source.

Zizek it not a Marxist. He is an Hegelian.

>>20865
Belated self-(You): Bonnell's Roots of Rebellion seems to be the closest source I could find to this topic so far. If anyone has any further reading recs, do tell.

>>21574
Would it be worthwhile to do a thread comparing and contrasting the political forces of the American, Russian, and German labor movements of the 1910s? I've recently finished Brody's book, am starting this one, and would love further discussion on the topic.

Seething about the fact that I have an academic interest in explosives but I'm too spergy to hide my power level when questioned, at least by their standards

Finally picked up The Organizational Weapon, if only because it was the only book I could find of its type and focus apart from Roots of Rebellion.

Finished the Alan Turing biography by Andrew Hodges. A harrowing tale of the dangers of modern technology, because I got an e-ink device and I usually don't display the page number to have more screen real-estate. I only bothered to check after many hours in already and to my horror realized it's over a thousand e-ink pages (in paper form it's below that, but still). It is easily five times longer than it needs to be. If only I had so much as glanced at the dead-tree version, I would have immediately decided against reading it. I just can't abandon a book in the middle and this took me forever.

So you have an interest in computing history and fighting Nazis? Would you like poetry with that, poetry by some dude who was fascinated by the smell of his own armpits? Well, guess what, every chapter has that stuff as an introduction. The author took any opportunity to insert a reference to Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz and fucking Gödel and never asked himself if he should. Was he paid by volume of output? This thing is chronological and it will shock you how many pages still lie ahead after World War II.

Here is a representative section, paraphrased from memory:
<Alan Turing was sitting at his desk in Britain while being homosexual and he (Alan, not Alice in Wonderland) was frustrated by the complex signals of society he had to decrypt like the Nazi codes (remember those!) and he had to hide his homosexuality (he was gay), so to his colleagues he was a, ahem… 🤔 one could even say: an ENIGMA (I am very smart) blahblahblah

To stride anew?

Anyways it turns out the glowies might've killed Paul Robeson, and you mayyyyybe want to reconsider the efficacy of the "meds".
https://mronline.org/2024/02/27/according-to-his-son-civil-rights-icon-paul-robeson-was-a-victim-of-cias-mk-ultra/

Read On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil (1943). There just was an episode about that text on the "You Can't Win" podcast and since it was a PREMIUM episode for paypigs and the hosts are much dumber than I am, I figured why not read it myself instead of listening to these dweebs yappering about it.
https://libcom.org/article/abolition-all-political-parties-simone-weil
It also got a preface by the translator and another essay at the end about how great Simone Weil was, which I guess got added because you certainly don't get that impression of greatness from her essay. Here is a sentence from it:
<How many times, in Germany in 1932, might a Communist and a Nazi conversing in the street have been struck by a sort of mental vertigo on discovering that they were in complete agreement on all issues!
Her and her two fanboys are in the anti-"totalitarian" camp, you see. It's a shame how anemic this piece is because there is certainly something to the idea that a party apparatus suppresses debate and honesty. When it comes to how to do away with parties she has nothing else than this:
<At election time, if contributors to a journal are political candidates, it should be forbidden for them to invoke their connection with the journal, and it should be forbidden for the journal to endorse their candidacy, to support it directly or indirectly, or even to mention it. Any ‘Association of the friends’ of this sort of journal should be forbidden. If any journal were ever to prevent its contributors from writing for other publications, it should be forced to close.
<All this would require a complete set of press regulations, making it impossible for dishonourable publications to carry on with their activity, since none would wish to be associated with them.
<Whenever a circle of ideas and debate would be tempted to crystallise and create a formal membership, the attempt should be repressed by law and punished.
Well then, how to conduct elections without parties? She got nothing, but there are several ways.
1. We could take the concept of term limits to the next level: Instead of parties, there could be election groups with registered members and there could be regulations for
-how long you can be a member of an election group and then you have to take a time-out for a couple decades
-expiration dates for election groups themselves
-a limit on the proportion of members of the new election group who are from the same old election group (say 1/10)
-a minimum proportion of people with no prior membership in any election group for a new election group (say 2/3)
2. We could use voting systems without party lists like STV or approval with reweighting.
3. We could do away with elections and use sortition.

