/edu/ - Education

>>19860
I've been reading Caroline Elkins' book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire recently, and I thought I'd talk about it a bit. No PDF or Epub, because I have it in hardback.

The book is actually just as much a history of liberalism as a history of the British Empire, and it's fascinating seeing how the liberal mindset came into existence. Reading the examples from the book, you can really see where the paternalistic British liberal originated, with the idea that we must save the global south from themselves. Hence, African leaders famously complaining about how when China turns up they get a power plant, and when Britain turns up they get a lecture; it was the same back then, but Britain actually had the hard power to back up their rhetoric.

It also explains how Britain's use of force changed between the 18th and 20th centuries, with Britain preferring a "hands-off" approach in the 19th century which gradually failed as Germany, the USA, and the Russian Empire began to industrialise and compete for territory (there's an interesting parallel with America and China in the 21st century, too). Occasionally news of some atrocity that was comitted by the British Army (or one of the private companies they got to manage the colonies, such as the East India Company or the Royal Africa Company) would reach home, and there would inevitably be debates about it in parliament- which usually ended with the crimes being somehow justified and then forgotten about, and occasionally with the perpetrators turned into heroes (the 1857 Indian rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion are two good example from the book).

The book isn't specifically Marxist, but is still well worth reading from what I've seen so far.

I want to write a leftypedia article.
If I'll do it it will probably be regarding fascistoid regimes myth and lies regarding the QoL in their nations.
Like, did you know that the only nazi anti-unemployment work program that had any measurable success was such because it obtained shadow funds?

I don't have much motivation to read anymore. Even reverse-engineering Capital hasn't given me the insight to research and make independent analysis on even a city level. I suppose I'm just a midwit.

>>22056
Marx lived in simpler times.

just finished reading picrel last night and really enjoyed it. Did exactly what it says on the cover with the following sections:

>the shaping of Tianjin
>Inconstant Industrialists
>Varieties of Work and Working Life
>Flying Hammers,Walking Chisels:The Workers of Santiaoshi
>Winning the Turf: The Transport Workers
>Sea of Wheels and Belts: The Cotton Mill Workers
>Drumsongs and the Devils Market:The Patterns of Working Class Life
>The Shaping of Working Class Protest

The Chapters themselves smoothly transition into one another and have plenty of labor statistics from the time referenced in them. Theres a ton a good information packed in this book so I don't even know how to summarize it properly. It not only focuses on just describing the conditions of different workplaces but also shit like diet,housing,entertainment and culture too. Some interesting parts that have stuck with me so far include

>preindustrial rural superstructures over an industrial base like the ironworkers of Santiaoshi working in small handicraft shops using an apprenticeship system based on traditional rural ties or sworn brotherhoods and sisterhoods created by cotton mill workers

>CPC organizes cotton mills factories well put doesn't do well in industries where preindustrial social relations still exist like the Santiaoshi Ironworkers or transport guilds

>the transport guilds themselves are these crazy pseuod-corporatist entities with heavy ties to organizied crime that didn't go away until after the 1949 liberation

>Massive organizied crime problem first with the Hunhunr and then the Qing Bang gang ran shit like the Mafia

>highly coordinated slow downs called "soaking mushrooms" employed in cotton mills when striking was not an option and equally complex theft rings that even stole from the factory under japanese occupation.

>the KMT using government made trade unions as an attempt to control the workforce as well as attempting corporatism with the expected results(still went better than the italian attempet imho)

>Tianjin had a large but very fractured working class with many vertical alliance based on tradtional rural ties that made organizing difficult. Although some rural ties such as sworn brotherhoods/sisterhoods were also used in organizing as well.

Also I thought this section from the end was cool

<Yet it seems clear what mobilized workers in period of action was not an abstract commitment to revolutionary ideology, but the concrete possibility of doing something about the immediate conditions of their working lives. Marxism-Leninism came to the workers in the form of a teacher who taught them how to read, or a fellow worker who told them stories of the eighth route army.

I've been reading the Overworked American, surprised by how much it holds up being a book from the mid 90s. I like the part were she says the more people you hire the more you'll have to pay them, so it's cheaper just to overwork the existing employees. i've always been afraid not having enough free time in my future so it's reassuring that's it's not just me.

This book is enjoyable. It is very much a fascist piece of work, the author identifies as a civic nationalist, but it is enjoyable and artful for the way it argues against libertarianism, for class collaboration and corporatism in the context of liberal sensibilities for "true" democracy over elected aristocracies, and could easily get some Berniebro or equally curious moderate to go along with it. If I had read it when it was released, I certainly would have become a fascist.

