/edu/ - Education

Anti-socialist propagandists are incoherent: One minute they talk about people being forced to work to an inhuman degree, next minute they say everybody gets lazy in socialism. My impression from what I heard about the GDR and the USSR of the 80s is that the second anti-socialist statement is the more realistic one.

People were not afraid of being jobless or homeless. It was common for someone to go buy snacks during for himself and others during official work time. Though it has to be said that this is also common in capitalism but restricted to more privileged jobs, so I'm not sure I would even count this as a minus for socialism. People spend more of their awake time at work than with their families. Seen in that light I think less stress at work due to lower discipline might be well worth the lower material output.

I firmly believe that something like quadrupling productivity only comes from technical changes and not from increasing work discipline. The idea of the need for more work discipline is popular among managers because you don't need to be intelligent to have this idea and it really can bring small improvements almost everywhere. Technical changes can bring massive improvements but managers and owners usually don't have the knowledge and thinking skills for making those.

Of course more remuneration for working longer hours and odd hours is something to be kept. And it makes sense to have some element in the salary that is performance-based as long as that performance can be unambiguously measured. Like carrying sacks… I have to admit I don't think most jobs are unambiguous like that. Some bonus might be distributed by co-workers voting on who should get it. Now they might abuse this by just giving it to a person who is just fun to be around and not necessarily very productive from the consumers' point of view, but is this really a big problem? Remember how much time we spend with co-workers and how this affects our quality of life and theirs. Might as well call this strategy not abuse but a sensible choice people can make.

>>12571
Do I seriously have to give an example?
Let’s say you, steve, and I run a business together. As some kind of communist co-op, in which we are all owners of our means of production. Let’s say we work at a bakery, or a coffee shop, or literally anything. You and I notice that steve seems to be “slacking”. He comes in late, he’s slow, he doesn’t seem to all be there. “But he is our brother!” you say. So we confront him. He shrugs us off. He keeps coming in like this. We ask his friends and family if something is up. We take him to dinner. We follow him home. We drink together. We do various social obligations that extrapolate specific psychological information to determine what is wrong with steve. Does steve have a different circadian rhythm and his shift should start an hour later? Is steve on heroin? Is SteveS marriage crumbing? Does steve stay up all night following his artistic dreams? Did steve suffer a traumatic coffee burn? What the fuck is wrong with steve? We are invested in him as a friend, a comrade, and a co-owner. We take the time out of our day to shove ourselves into his life to figure out what’s going on and we participate in helping find a solution to why steve is like that. This expands to beyond just us two, it’s everyone in Steve’s life also helps. Imagine if your coworkers actually gave a shit about you.

>>12569
i would really love to see someone come in with policies from post-war USSR, or China under Mao, in the communes etc… that would help settle this

but i can point to the fact that Marx talks about creating an army of labor (in the communist manifesto), so maybe something like military discipline, but in context to reflect the situation of labor rather than war. On the other, self-management of individual firms by the workers makes sense as well. They could set the punishments. Or whatever bureaucracy deals with planning production will also deal with people messing up the plan. Or both?

It might make more sense that coworkers have means of dealing with e.g. dangerous work practices, while a local governing organ carries out discipline related to absenteeism, slow labor, etc.

Some disciplinary actions that make sense (to me): being relieved of duty, being given shitty tasks no one else wants, coworkers giving the cold shoulder, cutting consumption power for an individual, cutting consumption power for a whole factory to make them get their people in line… and maybe in the last case if a production plan can't be met because people aren't committing themselves, there has to be a (public, political) reckoning where either a new plan is set, or the people commit more energetically, or the people remain split and cultural revolution against loafers or saboteurs takes place

If worker slack off, the answer is to make the workplace better.
Any other answer is "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

>>12574
The laziness I think of is the capitalist laziness: the business owner who comes in once a week for an hour to nitpick overworked workers, the manager who doesn't advise and take an active role in the workplace, or the owner's child who has a position on the board but spends their days at the beach. I’m not sure that form of laziness can really be applied here. I don't mean coming into work late or missing a few days without telling anyone. What I mean by absenteeism is excessive missed days. Missing 30% of your workdays (excluding days off) is starting to get excessive.

My other concern, safety, doesn't seem to be addressed in this thread. There are other issues as well like harassment and bullying. What I mean by safety is, take for example, the way one fells a tree. If felled improperly, it can hurt a coworker. If the reason for doing it can be addressed socially, then great, but if they're doing it too much then it starts to beg the question of if it's intentional and what to do about that.

I agree that technology does more of the work in increasing productivity and that this can be used to the advantage of society. Less work for all, but these are all goals to attain, not really concrete ways of dealing with workplace misbehavior. It is often a solution to a number of problems though: “we would have no need for x rule if this process were handled by technology”.

