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/edu/ - Education

'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' - Karl Marx
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File: 1661230517492.png (1.56 MB, 1060x1315, Strawman Marx.png)

 No.11465[Reply]

I'm in a pretty big dilemma.

My boyfriend claims he is interested in Marxism, yet has an incredibly negative outlook. He believes there will never be a revolution, all narratives of a grand redemption are a lie. He's also swallowed the western Buddhist bullshit (mixed with absurdism) full force; basically, he believes human existence is inevitably empty and absurd and that any attempts at building something bigger and better than ourselves is a mistake. He has a history of depression so that definitely informs his views as well.

He's also a huge fan of Zizek, whom I despise.

The two of us read books together, mostly on religion (Buddhism obviously) and psychology. I'm looking for Marxist texts that we could read together that would shake him out of (or at least question) his bullshit. Namely, I'm looking for books that have both 1. a generally positive outlook on communist revolution or building the communist project, 2. present a strong case for Marxism against rival/bourgeois ideologies, and 3. is philosophical.

Any suggestions would be great.
91 posts and 7 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.11938

>>11936
ok - do you have any thoughts in your head about the rest of what I said? I didn't post the dalai lama just because i like him, i posted it because he's relevant to buddhism

 No.11939

You need to unfuck his understanding of philosophy first, and he's not going to jump into Capital (who would without being somewhat convinced of its use first) so that leaves other philosophers and history books. Similarly there's not point throwing any serious Marxist philosopher like Althusser at him because he hasn't read Capital, it'll just go over his head. That leaves:

Nietzsche or D&G. Deleuze is the safer bet. You can also just say fuck it and start with the greeks, skip Plato, read the illiad and then Aristotle.

A soft history book written by a Marxist could be good light reading, like Howard Zinn or TJ Clark for Art History.

 No.11940

>>11939
Oh if I were to recommend a "Marxist" book it'd be Capitalist Realism, it's kinda retarded but its a good polemic against western mental health and Fisher is a good writer.

 No.11941

>>11505
> capacity for cooperation
I tend to meme this shit hard, but if you want an actual corollary to > survival of the fittest look no further than everyone's favorite communist fanfiction author Kropotkin. He spent years in fucking Siberia showing that cooperation is just as important as competition in nature.

Don't read the bread book though, its fanfic tier.

 No.11942

>>11939
How will reading Deleuze unfuck him?


File: 1608528407643.png (519.1 KB, 567x661, marxjew.png)

 No.4631[Reply]

Everyone tells me Penguin Classic's translation of all of Capital is the best around but what about the rest?

- Paris Manuscripts
- Germany Ideology
- Civil war in France
- Feuerbach
- Gotha
- Grundrisse
- Wage labor and capital
6 posts omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.8697

>>4631
necrobump but i'll answer anyways

>Paris Manuscripts
Martin Milligan https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
>Germany Ideology
Prometheus https://kalamkopi.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/karl-marx-friedrich-engels-the-german-ideology.pdf
>Civil war in France
the original https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm
>Feuerbach
Engels https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/engels.htm
>Gotha
https://archive.marxists.xyz/library/karl-marx-critique-of-the-gotha-programme-en
>Grundrisse
Penguin https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 No.11932

File: 1666730962259.jpg (273.96 KB, 586x900, 9781840226997.jpg)

Don't get the Penguin editions of Capital
They have batshit book-length intros by random scholars pushing their own interpretations, the translations are unnecessarily pedantic and unreadable, and the print quality is awful even for Penguin Classics
They didn't even try with the third volume, where they pretty clearly used what look like photocopier scans for some reason, with triangular black splotches at the corners
Just get the International Publishers editions, or the Wordsworth edition of volumes 1 and 2

 No.11933

>>11932
the first penguin volume has intro by Ernest Mandel whos economic writings were well received by Guevara but he polemicises against the value form critique pushed by Michael Heinrich and predecessors.

 No.11934

>>11932
All three intros are Mandel who isn't some who lol. They are terrible photocopier prints with shit bindings though.

