/edu/ - Education

newfag thread; engage with accordingly, and point out any level of moronocy

The USSR engaged in huge amounts of primitive accumulation that was no different then what bourgeois governments; especially those of England and France; engaged in. If anything, the parallels are comically striking, especially after the fall of the NEP (New Economic Programme) and the failure to develop a solid alternative. The USSR under Stalin lead arguably one of the largest and most efficient attempts at primitive accumulation in history. And while they arguably helped create the economy that ended up beating the Nazi menace, the path there was mired in nothing but bloodshed.

First, some background: the NEP had offered the USSR a significant rebound from the civil war conditions of War Communism. While richer peasants continued to hoard and manage a significant amount of grain, the ability to sell it on a market let prices generally lower and allowed for some form of access to food, cooling the woes. However, in 1928, the situation fell apart. From PDF:

>In fall 1928, the economic situation grew worse. Harvest collections fell again, and the price of food and grain on the free market shot up. Workers’ riots intensified, and peasants, spooked by earlier confiscations, reduced their sown area. In early 1929, V.M. Molotov and Stalin visited the Urals and Siberia to oversee grain collections, impose delivery quotas on kulak households, and arrest hoarders. These “extraordinary measures”, extended throughout the country, allowed the state to meet its procurement and export targets.

The collectivization campaigned that followed, however, was not just hurt by the clear backwardness of the peasantry (especially the clerics), but by a rushed decision.

> That summer, an emboldened Party mobilized 25,000
workers to go into the villages to organize collective farms. The hasty decision, made under pressure of urban strikes and rural disturbances, produced a cascade of unanticipated consequences. Neither Party leaders nor worker activists were prepared for the intensity of resistance. Rumors swept the countryside. Angry, frightened peasants slaughtered rather than collectivize their livestock, and village priests warned that the Apocalypse was at hand.

This isn't totally Stalin's fault; this was well aided by the internal peasant woes by all means; but the fact of the mattePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

For example, did you know that the Gulag myth (the one of forced labor) originated in the 1920s in Finland and Sweden. Soviet lumber industry outperformed the Scandinavians and out-competed it on the European market. They then slandered the Soviet republic.

In a capitalist mode of production, scientists are downstream from economics. They are merely workers hired to produce a commodity called research. In capitalism the seller of a commodity (whether that commodity is a good, a service, or labor power) doesn't have the power to tell the buyer (whether end consumer or capitalist) what to do with it. Since it is the capitalist (or their bourgeois representatives in government) who are buying the research (labor commodity) from the scientists (workers), they can use the knowledge in the research however they like. They can withhold it from the public. They can use it to make weapons. Under capitalism, no matter how strictly a scientist obeys the scientific method, or how consistent their personal set of ethics are, they are at the end of the day, merely workers hired in a capitalist mode of production. This is why liberal appeals to "science, logic, and reason." fall flat under capitalism. It is the bourgeoisie who decide what to do with the knowledge (commodity) produced by scientific research (labor).

Pascal’s Wager is the best argument for Christianity and is only said to be the worst by those who have not read Pascal. Pascal in his Pensées shows why other religions are false and shows why Christianity is the true religion so the common objection against his wager is wrong.

There are too many unanswered questions in the universe to take a chance on eternal hell.

The cosmological argument. Why is there something rather than nothing? The only explanations from atheists are supernatural explanations. Silly reddit sci-fi explanations like multiverses and eternal universes both of which are not shown in nature at all and are just as likely as a creator of the universe existing.

DNA is which is more complicated and structured than you can possibly imagine created out of stardust for the first microbes in the universe. Consciousness. Where does it come from? Quarks? All this created randomly from nothing? It’s a bigger leap to say the Big Bang, DNA for microbes, consciousness, and everything else in the universe came out of nothingness and random chaos. All of it seemingly so perfected crafted where even a centimeter of difference would mean nothing would exist in the universe. Really. How does something so perfectly crafted and complicated as DNA come out of nothingness and stardust for microbes and every living thing on the universe?

None of this means you have to be absolutely 100% sure a God exists. It’s just enough of a doubt that it’s worth trying to find faith in God.

Think of it like percentages. 20% from the cosmological argument. 20% from the teleological argument. 20% from the argument of beauty. All of these arguments combine into a reason to justify having faith without evidence.


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If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is….
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

I have suggested before writing a shorter Edition of Capital aimed at the working class. I was mocked for this idea. People said that Capital is "perfect" and that it cannot be made shorter. People said that I "think workers are too stupid to read" (I do not think that). People said that I "think I am smarter than everyone" (I do not think that, in fact I was requesting help in writing such a work). People seemed obsessed with the idea that if a plainspoken version were available, it would ruin the original, even though the original is widely available.

Despite all this, I have found that in an 1868 letter Engels suggested the very same thing to Marx.

Is it not evident, then, that such an idea is not only not stupid, but of the utmost necessity for spreading and popularizing Marx's very important ideas?

The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls “heroism”: a “defiant creation of meaning” expressing “the myth of the significance of human life” as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.

Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project," (sometimes called an “immortality project,” or a “heroism project”). A person’s "causa sui project” acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they suscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete “self-negation” we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature. [4] By being part of symbolic constructs with more significance and longevity than one’s body—cultural activities and beliefs—one can gain a sense of legacy or (in the case of religion) an afterlife. In other words, by living up to (or especially exceeding) cultural standards, people feel they can become part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things i.e. that they are “heroic contributors to world life” and thus that their contributions last beyond their biological lifespan is what’s referred to as an “immortality project.”

How exactly would you define Trotskyism? How exactly would you summerise it's key differences from other Left wing political positions?

From my understanding most people here are Marxist-Leninsts, and even those who aren't certainly don't seem to look favourably at Trotsky.
So in your view what was wrong with Trotsky's ideas, and with the modern Trotskyists?

I couldn't find any left-com threads in the catalogue so I decided to make my own.

Also, can we get some flags to differentiate between the only 3 left-com internationals? The current left-com flag is that of the PCInt and Bordigism.
I suggest for Damenites use the ICT logo and for the whatever ideology the ICC is use the guy with the hammer.
I know the council coms have a pancake flag but I think the logo on the council-communist reader goes hard. Just a thought.

The anti party group were Marxists who has survived Nikita Khrushchev's purges. They attempted to democratically replace Khrushchev and return the USSR to Marxism and were arrested.

Leftypol, what do you think it means to be a man worthy of death? I don’t mean in a way that they deserved to die, I suppose I applaud them for having died on noble conditions . Its a topic im still thinking about it, what about you? What does death mean to you?