>>12576
>Do I seriously
Unfortunately, I have to annoy you further. This basic instinct to care for our comrades is to be expected in an ideal scenario where problems just amount to some resolvable personal issue. But it's just that – the ideal and not the reality of the transition from the beginning of post-capitalism to the success of communism.

This ideal assumes we have gotten past the cultural transition stages where conditions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are no longer prevalent (the incidence in the US appears to be anywhere from 4%-8% of the population). Misbehavior takes several generations to eradicate and it requires active education of existing and future generations on the importance of collectivism. Even then, the studies show that East Germany had some incidence of NPD; we don't really know if that will evPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>11292
I've read a few short stories by O'Connor and Faulkner and just amazed at 1) how good they are and 2) how deeply nihilistic southern writers who came out of the Reconstruction were.

>>602
Library reading halls if i need to do serious study. Audiobooks on leisure time.

>>10312
Be more selective with what you read I guess. Beyond that, I once had a conversation with a friend wherein we basically said the only way to enjoy things these day i.e TV, movies, art, fiction etc etc. you kinda have to wear like ideological lenses - place yourself at a distant and just use it to numb your mind to a certain extent. Otherwise you're gonna go insane with how shitty (almost) everything is. Ideally, reading theory etc. immunizes you to a certain degree from the most glaringly disgusting aspects of the Spectacle.

its always shocking to me how boring the stuff ppl read is, most classics are trash imo.

7-8 years ago i got rly into fin-de-siecle french decadent stuff, 19th century european decadent & symbolist lit in general.

its full of sex drugs and death, its pretty pulpy and plot-driven most of the time too. not boring at all, very metal. The fin-de-siecle concept of 'spleen' is very applicable today. I'd recommend (bearing in mind that a lot of these authors are fundamentally reactionary but w/e)-

Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau
Abbe Jules by Octave Mirbeau
La-Bas by JK Huysmans
Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain

My favorite book is Harry Potter (I only read the first one)

The book that influenced me the most would have to be a tie between the Bible and Slaughterhouse 9 (although those germans totally had it commin, amiright?)

I like how they are heavy and very chewy without rotting your teeth.

I'm not going to be reading anymore now that chat GPT is online because how will I ever know if what I am reading was written by a person?

https://web.archive.org/web/20110605071434/http://www.iww.org/en/organize/strategy/salt.shtml

I found this old IWW article. Attached is audio of it being read aloud. Enjoy, comrade!

Some of the info is a little outdated (telephone numbers, note pads), but you can easily apply it to today!

>>11551
Doing cardio eating healthy and having a normal bmi
Bodybuilding is not healthy for the body

>>11554
if you want to build some muscle mass to be strong or for asthetic reasons thats no problem but do it in a healthy way

>>11551

You should be able to see your abs in good lighting.

man liberals love giving fascists attention and publicity

>>11526
Based

Guy in pic rel (the swoletariat/the_gay_boy_show) is perfect for this thread who is incredibly awesome and makes awesome shit like this vid https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iRUEMe2pe88

>>12507
>>12509
platonic philosophy was actually akin to eastern philosophy in the sense it was an attempt to make a coherent edifice of the various pagan mythologies like what 'theology' is understood as today.

>>12511
Plato is fantastic for exposing people to critical thinking. All his dialogues are relatively short compared to shit like Hegel or Deleuze or even Aristotle. The form of said dialogues are just that, dialogues, so those who are exposed to constant television and movies and other simulacra media can understand the flow and structure of the writing. The content itself is less important. Plato is baby's first philosophy and newbie gains. It's a rapid pace of examining the world in a way outside of the norm. Most of them never go anywhere because
>OH SOCRATES I MUST LEAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE VOTE TO KILL YOU RIGHT NOW AFTER YOU UTTERLY DESTROYED ME IN DEBATE
<SOH-KRATES U R SO WIZE!
Even with that taken into consideration, the content of his ideas do subsequently create the building blocks for future philosophers, and as the guy quoting Deleuze in the other thread said
>the power and authority of philosophy comes from it's history.

>>12509
Idealism is a philosophical view that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual in nature and that the material world is derived from non-material entities. Plato is considered the father of idealism because he was one of the first to develop and articulate an idealist worldview, arguing that the physical world is a flawed and temporary reflection of the eternal and perfect world of ideas.

>>12538
Even under capitalism money is only a means to capital accumulation, and most capital isn't "liquid"/tied up in financial instruments

Prabhat Patnaik - Capitalism and its Current Crisis

Apologies if anyone already posted this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCCxU3ArTDs

https://youtu.be/77KLuvbOqGA

Description

Prof. Mark Blyth: What is wrong with austerity?