 No.11935

>>11933
The value form critique didn't even exist lol, it has some origins in the work of Rubin from the USSR. Everyone before that (like the second international) believed value was created in production and realized on the market.


File: 1664843046496-0.png (144.04 KB, 333x500, ClipboardImage.png)

File: 1664843046496-1.pdf (17.39 MB, 67x118, Domenico Losurdo - Liberal….pdf)

 No.11777[Reply]

We're going to read and then discuss a book by leftypol's favorite historian: Dominic Losurdo! We'll be reading "Liberalism: A Counter-History" starting next week, October 10, 23:00 UTC. We will be doing Chapter 1 for this first meeting!

Join us on Matrix/Element: https://matrix.to/#/#leftyread:matrix.org

<One of Europe's leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism's dark side. In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
55 posts and 16 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.11833

File: 1665223694901.png (78.92 KB, 787x258, calhoun.png)

This book seems extremely stupid, granted I haven't read Locke but it doesn't take a world genius to point out that a political philosophy based on a transhistorical morality would of course be contradictory.

That's like Engel's whole fucking point in Socialism Utopian and Scientific. Hell it's a common reason why people bash on Kant and prefer Hegel.

 No.11834

>>11787
Same, it's 1 A.M. where I live and I have to go to work the next morning. I'm already reading a couple of books right now so it's alright, I'm going to focus on what I've already started, but keep this in mind next time, 23:00 UTC basically means no one in Europe with a normal sleep schedule is going to join your reading group.

 No.11835

File: 1665357288162-0.png (36.7 KB, 1013x200, Liberalism a Counter Histo….png)

File: 1665357288162-1.png (276.9 KB, 1068x1325, Liberalism a Counter Histo….png)

burgers BTFO

 No.11876

>‘The Liverpool Courier, 22 August 1832, estimated that three quarters of Britain’s coffee, fifteen sixteenths of its cotton, twenty two twenty thirds of its sugar, and thirty four thirty fifths of its tobacco were still produced by slaves.’57 In sum, we should bear in mind the candid judgement of two eighteenth century British witnesses. The first, Joshua Gee, acknowledged that ‘[a]ll this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations’.58

 No.11927

wow this book is depressing
whoever came up with "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" really missed the mark
fascists are more like liberals doing what they always did but wearing clown costumes


File: 1666376371489.jpg (138.02 KB, 640x550, AzovseaNASA.jpg)

 No.11907[Reply]

This canal will make the Sea of Azov (over time) become a freshwater lake, while the Canal acts as a man made river. Cities like Rostov will still remain port cities but will have access to lots of fresh water.

 No.11911

How is this going to transform the Azov sea into a freshwater lake and why would you even want to do that? This isn't an arid region so water supply shouldn't be that big of a problem.

 No.11912

Do it

 No.11919

>>11911
Crimea is aird


File: 1666300721129.jpg (138.68 KB, 1000x1481, 1666235883048.jpg)

 No.11899[Reply]

I'm not 100% sure i should post this here but i was directed to here from the QTDDTOT, Do you know any good books from a conspiracy orientation that debunk the jewish conspiracy of the jews being behind it all, like Behold a Pale Horse?

"I give lectures all over the United States. At some point before, during, or after every lecture, some well-meaning but misguided soul, tells me that I have it all wrong and that it's the Jews, the Catholics, the communists, or the bankers that are the cause of all our ills. The target group is blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong. Power over everyone and everything is always attributed to this group - whichever group it happens to be at that moment to that person. These poor people are on the right track, in that there has been and certainly is a conspiracy to bring about a totalitarian world order. They are completely off track to think that any one ethnic, religious, or financial group alone could ever muster enough power to bring its plan to fruition. One group, you see, would always be opposed by all of the other special-interest groups that exist and have always existed throughout history. That is, unless they were all really the same group (the Illuminati) or for some reason they became unified (the Bilderberg Group)."

