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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: 1608528010941.jpg (40.95 KB, 554x380, trotsky.jpg)

 No.733[Reply][Last 50 Posts]

Alright so I've had a few interactions with people on /leftypol/ who seem to think that Dialectics means rejecting the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction. As far as I can tell this has no real basis in the work of Marx or Engels and is a good to not be taken seriously by anyone who understands logic or philosophy or mathematics. I was really confused about where this came from for a while. I have read Mao's "On Contradiction" many times and I suppose that text could be read that way, but I don't think that is what Mao meant by contradiction or "the unity of opposites". Last night though I read Leon Trotsky's "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics" and I think I've found my answer. In it, Trotsky straight up makes a case for why A=/=A, and does make a somewhat compelling argument until you examine it critically.

This piece is well written like most of Trotsky's work, but his argument is full of non-sequitors and general misreadings of Marx and Engels. I want to make this thread to do some comparing and contrasting between four texts in particular, but we can bring in other lit if people want. Those four texts are…

Anti-Duhring by Engels:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm

The ABC of Materialst Dialectics:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

Dialectical and Historical Materialism:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

On Contradiction by Mao Zedong:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
136 posts and 60 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.8420


 No.10301

File: 1649180939099.pdf (30.83 KB, 197x255, Aizenberg.pdf)

Not sure if this is the appropriate thread for discussing this type of stuff, but since it involves dialectics, i figure it would fit.

But, honestly asking, what is the point of studying dialectics? I read PDF related, and didn't get much from it. This Aizenberg guy even claims Hegel used the Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis triad (i thought that was Fichetean meme?).

 No.10334

REJECT METAPHYSICAL NONSENSE OF "MATERIALIST" DIALECTICS WHICH IS NOTHING BUT ANOTHER EXPRESSION OF IDEALISM, EMBRACE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM.
https://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/

 No.10335

>>919
https://www.lacan.com/zizgorgias.htm

Here zizek mentions the idea of a dialectical mode of thinking or something. I generally agree that dialectics is more about presenting things in their fullness, contingency, process, and necessary movement, but this was a neat little thing. Basically just this part:

>There are, roughly speaking, two philosophical approaches to an antagonistic constellation of either/or: either one opts for one pole against the other (Good against Evil, freedom against oppression, morality against hedonism, etc.), or one adopts a "deeper" attitude of emphasizing the complicity of the opposites, and of advocating a proper measure or the unity. Although Hegel's dialectic seems a version of the second approach (the "synthesis" of opposites), he opts for an unheard-of THIRD version: the way to resolve the deadlock is neither to engage oneself in fighting for the "good" side against the "bad" one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced "synthesis," but in opting for the BAD side of the initial either/or. Of course, this "choice of the worst" fails, but in this failure, it undermines the entire field of the alternative and thus enables us to overcome its terms.


I think there's also something to be said for a dialectics which privileges overcoming deadlock and active thought, and another which comes to view the relationship/unity of opposites as necessary and in some way able to be thought of in a self-contained way. But this is just a feeling. It's also interesting to me that in Engel's laws, they can't be easily lumped into one thing. Negation of negation, quality into quantity, and unity of opposites - they're on both sides, the unity sees the opposites as united, whereas the quantity into quality and negation of negation sees the overcoming of deadlock and the specific form of transformation (quantity into quality). I'm just a dialectics lightweight tho so anyways take this zizek essay

 No.10336

>>10334
fam this is unreadable omg



 No.2320[Reply]

Is mathematics invented, discovered or both?
49 posts and 4 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.10118

>>10099
sry, or oranges are already fake as fuck, see this highly underrated comment (not mine, just based and noumenon pilled):
>>5821

 No.10151

the question isn't very interesting. there isn't very much practical difference between invention and discovery in the first place. to invent and to discover are both to unveil something novel. it's why european settlers refer to things like "the discovery of america" which just as well be described as the invention of colonial states in the western hemisphere. was deep sea navigation discovered or invented? the astrolabe was invented, but doesn't work if you haven't discovered the relationship between sun declination and latitude.

 No.10296

>>2320
Mathematics is an expression of truth. If you look at the various branches of pure mathematics, many don’t even remotely resemble what you probably had in mind (high school algebra or the basic college curriculum of calculus and linear algebra). Mathematics is similar to a programming language. You have some set of primitives, some set of operations you can perform, and from there you begin to derive the consequences of the operations you’ve defined. I guess you could say in that sense that mathematics is “invented” or “contrived”. Whether it is “real” or not depends entire on whether the system you have defined is useful for solving any real problems. Like if I define a logic about Barbie dolls, I define what properties Barbie has, what operations I can perform on her (brush her hair or undress her), etc… with a little effort we can make such a logic self consistent and valid. You obviously realize immediately that we probably can’t gain any useful or meaningful knowledge from that, so is it real math or not? I don’t see why not.

