/edu/ - Education

Why must've the Universe had a beginning? Why couldn't it have just been? Matter in motion since forever, always changing - as Heraclitus, Descartes, Engels, Lenin and other materialist philosophers postulated. Makes more sense than anything else.
>doesn't fall into the trap of an immovable mover
>doesn't fall into the trap of making matter out to be immutable since it is always changing
>removes the "I" from the equation, where consciousness just becomes another form matter in motion (electricity in our brains)
Why do the professional philosophers insist on arguing about idealistic nonsense when the two simple axioms
>matter always existed
>matter was always in motion
Solve all philosophical problems and leave only their practical solutions - i.e. the natural and social sciences, something tangible with results, to be studied? Is it because if the theory starts requiring practice, they lose their cushy jobs and pseudo-intellectuals on this board who jack off on structuralism, post-Marxism &c. would have to start doing manual labor to prove their points?

I'm searching for good(!) resources on how to outreach, recruit, organize people.
Looking for modern material i.e. "Social Media" and "Youtube" should be part of that.

If you know French or German, please contribute a chapter to /leftypol/'s first crowdsourced translation project! This project started on >>691.

The book is Karl Kautsky's history of the French Revolution, originally published as Die Klassengegensätze im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution in 1889. Coming from the "Pope of Marxism", as Kautsky was then known, this text likely had an immense influence on Lenin and other revolutionaries of his day. It was approved by Engels himself, and may have been foundational in establishing the Marxist theory of bourgeois revolution, yet it has never been translated into English. The original German is available here: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1908/frev/index.html and an old French translation is available here: https://www.marxists.org/francais/kautsky/works/1889/00/antagonismes-table.htm

What makes this work especially good for us to translate is that it's relatively short - just around 60 pages in total, divided into 10 chapters. With each chapter being 5-7 pages each, it is conceivable to translate a chapter in one day's volunteer work. Comrade Akko has already translated the preface, and is working on chapter 1. That leaves 9 chapters to complete:

Preface: Complete!
Chapter 1: Second draft complete (French)
Chapter 2: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading complete (English)
Chapter 3: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading in progress (English) - Proofreader needed
Chapter 4: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading complete (English)
Chapter 5: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading complete (English)
Chapter 6: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading in progress (English) - Proofreader needed
Chapter 7: Draft complete (French) - Proofreading in progress (English) - Proofreader needed
Chapter 8: Complete! (Copyrighted work, permission secured)
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Greetings, comrades.

Some of you may already be aware of our work. We began our project since September 2020, we are almost 3 years old, and we've been expanding our work since then. As a celebration of ProleWiki, we are beginning a recruitment campaign to attract Marxists-Leninists interested in improving our work.

We have enough money to keep us going for two more years, so we're not currently interested in donations. What we really want is people who study Marxism-Leninism and are interested in making their knowledge more accessible to the general public.

The current articles available is a reflection of our current set of editors' knowledge. It is bound to improve over time while we internally debate about many subjects and increase in number of editors. We currently have editors from all over the world, United States, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Denmark, Germany, and many other countries.

If you see anything wrong with our articles, the best thing you can do is join us so you can correct them. What are you waiting for? Join us!

https://prolewiki.org/

I started being interested in eastern spirituality in general since i started training physical yoga last year. It changed my life i would say, i stopped feeling any physical discomfort caused by sedentary lifestyle and many times at the end practice, laying down on floor in "corpse pose" i felt something approaching a bliss, my mood also seems significantly lifted, i no longer give a fuck, even tho my material situation has not changed much.
This in turn caused me to get interested in eastern philosophy itself, i started reading Yoga Sutras, translation by Swami Satchenada (most popular translation from sanskrit i think, this guy was pretty famous with american hippies back in 60s).
Many of Satchenada commentaries are pretty interesting, they are modern and straight-forward, for example there are explamples including driving cars or going to the mall, there are also fragments that made me ask, is this guy reactionary? Can i reconcile at all my marxist tendencies with my interest in eastern philosophy, or are those things contradictory? All i know there is some one movement that says "actually buddhism and marxism has lot in common", are there more?
Here is the quote i am talking about:

