/edu/ - Education

Is Michael Parenti a leftist worth reading or is there someone who does what he does better? I've heard people saying there are better Marxist historians but they don't seem to ever cite any. If I should bother whit him which works are best?

Americans are a practical people and they always say: “Time is money.” They have a whole branch of literature—unfortunately, we Chinese know very little of it—dealing with the organization of business in industries and finance, showing young Americans how to save energy and take a shortcut to success. The latter are taught all that very well, and we should learn it too.

At present we cannot permit ourselves the luxury of wasting time and energy.

We live on the borderline of two social systems: the old, capitalist system is dying, and the new, communist system is rising. In these days we cannot live as did our fathers and grandfathers. Every day brings something new, and we should be able to see it with our own eyes, to judge and decide on it. But to do that correctly, we must know a lot.

That applies to the working class in general and to every worker in particular. There is no time to work leisurely, with one’s sleeves down. We must work as economically, i.e., as cheap as possible.

History had fated China—a comparatively backward country—to be the second to raise the banner of social revolution and to hold it aloft for 40 years now; she must fortify her material foundation if she is to continue the stronghold of the world revolution. To do that she must work feverishly, without letup, with the maximum economy of time and energy.

(Excerpt from a talk with leading members of the State Planning Commission, the State Economic Commission and departments in charge of agriculture.)

April 20th 1983

In my opinion this is one of the most important and useful pieces of Marxist theory in the past few decades.

One thing I constantly encounter amongst young millennial and zoomer Socialists especially of the more woke/idpol variety is that they have absolutely no understanding of the concepts of relative risk and self interest, raised or lowered expectations, plausibility, assessment of leverage power etc - stuff that is very obvious to working class people and especially trade unionists. So many young earnest revolutionaries think that the people don't revolt because basically of brainworms and that they just need to read more books and get why capitalism is bad or whatever. No, there's instrumental rationality and logic there which needs to be understood. People look at the forces around them and leverage power they have - filtered through media and bullshit of course - and decide what they think is realistic accordingly.

It is a lack of this understanding that led, for Chibber, in part, to the ultimate post '68 cultural turn in the Left - to explain why western workers wouldn't revolt, leftoid students and grads decided it must be muh hegemony brainworms and racism (rather than that shock horror social democratic keynesianism in a booming economy was doing well for them relatively speaking) so they went in search of fetishised new inherently revolutionary classes and subjects - far off foreign struggles, women, sexual minorities, racial minorities etc etc etc. This process is still going on today. And I think it also serves as a sort of form of avoidance for a Left which is increasingly rooted in universities - anything to avoid engaging with people where they actually are and your own working class instead of fetishising sub groups of it.

There really needs to be a risk and Socialism 101 lecture derived from this book to kick the idpol out of people, the idealism, the frustrated seething that at its worst turns people towards LARPing and revolutionary adventurism. That and getting people to do boring long term community activism and trade union work.

TLDR 1968 was over half a century ago, the '68 new left was sort of a dead end

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674245136

I would recommend 'confronting capitalism' also by chibber for a bit of a more normie broad intro

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What was actually being fought over in terms of policy?

Who wanted what?

What were the longterm effects?

I'm legit lost on what headspace these leaders were so caught up in.

I think it's funny that Mao lured Khrushchev to a pool for a meeting and tried to make him swim, or that they made each other stay in bad hotels when they were visiting each others' countries, but why do these petty dramas appear to eclipse some larger struggle? Please explain this shit to me anons. What were these guys fighting about?

Looking at the recent advancements in the field of AI that perpetually make it into the news I thought it was appropriate to make a thread about artificial intelligence. Even if you believe the recent news on AI are merely sensationalism and that we will head into another “AI Winter” soon, I think it would be interesting to discuss the existence of artificial intelligence and “its labor” from a Marxist perspective and talk about where human beings and their labor fits into a society where AI manages to do a lot of the things that for a long time where believed only a human could do. That aside, I just find it reasonable to remain aware and therefore discuss the impact of current state of the art machine learning models that produce photos with ever increasing striking realism.

