/edu/ - Education

>>21947
>Stalin
>Mao

Holy KEK

>>22009
NTW but YES
>J. V. Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm
and
>Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung
Should be required reading, because too many idiots run their mouths about the USSR and Mao and Stalin, while blatantly ignoring what they actually said and enacted.

Techno-Capitalism reading list:
Shoshana Zuboff - The age of surveillance capitalism http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=88F4E36A731B1594144F40497AF25C34
Brett Scott - Cloudmoney http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D8D28B8D622C939973A87B16A5C4EAE6
Yanis Varoufakis - Techno-Feudalism http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0BA99CA5241D520DCF86C93DF0FFB7C9
Edward Snowden - Permanent Record http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=A5BDA164BB2B8419C57E57012A2F7F82

>>21640
Currently reading this. This book is terrifying, amazing and probably the most important thing you can currently read.

What is relative surplus value? Idk, it sounds like something to do with prices but I can't really wrap my head around how it is different from normal surplus value.

Reposting an effortpost from a while back about Super-Profit

Let’s say that the average television takes 1 hour to make. 1 hour is the SNLT for televisions. But the owner of the ACME TV factory invests in some fancy new machines that make his workers twice as productive. They can now make a television in 30 minutes. They are producing way below the SNLT. This allows ACME to produce twice as many televisions in the same amount of time.

Now if ACME sold their new TV at half the old price they wouldn’t make any more money than before and there would have been no point in investing in all that new stuff. Rather than sell them at their individual value (30 minutes) they continue to sell them at the SNLT (1 hour), or perhaps just under the SNLT in order to out-sell their rivals. Because the price of TVs hasn’t changed significantly there is still the same demand from consumers for TVs, but now there is a giant surplus of TVs on the market because ACME has been making twice as many TVs. ACME’s rivals won’t be able to sell all of their TVs. Part of their product will go unsold. Meanwhile ACME will sell most of their TVs at the SNLT, making not just their normal profit, but an additional “super-profit” because they sold their TVs above their individual values by selling at or near the SNLT.

Profit vs. super-profit

Profit comes from exploiting workers. The only way to turn money into more money is to invest it in workers, or to be precise, in labor power, the only commodity which can produce more value than it costs. (This is all covered in the video “Law of Value 5: Contradictions”.) When ACME sells TVs at under the SNLT they don’t just reap their normal profits from exploiting workers. They also get super-profits: profit appropriated in exchange because their TVs are made at under the SNLT.

It is this race for super-profits that drives much of the technological dynamism of a capitalist society as capitalists compete to constantly lower SNLT. By doing so capitalists don’t just exploit value from workers. They also appropriate value in exchange.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/law-of-value-6-socially-necessary-labor-time/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb6dPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Look interesting. I don't have the know-how to contribute anything, but I would read the stuff on there.

Bumping for interest. Will post a more meaningful response later if I think of something

Good idea

Hey man, I think that's admirable that you continue educating yourself and trying despite how much frustration it has caused you. You are trying to understand a very difficult subject here that most people aren't even trying to understand.

I have only read a couple of essays and a few books on the matter, so anyone more knowledgable feel free to correct me. In general, dialectics is the interaction of antithetical forces which leads to a radical transformation of something. With that comes new emergent qualities and phenomena. Dialectics is applicable to all kinds of domains and subjects and depending on that changes its appearance, but boils down to being the same thing.
Positivism and logic conceive of existence in a manner that is static and devoid of contradictions and therefore produces concepts that merely stack upon one another in a linear fashion. Dialectics on the other hand conceives of existence as inherently contradictory and always in motion. That's not to say dialectics is arbitrary since there are still causal relationships and laws inferable from that. Advancement in dialectics doesn't look like a mere summation of conclusions that are eternally correct in a static form they were in but a development of transformations that harbor its prior anithetical composites in a new form.

This is all you need to know, as demonstrated by Marx in a single paragraph in the first volume of Capital, chapter 3, section 2:
> We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions. The differentiation of commodities into commodities and money does not sweep away these inconsistencies, but develops a modus vivendi, a form in which they can exist side by side. This is generally the way in which real contradictions are reconciled. For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.
The rest is bullshit.

It is extremely important that the question of methodology be raised, not to assert a philosophical introduction in abstraction, but to show the concrete relation between method and analysis or more specifically between dialiectical materialism and political economy. It is the fusion of the Marxist philosophical method and outlook with the political economic analysis which makes that analysis a Marxist-Leninist one. In other words the method of political economy must be dialectical materialism. In the Preface to Capital, Marx states:

whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually nxy method in this striking and (as far as concerns my own application of it) generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectical method?

