/edu/ - Education

>>22717
The leftypol twitter account (leftypol_org) Is now shilling for this incoherent book with a pinned tweet.

>>24588
https://gofile.io/d/xDOS8o
also here

>>24691
Official blog of the Caracol archeological project:

https://caracol.org/
https://caracol.org/july-2025-the-tomb-of-te-kab-chaak/

>>24690
Some fully reconstructed funerary masks found in Maya tombs for comparison.

'Trash' found deep inside a Mexican cave turns out to be 500-year-old artifacts from a little-known culture

While investigating a cave high in the mountains of Mexico, a spelunker thought she had found a pile of trash from a modern-day litterbug. But upon closer inspection, she discovered that the "trash" was actually a cache of artifacts that may have been used in fertility rituals more than 500 years ago.

"I looked in, and it seemed like the cave continued. You had to hold your breath and dive a little to get through," speleologist Katiya Pavlova said in a translated statement. "That's when we discovered the two rings around the stalagmites."

The cave, called Tlayócoc, is in the Mexican state of Guerrero and about 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level. Meaning "Cave of Badgers" in the Indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlayócoc is known locally as a source of water and bat guano. In September 2023, Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas ventured into the cave — possibly the first time anyone has entered it in about five centuries.

While taking a break to look around, Pavlova and Beltrán were shocked to discover 14 artifacts.

Among the artifacts were four shell bracelets, a giant decorated snail shell (genus Strombus), two complete stone disks and six disk fragments, and a piece of carbonized wood. Pavlova and Beltrán immediately contacted Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which sent archaeologists to recover the artifacts in March.

Given the arrangement of the bracelets — which had been looped over small, rounded stalagmites with "phallic connotations" — the archaeologists speculated that fertility rituals were likely performed in Tlayócoc cave, they said in the statement.

"For pre-Hispanic cultures, caves were sacred places associated with the underworld and considered the womb of the Earth," INAH archaeologist Miguel Pérez Negrete said in the statement.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

<La joya prehispánica de Perú de más de 3.800 años, Peñico, abre sus puertas al mundo
Este lugar floreció entre los años 1800 y 1500 a.C., al mismo tiempo que lo hacían las primeras civilizaciones en Oriente Medio y Asia. Ubicado a tan solo 12 kilómetros del sitio arqueológico de Caral, el Peñico ahora es noticia porque, tras ocho años de trabajo en el yacimiento —llevado a cabo por un grupo formado en su 80% por habitantes locales—, por fin abre sus puertas

Market socialist reforms

Anti-corruption reforms

There was no future for socialism, so it could only die no matter what you did to resuscitate it. The argument for socialism was never premised on economic growth, nor was that seen as the purpose of capitalism necessarily. The argument for socialism was whether there was any interest in continuing the project, or if the favored wouldn't cut loose anyone who wasn't meant to make it in the world to come. They chose the latter, some enthusiastically, some only out of immediate self-interest, and some entirely against their wishes and sense of the world but mandated by the pressure of the first two groups. It became impossible to speak of a world where someone could simply exist as a poor. Only exceptional people are wanted in the world to come, and exceptional people are by definition not the masses.

Literally "The rent is too damn high". The entire economy is set up for as much rent extraction as possible by decades of policy, with the intent of imploding capitalism as anything involving actual capital.
In the rest of the world, real estate is not ridiculously overpriced, with the exception of some parts of the Middle East that are already an advanced model of the new program they want for the world. It's still expensive everywhere, but not so expensive that it is inflated ridiculously beyond what anyone actually pays for it. The entire purpose of such high rents is to make them unpayable, so that there is no more family home and you can't rent an apartment without three working-class incomes that you can't possibly attain. The only reason there isn't a mass implosion is because of those holding on to their accumulated wealth from generations ago and housing programs that prop up the ridiculous rent-seeking… sometimes. If you are a poor, you are dead in this world. Dead. The poors are made to live as if they were illegal aliens in their own country, squatting in their friends' homes. Such is life. If any of them find a place of their own, the mob of squatters comes in to wreck it, all with the tacit approval of the rent-seekers. No one could afford these rents without being selected to live, and those selected to live are just handed everything. They do not struggle. They do not.

Once you've gotten through all the dialogue and links above you're ready for:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/

Have a glance through:

>>23225
>>24686
>>24362
>>23862
>>23803
>>23501

If you have trouble, ask questions in this thread even, if you see something someone posts ask questions about it

And if you just want to see it in motion https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm

>>24711
Wrong. Dialectic is the only genuine science.

>>24705
>Saying heat death is "proven science" is just so stupid, now i gotta jump in.
Wrong. You deny the Second Law of Thermodynamic. Denial of heat death is denial of dialectic. Your admission of ignorance demonstrates you speak from bourgeois contrarianism.
>Physics is not complete.
Irrelevant. The universe does not care about humankind's undersanding.
>Physics is not complete. For example, physicists expect that there are undiscovered "structures" between the quark and planck scales, that there must be issues with the current models due to its inability to correctley predict the higgs boson mass, and lets not forget the breakdown of quantum mechanics and relativity when used for modeling black holes. More blatantly, heat death is currentley predicted by the observation that the universe seems to be expanding, and is explained by undiscovered "dark energy".
Wrong. Your appeal to ignorance and unknown future discoveries is undialectical. Dialectics is based on study of material reailty. Quantum calculations do not determine if a star or the universe dies.
>Heat death is not "proven science", it is a prediction based off assuptions about dark energy, which may or may not turn out to be true. There may be a Big Rip if things expansion keeps accelerating, for example.
Wrong. Heat death is proven science. All proven science is prediction based on evidence. Science has no room for maybes. Big rip is heat death with extra steps.

