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'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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If the price of something is determined by the amount of human work that goes into it, how does one explain the price of luxury items or artworks (which only require a little bit of work but are overpriced due to the supply/demand imbalance)?

It might seem like a bunch of impertinent exceptions that could be overlooked but
- the luxury industry is far from being marginal
- if the premise that the value of something is determined by the amount of human work that goes into it isn't true in every context, then the whole law of falling rate of profit doesn't hold true in every context either

(It's been 3 years since I last read Das Kapital and I'm too lazy to read it again)
32 posts and 4 image replies omitted.

>>26251
>One can, indeed, imagine a t-shirt which has far more labour put into it with a more complex design but which is worth less and priced less because instead of a /leftypol/ design it has a large declaration that the wearer is a pedophile.
Such t shirts were in fact sold at malcolm mclarens "SEX" shop, according to the autobiography of the punk model, Jordan. No really surprising there were fights on the King's Road between punks and the more traditional teddy boys.

>>26251
But unless you're got a punky buyer in 1977 you've basically made a mud pie, not a t shirt

Ricardo gives the starting conditions of the LTV here:
<Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them. There are some commodities, the value of which is determined by their scarcity alone. No labour can increase the quantity of such goods, and therefore their value cannot be lowered by an increased supply. Some rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality, which can be made only from grapes grown on a particular soil, of which there is a very limited quantity, are all of this description. Their value is wholly independent of the quantity of labour originally necessary to produce them, and varies with the varying wealth and inclinations of those who are desirous to possess them. These commodities, however, form a very small part of the mass of commodities daily exchanged in the market. By far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects of desire, are procured by labour,. and they may be multiplied, not in one country alone, but in many, almost without any assignable limit, if we are disposed to bestow the labour necessary to obtain them. In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/ricardo/tax/ch01.htm
So, the LTV only applies to most goods, but not all of them.
>if the premise that the value of something is determined by the amount of human work that goes into it isn't true in every context, then the whole law of falling rate of profit doesn't hold true in every context either
That's true, but Marx also allows for countering tendencies in the law of the falling rate of profit. These concerns are mostly taken up by mainstream economics in "trade cycles" or "business cycles" anyway, so it is not an esoteric Marxist reading of things, but an exoteric fact.

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>>25362
>Austrian School definition of price
The Austrian School has an absolute separation between values and prices, the same as the Classicists and Marxists. For all schools of thought, the value and price only coincide by equilibrium of supply and demand. This is why goods can be "over-priced" in colloquial language. If all prices were identical to values, this couldn't be said. But this argument goes all the way back to Scholastics like Aquinas or Luther, who said that prices can differ from what a thing is "worth".
>The prices of things are set by merchants in response to what they understand the respective value of those things to be.
No. A merchant "buys low and sells high". There is no other imperative. This is why the only regulator on market price is a mutual competition between merchants, lowering prices to a minimum. The minmum price in a free market is seen to be a commodity's "value".



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A list of reading groups and their schedules that have chosen to advertise themselves here. Take a minute to check them out. If you would like to promote your reading group, feel free to leave a comment telling people where they can go.

>>5912 /read/

>>6162 Continental Floppa

edit: linking the old Reading Thread sticky, for easy reference: >>>/leftypol_archive/5825951
20 posts and 6 image replies omitted.

>>22049
When Soviet tanks entered Hungary in 1956, supporters of this were called "tankies". This happened under Khruschev, not Stalin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sgNVG9a4XU

>>22049
Oh you should definitely read Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, I would describe it as a very revealing text.


>>22066
not to mention the repressed anti de-stalinization protests that khrushev also repressed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Georgian_demonstrations

>>22105
Very under discussed part of Soviet-communist discussion



 

I just watched the Matrix Trilogy (AGP classic; literally made by trans women and is trans culture) and it inspired me to get into continental (and even analytic) philosophy; I especially want to get into the former as the latter seems to be getting at about the same conclusions but it takes them longer and is dogmatic (and also Chomsky is tied to Epstein). Regardless of Deleuze's character I was going to start with schizophrenia and capitalism but I discovered the reading list in linkrel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4DvIJlZow

So I'm going to start with Kant's critique of pure reason for now and work my way up.