File: 1653576782622.jpg (284.32 KB, 1200x1462, Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portra….jpg)

 No.10791[Reply]

As the title says, I want to learn about economics from a capitalist perspective. Even if I learn economics from Marxist literature, which might be a truthful description of the matter, the terminology and ideas of capitalists themselves are still foreign to me. So which books should I read to get an understanding of economics from a capitalist standpoint?
26 posts and 6 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.11287

>>10791
OP you can just read Smith, Ricardo and Keynes. I plan on doing it one day, but taking a break after finishing Volume 3.

Everything else as pointed out in this board, is ideological - the above are too, but they are giants nonetheless.

I would probably join a Keynes reading group of The General Theory, maybe Ricardo too. After seeing passages of Smith I really don't enjoy his writing, its more technical than Marx's and less insightful.

 No.11288

>>11287
Also since I want to read Shaikh's Capitalism I need to go through an undergrad book of microecon, it's not hard by any means if you don't follow a graduate text - the one I flipped through looked like a graduate text on number theory in the first few chapters and the problem sets were not easy - just a necessary slog to understand the field.

 No.11323

>>11144
Just started reading macroeconomics and I‘m pretty delighted. Exactly what I was looking for. His (or their) writing style is very informationally dense and it can be difficult to keep up with all the presented notions, but it was pretty much what I was looking for. Presenting different schools of thought, going into the historical development and the shortcomings of the status quo.

 No.11338

Thomas Piketty

 No.11898

>>10793
Martin Luther once said: “if you want to change the world pick up your pen and write”; in order to be financially comfortable so one can spend the whole day reading and writing, one has to play the game and understand it— by owning assets (real estate, value stocks, government bonds) that give cash flow.


File: 1643688728595.png (696.69 KB, 791x1055, ClipboardImage.png)

 No.9600[Reply]

Does anyone have any books about the Dominican Civil War? I'd like to understand just what the fucking US Military helped do to the island. According to the Wikipedia article, the man in picrel(Juan Bosch) was just a social democrat, but the fact that they couldn't even allow that when Europe already more or less had social democratic movements is something that speaks volumes.

 No.9601

Most likely they didn't want another Castro
Castro also presented himself as a democrat before switching over to the Soviet bloc and giving them Cuba.
Bosch was also apparently carrying out land reform which would have broken up the large landowning feudalist class, a class that the US empire finds easy compradors in. Same reason they moved against Allende.

 No.11881

File: 1666142810577.jpg (13.52 KB, 289x432, 1963.jpg)

>>9600
I doubt that a lot of books on the topic have been translated into English.
I've heard that pic related is pretty good. Author is Cuban residing in DR.

 No.11883

The US at that time was truly paranoid about socialdemocrats being fellow travelers, making a lot of heads roll for just plain domination.
Well, if you wanted to do some socialdemocracy the first thing in the table was to be anticommunist, declare it to the four winds and then you could work something, like Betancourt in Venezuela

 No.11884

>>11883 (me)
After watching it, those Dominican socdems have truly a their heart in the left, or maybe is just beacuse the 14 de Junio were fighting against a dictatorship
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimiento_Revolucionario_14_de_Junio


File: 1665519850148.jpg (1.56 MB, 2774x1840, 6237383173_43cc0b5400_o.jpg)

 No.11836[Reply]

I've heard conflicting claims. Either people claim colonialism was highly profitable for Europeans, or they say it wasn't profitable at all, and some even say it was a net negative financially. In the latter two cases they claim it was only done for prestige. So what is it? And if you give an answer it would be preferable if you gave sources as well. To me it makes little sense that Europeans would have committed to colonialism for so long and extensively without it being profitable.
14 posts omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.11857

This is why OP's question make absolutely no sense. Colonialism lasted several hundreds of years and is still alive in some forms today, it involved countless parties with conflicting interests, and you want some dumb simplistic answer with concrete evidence for it.

 No.11858

>>11857
No, I don't want a simplistic answer. I welcome thorough and nuanced replies. I phrased my question in a broad manner because I don't know much about the subject yet. Hence I won't even know where to draw a distinction.
Now sperg out elsewhere or answer my question.