Just read catcher in the rye
Its crazy that it was written in 1951 by a ww2 vet. Its so youthful and modern. It really captures the aloofness of later generations that i guess was always there.

Davies and Wheatcroft make the following claim:
<while some peasants were richer than others, and in certain areas had formed a social group which in marxist terms exploited the majority of villagers, the kulaks had never been an easily recognis- able socio-economic group or cohesive political class. By the end of 1932 a million families or more of the richer or less obedient peasants had been expelled from their villages or had fled to the towns. The ‘kulak’ class in the villages no longer existed as a social or political group – though many peasants were disaffected because of the way their ‘kulak’ relatives and acquaintances had been treated.
(Years of Hunger, pg. 191)

I have not researched the topic, so I have no other references on this argument. Anyone here who has?

I just finished picrel and like it alot and was wondering what other anons thought of the book? I enjoyed it and the concepts of print-capitalism and official-nationalism are cool and useful. I particularly thought the parts about how national identity developed in southeast Asia to be interesting. The way peruvian national identity was created by creoles "inviting" in the natives also kinda reminds me in some ways of how US national identity is viewed by some now where anyone can become a "true american" via assimilating into culture.

I cannot see exploitation ceasing to exist under communism completely. Sure, it will get diminished, but still present, as exploitation is not limited to class. What's the solution to eradicate all forms of exploitation completely?

>>21707
>What's the solution to eradicate all forms of exploitation completely?
It is necessery, to overcome all kinds of differences between individuals. Not only sex, age, nationality, intelligence etc. We must also overcome the species barrier. In order to truly eradicate all forms of exploitation, all differences must be sublated. Where differences are, there are strong and weak. As long strong and weak exists, there will be oppression/exploitation. Also the contradiction between the individual and the collective. Thinking this consequently to the end, we will only achieve the eradication of oppression, through the sublation of existence itself.In other words: The world must stop to exist. Or in the words of Kaneko Fumiko: "The goal of my activities is the destruction of all living things."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-res-kaneko-fumiko-because-i-wanted-to

Baudrillard calls himself a nihilist, yet he assumes, that there is reality otherwise he wouldn't be able to conceptualize his idea of hyperreality. Another thing: If Baudrillard is an actual nihilist, why does he differentiate between reality and fiction at all? Is he fucking retarded?? There is no lie, when there is no truth. At the same time, Baudrillard gives in his writings the impression, that hyperreality is somehow "bad" (of course, real intellectuals like Baudriboi never boil it down to good/bad). Shouldn't we actually embrace the lie, the fake, the hyperreality like all real/fake nihilists do? So why did you wrote this book mr. nihilist?

>>21712
So basically, enshrine certain forms of exploitation and do nothing about them. Very cool.
Sass aside, which forms of exploitation would you consider unavoidable and therefore acceptable?

Been reading about the Second Seminole War and specifically Andrew Jackson's thoughts about it. Jackson lamented how badly the war was going for the United States, and he pejoratively called the war a "Punic War". But the Romans won the Punic Wars and the US would identify more with Rome than Carthage, so why would he call it a Punic War in a negative way? I don't get it

>>21715
Sure Rome won the Punic war due to having a much larger economy/population than Carthage but they famously suffered multiple embarrassing defeats that killed over a hundred thousand legionnaires and only won by attrition, that's probably what he saw happening to the US.

>>21714
>enshrine certain forms of exploitation and do nothing about them

Where did I said this?

Finished Science Secrets by Alberto A. Martinez (2011) about pop-culture myths around Newton, Darwin, Galileo, and a lot about Einstein. I got it after the title was thrown at me in an online debate together with some ad hominem nonsense. The poster claimed that Galileo made up the story of dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (I hadn't even said anything about Galileo?) and this books supposedly debunks that. Turns out there are no writings by Galileo claiming that, so says this book. Hah!