India & Global Left
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2023
Mark Blyth is a political economist whose research focuses on how uncertainty and randomness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013, and The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (Oxford University Press 2015)

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Mark Fisher
Slow Cancellation of the Future

>>12529
>>12529
Miss this motherfucker more than you’ll ever believe.

I am a union organizer. Try crossposting on /leftypol/ for more responses.

For directions and strategies I would not look deep into strike history at the expense of reading organizing manuals, unless you are already organized into a union. Read at least one organizing manual cover-to-cover before you try to organize a strike or a union.

Good, easy to read union organizing material is found in the IWW organizing manual, and the EWOC organizing guide attached. If you have a local IWW branch please contact them as they will likely give you a comprehensive training for free if you join.

William Z Foster, the best chairman in the history of the CPUSA and the organizer of the 1919 steel strike and the trade union education league, wrote an organizing manual that was resurrected by new york communists to successfully organize an amazon warehouse: https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1936/10/organizing-methods-steel-industry/index.htm

The best modern organizing guide is Labor Notes' "Secrets of a Successful Organizer" and is $15. https://labornotes.org/secrets - This is a guide on how to organize your coworkers and is overlaps rank-and-file movement organizing in existing union workplaces with new union organizing.

The attached "labor law for the rank-and-filer" will inform you about how to use the National Labor Relations Act (USA) to shield yourself and your coworkers from getting fired for union and strike activity (Feds can order reinstatement with backpay). If you plan a direct action including a strike, you should read the corresponding section from this book.

For strikes - study the failure of the 1919 steel strike and 1919 Seattle general strike, success of sit-in strikes in Detroit auto and retail sectors two decades later. Rely on your coworkers to run the strike, not union bureaucrats. Do not do for your coworkers what they can do themselves.
Strike overview:
https://labornotes.org/2019/10/ways-strike
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here's this

>>12503
I remember a long time ago seeing a chart that described knowledge acquisition in education. That k-12 and undergrad made up a small middle circle. That graduate school expanded the circle very little except made a mound on one portion of the circle. A doctorate then pushed up right against the edge of all human knowledge in regard to the specific field and your thesis is a teeny tiny pimple on the edge.

When one participates in a law journal they have to do hours of research into whether a given topic idea was already written.

When one briefs an appeal, they have to research what the law is, and whether there are any cases similar enough in fact and law to apply to the given situation. If there isn't anything on point, the lawyer must then concoct a unique argument against the given fact scenario. This is much like the little pimple on the circle, the appellate court decision is unique, but only in a very small and particular way.

If you think your research has lead you to find that there is lacking information regarding modern praxis, then it looks like you have a rabbit hole to go down. To find the historical make up of praxis, to see what is already out there about modern praxis, and to synthesize a modern approach if one hasn't yet been fully articulated. Or perhaps even a guide to the modern landscape. Who knows!

>>12515
I was planning on doing the same, I came home with a bunch of interesting ideas I was going to read about, make some notes on and think of a plan to truly get into.

Then I got drunk and now I'm just wallowing in my own rot.

Can always try again tomorrow. Good luck to you friend.

>>12516
>>12516
Write drunk manifesto. Edit in the morning.

>>12503
i 100% agree but somehow i'm not depressed by it…
I think it's kind of exhilarating. Marx said that the scientific process was in concretizing abstractions, and that's exactly what our job is now. There is a huge overgrowth of literature and information out there, and it takes a huge amount of labor to go through it all. Just keep your own personal notes, quotes, lists of shit you've read, summaries, etc. and hopefully someday there will be something to do with it all, to share with others. To me this is a great prospect, because all of the reading I do anyways, now has a somewhere to "go", outside of me, I guess waiting for a future place to be categorized and put out into the world, to help others discover what is already known, theorized, etc. and also to help separate the bullshit from the quality finds, so that the labor doesn't need to be repeated so many times. We can rapidly accelerate our collective theoretical knowledge if we coordinate it by all putting in and sharing notes. Build the collective mind anon

>>12392
>intellectual work.
me no think

>>12479
the original picture

>>12478
1. They are talking about the zaporozhian sich. As we all know, that was an ukrainian area inside Cossack hetmanate. Cossack ≠ ukrainian.
2. If the territory is majority ukrainian, historically ukrainian, governed locally by ukrainians, speaks and acts ukrainian, is recognized as the ukrainian heartland and exist in the same place as zaporozhia, you could easily call it a predecessor to modern ukraine as they do in ukrainian schoolbooks.
3. They were talking about lenin-era goverment, not some great man.
4. It's not annexed if they have internal dissent and/or they fought in the war?
5. They were talking about goverments again. Wikipedia says administration was handed because of "the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR". Who has denied this?
>tl;dr
This doesn't even take a minute to read uygga why add this
>>12481
Pic says so in the way that one would exclaim "this welfare is a gift from the goverment". Meant ironically and to annoy mildly since everyone knows they have much better reasons to do so than goodwill.