 No.10297

I just realized what point I was trying to make. Mathematics is obviously invented. It is just a framework within which you can systematize your reasoning about a given question or problem. However, the conclusions you derive from within that framework are discoveries. So a given branch of mathematics or logic is just a method for making discoveries.

 No.10333

math is invented. to say that math is "discovered" is idealism



File: 1640369773415.pdf (7.6 MB, 169x255, marxism ethics.pdf)

 No.9069[Reply]

I finished reading Eugene Kamenka's Marxism and Ethics earlier this week and I found it so interesting.
There are two big thesis that stuck with me from the book:
Marxism can be seen as an ethical system that is not concern about good or evil, right and wrong but about alienation and liberation.
If moral system stem from material conditions that can be seen in soviet history, during the revolution soviet thinkers denounced many ethical ideas as bourgeois and celebrated revolutionary violence but after WWII when eastern socialist countries became prosperous and estable ideas that were denounced as bourgeois returned to ethical discourse.

Honestly the book doesn't answer the question of what marxist ethics are or what ethical system is more compatible with marxism but shows really well how ethics can be understood as how the conditions of a society understand the meaning of their actions.
Kamenka has another book on ethics and I wish to read it next.

This thread isn't just about Kamenka's book, I want us to talk about ethics in general and how they relate to marxism.
8 posts and 3 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.10248

>>10242
Here is the book

 No.10304

>At the same time, the materialist interpretation of history, with its emphasis on historical change and class conflict, helped to lay the foundations for pluralist view of man and society - for the recognition of competing moralities and outlooks within society and within the individual man himself. It taught us that society was not a harmonious whole and that men were not harmonious wholes. Just as there was no total social interest, subsuming and reconciling all individual interests, so there was no total individual interest - a man could be part of many traditions, confront himself and others in many roles, be torn between allegiances to competing groups and ways of life. Marx himself and his disciples, it should be noted, were never thoroughgoing in this pluralism: they did tend to treat any individual man as belonging to a single class and to think of society as being made up of a finite number of classes. Marxian pluralism has to be, and has been, carried further than Marxists have been willing to carry it: we have to recognise the individual man, and the individual society, as infinitely complex, as the battlesite of an infinite number of traditions, outlooks and ways of life, as an economy of motives and interests which can never be exhaustively enumerated. None of the components of such an economy can be treated as atomic simples, confronting other components as monads without windows. Within each society there is an infinite number of sub-societies; component traditions and interests have points of affinity as well as points of conflict; they enter into alliances, change allegiance, split up into further components and so on. The complexity of individuals and 'their' interests has long been recognised in literature, especially in the novel; it is time that it was more clearly recognised in ethics.
Page 34, 35

Liberal hogwash. Of course the world is deeply complex and the motives of individuals can be fractured into numerous pieces, but the issue is that liberalism does not ultimately assign precedence or weight to factors. Everyone is given the freedom to decide for themselves to zero in on whatever factor they arbitrarily deem important and what weight they assign to each factor. Precedence and weight of all factors remain free to choose at any moment. This typically leads to the unverifiable, fantastical explanations of liberal political analysis, for which there can be countless of for the same eventPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

 No.10313

>Dr Israel Getzler, in his biographical study of the Men- shevik leader Martov (Martov, Melbourne U.P., 1967), shows us the moral disgust that Martov and other Menshevik leaders felt when faced, especially between 1903 and 1918, by Lenin's un- scrupulous tactics and lack of nicety in moral matters (the scandal of the Schmidt inheritance and Lenin's connection with counter- feiting and bank robberies to augment Party funds are the best known instances).
Page 54

Based Lenin.

 No.10314

The author in the OP‘s book shoehorns a lot of unsubstantiated claims in that he seemingly expects the reader to take as self-evident. He could have elaborated on each of those claims. Given there are only 67 pages the counter argument surely can‘t be that the book would have been too long otherwise. The perpetual snobbishness is also unnecessary.

 No.10315

>>9069
Man, I am dying to participate, I'm too busy to do anything but shit post.
>>9157
I have objections to these conclusions. Marx thought many things and one of the things is "man makes history, but not to their desire" or something like that. I think socialisms have been a very obvious result of trying to establish socialism by sheer will, rather than the thrust of political economic God thrusting us to it. And it has worked, and is working. So its not so much that the proletariat will win just because, but that in order to win it must win from wherever it is now, not from some desired state. Due to capitalism still existing 200 years later, it has changed and become different.

Idk, I haven't read the book, of course, but I disagree with the claims being made. It sounds like it wants to shoehorn ethics into Marx where there are none, and ignores the ethics that is arguably definitely in marx, namely the normativity of proletariat fighting for itself. Which is a historical truth but it is also a perspective claim Marx makes, I think.



