/edu/ - Education

>>24348
>Why was Marx able to come up with his theory of history?
hegel.

>>24348
>why was marx able to come up with his theory of history?
Because he was smart and worked hard

>>24345
what an actual retard.

>>24351
lmfao

imagine believing theres a "marxist method of looking at things". marx did regular science, not some philosophical gibberish

Perhaps I dont understand materialism, scientific value, communism, marxism, or what you mean
but
The way I see it, materialism is all that matters because its all that can be proved to exist
>inb4 solipsism brain in a jar shit, I dont care if my house isnt actually real, I have performed numerous repeat experiments by living in it and all evidence points toward corporeality
I guess this is one of those things that can be really easy to bring into a navel gazing circlejerk about what is reality, what is real, etc, like in the same vein as Last Thursdayism where technically you could have been created a few days ago and it just so happens that all your memories are generally pretty accurate and also congruous with reality moving forwards

Bumping this one

>>20840
Why?

Have we discovered a "scientific value" of commodity? Ten yards of linen gets you ten scientifics. Balderdash !

>>1230
>Hello comrades. I have doubts about materialism
Read this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpegMcxhRc&list=PLrodPcAMP2OsMmlF6pGphTSKU1z03GH5N

>>24578
>machine to tell you what to think, that is on you or whatever pedagogy you received that insisted on turning off your own sense and reason. Computers don't "make" you do that simply by existing or carrying out their instructions.

It can if it affects the information that our sense and reason depends on. For what we call sense and reason are heavily dependent on information that we previously know of. Communism was developed on the understanding of past economic events and history. Adam smith capitalism was based on his analysis on britain history and other things.
The ruling class can simply just modify the computers ai and etc to promote answers that can modify such information. Make it so that this information is biased or in favor of the ruling class ideology. And when the internet, computer or ai is made in such a way to be pro ruling ideology information. Then how can a lot of people be able to use sense, logic and reason to see the truth, if the information that the logic and reasoning uses is mainly pro ruling ideology?
And yes people in the past didnt need to know much. But the information that they did know affect their sense and reasoning. It still affected their plans, their decision making and etc. And we can know this since the ruling ideologies of the past, christianity, confucianism and etc did affect the populations thinking. It shaped how they viewed the world.

>>24578
>Human beings, for themselves, have to maintain some fidelity to the actual world we live in,
Also theres a severe issue with this. Yes humans have to maintain some connection to the actual world. However that connection is quite limited.
Humans, just like in the past, are mostly going to be connected to their local communties. Human also are mainly limited in knowing about things happening in their life span. Thus human viewpoints will be very limited
As such this leaves numerous blank spots which would require exterior sources of information. And this is where the propaganda thing I mentioned here comes in. >>24583
This situation would give a lot of power to the ruling class to use ai computers and etc to shape human viewpoints. For in these blank spots, the ruling class would mainly have monopoly of information. Information which would shape the sense and reason of human beings.

>>24583
Every computer, every algorithmic program, is predictable and can be understood in principle by the user. We expect programs to do particular things, and can ask what the machine is doing even if we don't have a disassembled source code and full knowledge. We never once believe the computer is actually magic, and that is what the ruinous pedagogy insists we HAVE to do. The computer is a machine, and not a particularly complicated machine. So too is the network of these computers fairly simple to understand, even if the number of agents and the command and control of superior users is not immediately known.

I write more about this in The Retarded Ideology. I'm re-reading the first book and I find it remarkable just how well I set up these arguments for the future books, looking specifically at the mechanism-vitalism "debate".

If you're talking about censorship and total control of information, that is handled ultimately by a very human source that insists on forced ignorance. There are many people who are partisans of this forced ignorance, who have resorted to terror and torture to insist information works in the way you believe. All of those people are not made of magic nor possess any special power. They are made of flesh and blood, possessing the same basic knowledge process as any human, and for any of their plans to be realized they can only operate with machinery much as we do. They do not receive any "super-science" or "super-technology" that allows them alone this power, or grants to their machines special power.

The method of information control deployed today is not inscrutable or "unknowable". It is actually painfully predictable. Its "secret" is that it can deploy in any arena an unbearable degree of shrieking and humiliation, so that the public of any and all countries will be cowed into submission. This is the standard Germanic pattern of behavior, because they insist people need to "respect" their disgusting race and their stupid warmongering habit.