In respect to the importance of the diatectical method and its relation to political economy, V.I. Lenin stated:

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic (dialectical logic). Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx/

In the same light, it can be stated that unfamiliarity with dialectical materialism can lead to an analysis that is not dialectical but metaphysical (i.e. one-sided, isolated and subjective). Hence there have been and still are “Marxist-Leninist” groups who parrot dialectics in isolation, but use the metaphysical method in analysis and practice.

What then explicitly is dialectical meterialism? Materialism, in the Marxist sense, states that matter i.e. the total, real objective world exists independent of the human will (mind). Dialectics is as, expressed by Engels as follows:

It is . . . from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice-versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of the negation.

Dialectical materialism is diametrically opposed to the idealist world outlook and the metaphysical method (previously described), which are the ideological bases for the bourgeois forces the world over. Consequently, it can be seen that proletarian political economy differs from bourgeois politicalPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

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 exceptiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/4494416-boiling-tap-water-may-be-solution-to-microplastics/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2419556-boiling-tap-water-can-remove-80-per-cent-of-the-microplastics-in-it/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920297/

So does boiling water actually remove plastic particles or not?

>>19860
I've been reading Caroline Elkins' book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire recently, and I thought I'd talk about it a bit. No PDF or Epub, because I have it in hardback.

The book is actually just as much a history of liberalism as a history of the British Empire, and it's fascinating seeing how the liberal mindset came into existence. Reading the examples from the book, you can really see where the paternalistic British liberal originated, with the idea that we must save the global south from themselves. Hence, African leaders famously complaining about how when China turns up they get a power plant, and when Britain turns up they get a lecture; it was the same back then, but Britain actually had the hard power to back up their rhetoric.

It also explains how Britain's use of force changed between the 18th and 20th centuries, with Britain preferring a "hands-off" approach in the 19th century which gradually failed as Germany, the USA, and the Russian Empire began to industrialise and compete for territory (there's an interesting parallel with America and China in the 21st century, too). Occasionally news of some atrocity that was comitted by the British Army (or one of the private companies they got to manage the colonies, such as the East India Company or the Royal Africa Company) would reach home, and there would inevitably be debates about it in parliament- which usually ended with the crimes being somehow justified and then forgotten about, and occasionally with the perpetrators turned into heroes (the 1857 Indian rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion are two good example from the book).

The book isn't specifically Marxist, but is still well worth reading from what I've seen so far.

I want to write a leftypedia article.
If I'll do it it will probably be regarding fascistoid regimes myth and lies regarding the QoL in their nations.
Like, did you know that the only nazi anti-unemployment work program that had any measurable success was such because it obtained shadow funds?

Does anyone here remember some publication by the IMF where they basically officially admitted that neoliberalism failed? It was posted on /leftypol/ a couple years ago and I forgot to save it

The Intifada Podcast discusses Dugin, part 1. It's pretty educational, they give a lot of historical context that most people will be unaware of. Two years ago was the time for this episode.

>>13027
when im working full time and with long commutes audiobooks and good podcasts are a great alternative, stressing the purity of the book is counterproductive when most people do nothing to educate themselves. also plenty of people who have trouble reading for various other reasons that are more likely to listen to a podcast, i find its helpful to be familiar with a range of educational podcasts to be able to recommend to people who are sharp and curious but dont read

You better appreciate this anons, it took some time to figure out how to shrink the mp3
American exception recent Patreon episode. Why is it notable? It includes a close reading of brand new less redacted transcripts of the testimony of James Jesus Angleton from the 1975 Church Commitee Hearings. This is the guy who on his deathbed admitted that they thought they were kings of the world and admitted that he was going to hell. Not much consolation to Indonesian communists.
>TLDR Here's previously unknown specifics on how Israel exerted control on US foreign policy beyond Presidential authority.
The first half of the episode is nbd also, just Col Lawrence Wilkerson admitting culpability for misleading the world and the UN on WMD.