At the same time I have also read about half of the Ego and it's own and fear that I am wasting my time doing this as I can already intuit some of the ideas and their implications while consciously knowing that I'll gain far more insight doing it the hard way.

For people who have read a lot of philosophy, what do you think? Is it better to be patient or start with the harder texts and reread them?
2 posts omitted.

>>26218
Read all Plato's dialogues, especially the harder ones. Take your time, learn how to think. Don't buy the usual formulas, use the dialogues as conceptual workshops to make ideas clash with one another. Don't bother with the introductions unless they give some historical context and explains some of the complex terms, so you dont stumble into "false friends" (google it), such as ουσία and other such terms. Don't believe the usual interpretations, such as the supposed world of ideas vs world of the bodies and all that christian dualist crap, and also take the Phaedo with a grain of salt, don't go about reading the other dialogues basing your interpretation on the Phaedo, or on any other one for that matter. I say this because the usual crap that people say about Plato seems to take the Phaedo as the one and only dialogue he wrote. Dont try to fit everything in a single mega system that Plato supposedly had. Dont buy all the biographical crap, the introductions where they speak about Plato as if he was their neighbor, when we actually know almost nothing about his life. Dont bother with that, just use the dialogues to see how complex speculative concepts move, work each other out, transform into one another, destroy one another, etc.

This way, you will learn how to think, because Plato has put into the dialogues everything a philosopher needs. In the dialogues philosophy appears in its natural element, it's natural habitat if you will: two or more people talking about concepts, take advantage of that and treat them as if they were a friend you were reasoning with.

If I were you I would follow up with some Aristotle, some modern stuff (Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Hume etc) and then some Kant. Then, whatever you want, you are from that point onwards free. Take a word of advice from me: there will probably be a point you'll get into romanticism and/or existentialism and similar lines, be extremely wary of that because it's a phase not to get stuck on. Be wary of the philosophers that criticize Hegel saying he is an absolutist, that he rejects feeling, that he rejects this and that… Give good old Hegel the benefit of the doubt and approach him someday with an open mind, he is an endless source of complex concepts and manouvers no philosopher should abstain himself from. Marx himself said that Hegel "truly has the last say in philosophy". AlsPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26223
Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

Then as far as eastern philosophy, one should read the Upanishads and bhagavad Gita, Laozi, Zhuangzi and the I Ching, Visuddhimagga and Milinda Panha

>>26224
>Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

First and foremost, Aristotelianism is but a small fraction of scholasticism. There are countless other schools and the Aristotelian one only got prominent in the end, and was never in a position of undisputed hegemony. Secondly, Aristotle in itself is very different from scholasticism, and Plato never ceased to be a direct influence in its own right, save for the long time in which most of his dialogues were lost in western Europe alongside most of the corpus aristotelicum. Even still, some dialogues always stayed in circulation, such as the Timaeus (for obvious reasons), and many of his ideas (or rather, ideas about his ideas), through Augustine, Boetius, Dionysus Aeropagite, and this general neoplatonic mileau of early christian thought. In the 1200s, the corpus aristotelicum was recovered, iirc, by translations from the arabic comissioned in Spain (translations themselves made from syriac, which themselves were made from greek), and Aristotle was back in the scene. All of Plato's dialogues were recovered afterwards, in the 1500s, after the fall of constantinople, when many greek scholars fled to Italy, along the original greek version of aristotle, again, iirc. Here Plato was truly recovered and had an immense influence in renaissance and early modern philosophy. If you read Descartes meditations after you read the Phaedo, you will understand, and this is just one connection.