 No.11870

>>11853
It is a good book but even the author later buried it
>[Las Venas Abiertas] intentó ser una obra de economía política, solo que yo no tenía la formación necesaria
>[The open veins] tried to be a work of political economy, just that I didn't have the necessary instruction
https://archive.is/snJSD#selection-3271.111-3277.90
>It makes little sense to me that europeans would have commited for so long if it wasn't proffitable
It was, but for a class, not for the whole. The peasant and the worker as a class gained many benefits from the contact but not profits. Not even counting the destruction of capital that involved the periodic global war between kingdoms in that era.

 No.11871

>>11836
Colonialism was very profitable in the beginning and middle phases, but in the late phase the European powers got wrecked by attempting to maintain their colonies.

 No.11872

Colonialism was very profitable for the trading companies and monarchies that drove it. The fact that it also hurt people from Europe at times doesn't mean it wasn't driven by profit. The problem with framing things this way is it ignores the actual economic and political structures that drove the process (mercantilism and capitalism) in favor of spooky ghost stories about nations and the clash of civilization. Stories which were invented by the colonizers btw, so good job on decolonial theorists failing to decolonize their minds.


File: 1665776261270.jpg (78.88 KB, 350x463, thomas aquinas.jpg)

 No.11861[Reply]

What is /edu/'s opinion of scholasticism?
All the sources I've read treat it like an isolated episode in the history of philosophy without relevance to what came after the renaissance and any reference to it after the fact seems to be out of pure butthurt from catholics because philosophy became secular.
But is it really irrelevant or does it have anything worth studying from it beyond its place in history? Like for example is the scholastic dialectical method any relevant to marxism?

 No.11863

File: 1665778355097.jpeg (5.85 KB, 197x255, indefx.jpeg)

>>11861
its the culmination platonic-aristotelian thought which is the most 'scientific' expression of ancient ideology, western and eastern.

>According to Eliade, traditional man feels that things "acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality". To traditional man, the profane world is "meaningless", and a thing rises out of the profane world only by conforming to an ideal, mythical model. Eliade describes this view of reality as a fundamental part of "primitive ontology" (the study of "existence" or "reality"). Here he sees a similarity with the philosophy of Plato, who believed that physical phenomena are pale and transient imitations of eternal models or "Forms" (see Theory of forms). He argued: Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of 'primitive mentality,' that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity. Eliade thinks the Platonic Theory of forms is "primitive ontology" persisting in Greek philosophy. He claims that Platonism is the "most fully elaborated" version of this primitive ontology.


File: 1619110159963.jpg (128.42 KB, 1099x1717, Hez.jpg)

 No.5506[Reply]

I'm looking for books on Middle Eastern politics and history. Give me some recommendations. Also, has anyone read this? Is it any good?

 No.5515

Orientalism by Edward Said is a must read. You don't have to aggree with everything he said, but you should still read it imo

 No.5568

If you're interested in Iran specifically, Between Two Revolutions is a good book written by a Marxist that presents the history of (mostly) 20th century Iran through that lens very well.

 No.5572

File: 1619919756920.pdf (1.78 MB, 205x300, All the Shah's Men_ An Ame….pdf)

>>5568
> Between Two Revolutions
Thank you very much for the recommendation.
>>5506
I'd recommend "All the Shah's Men" by Kinzer on the topic of Iran. He has some other good books as well, such as "The Brothers" and "Poisoner-in-Chief".

 No.6791

File: 1628465759695.jpg (129.34 KB, 1119x1119, b555ac-20180401-trout-mask….jpg)

>>5515
>>5568
>>5568
Hello everyone, OP here, I read all your books and they are very good. And I want to provide an update on picrel. I read it, and after reading a lot of different accounts on Lebanon and Hezbollah. I can say the book in picrel is accurate. The author isn't a Marxist, but is legitimate and gives a accurate understanding of the group and it's history. If anyone disagrees I would love to hear about it.

 No.11848

>>6791
>I read it, and after reading a lot of different accounts on Lebanon and Hezbollah.
You can ask me and while I'm not exactly a Hezbollah expert I do live in the regime that is it's primary supporter


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