"Suppose some people drive up in a big car, park in front of a huge palatial home and get out. Some other people are standing on the pavement in the hot sun getting tired. How many of those people will be happy? Not many. They will be saying, “See that big car? Those people are sucking the blood of the laborers.” We come across people like that; they are always jealous. When a person gets name, fame or high position, they try to criticize that person. “Oh, don’t you know, that person’s brother is so-and-so. Some strings must have been pulled.” They will never admit that the person might have gone up by his or her own merit. By that jealousy, you will not disturb the other person, but you disturb your own serenity. Those people simply got out of the car and walked into the house, but you are burning up inside. Instead, think, “Oh, such fortunate people. If everyone was like that how happy the world would be. May God bless everybody to have such comfort. I will also get that one day.” Make those people your friends. That response is missed in many cases, not only between individuals but even among nations. When some nation is prospering, the neighboring country is jealous of it and wants to ruin its economy. So we should always have the key of friendlinPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Why aren't you a chaos marxist?
https://chaosmarxism.neocities.org/

"The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched conditions in Germany, in consequence of which cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers had taken possession of the chairs of philosophy-"

What the fuck is a flea-cracker?

Thread for History of Ancient China up until the end of the Chinese Empire
Discuss History, Mythology, Archeology, Socio-Economics, Politics and Culture of Ancient China. This includes Tibet, Korea and Mongolia.
Leftypedia >>3780 requires an article on Ancient China, all that is covered is the current People's Republic

Important Topics
>Mythology and Legends and their Modern Cultural Impacts
A society that arose at the beginning of human civilization, China's culture is enormous and diverse. Legends and mythology of China such as Fa Mulan and Journey to the West are just prominent examples of legends that influenced others across the globe. Recommend and discuss literature or myths on this.

>Eastern Philosophy, Culture and Religion
The East, especially China developed several unique religions and philosophies utterly separate from the primarily Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian philosophies of Western and Central Europe as well as the Middle East. The 3 primary Chinese philosophies are Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Discuss the merits of these.

>Military Conflicts and Everyday Life in Ancient China
Society in China developed on its own and so it had much different ways of life. China is also known for having massive conflicts, some of the first to have millions of men fight at a time. China is known for it's generals such as author of "The Art of War"* Sun Tzu, Han Xing and CaoCao.
*https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf

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Thoughts on this open-source US history textbook?
https://www.americanyawp.com/text/16-capital-and-labor/

>The socialist movement drew from a diverse constituency. Party membership was open to all regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion. Many prominent Americans, such as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, became socialists. They were joined by masses of American laborers from across the United States: factory workers, miners, railroad builders, tenant farmers, and small farmers all united under the red flag of socialism. Many united with labor leader William D. “Big Bill” Haywood and other radicals in 1905 to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the “Wobblies,” a radical and confrontational union that welcomed all workers, regardless of race or gender.32 Others turned to politics.

>The Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901, carried on the American third-party political tradition. Socialist mayors were elected in thirty-three cities and towns, from Berkeley, California, to Schenectady, New York, and two socialists—Victor Berger from Wisconsin and Meyer London from New York—won congressional seats. All told, over one thousand socialist candidates won various American political offices. Julius A. Wayland, editor of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, proclaimed that “socialism is coming. It’s coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it . . . you can feel it in the air.”33 By 1913 there were 150,000 members of the Socialist Party and, in 1912, Eugene V. Debs, the Indiana-born Socialist Party candidate for president, received almost one million votes, or 6 percent of the total.34

>Over the following years, however, the embrace of many socialist policies by progressive reformers, internal ideological and tactical disagreements, a failure to dissuade most Americans of the perceived incompatibility between socialism and American values, and, especially, government oppression and censorship, particularly during and after World War I, ultimately sank the party. Like the Populists, however, socialists had tapped into a deep well of discontent, and their energy and organizing filtered out into American culture and American politics.

Was the Meiji restoration and "restoring power to the emperor" a good or bad thing in 18th century Japan for the peasants? It marked the upper class revolution that caused the samurai feudal system to transition into a capitalist system. (Which ultimately turned into a racist imperialist empire that tried to invade and oppress all of its neighbors in Asia in a sort of fascist system, and as Japan lost the war the people starved and suffered greatly.)

I just found this photograph btw. Samurai didn't look nearly as impressive as I thought they would, and that hairdo is "objectively ugly."

There were a lot of peasant revolutions/movements that tried to go against the samurai but they all ultimately failed so no one except historians talk about them. Unfortunately too, the people who study Japanese history appear to be mostly weebs who romanticize the samurai so much that you never get to hear about the peasents' movements.