/edu/ - Education

Dunayevskaya’s state capitalist critique of the USSR, she read state stats and analyzed the data with the categories in Marx’s Capital, it’s really fascinating! Touches on labour laws, revolt, crises, preponderance of machinery, commodity fetishism, world market, LoV and more. I love when actual quantitative data is used in these types of questions. The book was published in 1958 but supposedly she began developing this theory as early as 1942, maybe even as early as 1939/40.

https://umsu.unimelb.edu.au/news/article/7797/2017-05-11-inside-the-leftypol-community/
Some /leftypol/ history

Should be enough to get /leftypol/ a glowpedia article even

Archive of article
https://archive.is/G7JQr

Talking of the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the sacking of Babylon is archive.org down for everybody else or is it just me?

The Rate of Profit: Rising or Falling?

Recently discovered there is a debate within Marxist economics that Marx had it incorrect, rather than rate of profit falling, due to capitalist technological innovation, cost-cutting and wage stagnation the Rate of Profit will rise, theorized by marxist economist Nobu Okishio.

Your thoughts?

Nobody ever talks about this, but the United States was in Haiti for longer than it was in Vietnam. July 28, 1915 – August 1, 1934 (19 years and 4 days). During the US occupation of Haiti, two major rebellions against the occupation occurred, resulting in several thousand Haitians killed, and numerous human rights violations – including torture and summary executions – by Marines and the Gendarmerie of Haiti. A corvée system of forced labor was used by the United States for infrastructure projects, that resulted in hundreds to thousands of deaths. Under the occupation, most Haitians continued to live in poverty, while American personnel were well-compensated. Death estimates have a high range, and I think the uncertainty of the statistics betrays how little Haitian lives were valued by the (mostly white) US marines, who frequently wrote letters home describing the Haitians as subhuman.

>3,250–15,000 Haitian deaths
>Hundreds to 5,500 forced labor deaths
>National bank of Haiti and its gold seized by US authorities

<"Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot on sight. Machine guns have been turned on crowds of unarmed natives, and United States Marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded."
<NAACP executive secretary Herbert J. Seligman wrote in the July 10, 1920, The Nation

The United States introduced Jim Crow laws to Haiti with racist attitudes towards the Haitian people by the American occupation forces that were blatant and widespread. Many of the Marines chosen to occupy Haiti were from the Southern United States, specifically Alabama and Louisiana, often the grandchildren of confederate veterans, resulting in increased racial tensions. Racism has been recognized as a factor leading to increased violence by American troops against Haitians. One general described Haitians as "n***ers who pretend to speak French".

The torture of Haitian rebels or those suspected of rebelling against the United States was common among occupying Marines. Some methods of torture included forcing prisoners to drink large quantities of water in a short period of tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.
<England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.
What did Marx bro mean by this?

market socialism needs to be tested more in my view, but I think it can work if it's combined with a form of central planning alongside it

zapatistas are a good model for functioning socialism in the current era, but its mostly agricultural so it will not be a good comparison point compared to something like the ussr which was much larger scale and had industry
and we can see socialism was working in many socialist states historically, i just think that the zapatistas have a more ideal model of socialist adjacent ideology than what the soviets did because of the emphasis it has on democracy, and it seems to mostly ideologically align with socialism, also seeming to have an emphasis on worker's coops

What is leftypol's view on this?

I've noticed that all of the ruling classes use the same systems of statism, legality, politics, and economics (a mix of capitalism with social welfare systems). They use legal systems, laws, and courts. They all have governments that control, politics, with parties and political systems. It's all the exact same thing all around the entire world. We have been under this shit for 100s of years meaning a specific order has been maintained with increasing expansion:
<States
<Legal systems
<Economic systems
<Political systems

There are people behind this system of social control. No matter what "side" it is, they all use the same systems I just mentioned, whether China or Russia or the USA. Their public servants like Soros and Gates and Musk And Trump and Putin and Xi, these are all just different factions that are opposed on the surface level. Rich dynastic families with old histories, secret orders, and monarchies have come together over time to rule the world in this way of statism, legalism, politics, and economics. They aren't necessarily on the same side, but they work together to maintain that exact order of the 4 points I mentioned earlier. Why?

You can claim that everyone developed these systems, and every society developed this in the history of civilization! Well, NO. Not all tribes developed the exact same system of control. The ideology of legal systems and justice is a very specific thing. The Native Americans didn't have police, they didn't have their own economic system like the Euro invaders. They lived based on a gift economy, the same way today you go to the Amazon jungle tribes and they have no conception of any of that shit. In the same way, the Aboriginals in Australia don't, there are even videos of them explaining the fucking shit to them because they don't understand how modern society could have gone so wrong.

The important thing is I don't reject everything in this modern situation of ours. I suppose government systems and other current systems would have to be used for a time as we transition and figure things out. The US state out of all the states spends the most on war. All other states are spending resources and money on war too. If we divert all of the money being poured into war, we can solve all hunger, end all homelessness, build a peaceful Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

What does /edu/ do for knowledge management? Does it work? How important is it? Experiences?

I am starting a Tiddlywiki and plan on doing the zettelkasten method. The way I understand it, I just take notes and link them to each other with tags or something? Seems straightforward yet quite useful.egoismEgoism

"History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes."

ITT We talk about all the weird historical parallels between events, movements, regimes, etc.

I'll start off.

>Charlotte Corday, "first as tragedy …"
<Sympathized with the Girondins, a moderate faction of the French revolution
<was taken aback when by the September massacres of 1792
<held Jean-Paul Marat responsible
<thought him too extreme, and a traitor of the revolution
<told him he had a list of enemies
<showed up at his house
<stabbed him in his bath tub
<she went on trial
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

So I read this book first a few years ago but it came up again in conversation recently. I wanted to make a thread about it so we can have a proper discussion about its positives and negatives, because I think it has both. First of all, I believe it was maybe the first book (that I know of) to give a properly dialectical treatment to the historical development of reproductive labour relations, building largely off of Engels' work. De Beauvoir had her own stuff but a lot of the marxism in her work is under the surface and indirect, whereas Firestone makes constant reference to Engels.

I shall sum up the argument for you, since I know many of you dislike reading. In primitive society, reproductive labour relations for the longest time worked such that matriarchy was the dominant mode of relations for reproductive labour, with differing cultural units for reproductive relations (clan, family, etc). At some point there is a 'flip' under which patriarchal relations begin as the dominant mode, which can be tied to the dawn of 'proper' technological civilisation as we know it (takes place after Engels' notion of barbarism with the rise of aristocracy), occurring as the west begins to exert its power over nature and systematises these relations. Firestone's conclusion is that biologically speaking, woman cannot truly be free until liberated from her biology.

I think in many ways it's a beautiful analysis, but also very flawed in the same way of de Beauvoir- namely, Firestone, rather than critiquing the focus of capitalism on productivity and power over nature, instead believes that women should be changing to conform to be 'more like men'. Moreover, I think it must really be supplemented with more modern treatments of gender (like via Judith Butler) given there's I think significant evidence that gender takes on a life of its own (and in many ways always has) which rather than being recourse to mere reproductive labour, also has its foundations in various other intersections of political life (capitalism, etc). Freud I think gives some good insights as to why sex and sexual relations and gender relations by extension have more to do with the human drive for power rather than reproductive relations.

Nonetheless, wondering if anyone else has read the text. I think it's a great piece of radfem literature.