>>12482
>1. They are talking about the zaporozhian sich.
Then that doesn't make sense, lol. Why only the Zaporizhya was the supposed original Ukraine?

>If the territory is majority ukrainian, historically ukrainian, governed locally by ukrainians, speaks and acts ukrainian, is recognized as the ukrainian heartland
You apparently don't know anything about the time, lol. For the Russian Empire there were no Ukrainians, only Russians. The "Malorussian dialect" wasn't an official language. Only the "Great Russian" was allowed in the official spheres. No autonomous Malorossiya existed inside the Russian empire. These territories were supossed to be completely russified.

>. They were talking about Lenin-era goverment, not some great man.
<by Vladimir Lenin in 1922
Where do you see some government mentioned, lol? Also the decision about joining Ukrainian SSR wasn't done by some "Lenin government" but by the local bolsheviks themselves

>4. It's not annexed if they have internal dissent and/or they fought in the war?
It kinda changes the context, doesn't it? "Annexed by Stalin" can mean that Stalin was stealing territories from Poland and Czechoslovakia for those ungrateful Ukrainians.

>5. They were talking about goverments again
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>>12486
1. Because it is where they were mostly concentrated, and it's not as if the cossack state was anywhere near ukrainian
2. Doesn't matter what the official line was, ukrainians existed and where they lived and died didn't change because of it. There, during the feudal times these local rulers had much say in local affairs so it is stupid to compare them to modern autonomous areas. Ukrainians did rise to official positions in some positions in these local goverments. And of course malorossiyan isn't a dialect because it isn't even a language to begin with.
3. When I say that "Trump banned xiaomi" I don't mean he personally went ahead and banned them for no reason.
4. No, I was asking how it matters if the ukrainians fought in the war. Would a reward not be a gift? Was stalin punishing them by annexing it to their control?
5. Look how I used stalin in the above sentence, it's more convenient to say. What are you saying this for? You said "The reason was simple: the territory is closer both economically and territorially to Ukraine and it would be easier for Ukraine to help Crimea with post war recovery", meaning that people were denying this alongside the decision being made by a state organ.
>And yes, there literally are people that "Khruschev gifted Crimea to Ukraine".
Has nothing to do with the reason for administrative change.
>It's irony
One that speaks so much about context should have figured this out. Do you think they meant lenin personally gave out some of *his* territory because nobody mentioned anything existing outside of him? Or did they mean it like an article reading "official mike johnson fails to get bill passed" where they personify the entire party and it's agenda to one face?

>>12487
>1. Because it is where they were mostly concentrated, and it's not as if the cossack state was anywhere near ukrainian
Then it makes sense even less because Zaporizhiyan Sich wasn't anywhere near Ukrainian as well (also the modern understanding of Russians and Ukrainains didn't exist at the time). But for the sake of argument I can accept it.

> Doesn't matter what the official line was, ukrainians existed and where they lived and died didn't change because of it.
I am not sure why are you telling me this. If you are trying to say that Ukrainians deserve these territories because they were important part of the society of the Russian Empire, that they fought in the army too, then, yeah, good, ok, I can take that. But if you are trying to say here that Russian Empire wasn't a chauvinistic shithole, then either get Lenin-pilled or piss off.

> it is stupid to compare them to modern autonomous areas.
I can compare it to Finland or Bukhara which enjoyed far more autonomy inside the Empire than Ukraine every did. Not to mention that by the end of 19th century there wasn't anything resembling Ukrainian/ Malorossiyan autonomy at all, because the tsars were actively surpressing it. (I was kinda wrong by saying that there was never anything like Ukrainian/Maloross autonomy inside the empire, it's better to say initially there was one but was soon liquidated)

>And of course malorossiyan isn't a dialect because it isn't even a language to begin with.
That's not my terminology, that's terminology of Lomonosov and V.V. Dal'. And yes, it's not a dialect, it's called Ukrainian language.

>3. When I say that "Trump banned xiaomi" I don't mean he personally went ahead and banned them for no reason.
lmao, ok
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>>12263
Got anything about American individualist anarchism since that was the first school of anarchist thought to arrive in America?

The Manifesto of the Sixteen

>>12321
Kek, no.

>>12284
All of Benjamin Tucker's works are good imo
Josiah Warren's manifesto is good as is Equitable Commerce, although it takes a slight turn from individualist anarchism iirc
steve p andrews Love, Marriage and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual is good
Walker's philosophy of egoism is the most based American anarchist piece of writing imo pre 20th century
as for actual histories idk i think bob black or maybe hakim bey wrote one lol