On that note, I would also like to direct you to the two threads on consciousness I made since that is related and people were also talking about artificial intelligence in there
Current thread: >>>/edu/9849
Last thread: https://archive.ph/LSgow

Anyone got these?
https://catalyst-journal.com/

I can think of a few, but not an exhaustive catalog:

>Lenin getting smuggled back into Russia by the Germans because they thought he would destabilize Russia
>The French King helping the American Revolution to own the British
>The Russian Empress showing the Francisco De Miranda (Venezuelan revolutionary and independence leader) favor in her court and protecting him from the Spanish crown by giving him permission to hide in Russian embassies all over Europe
>The British blockading Haitian ports to own the French, which prevented the French from coming back in and reimposing slavery when they were most able to.
>The Americans supporting New World Independence movements in general against old world monarchies, both for ideological reasons (bourgeois republican ideals) and opportunistic reasons (trade).
>The Americans trading with Haitian slave rebels against the wishes of the French, because it was profitable, even though they themselves were slave owners.

Most of these are from bourgeois republican revolutions against monarchies, or from slave uprisings (in the case of Haiti). Only Lenin fits a communist version of this happening, but I'm sure there are other examples.

Has anyone here read any of post-marxist Cornelius Castoriadis' critiques of Marx? I feel that in some places he gets the criticisms right, and in other places very wrong. Note that Castoriadis still remained a kind of anarchist.

Something I feel he got right:
- Whereas Marx claims that tech reduces surplus, by claiming that fixed costs would increase over time, and should lead to a reduction in variable costs like labour, Castoriadis criticises this heavily and says that tech provides opportunities to reduce fixed costs, and subsequently can actually increases the number of jobs

Neutral on this one (looking to hear what other people think)
- Castoriadis is highly critical of dialectics as a whole and suggests that Marx is claiming that simply because two things have tension with each other that they are opposites. Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today that actually unites us on a human level, rather than individual classes of people. Institutions are socially constructed but have taken on a life of their own due to our alienation.

I think he's definitely wrong on this one:
- Tendency of rate of profit to fall. He analyzed this after the war when it was going back up, but it has continued to fall even lower after that point. However he definitely was right to suggest that capitalism was far more resilient than Marx made out

https://files.libcom.org/files/cc_psw_v2.pdf
I'm taking most of these points from 'Modern Capitalism and Revolution'. Castoriadis essentially argues that Marx is outdated and that the system has already transformed from a simple capitalist struggle of 'the one who does not own but works' and 'the one who owns and does not work' into something a lot messier, which Keynes was (according to him) better equipped to analyse.

every time a liberal discovers that the molotov ribbentrop agreement happened, they think they've discovered some hidden gem, and the key to deboonking communism and making it a pariah in the arena of public opinion.

Perhaps they are correct.

See, the real truth behind the molotov ribbentrop pact or the winter war doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the USSR was trying to buy time, cut off potential corridors of german invasion, etc. etc. What matters is that the liberals have a simple, and easily disseminated narrative that can be repeated much faster than the counter-arguments. In short, they have a "Big Lie."

The "big lie" is a propaganda technique that involves telling a bold, often outrageous untruth as if it were fact. The idea behind this method is that by making such outlandish claims, they will stick in people's minds more than smaller lies because of their shock value, even if there is no evidence for them. Over time, these lies can become widely accepted as truth simply due to repetition. This concept was famously used during World War II by Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler who said: “The bigger the lie, the more easily it will be believed.” The term has since been adopted by other groups and individuals in order to manipulate public opinion on various issues.

The MR Pact is a "big lie." How is it told? It is told in a very simple form: Hitler and a Stalin admired each other, came together and rape poland, and only ever fought in WW2 because they disagreed on how best to divide poland.

With this big lie, you have a narrative where the last world war was entirely caused by "National Socialists" and "Regular Socialists" coming together to rape "Innocent Poland." and then the brave liberal democracies with their freedom-loving capitalist economies intervening to save everyone from the holocaust. In this narrative stalin is an opportunist who joined the winning side.

This is how most people in the EU/US/UK/Australia/Canada/New Zealand have come to see WW2. Why? Because it is convenient for their broader anti-proletarian agenda of keeping their economies in private hands.

Has anyone read picrel yet? Is it any good, or just more Applebaum tier trash? Obviously I'm not expecting a Leftist take, but anything critical of the usual "the people rose up to overthrow le evil tyranny" narrative would be good, even from the right. I think I heard the WarNerd guys rexerence it, so thought maybe it's not complete shit.