/edu/ - Education

This thread is about sharing and recommending literature pertaining to the Soviet Union.

This could be about political economy, architecture, art, women‘s issues, the revolution, personalities, et cetera.

I remember when I first came here, many people questioned my identity, thinking that I was not a real Chinese. At first, I was a bit annoyed, but later I felt that being cautious is normal. In today's chaotic and disordered internet, there are many people who disguise their identities.

>Posing as a 49-year-old teacher and “Z poet” named Gennady Rakitin and using an AI-generated profile picture, a group of activists began posting Russian translations of poems by Nazi writers on the VK social network as an experiment in summer 2023, Zakharov said.

>Replacing the original poems’ references to Germany and Nazi soldiers with mention of Russia and Wagner Group fighters, those behind the Rakitin character aimed to highlight the absurdity of Russian government notions of patriotism in what Zakharov called a “work of conceptual anti-war art”.

>By the time of Zakharov’s post revealing the true nature of the poems, over 2,200 people had become “friends” with Rakitin on VK, including former Roscosmos space agency head Dmitry Rogozin, senator Andrey Klishas and presidential culture advisor Yelena Yampolskaya.

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/06/29/over-100-russian-officials-fall-for-nazi-poetry-prank-pulled-by-anti-war-activists-en-news

I have used VK, and through my account left on VK, I quickly found his account:
https://vk.com/rakitin75

Actually, on VK, as long as you're willing to send friend requests, getting thousands of friends isn't hard. I think they must have specifically sent friend requests to Russian officials.

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What should i read before tackling Gramsci? Gramsci seems to me a monumental figure whom i must read if I were to understand the world a little better. For these reasons I don't want to rush it. What are the works I need to read before him, and what book of his should i start with?

Post charts.

Im at crossroads between joining - or applying for- a catholic seminary, OR, becoming a (non-militant, but firmly (non?) believing Atheist) . It may sound extreme or stupid but consider this: IF God exists, he exists absolutely and all his attributes are true (remember im working within a catholic framework), this means hell is absolutely true, as is heaven; as I genuinely dislike sex, I won't get married ever–why not go full the mile and be a priest? or at least Brother, Canon,etc? seems rational.
OTOH if Atheism is true ,and I eventually find out in the future, I would-have wasted decades of my life, so better to take on the strongest atheist arguments now, see if I can tank them -or not- and go from there.
tl;dr: Give the best books about Atheism, from scientific POV such as Darwinism, Cosmology, geological time; or philosophy and social sciences (history of Ideas, archeology, sociology and studies on mental health, or, even brain scan\ neurology\ biological clinical science about belief)

My analysis of the imperial core.

- Capitalist
- Comprador (tokens, social justice inactivists, plastic shamans, …)
- Labor Aristocracy (WASPs)
- Declassed (survivors of cultural genocide and white women, incarcerated, disabled, queer, certain immigrants, etc…)
- Working Class (the inherited working class, Indigenous, Black, etc…)

In my opinion, much of Communism consists of the labor aristocracy arguing with the declassed and comprador classes.

Is there any theory which discusses the declassed groups in more detail?

In my opinion, the declassed are an extremely confusing mix of reactionary and revolutionary sentiment. They are born into indoctrination with capitalist sentiment but do not benefit from this. Essentially, they are just really confused. It's not about oppression Olympics, just whether you were likely to hear that the Black Panthers were based growing up.

The Black Panthers discussed the white declassed a little but failed to go into detail. What is important is that the leading fringe of the white declassed will always be the disabled, transsexuals, queers, women and so on.
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So, before the site went down there was a thread about serious, rigorous, economic books about socialism, and economics in general, so, not "pop economics", anyway, any good recommendation of serious economics books?

Title. Answers to this question are also cool- have read Fanon in preparation for multiple essays on the topic and want to back it up with historical context. Obviously preferably dialectically materialist histories recently published. Africa preferred.

General thread for all things related to the field of Ecology, a subfield of Biology that focuses on studying ecosystems. Not sure what else to stay to start the new thread other than may you have biodiverse and healthy ecosystem wherever you may stay at and here is this cool paper I read and a question:

>Cool Paper: Comparison of the Assemblages of Sap-Feeding Insects (Homoptera-Hemiptera) Inhabiting Two Structurally Different Salt Marsh Grasses in the Genus Spartina

Abstract: The vegetation of New Jersey tidal salt marshes is composed primarily of 2 grasses; Spartina patens , which occupies a narrow elevational zone of high marsh and Spartina alterniflora , an intertidal species. S. patens forms a dense, persistent, thatch, while S. alterniflora produces only a loose lattice of litter which rapidly decomposes.

A comparison between the guilds of sap-feeding insects (for the most part, Delphacidae, Cicadellidae, Issidae, and Miridae) inhabiting these grasses reveals S. patens housing a much more diverse assemblage of herbivores than S. alterniflora. S. alterniflora -inhabiting species are exclusively bi- or trivoltine, while on S. patens , sap-feeders possess a greater variety of life history types and show a specialized trend toward univoltinism.

Removal of only the dead thatch portion of S. patens results in reduced species diversity and evenness of sap-feeders on the living grass system. Trivoltine species, which normally inhabit the upper strata of S. patens , increase their populations on dethatched grass compared to the unaltered grass system.

Both empirical and experimental evidence suggests that the complex microstructure and thatch of S. patens provide a more heterogeneous and protective resource which supports a more diverse and specialized fauna of sap-feeders than S. alterniflora

>tldr: Salt marshes have low elevated sections that recieve more flooding dominated by S. alterniflora and high elevated sections dominated by S. patens. An important group of herbivores within the whole salt marsh are Sap feeding planthoppers and it turns out the areas of High marsh with dense stands of S. patens that form thatch having the greatest species richness of plant hoppers. Not only were there more species but many univoltine(only one generation at a specific time of year) specialists were restricted to this microhabitat. Another thing I enjoy about Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

My reading group at uni is reading Imperialism in the 21st Century by John Smith. Is my diagram that i quickly drew up a good supplement for it? Is constant capital attributed to GDP? I would assume when analyzing a commodity's exchange value it doesn't but when we look at the actual commodities, raw materials, etc that make up constant capital it would already have been factored into GDP. Therefor there would be no need to factor in constant capital again… Also I know how much shit flinging occurs on here about value created through labor in the west being "more productive," so more value is created than "unproductive third world labor" vs the inverse of that position; the length of the values in the diagram is arbitrary and constrained for space reasons, not because i think one way or another; but feel free to argue ig. I mean, has anyone read the polemics of Harvey and Smith? They are sassy as fuck and hilarious. Disappointing though to see Harvey to take such a vague and stance on modern imperialism, as well as the dissavowment of China by Smith because of alleged "Stalinism" (lol). I'll link the first video and four polemics they directed at eachother:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRvcGP1ALvI
https://mronline.org/2017/08/26/a-critique-of-david-harveys-analysis-of-imperialism/
https://roape.net/2018/01/10/david-harvey-denies-imperialism/
https://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/
https://roape.net/2018/03/19/imperialist-realities-vs-the-myths-of-david-harvey/

I also linked these for my reading group as additional data:

https://monthlyreview.org/2019/03/01/global-commodity-chains-and-the-new-imperialism/
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