>>24584
Humans maintain enough connection to the actual world when their life and future depend on it. If the ruling elite did not invade our homes, break up our families, brag about exterminating and humiliating us openly every day, I doubt the people would care at all if the world is ruled by an oligarchy of rich people or a despot, or hold any particular notion of what society should be in the abstract. The people never valued freedom or a republic, and given the history of those claims, why would they ever value a thing that has only demanded they sacrifice something new every so often? The only thing that kept the peace in the older society is that governments largely did leave the common people to live their life, and delegating slavery and exploitation to private owners.

The great event that brings about "real modernity" is the American Civil War and the end of chattel slavery. The slave power and its allies sought a new way to hold slaves, and the outcome of the war effectively established state slavery and the power of institutions to do what the slave trade did before. The rewritten narrative of history, the one being imposed on reality now, is that immediately after 1865, the corporate state immediately imposed state slavery and this was automatically and "naturally" accepted, and no one could actually have opposed slavery in principle or held any other value regarding exploitation. The true history of the war and the wars that would come after is much larger, involving many competing factions that wanted the future to be things that were all irreconcilable with each other, and could not be agreed upon by any polity. Some wanted world peace, some wanted the great revelation and for Jesus to come down so the Kingdom of Heaven starts, a lot just wanted to go home for food, and quite a few wanted to end the entire social experiment of modernity as it had been conducted up to then. Then of course there were those who saw the future had a long way to go, and the world could very easily be something far more compatible with life and something we would want than what we lived in.

The short of it is that the entire history of the world after 1865 is ultimately traced to the abolition of chattel slavery in America, and the aims of those who want the slave power to be fully restored and want to justify and glorify the slave system. This has less tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

another attempt at trying to reconcile ideology and ruthless critique? Wow how original leftists

we have a language learning thread >>32096
forget these apps, they're supplementary material at best
>do writing using pen and pencil
>talk out loud using the vocabulary you have learned
>describe what you're currently doing in another language, this will show what you do and don't know
>study the lyrics of musics you listen a lot
>stick to only a few language books
>watch foreign language yt videos

>>24638
Dead pointer

You can either use the index or the catalog:
https://leftypol.org/edu/index.html
https://leftypol.org/edu/catalog.html

>>14135
This post is old but its the most important post in the entire website. Why, you may wonder: because its a psyop.

Accuse me of being a schizo, but I think antagonizing simple explanations for morons or the intellectually lazy is an FBI psyop designed to prevent us the commies from flipping the rightoid's target demographic: the intellectually lazy and the morons.

When people say shit like "no need to simplify! no need to dumb down! what are you a classist?" they're just weaponizing left wing rhetoric to prevent you from doing that which will actually work.

So I tell all of you: Dumb it all down, simplify then make it simpler. Make it spread.

>>22824
good post, anon

>>22824
I dont think its true at all that factory workers were studying capital on the factory floor

>>14135
truth nuke of unimaginable magnitude and potence

sorry leftoids, the workers WILL read the ruthless critique and they WILL agree.

>>14135
Literacy doesn't mean voracious reading.

>>19045
This is the only real good post on here.
Most talks about a glorious leftist revolution in the twenty first century is a farce.
At best it's lib left bs.
At worst it's just right wing rehash.

>>14136
>Illiteracy is on the rise in the US and child labor has returned. This isn't because workers are getting dumber, but because the bourgeoisie are getting more ruthless.

I have yet to see where child labor is being a prominent return with exceptions of some outlier factory using orphans.

Also, I find it funny how people are complaining about illiteracy in a time where everyone makes and reads text messages and/or essay posts.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>20045
I'd rather not wade through it again, to be honest my comprehension of it is lacking compared to volume one, but I probably should.

I think this topic is worthy of sending a thread off the bottom of the catalogue.

Want to make a new thread about it here in /edu/?

i already read entire Vol1 more than year ago. I have no started Vol2 still. Probably lot of anons in same situation. Lets start with Vol2 now

What is relative surplus value? Idk, it sounds like something to do with prices but I can't really wrap my head around how it is different from normal surplus value.

Reposting an effortpost from a while back about Super-Profit

Let’s say that the average television takes 1 hour to make. 1 hour is the SNLT for televisions. But the owner of the ACME TV factory invests in some fancy new machines that make his workers twice as productive. They can now make a television in 30 minutes. They are producing way below the SNLT. This allows ACME to produce twice as many televisions in the same amount of time.