It does not address nor answer critique of the state as bourgeois lackey, nor does it address the flaws of currently-existing "government-mediated brokering" between labor and capital under capitalism, pretending this is a novel and untested idea by omission. Nonetheless, a brilliant piece of propaganda. I will study its sources.

opps, my book recs

<3
Be well everyone.
Love you all.
lol.
https://libgen.is/search.php?&req=Harlem&phrase=1&view=simple&column=def&sort=extension&sortmode=ASC
THREAD THEME:
soft pink truth - do they owe us a living
https://youtu.be/mBzSJUbPnbo?
t

Finished The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane (2012). The myth is that people just are just naturally endowed with charisma or not and the book is about developing your charisma. Here is a typical excerpt:
<Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, embodies focus charisma. As he’ll tell you himself, Musk is very much an introvert. In Tesla’s open office space, his nearly empty desk is in the far right corner, two huge monitors arranged to create a cocoon, shielding him from the rest of the office.

<However, when he emerges from behind the screens, he is fully present and fully focused. You can feel the intensity of his attention, how keenly he listens to and absorbs everything you say. And he doesn’t need to say a word to show you that he understands you: his nonverbal body language makes you feel completely listened to and understood. (You’ll learn the secrets to this kind of listening in chapter 8.)

<Focus charisma is primarily based on a perception of presence. It gives people the feeling that you are fully present with them, listening to them and absorbing what they say. Focus charisma makes people feel heard, listened to, and understood. Don’t underestimate this kind of charisma; it can be surprisingly powerful.

<Focus charisma can be highly effective in business. One executive who has worked closely with Bill Gates told me:

<Most people think of charisma as people who are larger than life, who command a room with an over-the-top personality. But despite his unassuming appearance, being slight in build and looking like the stereotypical geek, Bill does command the room; his presence is immediately felt. If your definition of charisma is that when you walk into a room all eyes are on you, then Bill has it. If it’s that quality that draws people toward you and makes them want to listen to what you have to say, then Bill has that, too.
Other examples of charisma the author brings up are George W. Bush (visionary charisma type) and Madonna (doesn't say type). I don't know about you, but if someone IRL told me earnestly that I'm like any of those people I'd probably hang myself. Maybe developing charisma isn't for me :/

>>22071
I wonder what kind of charisma someone like Lenin or Mao has under the author's classification system.

copying this from siberia so you guys see it
https://files.catbox.moe/iufwmm.pdf nietzsche: the aristocratic rebel by domenico losurdo
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/04/01/on-the-misery-of-left-nietzscheanism-or-philosophy-as-irrationalist-ideology/
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/
https://files.catbox.moe/wo0h5y.pdf heidegger in ruins: between philosophy and ideology by richard wolin
https://mronline.org/2024/03/29/why-the-left-should-reject-heideggers-thought-part-1-the-question-of-being/
https://files.catbox.moe/w2jp94.epub the destruction of reason by georg lukács
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-myth-of-1968-thought-and-the-french-intelligentsia-historical-commodity-fetishism-and-ideological-rollback/
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/12/01/imperialist-propaganda-and-the-ideology-of-the-western-left-intelligentsia/
consider yourselves BTFO, you're welcome

>>22076
I read that monthly review article a little while ago it was pretty good. I'll have to get around to reading the destruction of reason one day.

>>22077
it's fun if you're autistic about Germany as many people on this board presumably are

>>22075
Book says about Mao: Focus Charisma (projecting an intense level of attention that makes people feel listened to and understood). Same as Bill Gates.

>>22071
It's weird that the author seems to only pick people who naturally would have all eyes on them (managers/owners, performers, politicians) as having charisma that draws people to them?? The only one who makes sense here >>22081 is Mao, since his political praxis consisted of listening to people. But still… leader of a country.

>>22083
Stalin was also good at listening.

I can't remember the thread in which I read the post, but for some reason an online media group had moved to quote a 19 year old 'book-fan' of Dostoyevsky's literature, in order to hear from her an understanding of the draw among young people to his works.

The language that the individual uses in their explanation is near-Orwellian. Orwell himself and his books are cliches for comparisons, but in this instance the description is absolutely fucking apt. Not just in the literative sense of how specific phrases of slang have gained currency and are used with a reflexive ironic concession, but in the total operation of their language and the manner in which it unconsciously reproduces the social relations that are combinant in her understanding, and the self-perpetuation of the ideology which sustains it.

If I had the post before me I'd quote it so I could break each sentence down piece by piece, but for the general effect, it is as though the political consciousness which has gained ascendency among youth is not only perfectly amicable to, but directly a construct of the form of, the logic of capital.

Missing the depth of it but putting it to a term, it is 'HR therapy speak'; bourgeois psychology which utlizies 'trauma' as the central manifold in its discourse which constructs meaning for individuals.

The prevelance of this explanation is like a fucking disease, not in the sense of this specific case, but the ascension of this form of psychology, which has launched itself with a religious zeal in converting the subjects it comes into contact with, with a new socially modality. It is not even a psychology proper. In its general shape it is an overarching ideology, which is the result of the collective social processes at play in the division of wealth in western society and their transformation under the revolutionary pressure inherent in the proliferation of capital.