File: 1624852411991.png (460.24 KB, 699x453, Screenshot_1.png)

 No.6217[Reply]

Can you recommend me some books that exposes the pornography addiction in modern society? I want a book that explains this phenomena by a marxist perspective, without any conservative "but tha westarn moral is dyingg!!11".
16 posts and 7 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.6761

>>6760 fucking autocorrect
>and were free
and weren't free

 No.6770

>>6760
>Inb4 "false analogy" the effects of pornography are comparable to heroin and other hard drugs, not some basic bitch shit like alcohol and weed.
This is very clearly just sexuality being a strong presence in the human experience. Your treating it as if its an opiate that should be rejected at every turn.
>>show that people get aroused easily
>Except that's a oversimplified and intentionally misleading claim
Elaborate.
>Actually it is, faggot. Pornography wasn't as graphic, easily-accessible and wide-spread even back in the 90s, people jacked to Hustler and Play Boy, which was just nude girls, not sex scenes and were free and couldn't be sold to minors legally. Anyone can open Pornhub and find tens of thousands of videos, pictures and more today.
>In the past, before the 1960s porn was limited to very esoteric circles of photographs which were neither widespread, nor widely sought. Erotic imagery from actual art is not the same as pornography either, so don't bring up some ancient depiction of a sex scene as some evidence of porn being old.
Deliberate misinterpretation of what I said but I'll bite. Your acting as if before pornhub people had more "tame" sexuality. Go out and look through the ancient drawings of sex and you will see its just as raunchy as it is today.
>Again, PORN IS FREE, only in a trap will you find free cheese - YOU are the product, retard.
No shit.
This is simply rebranded evangelical talking points of the 80s moral panics, but we're stuck in a time loop between the 80s and now. Clearly your under 25 and a virgin who is afraid of they're own dick. Go outside, have sex and pay attention in school.

 No.6775

I don't know why people go out their way to defend such garbage. Modern p*rn is distinct from what we've seen in the past in terms of accessibility and the ability to escalate. There's probably not much from a leftist perspective unless you want to dip into radfem stuff.directxDirect X

 No.6776

>>6770
>very clearly just sexuality being a strong presence
So basically you're just repeating yourself without actually arguing, concession accepted
>eating it as if its an opiate that should be rejected
If you can't see the difference between literal brainwashing of dopamine receptors and normal libido, you need help.
>Elaborate
The fuck is there to elaborate, yes humans are horny beings but porn is an unnatural product, that doesn't fulfill basic needs and actively affects our minds in similar ways to narcotics; that being addictive and damaging to the brain. Porn is not a part of normal sexuality and people shouldn't be aroused this easily because that's called hypersexuality, which is a disorder.
>our acting as if before pornhub people had more "tame" sexuality
Yes, yes they did. Outside of the upper class and other lazy bastards with money, most people had sex to have children and did not diverge too far from just that sex. Moreover even casual sex is still less shitty than pornography because its actually real.
>see its just as raunchy as it is today
Come back to me when you find the dozens of futa furry porn and shemale domination and all sorts of fucked shit. Come back to me when you show me that murals, paintings, drawings, wood-cuttings, frescos, carvings, sculptures and more depicted sex constantly, graphically and in public. And no showing genitals or having a mildly erotic scene is not porn.
>This is simply rebranded evangelical talking points
1) Wrong
2) I think I'll side with the Evangelicals on this one given that porn and pro-porn liberals have tended to be the worst kind of glowfaggot scum anyhow
>Clearly your under 25 and a virgin who is afraid of they're own dick
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 No.10303




File: 1608528077076.png (21.43 KB, 331x286, 1570719182043.png)

 No.1350[Reply]

Is there any Marxist historians you recommend?

>inb4 Grover Furr
58 posts and 11 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.9390

File: 1641915534008.png (631.72 KB, 680x666, ClipboardImage.png)

>>9250
>Basically you start reading and if he's just doing cocaine word salad with no logical negations discard the book
Probably a good idea.

 No.9492

the early Annales school

 No.9843

Why do even communists sometimes shit on Furr? What is the criticism? So far I have only read Bloood Lies and it is quite an indepth, meticulous deconstruction of Snyder's book. Why is Furr disliked among comrades as well?

 No.9844

Oops with the sage whatever

 No.10282

>>9843
He's often accused of misquoting the historians he criticizes. Whether that's true or not is something I am too ignorant to tell you.



File: 1647937964008-0.png (1.05 MB, 1280x720, ClipboardImage.png)

File: 1647937964008-1.png (183.98 KB, 360x555, ClipboardImage.png)

 No.10100[Reply]

Obscure gruella political literature
I'm sure everyone here has Che and Mao's guerilla warfare books downloaded at this point, but I'm curious about similar literature written by people in conflicts that were less famous
The Nepalese civil war, Western Sahara conflict, The Baloch conflict, Sri-Lankan communist insurgency

 No.10120

Marighella fought in Brazil and Cabral fought in Guinea. Fourth book is a nice selection of different texts.