Now if ACME sold their new TV at half the old price they wouldn’t make any more money than before and there would have been no point in investing in all that new stuff. Rather than sell them at their individual value (30 minutes) they continue to sell them at the SNLT (1 hour), or perhaps just under the SNLT in order to out-sell their rivals. Because the price of TVs hasn’t changed significantly there is still the same demand from consumers for TVs, but now there is a giant surplus of TVs on the market because ACME has been making twice as many TVs. ACME’s rivals won’t be able to sell all of their TVs. Part of their product will go unsold. Meanwhile ACME will sell most of their TVs at the SNLT, making not just their normal profit, but an additional “super-profit” because they sold their TVs above their individual values by selling at or near the SNLT.

Profit vs. super-profit

Profit comes from exploiting workers. The only way to turn money into more money is to invest it in workers, or to be precise, in labor power, the only commodity which can produce more value than it costs. (This is all covered in the video “Law of Value 5: Contradictions”.) When ACME sells TVs at under the SNLT they don’t just reap their normal profits from exploiting workers. They also get super-profits: profit appropriated in exchange because their TVs are made at under the SNLT.

It is this race for super-profits that drives much of the technological dynamism of a capitalist society as capitalists compete to constantly lower SNLT. By doing so capitalists don’t just exploit value from workers. They also appropriate value in exchange.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/law-of-value-6-socially-necessary-labor-time/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb6dPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

The preface is Hegel’s phenomenology of philosophy; it treats the various forms of philosophizing and delineates their defects. In a sense the preface is the completion of the section on absolute knowing. The book is itself a circle, the form Hegel attributes to the system as a whole. A theme that runs through the center of the preface is Hegel’s criticism of reflection and the understanding (Verstand) as capable of producing true philosophy and his characterization of speculation and reason (Vernunft) as the replacement for this inadequate form of philosophizing.

We find two sets of images in the preface. On the first page Hegel speaks of anatomy as being not a true science but only an “aggregate of information” (par. 1). Because it is a knowledge of only the parts of the body regarded as inanimate, we lack, in anatomy, a knowledge of the living body itself, of its principle of life. On the second page Hegel introduces the contrasting image of the bud of a plant producing a blossom that becomes a fruit. He characterizes this as an image of “organic unity” (par. 2) and as representing stages of necessity in the life of the whole.

Hegel says that the understanding schematizes experience, “a table of contents is all that it offers” (par. 53). The understanding, which proceeds through reflection on the object, produces, in thought, a world that is dead. All objects are fully categorized and rendered lifeless, labeled, like parts of a skeleton, or pigeon-holed, like boxes in a grocer’s stall. Reason, which proceeds speculatively, seeks out the principle of motion or life that is within the object, that makes the object, so to speak, what it is. Reflective understanding grasps the body as an anatomically ordered substance. Speculative reason goes within the body to its spirit to grasp its principle as a living subject.

The answer to this lies principally with Kant, with transcendental philosophy and critique. In his effort to answer David Hume and to secure, for the understanding, its own categories of experience, not derived from the senses, Kant forces himself to abandon reason. This causes Kant to formulate a very limited notion of experience, in which reason plays no role in the constitution of the object. Once one enters the world of critique there is no way out, no way to restore reason to its rightful place. Reason is sacrificed to reflection and to the trap of the transcendental.

How does Hegel move from the establPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>21909
The question of language goes right to the core of Hegel’s notion of systematic science, of truth that actually takes place in the embrace between thought and being. If a language of science is one meant to convey objective truth, then Hegel’s singular take on science must imply a special grasp of both its language and objectivity. What sort of discourse can claim to express objective truth within an idea of science that sees itself as the systematic articulation of existing knowledge? To answer this question we must guard against importing epistemological and linguistic notions foreign to the Hegelian idea of objective truth, neither must we import notions of objectivity and discourse alien to his idea of science.

