/edu/ - Education

"EXPLAIN JUSTICE TO ME OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN JUSTICE TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOu!"
- Plato, "Republic", 375 BC

Hello everyone, we have received the results of our project proposal topic, and I'm delighted to announce that we are teaming up with 'leftypedia' to deliver our planned 'argument/talking point resource' idea. In case you don't know, leftypedia is the current version of the old abandoned 'marxistpedia' which was a project started by leftypol users back in the day, so I think this is sort of like a homecoming in a way.

https://leftypedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Anyway, if you have a look at the leftypedia site you might be able to tell that they have a much more formal and 'encyclopedic' tone than what we're planning, just like wikipedia, but the admin is going to create a separate 'category' for our new content that will be called something like 'rhetoric: topic' rather than just 'topic', this will also feature on the frontpage much like the encyclopedic content. As a tenplate, I'd like you to feast your eyes on these pages which someone on leftypedia already made (albeit only on their personal userspace for now).

https://leftypedia.org/wiki/User:Anarcho-Bolshevik/compendium

I'd like to ask if anyone can come up with a slightly more catchy name for our new section than 'rhetoric', cause that sounds a bit cumbersome to me even though I came up with it, so yeah, open to suggestions.

So, since that isn't implemented yet, I'd like you all to try familiarise yourselves with the site for now, maybe take a look at the articles that are already there and improve some of them if you feel able. Unfortunately the site currently has only edit by approval so you will have to wait for any changes you make to be approved, this is because of a persistent spambot problem and I hope that we will be able to work out something to change this to normal editing as on wikipedia and the like, please just bear with it for now.

If you have an answer to a 'common question', or you have an effortpost you'd like to archive and save, then please post it in this topic for now so that we can work on it together until we can figure out how to categorise our new section of the site.

Thanks for your attention!
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Does anybody have some book that study the Belt and Road Initiative from a Marxist-Leninist (not MLM) perspective? Preferably from the Chinese perspective.
I need it to debunk reactionnaries shitting on China daily and claiming the B&R is unsustainable.

Why isn't communism the same as liberalism? Why didn't Marx become a liberal while writing Capital? Before the critical turn of the enlightenment the purpose of most philosophy was grant intellectual legitimacy to dogmas, or pre-existing state of affairs or beliefs that are taken for granted. Classical political economists and those that came before them (Hobbes, the Physiocrats, others) were similarly uncritical; the categories of political economy were explained, but not criticized. Vulgar economists (most economists today) don't even bother with attempting to understand the categories or the social relations they're made up of, and spend their time building models of different elements of capitalist production for the purpose of making it more efficient. It's no coincidence that "economize" means "to make more efficient", that is the sole aim of vulgar economics.

Where does Marx depart? Marx takes the materialist analysis of the political economists, their categories and terms, and constructs from these building blocks an immanent critique of capitalist production. Capital isn't liberal because Marx takes the materialist analysis seriously, he criticizes without reservation the most basic elements of exchange and the religious affectation of participants in the exchange with its elements (read Marx on commodity fetishism). We can't seriously call Capital, which is the most thorough rupture with political economy ever written, an economics textbook.
>Check reply for more, you know who you are

Writer worth reading or reactionary garbage?

Lenin apparently wasn't a fan; from "The Other Lenin" by Alexander Maysuryan:
> ["Demons" is] Evidently reactionary filth, like Krestovsky's "Flock of Panurge", I have absolutely no desire to waste time on it. I have no need for such literature; what could it possibly give me? […] I have no free time for this garbage."
Demons isn't the only book he doesn't like:
>I am familiar with the content of both these pungent works, and that is more than enough for me. I just about began reading the "Brothers Karamazov" and then dropped it: the scenes in the monastery made me sick."

However, Stalin apparently enjoyed Dostoevsky greatly. He had a heavily annotated copy of "The Brothers Karamasov" and at least once referred to Dostoevsky as a "great philosopher." Quote:
> [Dostoevsky is] a great writer and a great reactionary. We don't publish him because he is a bad influence on the youth. But he is a great author.

The Paris Commune successfully establishes socialism in France. What now?
ITT: Post and speculate about alternate history.

Dialectical thinking is not only a western concept. There is a native Chinese tradition of dialectics within Taoism, that while similar to has some interesting differences when compared to western dialectics. Is this something worth exploring? It was very influential to Mao's thinking. Not to sound to much like a libtard but it seems exploring non western philosophy might be an interesting way to gain insights that might be otherwise ignored.

I'm not sure if anyone is interested, but I've created a playlist of all of jacque Fresco's classic lectures from tapes 1-20. The audio is a little hard to hear, so you may have to wear headphones or earphones, but the audio is relatively fine.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiADn3rLZsazUnhTlBCgiD9MaxPCANwD-

Post any weird and obscure history facts that you know of

I saw this picture (pic related) on another thread, and I am actually pretty curious about the topic.

Any good suggestions (books, videos, texts) for getting into African philosophy, culture and art?