Either way, I didn't recommend you Plato because he is an influential guy. I didn't even recommend it to you to get ahold of the philosophical canon and get your stuff together historically. In Plato's dialogue you will find a truly godlike philosopher showing how CONCEPTS work, what are their limits, what configurations can they work in, how do they clash, which ones are implied (often surreptitiously, unbeknownst to the user) by using and abusing other ones… By reading Plato you don't become a PLATONIST, you learn how to THINK, provided you approach the text without those plain formulas found iPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>Is it better to be patient or start with the harder texts and reread them?
It's not as if you have to waste your time with obscure works. You just need to read Plato and Aristotle as a preliminary to any further philosophy. It all begins with them. This is what Kant writes (1787):
<In relation to the origin of the pure cognitions of reason, we find one school maintaining that they are derived entirely from experience, and another that they have their origin in reason alone. Aristotle may be regarded as the bead of the empiricists, and Plato of the noologists. 
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/critique-of-pure-reason.htm
So Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is a commentary on these ideas.
Philosophy is also related to various Wisdom literature, such as Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" (300 BCE), so I would recommend this in tandem.

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>>26223
Plato is extravagantly dialectical, by displaying the very process of thinking from an original premise itself, and to the same end, he is often open-ended in conclusion, such as the masterful deconstruction in Parmenides. Indeed, such as Socrates says to Phaedrus, he is a mid-wife of the mind. One of the earliest dialogues I read was Euthyphro, which completely changed my stance toward theological disputes, since it showed how the commands of God cannot be moral by themself, and so God is subordinate to a higher principle of virtue. This is tackled only in part by Aquinas later on regarding the Will of God - if God is always good, then can he be evil? Aquinas resolves it into the Aristotelian position of the potential to do evil without its actuality. Freedom of the Will is the capacity to act, distinguished from activity. It is a sound rebuttal, but it makes us ponder in the typical Epicurean way; "whence cometh evil?" I think the only real response is what Plato devises in Sophist, that matter (as becoming) is not a being, but is the negation of being, which is always good. So, evil does not exist; there are only failures of perfection. Kant adds to this in part by denying the validity of absolute evil, for if one acts toward his own (selfish) end, he still acts for the good of one. There is a small honour amongst thieves. This only makes sense by an Annihilationist eschatology also, since if Hell is separation from God, and God is absolute being, then the wicked soul must be destroyed, by itself. Thus, there can be no coercion in virtue or vice, but all is freely given.



 

If anyone has the pdf of this book in english or translated version, please send it, even the author was unable to keep a version of this

My friend wants to write a reserach paper on it



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Any leftist critique of the racialist religion of Judaism? Apart from Israel Shahak who was an anti-apartheid left-liberal activist that also campaigned against colonialism, I can’t think of any other polemicist that criticised Judaism, as the rest are either secular chuds or fundamentalist theists.

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>>26023
im by no means and expert on judaism or whatever so i probobly should just stay quiet on this BUUUT if i am gonna say something based on the things that i already do know it feels a bit TOO reductive to frame the entirety (not saying thats what you're doing) as a "racialist religion" but like i said im not very familiar on that stuff so i could be wrong or whatever

>>26023
the concept of a "chosen people" is reactionary
cutting baby penises is reactionary

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<In this provocative book, Benjamin Ginsberg examines the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack throughout the history of the Diaspora, with a concentrated focus on the “special case” of America. For Ginsberg, the essential issue is not anti-Jewish feeling, but the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena. The Fatal Embrace identifies the political dynamics that, historically, have set the stage for the persecution of Jews.

>>26026
it’s about the purest example for that concept there is… the religion is inherently tied to a perceived race…



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Wtf do I actually read to understand him? I've bought Philosophy of Right, and Phenomenology of the Spirit, which I tried reading 3 times and fell asleep every single one. Tried reading Kant's Crit. of Pure Reason to understand his influences, but no.
What am I actually supposed to read to make Hegel legible?

Apparently his lectures are more accessible, so start with them.
Try read different translations and commentaries, there are a few different interpretations, the traditional metaphysical view, the revised metaphysical view (Beiser, Holgate, Stern) and the anti-metaphysical view (Pinkard, Pippin) and the esoteric view (Glenn Magee, Cyril O'Reagan

The Science og Logic (1812) us the most comprehensive starting point.