Failure to comprehensively understand the nature of Hegelian scientific language has allowed to go unchallenged a wide-spread misunderstanding regarding the nature of Hegelian objectivity. This misunderstanding can be bluntly summarized as follows: the world itself operates dialectically, obeying an inherently dialectical logic. Many who know something of Hegel will probably find nothing objectionable in this statement. In fact, it appears readily verifiable with regard to that part of worldly objectivity Hegel deals with on the Spirit side of his philosophy, for example the rise of consciousness and inter-subjective relations. Indeed, spirit, as human activity, can easily be said to reflect thought or "mind", which, as the Logics tell us, is inherently dialectical. And it is this objectivity or "second nature"i that most commentators are interested in. When the natural world itself is brought into consideration, however, there is some embarrassment. It is indeed hard to verify, for example, that cosmological phenomena and chemical reactions operate along strictly dialectical lines. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature therefore tends to be taken less seriously, or ignored.

However, even when the inherently dialectical nature of Hegelian objectivity is ascribed solely to the Spririt side of his philosophy, crucial (Kierkegaardian, Marxian) questions arise concerning the coherency of the entire philosophical endeavor. If objectivity itself operates dialectically, what is the status of the philosopher subject (i.e. Hegel)? Or, more precisely, what is the status of Hegel's scientific discourse? From where does it derive its own objectivity Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>21904
>(Idealisation theory of science).
Idealism

scientific socialism is scientific insofar as it describes the functioning of the world in an objective and ideology-free way without rejecting its conclusions or the discoveries it makes along the way.

this is opposed to modern subjects such as sociology or economics, etc. which also analyse the world and its functioning but in a constructive lens. That is, their criticism is not ruthless, but constructive, for they hope to improve the system they live under with it.

scientific socialists on the other hand know that if they wish to abolish the misery they are forced to abolish the present economic system, because it is precisely it that creates and requires this very misery.

Throughout this thread, people have made a binary distinction between science and non-science. Partially they seem critical of this binary themselves and blame anglo culture for this crude way of thinking. But even anglo culture has a hard science VS soft science distinction, with further graduations how solid evidence needs to be to be considered proof in this or that community. You are unfair to even the biggest anglo STEMlord reddit-gold millionaires if you present them as being this crude and cocksure about what science is and is not.

Of course economics can be more or less scientific. They have causal models of booms and busts and they collect statistical data strengthening or weakening belief in this or that causal model. And economists also do little experiments about how people behave. It's called *drumroll* behavioral economics. Why deny that.

What a stupid thread.

i mean let's be real. the reason the 1939 american nazis liked washington is because he owned slaves, and the reason the 1938 American communists liked Lincoln is because he is perceived as having freed the slaves

>>17474
Was America truly founded on Hitlerism?

>>17469
How can you argue Washington was a symbol of wasp identity in the 30s when the bund was flying banners of him lol “let’s say, you’re retarded”

Nearly every narrative of American history has been so bastardized that I don't even get into the topic unless someone is over the usual posturing and bullshit that happens in these discussions.

Probably the helpful thing to remember is that the President was de-emphasized before the Civil War, and Lincoln takes a stronger role out of necessity but also bent over backwards to please his fellow Republicans and keep his generals happy even when they were drunk as fuck and wanted to undermine Lincoln for getting them involved in this mess. Washington presented himself as the great neutral force that everyone could agree on, while the government was mostly in the hands of the founding generation and they figured out what they were going to do with it (hint: they really don't agree on what they're going to do with it). Also he was a big Freemason and there were calls to make him a king, but Washington rebuffed this for all of the reasons kings are a terrible idea. In many cases, the President was a titular head who was out and about doing things, but the general public did have that strong an identification with most presidents. Washington was an exception because he was Washington but, as mentioned, he was the neutral center everyone could agree on. The real center of the country was Congress and its prominent Senators and Representatives, and the alliances and clubs the most prominent Congressmen had aligned with them; and really this meant decisions were made in the smoke-filled back room and this was suitable for everyone. No one was convinced laws were made entirely by ponderous procedures as a formality, as if that were the entirely of what the law and the state could be. If you tried to tell people that was how government worked, everyone, of every social class, would laugh at you and ask if you are on the dope. The procedures did have a disciplinary effect on the other Congressmen, prevented any one of them from jumping up and down like a retard too much and making Hitlerian proclamations. The President was a man tasked with very important executive business, and usually represented what the victorious party and government were going to push for, but to become President you had to please Congress and play ball, hence why the surest path to the Presidency was for all of American history through Congress. (Trump is not a President, he's a sniveling retard put up for show because this republic is deader than dead.) When Lincoln, who was the most oPost too long. Click here to view the full text.