>>21998
Here's the follow up to the last episode: because of the explosive contents of the newly unredacted Angleton Church Committee testimony Dr Aaron Good convened a panel of experts for discussion.
>There are two separate monuments to Angleton in Israel
>"You have to think of James Jesus Angleton as an Israeli agent in the US government" at or beyond the level of President
These podcasts lay out the history of the US/Israel relationship at the highest levels and explain why the US + UK are willing to crash the Rules Based International Order to defend Israel today

>>21998
took me a while to get thru the first one. interesting point made about the compartmentalisation of the intelligence agency. angle ton had the Israeli account. which was sealed off from the Arabists. Zionists often argue that because these state dept arabists exist, they're a persecuted minority, and it shows the US and UK was always hostile to zionism. but they misread a state can have different factions supporting different interests. going to get thru the other one later

>>20928
That is not what horizontal gene transfer means.
>The experiment carried out by Lysenko has neither been verified nor disproved by anyone else.
According to Lysenko wheat would regularly produce rye grains without human intervention. Strange how this never seems to have happened again in the history of agriculture.
>You are obviously hyperfocusing on this one experiment
I am hyper focusing on the things he actually wrote. Otherwise you will just claim that he discovered epigenetics, despite there being no connection to his theory of creative darwinism.
>all of Lysenko's work
How he treated cows better and whether or not that lead to more milk isn't relevant.

I now know why all of you are so mad
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4078

>>21138
Belongs in >>>/hobby/5031

He was great, he made fruit trees grow in Moscow

Irrelevant link dump https://academic.oup.com/plcell/advance-article/doi/10.1093/plcell/koae130/7658667?login=false

>>22026
>the first atomic bomb hit before the soviets declared war.
True, however the key fact here is that the Japanese commission to investigate Hiroshima hadn't gotten back to the Government on their findings, at best all they knew was that another city was destroyed, but given how regular firebombing already wiped out cities before, it changed nothing, as radiation was not well understood as an impact, and they didn't even know it was a singular bomb until days after Nagasaki was also wiped out, and they surrendered around that time.
In essence; The Japanese only lost hope of fighting back after the USSR joined because losing cities to bombs was already something they were used to, and it was honestly pointless, as the smashing of the Manchurian Army forces and the USSR's rapid island hopping (crushing large garrisons with ease) from the North meant the Japanese military defenders would have been smashed quickly and with little to show for it.

A good video on the topic discusses this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmtGal69BvQ
>Why the Japanese ARMY Still Didn’t Want to Surrender After Being Nuked Twice

>>22032
>the Japanese only lost hope when the soviets declared war.
The thing is the people on the home islands didn't really care because for intensive purpose it was Manchuria getting invaded not them. secondly a good chunk of the officers didn't want to surrender either only through the emperors plea did they choose too. and even though atomic bombs are a whole another beast compared to fire bombing at least with fire bombing at least you had the chance to escape and if you survived your where mostly fine after words. one the ground of Hiroshima it was observed that the survivors survived from radiation sickness afterwords kill a lot of them.

>>22031
>>Muh both sides!
Nobody was saying this but the delete-happy ML janny already got on the case and deleted everything as usual, lmfao.

>>22044
>both Churchill and FDR wanted Stalin to declare war on the Japanese
Churchill did because he didn't know about the bomb. FDR did because he sought good relations with the USSR. FDR died conveniently for the US establishment, as they did not like his policies that supported workers rights and sought to have the war end with good relations between the USA and USSR, it's why they forced him to start his final term with Harry Truman. Truman was just a few seig heils short of being a fascist himself and he hated the Soviet Union and he didn't want to uphold the agreements Roosevelt had made with Stalin. He wanted to use the bombs to both scare Stalin and end the war with Japan surrendering to the USA, but mostly failed with the USSR still getting back its territories and Stalin being completely unphased by the threat of something he was already aware of and preparing for.

>>22035
> the USSR after 1930 totally didn't have a capitalist mode of production and bourgeois social relations.
No, it did not.
>I thought I was on /edu/?
Yes, you are, which is why your bad faith shit-lib takes are garbage.
>ML janny
<wvobbly
LMFAO
>nobody was saying this
You verbatim called WW-2 an inter-bourgieoisie conflict, which is the exact same narrative both-sideist ideologues use to cry about "muh russha bad" relative to Ukraine, and is also the same anti-communist narrative used to equivocate Nazi Germany and the USSR.
So yes this is /edu/ and bad faith takes like this belong in the trash.

>>22033
>the people on the home islands didn't really care because for intensive purpose it was Manchuria getting invaded not them
The PEOPLE didn't care, but the people didn't know much about the nuclear bombs either. The Imperial GOVERNMENT cared, because as I explained, Manchuria was one of Japan's most powerful military forces, and it was crushed in days, and the USSR literally island hopped onto the Northern islands of the Imperial Japanese archipelago.
>atomic bombs are a whole another beast compared to fire bombing at least with fire bombing at least you had the chance to escape and if you survived your where mostly fine after words. one the ground of Hiroshima it was observed that the survivors survived from radiation sickness afterwords kill a lot of them.
Yes, after-effects that were not properly catalogued, widely known or well understood until long after Japan's surrender.