Some readers may find frustrating that chapters don't end with pass or fail. It's a meticulous work of tracking how the stories have evolved and how they shrink the closer you get to the supposed origin. At the end, Martinez confesses how he too had spread some myths to students before doing the research that lead to the book…

Actually now I'm not 100 % sure anymore whether that poster was arguing with me or somebody else and whether that poster really said the wrong stuff about Galileo as I remember it.

Here is what I've learned today: The inventor of the metaverse also coined the term anglosphere.

Been reading this.
Burgers are so fucked, I’m sorry.

I don't care for the EU institutions, yet I am required to know them by heart

Honestly, not much.
I've been feeling pretty shit recently and I've been trying to focus on things I enjoy, rather than slogging through theory. Not that I don't necessarily enjoy reading Marxist/Leftist literature (I'm currently reading Blackshirts and Reds), but I just don't feel like I've really learned anything after I finish a book. I finished Socialism, Utopian and Scientific not too long ago, but I couldn't tell you much about what Engels was getting at if I was asked.

I did learn about the Bessemer process though, which is cool :)

<Marx Saw Capitalisms Doom With Unerring Accuracy
Marx identified the tendency of capitalism to try and cut out the actual production of commodities in Volume 2 of Capital. In that work he (with a supplementary note by Engels) stated the following on page 137 of that work.

>‘It is precisely because the money form of value is its independent and palpable form of appearance that the circulation for <…<M which starts and finished with actual money expresses money making, the driving motive of capitalist production, most palpably. The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money making. This explains why all nations characterised by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish he money making without the mediation of the production process.’

>What this tells us is that even in its earliest stages, in fact at its height in terms of British industrial capitalism, the tendency to look to cut out the production process and just simply move from money to money is already an integral feature of the system. Combine this with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and you have the explanation of why it is that the race for a division of the world between the European colonial powers kicks off in the 1880s. By that stage Britain was losing ground badly to both the USA and the unified Germany. In fact Britain was being out innovated by US industrial capitalism by the 1850s. Why is this? There have been a myriad of explanations of this given by bourgeois academics over the last 150 years but the biggest two reasons are the two factors Marx outlined. To actually compete with US and German industrial capitalism would have taken a giant investment in updating the means of production and an even greater one into research and development. The British ruling class of course went for another option which is seize as many areas of the world as possible in order that they could hyper exploit the labour and natural resources there. Hence why the scramble for Africa hits at the end of the 19th century when the British hit the imperialist stage along with the (industrially weaker) French with the Germans rapidly joining the struggle.

>What does this mean for our modern imperialism in the form of the US and its block of vassals? In practical terms it means that the US imperialists followed the exact same path as their British predecessors in terms of responding to a crisis of profitability by deindustrialising and increasing the export of capital. I admit that I underestimated how far gone the US ruling class truly are and also how strong the tendency towards cutting out production, minimising actual investment, corrupt short term practices such as stock buy backs really is. The fact that they are unable, even when faced with losing the war in Ukraine and getting overpowered by China, to actually change course is surprising in some ways. These tendencies that were identified by Marx now absolutely dominate the ruling classes of all the US block nations. To reverse them would take a drastic, genuinely Bonapartist system being introduced if capitalism is to stand a chance of surviving. As things stand it looks like the dominant tendency within the US ruling class will remain that of “cashing out”, in other words squeezing out as much profit as they can while they can and not caring about much else. This is why all decisions taken in the US political system appear to be ridiculously short term because they are reflecting the underlying tendency of the ruling class to grab a quick profit, even by means of getting bailed out by the central bank, then cashing out.