>>26208
>>26212
Thank you anons. Wasn't aware there were so many different ways to view Hegel (though I shouldn't be surprised really). I'll report on my findings in… maybe a month. Or more.

I tried to read Hegel once, but I'm to low I.Q to fully get.

>>26206

it's hard to get hegel if you don't get Kant, not the phenomena noumena Kant, the real shit, the critiques, and some Fichte too. This is the bare minimum I think, but after that, you can always check why Kant was so revolutionary, by checking Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Wolff, etc. And after that, you could go back to Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus, or wherever you want.



 

Should I drop aspirations of being a conservationist? I find myself lucky enough to be able to go back for a second degree and have wanted to get a degree in biology since before I finished my first, entirely unrelated to that field (though much more marketable), degree. Everyone seems to be in love with environmental rape and collapse now and I can't muster much hope in regards to the importance of futilely trying to keep the various floundering ecologies of the world afloat anymore.

I'd resigned myself to the truth of environmental collapse but reading daily about how America has decided to kill another endangered species, actively, entirely without any remorse, has become more than I can handle.

I don't want to be doing shit in an office 'till I die, but I don't know if going back to follow what I'm actually interested and passionate about will yield much fruit, if any at all.
4 posts and 1 image reply omitted.

>>26061
Growing up I would see villains in fiction whose ideologies are so retarded that it de-immersed me from what I was reading, but as an adult I've come to realize that reactionaries are simply like that and have podcasts and substacks where they say so plainly.

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>>26172
I used to hate how cartoonishly evil villains were in some work of fiction, and thought moral ambiguity and all sides doing bad things was closer to the truth. Now I am an adult ruled and I realized real life is full of cartoonishly evil villains.

>>26061
Why did he not use horrors per square meter? It is a much more common measurement.

>>26063
Utilitarianism would be conservationism funnily enough

We need 100 Kaczynskis in every Chinese fast fashion factory



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Why do you justify the Russian Revolution? Didn't the Eserys win the 1928(?) election? If so, why did the Bolsheviks start the revolution anyways?

>words words words words make the body longer

>Why do you justify the […] Revolution?

iirc the handwave justification is that the SRs were split between their left and right, with the left underrepresented because of outdated candidate lists, which justified ignoring the constituent assembly. the left-SRs backed the bolsheviks in shutting down the constituent assembly. they had both the numbers and the power to pull it off in practice, even if the parliamentary arithmetic didn't work out in their favor.



 

ITT post information about the history and anthropology of the New World. A lot of new anthropological work has been done in this field in recent decades that has not yet entered public consciousness.
182 posts and 235 image replies omitted.

Basketmaker Culture and Puebloan Origins

Settlement containing a stela with Maya influences found at the site of a new housing development in Coatepec, Veracruz


New Classic Maya site with Rio Bec style temple and multiple monuments containing inscriptions found in the central Maya lowlands in Campeche. The site is notable for having no signs of looting.

Palenque: Discoveries You Haven't Seen Before
from Archaeologist Ed Barnhart (his personal youtube channel), who led the Palenque Mapping Project (1998-2000). He's an excellent communicator about Archeology and his professional focus is central and south America. This video is covering some lesser known details about the site.

>>20613
i know this is years ago but in that case, you could make a career out of that my man… ever thought of that?



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<Nearly all self-proclaimed Marxists are frauds who haven’t even read Marx, let alone understand him. They use the label Marxism, despite knowing nothing about it, as a pseudo-intellectual obfuscation for their liberal ideology.