 No.10254

Anyone have Revolution in the Revolution by Regis Debray ?

 No.10255




 No.10243[Reply]

>check picrel on wikipedia
>an entire section of the article is unapologetically citing a source published by US DoD
yeah, no.
Does anyone have any book recs for Afghanistan's socialist era, or am I going to have to "NOT ONE CRIME" my way through this the hard way?


File: 1615416680455.jpg (1.74 MB, 4000x3000, NEET.jpg)

 No.5112[Reply]

This thread is for us NEETS to help each other and give tips to aspiring NEETS
For example how to get NEET buxs
How to cope with the mental consequences of beeing a NEET
how to overcome the creeping loneliness and slow mental declince
How to occupy yourself during these long boring lonely nights
I'll start I really love nightwalking the night time is my only possibility to get out of my room without having to cope with the anxiety that comes with going outside
So that really gives me the possibility to get some fresh air and exercise without stressing myself out
19 posts and 4 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.5198

Are there any major differences of characteristics between urban and suburban, over the patterns of hikikomori or NEETs? The latter seems like it'd be far more alienating, suburbia being already very atomized. How many NEETs are residing in cities anyways compared to suburban or rural areas?

 No.5200

>>5188
pretty sure both words come from Japan

 No.5203

>>5200
Nah it's from UK and then spread to Asia for some reason.

 No.10215

Can some American wagies tell me why you work when wages have been stagnant since the 70's and the rich are only getting richer?

 No.10220

why is this a thread on /edu/?



File: 1625415138085.jpg (51.67 KB, 620x421, georges-bataille.jpg)

 No.6273[Reply]

is he a schizo? Are his theories specifically general economy compatible with marxism in some form or are at least of some interest?
Does he have a good grasp on dialectics or his rambling lead to Nick Land tier shit?
3 posts and 1 image reply omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.6482

Post some more Bataille PDFs bleaseeristocracyΈριστοκρατία

 No.6490

>>6482
Here you go

 No.6493

>>6490
thanks anon, if you have any more surrealist pdfs please link. i love that shit.eristocracyΈριστοκρατία

 No.10140

>>6273
He's a glowie and a satanist. If his ideas are correct then the darkest transgressions of war and genocide are the most glorious aspects of human civilisation. However, his arguments are convincing and almost impenetrable. I will continue to peruse his body of work and I will be the one to finally disprove him.

 No.10141

extremely boring fucker, anytime anyone mentions him i know to stop taking anything “intellectual” they have to say seriously



File: 1608528152394-0.jpg (287.46 KB, 732x1024, 8df3c00570.jpg)

 No.2083[Reply][Last 50 Posts]

So some of you may have read the quite popular pdf where Rafiq dunks on eco fetishism, in that thread he references a previous thread where he had spent a lot of time focusing in on eco-fetishism, however this thread has been lost from Revleft. It's available on internet archives but to preserve it I've made this in the style of the previous popular pdf. Hope you guys enjoy!

This thread could serve to discuss this work if anyone ever dedicates the time to read it, or we could debate the place of ecology in modern day Marxism. To provoke discussion: does nature have any value outside how it immediately serves human interests?
106 posts and 10 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.9860

>>9788
>Here is why, personally, I hate when people moralize about atrocities against indigenous: Because they hypocritically neglect that these atrocities are the very foundation of the institutionalized moral agency act upon, against 'capitalism' or 'American settler colonialism.'
Fucking breathtaking. This is full idealism. Use of moral pleas is just a cynical rhetorical tactic. It's not the foundation of land back movements. The foundation is the material interests of having control over land again instead of being packed into reservations that keep getting smaller. This dude really doesn't understand materialism at all does he? And he's also clearly having trouble with dialectics because the moral repudiation of the (alleged) source of the institutionalized moral agency is a perfect example of an opposition or tension arising from within something. This pic is maybe the best example of Haz telling on himself for what a pseud he is.

 No.9882

>>9701
This is what he does, he reads articles on stream and he reads them well. What a weak piece of "evidence".

 No.9903

Lots of cope in this thread. Why is this in /edu/?

 No.9941

>>9903
It started out as a relevant thread and then got derailed.

 No.10132

>>9701
The accused person in question does not have many opinions in common with the Infrared Collective except interest in conservative philosophy, which is not very abnormal, even on the far left. Marcuse and Adorno spoke positively of those thinkers, for example. And a germ theory of ideology is a silly sort of cancel culture, that if prosecuted to the end totally would warrant the cancellation of Marx himself.



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