The worst of it is that in its extremity it licenses a form of vitriol which can only be compared to the propaganda at play in antisemitism. I'm not over-stating this; in the quote, the individual annihilates the boundary of human subjectivity through an explicit statement where she claims that femininity is the conditional quality to human existence. She oblates masculinity with violence and in so doing flattens men into the same category as with which the Nazi percieves the Jew.

This absolute fucking poverty in this rational perception is endemic. Individuals who set out to defend an asbtract cauase of the new form of rights which have emerged over the last few years do so by obliterating the real material dimension of human existence. The depth of human psychology in Freud which was expounded over a century ago has been burried, like Marx's writings, to the preservation of academic anarchronisms.

These convulsions which are simply revolutionising social subjectivity into a more pliable consumerist existentiality are being waged by the worst of all sychophants.

The individual's rational logic is both simple and clear in its original purpose: they wished to paint Dostoyevsky's works as the result of his troubled and turbulent emotional life (hoping most likely in the process to project their own self-image as someone who is learned).

What's embarassing is that it just becomes a display of the presiding tectonics of both their own internal and external reality, the two being sufficently confused that they essentially end up back where they have started.

What's absolutely painful is that, even among those who are literate, this is the new standard: a politically castrated subject who with absolutely no valid self-reflection.

>>22095
a politically castrated subject with absolutely no capacity for valid self-reflection.

>>22085
I just finished Cecelia Bobrovskaya's memoirs, and she describes Lenin as an amazing listener (and Plekhanov, too, in passing - she was inspired by how he took interest in the minutia of practical work)

I think it's just inherent to communist work that we need to be good listeners. Still, my skepticism at the potentially circular methodology of the work stands lol

>>22113 (me)
to review the book: very funny, very human. I think it would be a fun read even to non-communists.

Really the only practical lesson I learned from it is that the semi-committed, spineless, well-off intellectual types served a very important function, by stitching back together local socialist groups after big busts. They were above suspicion and kept themselves legal, so they would be there when everyone else was in jail or scattered. It really puts weight behind Lenin's exhortations to go to all classes to spread the ideas and look for comrades. Even though the illegal socialists engaged in constant practical work were suspicious of the strictly legal semi-comrades, they served a purpose in being only somewhat connected to the more serious activity.

im reading phenomenology of spirit HOLY SHIT what am i reading???? half of it makes sense and i can agree with fully and the other half i have NO idea what is even being said. i am reading it alongside lectures on phenomenology by alexander kojeve. i am looking forward to reading capital with a better base of understanding of dialectics but goddamn

>>22115
read the Logic instead (or… next)

>>22067
Is this an accidental reply, a reference to something, or something else I'm too ignorant to get?

Currently reading the politics of heroin, wondering if anybody has any book recommendations about the history of immigration laws in the US, or just the history of immigration in general.

>>22125
forgot to link pdf

https://renincorp.org/bookshelf/politics-of-heroin-in-south.pdf

<The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and the wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the income taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested. In fact, this fiscal policy does not only prevent the further accumulation of new capital. It brings about capital decumulation. This is certainly today the state of affairs in Great Britain.
Mises, "Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism"
I always found it admirable how candid Mises(and other Austrians) are on the basics of use vs. exchange-value and labor's role in it, even the organic composition of capital to an extent. The disingenuous part is where they act like these things are new, or that Marx himself didn't write about them(where even then they were centuries old).

I've been reading a lot of right wing edgelord lit recently. Its exhausting. There isn't really much too it beyond bashing the libs. Outside of that, their ideas are usually just wallflower liberalism mixed in with various shades of more or less explicit genetic racism, odd references to the occult and mysticism (90% of which is inaccurate), and bitching. Its literally just tribal white idpol SJWism. What a waste of my time.

Finished Two Texts for Defining the Communist Programme by L. L. Men (1986). For LLM, socialism requires labour vouchers as described in Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx and Anti-Dühring by Engels, as well as democratic bottom-up voting with the right to recall as in the Paris Commune. By that standard, the USSR was not socialist at any point. Was the USSR moving towards socialism? For LLM it is clear that the Bolsheviks stopped pushing in a socialist direction before the NEP even. LLM shows some awful statements by Lenin and even worse ones by Trotsky, but does not accuse the Bolsheviks of conspiring against the working class from beginning. In general, conscious intention of individuals or groups do not play a big role in the author's picture of history. LLM is also very critical of basically everybody from the Workers' Opposition to the Kronstadt Sailors, anarchists, and various grouplets like the SPGB.

