/edu/ - Education

it should take me a couple of days max to do so.
drop links, pdfs, images

if it's larger than 20k lmk and i'll think about it

i'll also do belarusian if needed

I haven't read much but I'm confused as to why Marx and others conceived of the proletariat as the class that would overthrow capitalism. If we look at history through a materialist lense it seems to me that it's only been a third propertied class overthrows the current system of production, not the people without property. For example, it wasn't slaves that overthrew slavery, it was landlords. It wasn't serfs that overthrew feudalism, it was the bourgeoisie. Every revolution calling itself socialist that actually took state power was led by petit-bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Fidel Castro and manned mostly not by workers, but by peasants in a semi-colonial semi-feudal relationship to the means of production. Most proletarian movements in advanced capitalist societies have been reformist and class collaborationist. How, after all of this evidence, can we say that the proletariat is the revolutionary class? How can you say the workers have nothing to lose but their chains when they need capitalism to keep going so they can have running water, electricity, and the spectacle to keep them comfortable?

I'm a history major in Burgerstan, I'm hoping to really focus in on labor history and eventually get some kind of law degree so I can help Unions or work for OSHA or some shit. I thought it might be a good idea to start reading up on one of the more violent episodes of American Capitalism. Can anybody recommend some good accounts or Historians that cover the Coalfield Wars?

It seems like most socialists are either Marxists who support comprehensive state planning, or anarchists who support either cooperative firms or informal local economies.

Isn't this a false dichotomy, though? Different institutions have different strengths and weaknesses. Non-centralized institutions are necessary to deal with major collective action problems, like for instance climate change, but can come with a small number of failure points. One could imagine a world where SOEs produce public goods and homogenous commodities at scale, while smaller cooperatives form to produce more differentiated or experimental products.

I suppose a difficulty this introduces is that unlike everyone both owning and working for the state, or everyone both owning and working for their cooperative, this produces a seeming worker-owner split, with everyone owning the state but only some working for it. But there might presumably be a way to fix this with the way the state funds new cooperatives and collects back surplus from successful ones, which would seem to be necessary to avoid independent capital accumulation in an economy of just cooperatives anyway; and there may be aspects of the labor/ownership split that are physically inevitable per Critique of the Gotha Program (it cannot ever be the case that the only people who benefit from labor are the laborers, etc.)

Probably people have already done the math on this, or shown ways you could do it or why you couldn't, but I'm an ignoramus, so I'm posting this here.

I've heard the May '68 failure characterized as being due to a conflict between the PCF and the students themselves. I haven't finished reading PDF related (below) but so far it seems to support this, being from the perspective of the students and, as you would expect, laying the blame on the PCF as well as heaping them with epithets (comparing them to liberals, for example). So my questions here are:

&lt1. Is this book known to anyone? If not, does it look like a decent primary source from the students' point of view?
&lt2. Does anyone have anything more sympathetic to the PCF that could balance it out? Or even something more neutral to both sides?

Thx anons

Hey /e/Im a brainlet prole that recently got a scholarships to university, and Im wondering if there are any resources that you could recommend to improve general academic skills with an emphasis on essay writing. I've done a general scan for books and courses on libgen and TPB. But I wanted to get some advise with a left perspective. When I say brainlet I mean dyslexic and when I say prole I mean any unskilled job I can land (bar work, kitchen work, construction, etc.) My degree is in healthcare and administration.

Hello comrades. I have doubts about materialism since the philosophical part of Marxism isn't my strength, but I want to be able to understand it better since materialism is the foundation of marxist theory and the communist movement.
I've had arguments in the past with people who claim that modern science doesn't prove materialism or that materialism cannot explain things like the origin of the universe or quantum mechanics. Well, where do I begin with this? Is materialism the truth? The most basic part of marxist philosophy is the assertion that matter is objectively real, right? How do I prove this then? Maybe one of you STEMlords around here can help me out with this. Any resources on this is appreciated.

Inspired by my reading of the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
How do we know myths, stories, magic, etc. are not real? Assuming what we know scientifically is true, how does this negate myth, legend, etc? Why are dinosaurs not simultaneously animals and also monsters when they fit what we would have called monsters? Why are overriding social systems not tantamount to a spirit or God when they control our actions and shape our life histories even if they don't act consciously? Are they not what we'd call an egregor, i.e., a presence brought into existence by the actions and beliefs of a large number of people? Is our Sun not a God when it is responsible for all life on Earth? Is the biosphere not some sort of Earth spirit when it encompasses all living things yet influences each individually and can be destroyed through harming the Natural (non-human) World. Are spirits not the electrical currents moving through your brain? Do we not tell history as a story?

In the beginning there was nothing but the One, then the One expanded into the Everything, as the Everything continued to expand soon the beating hearts of the Everything, the Stars began to form from the energy of the Beginning, the stars coalesced into huge interstellar communities, galaxies; in the nuclear core of the stars more building elements were created, and from the stars came the planets; in the deep seas of one planet around one star life formed out of the energy of the planet's iron core, over the course of billions of years life arose in complexity in a way matching the Everything until finally from Life emerged the Someone, a complex arrangement of the Everything capable of consciously perceiving itself.

Why isn't our understanding of the Universe, even being scientifically true, a myth? Myths were once truths, after all.

Alright so I've had a few interactions with people on /leftypol/ who seem to think that Dialectics means rejecting the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction. As far as I can tell this has no real basis in the work of Marx or Engels and is a good to not be taken seriously by anyone who understands logic or philosophy or mathematics. I was really confused about where this came from for a while. I have read Mao's "On Contradiction" many times and I suppose that text could be read that way, but I don't think that is what Mao meant by contradiction or "the unity of opposites". Last night though I read Leon Trotsky's "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics" and I think I've found my answer. In it, Trotsky straight up makes a case for why A=/=A, and does make a somewhat compelling argument until you examine it critically.

This piece is well written like most of Trotsky's work, but his argument is full of non-sequitors and general misreadings of Marx and Engels. I want to make this thread to do some comparing and contrasting between four texts in particular, but we can bring in other lit if people want. Those four texts are…

Anti-Duhring by Engels:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm

The ABC of Materialst Dialectics:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

Dialectical and Historical Materialism:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

On Contradiction by Mao Zedong:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

I saw this thread on leftypol and thought it would be very suited here. Did you guys go to university or any other forms of higher education? Why or why not? Did it help you achieve what you want to achieve? Would you go back in time and choose a different path?