To begin, what is Marxism?
>Marxism is not a theory of equality. It is not a diagnosis of injustice, nor is it a specific prescription of how to remedy society’s ills. Marxism is a method for acquiring knowledge about the laws governing the historical development of societies. Marxism thus regards itself as a type of science. Most people think of science as something purely descriptive.
<But the reason Marx’s contemporaries called him Prometheus is because he bequeathed a science that did not just describe reality, but participated in its development. This makes Marxism totally contrary to modern science.
>Modern science places knowledge above its object. To know, means to strip something naked to consciousness and turn it into a utility for the knowing subject. He who knows an object, can control, master, and alter an object. But the ‘object’ known by Marxism is none other than human society itself. And the paradox lies in the obvious fact that society is not just an object, but also a subject. Marxists (subjects) are themselves part of the very object they make knowable.
<To complicate matters further, Marx does not claim knowledge of society alone can transform society. Instead, he proves that society is already coming to know and transform itself materially in the form of the then growing proletarian class. Most people think Marx is ‘Promethean’ because he wanted his ideas popularized. But the REAL reason was because he had the courage of declaring the return of knowledge back to being itself, and human beings in particular. He created a science that ceased to be above its object.
>For Marx, the knowledge of historical laws arrived at by consciousness, was being reflected in history itself. Knowledge of humanity does not dominate humanity, but reveals that it was there, and part of it all along. “Communism is the riddle of history solved.”

Why the need for class consciousness?
<This is where people misunderPost too long. Click here to view the full text.
28 posts and 19 image replies omitted.

“Western Marxism,” yesterday and today

https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/

>In recent years, the writings of the late Italian Marxist-Leninist Domenico Losurdo have exerted increasing influence over sections of the Anglophone left. So far ten of his books and more than a dozen articles he wrote have been translated into English, along with a number of interviews. During his lifetime he was praised as an “almost unbelievably well-read” historian of ideas,[1] celebrated as “one of the great contemporary authorities on Hegel.”[2] Posthumously, Losurdo was eulogized as a boundlessly erudite militant and scholar.[3] Today he is held up by the organizers of the Critical Theory Workshop and the owners of the Red Sails website as one of their leading lights. A couple of his texts have been the subject of intense controversy, however. When Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend first appeared in Italian in 2008, it generated a storm of outrage. Losurdo’s final written work, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it can be Reborn, has similarly stirred scandal among commentators. Even before the English edition appeared in September 2024 under the auspices of Monthly Review Press, this polemic garnered a highly critical review in the pages of a major leftwing journal.[4]


>Many of Losurdo’s most outspoken promoters in the English-speaking world have suggested that there is a conspiracy to suppress the translation of his more controversial works. Whether or not this is the case is difficult to ascertain. They are right to point out, in any case, that it is mistaken to treat his books on Stalin or on Western Marxism as if they were somehow aberrant within his broader corpus. No doubt writers produce works of uneven quality; some texts will always be more worthwhile than others. But the comparative approach he adopted with respect to these topics is identical to the one he employed in his inquiries into liberalism, class struggle, nonviolence, Bonapartism contra democracy, and revisionist history, as well as his studies of philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Losurdo even recycled a number of arguments he made in these works for his reconsideration of Stalin and diatribe against Marxists in the West. It is therefore futile to di
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26198
>The following essay will take Losurdo’s book on Western Marxism as its point of departure, but will refer to many of his other works along the way. For ease of readability, it will be divided into three parts. Part one will interrogate how “Western Marxism” was historically articulated, especially how it was taken up by journals influential on the New Left. It will be seen that the notion was evaluated differently depending on how these journals oriented themselves toward “actually-existing socialism,” toward the question of defeat, and toward the prospect of revolutionary politics in the present. Here the methodology utilized by Losurdo will also be examined. Next, a second part will make reference to the various Marxists he disparaged, to see whether his characterization of them withstands scrutiny. Some of his careless, and at times even unscrupulous, scholarship will be demonstrated in this section. Finally, a third part will challenge Losurdo’s antirevisionist credentials.[5] Revisionism is a topic he wrote about at length, mostly when it came to the history of war and revolution, but Losurdo himself revised the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in two major respects: first by denying the need for coordinated international proletarian revolution, and then by denying that the state would ultimately dissolve in a classless society.

No, I'm not a Marxist, I think Marxism has already run it course

>>26201
Whwt do you think has replaced it?

Bunch of irrelevant wannabe-intellectual bullshit. None of this is doing the working class any good



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