>To actually turn this around, to really get meaningful investment and updated means of production put in place the US would have to put in place a system that borrows from the Chinese. They’d have to put in place a system where the capitalist class is, effectively, removed from political power and is told “use it or lose” it in terms of its capital. This won’t work though as the only reason the Chinese are able to exercise political control over the domestic capitalist class is because they have already had a revolution that removed the power of the old, comprador bourgeoisie. The US is at the apex of the imperialist system and if they tried to do such a thing it’d cause all kinds of rebellion from the bourgeois which will happily fund destructive, reactionary political tendencies in order to hang onto its loot.

>It is of course possible that a new balance of class forces will emerge inside the USA that will compel the more far sighted bourgeois to actually make some changes. At this stage though I cannot see this happening what seems to be favoured is just finding a way to keep the looting going for another few years. These tendencies are what will doom imperialism. Here then we must return to the “socialism or barbarism” question because the bourgeoisie will happily embrace barbarism to defend their parasitism. In order to overcome this rotting system the communists will have to develop an understanding of how truly far gone it is.

https://marxengelsinstitute.org/2023/12/10/an-end-long-predicted/

>>21727
Michael hudson talks about this problem in regards to a rentier class, but the criticism marx makes of the money-capitalist goes further, especially in volume 3

>>21722
Try writing out notes to what you read, then simplify them into concepts and shorthand. Most stuff is just filler anyway, so skimming is allowed.
Also, most people in the west dont even read any non-fiction, so you are already more educated than the majority who just listen to podcasts.

Found this book through my searches, and it proclaims to be a more balanced take on the AFL-CIO compared to Buhle's account(it mentions Taking Care of Business directly). Will read for a more domestic perspective on the union, but don't expect much more than additional rabbit holes to go through.

Skimming through Beyond Dispute by Stafford Beer and colleagues (1994). Beer is as pompous as Stephen Wolfram without having the math chops. This is about organizing people into discussion groups using the geometry of an icosahedron (20-sided die) as THE GOLD STANDARD and then there is a lot of babbling about psychology, Condorcet cycles (without calling them that), world citizenship, a (dumb) proposal for package sizes, and uuh Chakras.

So what's the deal with the icosahedron: The idea is to organize people into groups with discussion topics (one group got one topic, an individual is in more than one group) and to avoid hierarchy of people and hierarchy of topics. What logically follows from the hierarchy avoidance is that the organizational chart for this must be highly symmetric, which is true of this particular geometric shape, but also others.

A person is represented by an edge, a group & and its topic is represented by a corner, so a person is in two groups. Why not instead picture a 12-sided die as a mini planet of office dorks sitting at hexagonal tables, each table being a discussion group and at each corner sits a person in a chair rotating between three tables? Well, then two of the same dorks would be meeting in two discussion groups. In Beer's scheme, you meet completely different sets of people in your discussion groups, which is a good thing if you want many direct connections to other people in the org. A person actually visits more than two groups, by also being assigned the role of critic for two other groups (these are far away points from the two groups you are a "proper member" of).

Some voting procedures are presented that are crummy, but not really the core of the proposal, which is that beautiful shape. Am I really sold on that shape? Not quite, but I strongly agree with the emphasis on making links to many other people direct or short (one person between).

>>21742 (me)
>Why not instead picture a 12-sided die as a mini planet of office dorks sitting at hexagonal tables
*pentagonal tables

Finished What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub (2020), about Silicon Valley BS like disruption & failing better. Exactly the sort of book that the people who need the most won't read and that the people who do read already agree with.

>>21644
omg she criticizes anti-factionalism of parties and her solution is to ban people to form factions… but for all society. Is this dialectics?

>>21670
Is this where Zizek gets his joke about the vague soviet definition of kulaks? lol

As far as the claim (well, which claim? I'm going with the last, that many other peasants were disaffected), with no knowledge of this specifically it does seem right when looking at feudal/rural-patriarchal relations in general. Social views are not only formed by class but also familial ties and tradition, especially in an especially traditional and family oriented social structure.

