/edu/ - Education

Finished The Lifespan of a Fact a book that shows an essay by John D'Agata, with comments and corrections by editor Jim Fingal, and some back and forth between the two (2012). The essay is about a teen suicide. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the teen's parents, but this is so fucking funny (bet they loled too).

Pro-tip if you ever read it: This isn't over when you close the book. It's the last sentence on the back about what John and Jim are up to now that really marks the end. So don't spoil the ending for yourself. (Not to brag, but I gotta say: I had a hunch.)

>>24588
https://gofile.io/d/xDOS8o
also here

>>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.

>>22286
>Someone once wrote that if you just read the first chapter of Capital I, II, III, and "IV", as well as Grundrisse, that you'd have enough to really be useful at a boot-on-ground level.

There's no way this can be true. The first chapter of II builds on a lot of the concepts introduced throughout volume I, and the same relationship is true of III and II. "IV" is Theories of Surplus Value. The first chapter of that is about Sir James Steuart, a political economist from the early 1700s. Not exactly Marx's biggest influence in Political Economy. Grundrisse is a collection of notes and doesn't even have a clear Chapter structure.

>>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.

QRD on all the books:

"Witness" – Chambers was a fucked up guy, joined Communist Party USA and was part of its underground network, wife refused to abort their child which lead him down the path of religious conversion, claimed he understood the godlessness of communism so he quit, became a Christian, and then snitched on CPUSA during the 2nd Red Scare ("McCarthyism"). Book is highly melodramatic and presents a highly good-vs-evil Manichaean worldview. Chambers also blames intellectuals for propagating communism in America, heavily promotes Christianity as the only way to save the world from the communist menace, and is overall a sensationalist asshole.

"School of Darkness" – Bella Dodd was an Italian immigrant who longed to fit in with American society and culture, joined CPUSA in the mid 1930s, recruited a bunch of CPUSA-affiliated teachers into the Teachers Union in New York, worked her way up to become very successful in the Party, fell out with the Party soon after Earl Browder got purged, ended up leaving CPUSA and became a born-again Catholic after meeting with Fulton Sheen, Sheen then convinced her to snitch on the Party during McCarthyism as a form of "repentance". Basically, Dodd was desperately searching for validation her entire life. When communists didn't want her anyone she became Catholic and anti-communist and got validation from that crowd.

"Radical Son" – Horowitz grew up being raised by CPUSA-affiliated parents, was raised to believe in communism, became a big name activist in the 60s New Left, worked with the Black Panthers, then had a falling out with the Panthers, accused them of murdering a friend of his, had a complete falling out with leftist politics and embraced Reaganite conservatism in the 80s. Most of his memoir is about "growing up" and realizing the leftist beliefs his parents raised him with were "wrong". He also hates intellectuals and is highly self-righteous.

"Unplanned" – Abby Johnson worked at Planned Parenthood and became very successful at it. She became a clinic director. Then, one day she allegedly witnessed a fetus being aborted on an ultrasound and this destroyed her mentally. She became a staunch anti-abortion activist afterwards. A lot of details in her memoir have been scrutinized by her former coworkers. Her book doesn't have some great metaphysical discussion on the "evils of leftism" as the other three but it's a more contemporary conversion memoiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Most of these stories are often aimless semi reformed degenerates or underachievers

There is also a specific libertarian brand of
>i was briefly a member of a trotskyist party and it felt a lot like a cult
<therefore all leftists are middle-class hipsters who can't think for themselves (unlike me bc i'm so smart and basic economics)
Here is something in this vein by Robert Anton Wilson:
>I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain.
>This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns. (Why was I immune to Stalinism — an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystallized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)
>After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.
>Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class bPost 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.

>>24602
>>24603
>likely served as a trading hub linking Pacific coast cultures with those in the Andes and Amazon
If they can find more solid evidence to that effect this is an incredibly important site and a historic find.
>After eight years of studies
It's crazy to think about how far the published research on rediscovered ruins in the Americas has come since 2017. One wonders how it might have been affected if this information was public, although it's understandable why they'd want to study this quietly for a while.

>>24603
>la civilización prístina de Caral, la primera de toda América.
That we know of ;-)
At the rate they keep finding things on these continents who knows if that honor will last

>>24604
>If they can find more solid evidence to that effect this is an incredibly important site and a historic find.
In another article I read it mentioned sculptures with Amazonic traits, likely the ones in >>24603. I'm not an expert but one of them looks like a monkey to me and they don't live on the coast of Peru.
>it's understandable why they'd want to study this quietly for a while.
Yes. Many articles also mention how Ruth Shady, the director of the Caral Archeological Zone, and her archeologists have been threatened by land speculators who seem hellbent on buying the land around the archeological sites to develop it.

posting about this cause i'm just finding out

Mexican government acquires long-lost Aztec manuscripts about the rise and fall of Tenochtitlan

María Castañeda de la Paz still vividly recalls discovering the Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco in 2009. While on vacation, a colleague mentioned a friend who had some potentially interesting manuscripts. She went to a meeting in Mexico City’s ritzy Coyoacán neighborhood and was amazed to find copies of these codices, one of which narrates the history of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec empire’s ancient capital. “It’s not every day you come across documents like this,” said Castañeda de la Paz. “I was thrilled and surprised because documents about the history of Tenochtitlan are very rare.” She is among a team of experts who unveiled the discovery on March 20 at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. After years of research and negotiations, the Mexican government paid 9.5 million pesos (roughly $500,000) to the family that owned these historical manuscripts.

The effort to acquire documents dating from the late 16th century and early 17th century was long and fraught with setbacks. “The person who showed me photos of the codices on a computer mentioned they belonged to a family, but didn’t provide details other than the family had two or three documents. I was given some color copies to analyze, and I suggested registering them to prevent a rise in black market value. The family wasn’t interested in that, and I started to have some doubts about who really owned the codices. I tried many times to contact the family but they were unresponsive, and unfortunately their interest eventually faded,” said Castañeda de la Paz, a researcher at the Anthropological Research Institute of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM).

Unable to persuade the family with the valuable manuscripts, Castañeda de la Paz contacted Baltazar Brito Guadarrama, head of the National Library of Anthropology and History (BNAH), and showed him the copies. Brito then led the effort to contact the family and acquire the codices. “I was totally surprised when I opened the little box they were in. And when I lifted the first sheet, I just knew it was an original document,” said Brito. The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) hasn’t disclosed the owners’ identities, but Brito says they said the documents were passed down through generations in the same family.Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>24611
FULL set of sheets of the tira de san andres tetepilco

https://www.facebook.com/glifonawa/posts/pfbid0bb8KsnUT5RSLbcQANJBySP6gozhs3Q8yryQwU2hAZjrkYe5e66ho72LsVjNAUxutl

lonely ushnus in the middle of desolate, giant plazas, surrounded by the corpses of dead inka cities and suffused in the cold climate of the suni make me feel melancholic

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.

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

Don't Talk to the Police
>Regent Law Professor James Duane gives viewers startling reasons why they should always exercise their 5th Amendment rights when questioned by government officials.

Alternative links:
https://piped.video/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances Insert /watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE to the end of the link

>>20135
Oh, someone already posted this. Keeping it up cuz of the piped links though.

Beyond Chavs: Imagining a working class politics for the 21th century
Owen Jones

bump