>>24707
For what it's worth, thermodynamics is fairly clear about the ultimate fate of the universe if heat is analogous to all energy, so eventually there is no more thermal activity as such in the universe, and no way to start the engine artificially. I have no problem with the credibility of the theory. I just reject calling it "proven science" imperiously for the reasons provided, as if it were declared or asserted by nature to doom us. There are other ways for the universe as we can possibly know it comes to an end that aren't about heat systems, and we have no "natural" notion of an artifice that can generate heat in the first place. My take on it is that "the universe as we know it" is primarily artificial history, even if the "artifices" came about by happenstance in nature. We study a thing called "nature" to discern a past and general laws about all of these things, but nature by itself says little about what the universe is or should be. Appeal to nature ends with a gigantic "just-so" story which is where you get stupid things like the "anthropic principle", or pure self-centered hedonism that makes the most ridiculous parts of Christianity and Islam look like bastions of sanity. It's not a great theory or claim to believe that eventually the energy or fuel for processes is exhausted, but for the crass interpretation to hold, heat has to be a "total, closed system", i.e. there can be nothing but heat in the universe which is patently false. If you're not referring to heat then thermodynamics is not the appropriate principle, and one thing I find really annoying are people who make asinine philosophical claims based on thermodynamics about "order", "chaos", and so on. You've probably heard them many times because stupid people raise these points all of the time.

I can't say as much about the current state of the theory or "Dark Energy" since Dark Matter and Dark Energy only exist as a very big cosmological fudge factor, or an acknowledgement that we really don't see much at all with telescopes. My take is that physics went really really bad some time around the 1930s because they didn't want people to know how a nuclear bomb worked and thought they could make their death weapons like magic. The problem is, people can understand fission well enough, and can understand fusion and why you can never do much with fusion power. Maybe if you had enough mPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

"There's no golden road to science" or whatever - Karl Marx

>>24296
>>24304
LOL

No. Start to use your 2 neurons and read you fucking idiot.

>>24294
Honestly same. For me it's more not knowing where to start, and when there's volumes upon volumes of thick books covering every little niche part of the subject it's hard to know where to start

>>24694
Start with these: >>24296

Ancient Egypt had a command & palace economy. Considering how long their empire existed it might be one of the more interesting ones to look into.

>>24656
Sort of related to your point, I've been reading a lot of Ranajit Guha recently, and in his book History at the Limit of World-History, he critiques Hegel for a limited view of history:

Guha critiques the concept of world-history in the lineage of Hegel as being almost exclusively Eurocentric. Yet this is not merely a cultural rebuke, for Guha sees that Hegelian history, a worldview that saw human development motivated by a transcendent world historical ‘spirit’, as one ‘held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism’ (p.5). World-history then took on an elevated quality as something that only people who had both writing and a state were able to participate in (p.10). Thus by ignoring the vast majority of the globe, Hegel’s world-history becomes ‘a short story with epical pretensions’ (p.35).

here you go anon. these might not be exactly what youre looking for in the sense that theyre not focused surveys and have their own broader theses, but ive read all of these and theyre excellent. idk how these versions are because i have the physical copies, but if youre interested in this topic i highly recommend them.

the banaji and wood books in particular are really fucking good

>>24656
Believe it or not, Churchill

mods love sending good threads here to die

QRD on all the books:

"Witness" – Chambers was a fucked up guy, joined Communist Party USA and was part of its underground network, wife refused to abort their child which lead him down the path of religious conversion, claimed he understood the godlessness of communism so he quit, became a Christian, and then snitched on CPUSA during the 2nd Red Scare ("McCarthyism"). Book is highly melodramatic and presents a highly good-vs-evil Manichaean worldview. Chambers also blames intellectuals for propagating communism in America, heavily promotes Christianity as the only way to save the world from the communist menace, and is overall a sensationalist asshole.

"School of Darkness" – Bella Dodd was an Italian immigrant who longed to fit in with American society and culture, joined CPUSA in the mid 1930s, recruited a bunch of CPUSA-affiliated teachers into the Teachers Union in New York, worked her way up to become very successful in the Party, fell out with the Party soon after Earl Browder got purged, ended up leaving CPUSA and became a born-again Catholic after meeting with Fulton Sheen, Sheen then convinced her to snitch on the Party during McCarthyism as a form of "repentance". Basically, Dodd was desperately searching for validation her entire life. When communists didn't want her anyone she became Catholic and anti-communist and got validation from that crowd.

"Radical Son" – Horowitz grew up being raised by CPUSA-affiliated parents, was raised to believe in communism, became a big name activist in the 60s New Left, worked with the Black Panthers, then had a falling out with the Panthers, accused them of murdering a friend of his, had a complete falling out with leftist politics and embraced Reaganite conservatism in the 80s. Most of his memoir is about "growing up" and realizing the leftist beliefs his parents raised him with were "wrong". He also hates intellectuals and is highly self-righteous.

"Unplanned" – Abby Johnson worked at Planned Parenthood and became very successful at it. She became a clinic director. Then, one day she allegedly witnessed a fetus being aborted on an ultrasound and this destroyed her mentally. She became a staunch anti-abortion activist afterwards. A lot of details in her memoir have been scrutinized by her former coworkers. Her book doesn't have some great metaphysical discussion on the "evils of leftism" as the other three but it's a more contemporary conversion memoiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Most of these stories are often aimless semi reformed degenerates or underachievers

There is also a specific libertarian brand of
>i was briefly a member of a trotskyist party and it felt a lot like a cult
<therefore all leftists are middle-class hipsters who can't think for themselves (unlike me bc i'm so smart and basic economics)
Here is something in this vein by Robert Anton Wilson:
>I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain.
>This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns. (Why was I immune to Stalinism — an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystallized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)
>After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.
>Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class bPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>24627
None of these examples were people who "briefly joined a Trot party".