>>21714
Plants. I think it's okay to determine where a plant lives, and control some of the conditions of its life, and then harvest it. It's not like this is any different from its natural condition, so it's not like we have made its potential lot worse. jk, i don't care about exploitation in general, i care about exploitation that is harmful to me and my loved ones [expansive], or which cause diffuse harm to all of society or the environment and can be assumed to impact us all. Otherwise, why care? To me communism is a deeply particular philosophy, rather than universal. Its universalism is imo a caricature given of it by conservatives who just don't see how materially connected all of our struggles are

Started reading this guy's book, Chinese Power. I already distilled the first points in /prc/. It seems to basically support my already existing position with facts: China is revisionist and its economy is capitalist, but it does have a socialist tendency, which reflects on the country's development and political situation. It is kinda heavy with material you can't use, like specific biographies, and the author is more than likely wrong on many points, but any actual compilation and analysis of data on the country is still precious. There is probably a better book on the subject, but I'm too dumb to find it.

I'm new to theory but my untreated ADHD is a big obstacle. I read The Principles of Communism which was recommended to me as a beginner text but it felt more like reference material. I feel like I digest information much better when it's presented in conversation.

>>21870
Do you mean that someone talks to you about it, or is written down like this good:
https://libcom.org/article/conversation-hairdressers-assistant-wilhelm-reich-1935

I'm just new here and trying to figure out how to use this website. I've never used 4chan or such (actually, i thought this site was a board on 4chan, and i spent few minutes there to find here).

>>21822
I was referring to the argument that the kulaks were never rigidly defined or easily identified.

>>21547
There's an article in City & State New York that attempts to summarize relevant data up to 2018 that I found later, if nothing else.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2018/09/the-battle-for-hudson-yards/178151/

I've started theory as history by banaji, main thrust seems to be that a mode of production isn't necessarily equal to one form of exploitation. In that vein he kinda attacks "stageism". Honestly the only "theory" I've read is a bit of Capital 1, some Marx pamphlets/speeches about commodity productions and what G. E. M. de Ste. Croix and Perry Andersen say about modes of production and commodity production in their two big books about the classical Mediterranean so some things are going over my head but I'm liking it. Feel like I might want to buy it for myself one day since this is just a copy I asked my library to get me

Finished Marx and Marxism by Gregory Claeys (2018). This guy is apparently a distinguished professor and expert on the history of political thought. I would have never guessed that from reading this. It seems like an even-handed take at first with direct references, but as it goes on, outrageous quotes by Lenin, Stalin, Mao pile up and the sources turn out to be spooky western cold warriors. Or there is no source at all like when he says that Marx claimed us proles to be particularly
<virtuous
or that Wilhelm Reich
<was threatened with execution by some communists for introducing these issues
Meaning "these issues":
<the proletariat’s suppressed sexual urges prevented it from achieving political consciousness.
So this Reich guy is important enough to mention, and the usual lot of Frankfurt school plonkers. Who doesn't make the cut? There is no Strumilin, no Kantorovich, no Piero Sraffa. The author talks in dismissive tone of
<the weaknesses in Marx’s economics
but almost nowhere describes the economics of Marx, never mind some actual criticism. There is nothing here on the transformation problem, despite the length of this book. A few sentences on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is all you will get here (without even relating that to organic composition of capital). For the most part, he doesn't really criticize, but gestures that he is about to do criticism, like he "criticizes" Marx for his
<‘scientific’ nature of the theory of surplus value, while excluding other theories of exploitation
and then… no alternative theory of exploitation follows after this. He doesn't care to make an actual argument for his positions. Just assert, assert, assert. What is his realistic alternative to Marxism?
<Pleas for a universal basic income become increasingly plausible as we move towards both more skeletal welfare systems and a persistent shortage of well-paid jobs.
Uneducated person that I am, my guess would be that an establishment that is hostile towards decent welfare is also hostile to the idea of a guaranteed basic income, and will do no more than copy the name to mislabel a policy (meaning you are ✌guaranteed✌ the ✌universal✌ income as long as no exception clause is triggered).