I found an interesting reference to The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 Volume 2 by E. H. Carr (1952), referring to discussion about abolishing money:
(page 267)
<In January 1920 the third All-Russian Congress of Councils of National Economy at length accepted a thesis which declared that, "in view of the excessive instability of the monetary unit and unit of account (the ruble) ", it was desirable to establish a new unit of economic accountancy " adopting as a basis of measurement the unit of labour ".[1] This proposal was referred to a commission. It occupied for many months the best economic brains of the country; and the term "labour unit" became familiar enough to be known by a current abbreviation as tred (trudovaya edinitsa).
<[1]Quoted in L. N. Yurovsky, Currency Problems and Policy of the Soviet Union (1925), p. 34; it was not included in the published resolutions of the congress.
(page 268)
<None of several schemes for replacing money by tred or by some other unit had won acceptance when the introduction of NEP caused the whole project to be relegated once more to the realms of academic speculation.[1]
<[1]The discussion occupied an enormous place in the economic literature of 1920 and the first month of 1921; a rival to tred was propounded in the form of a "unit of energy" (ened). A detailed study of the discussion would have some theoretical interest, but it had little or no influence on future developments. It was influenced by two works of the German economist Otto Neurath which were much studied by Soviet writera of the period: Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (Munich, 1919), and Von der nächsten und übernächsten Zukunft (Jena, 1920).

What's a book that will help me understand chinlet psychology?

>>22163
Kill all normies by angela nagle

>>22156
Now answer the question; why is liberalism so vapid that men consider this a better alternative?

Finished I've Been Thinking, the 2023 autobiography by the materialist philosopher (though not Marxist) Daniel C. Dennett (born in 1942, died in 2024). A massive cast flashes by, mostly academics, but also Silicon Valley types and even Hollywood.

Early on, Dennett says:
<[John] Searle’s world is full of philosophical nincompoops; mine is full of philosophers who are learned, intelligent, hard-working but often self-defeating presenters of their best ideas. Why would anybody want to be a philosopher if philosophers in general were as stupid as Searle seems to think? (Sir Karl Popper is another philosopher whose low opinion of those who disagreed with him has made me wonder how he could stand being a philosopher.)
A significant part of what follows is cringe anecdotes about his colleagues. (I especially like the bit where he asks himself whether he should openly tell another philosopher about his atrocious sense of fashion and decides against it, so to not make an embarrassing scene for that guy, naming him so people from all continents will know about that guy's atrocious sense of fashion a hundred years from now.)

If you can't decide on what to read and are bad at concentrating, this book is for you. The chapters are short and the topics change between shooting documentaries, dabbling in music and sculpture, sailing, farming, and trips all over the world. I'm green with envy. It's an entertaining book for sure, but did I get wiser? He drops tons of references to interesting stuff. I think for wisdom I'll better take up his collection of handy analogies and fallacies (Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking).

Hypocrisy: Dennett claims religion is mumbo jumbo, yet he talks about meeting the Antichrist at the TED brain-trust lunch. If you care to know what I mean by that, you can find the book on libgen.

>>22284
>meeting the Antichrist at the TED brain-trust lunch
That is absolutely where you'd expect them

The more I read The System's Greatest Trick the more I'm convinced Ted already believes in dialectical materialism and the concept of revisionism but feels the need to dress it in different language.

>>22332
*Neatest
fuck

Finished A Framework for Representing Knowledge by Marvin Minsky (1974). Supposedly about AI, this is super wishy-washy and doesn't lead anywhere. I now believe Minsky wasn't good for anything, maybe even delayed the development of AI with his polemics against Perceptrons.

Lawyer anon here. Was reading an old professors book on local Chicano history and I was so blinded by rage by his repeated use of the phrase middle class I remembered lefty pol existed.

Just finished reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (I highly recommend this for everyone) and next on the reading list is Atomic Habits.

Thinking about industries where the leading capitalists are seemingly beyond competition. Does anyone have an analysis on the semiconductor industry and TSMC's ascendancy? It seems that there can be no tendency towards falling rate of profit when the closest competitors are years behind, and that's assuming SMIC can make do without EUV. Global Foundries and Intel are even worse off.

DAE struggle nowadays to take leftist lit seriously? I ate contemporary stuff up a few years ago but I'm pretty jaded ow and find the prose of leftist authors so fucking preachy, predictable and sophist. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading the fucking Illiad with the amount of epithets that leftists use. God forbid one mentions any rightoids name, even tangentially, and you'll get several qualifiers reminding you the guy's bad. The same tropes and the same examples even in wildly different contexts. I used to find academic 'non-political' i.e. vaguely liberal academic works boring, yet now I prefer them covering the same topic over a leftie author.

Right now, found this bad boy: https://web.archive.org/web/20140714093710/http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/DZ_article1.pdf

>>22361
(So far I am undestanding only a third of it D:)

Finished some Spengler just recently. Is it just me, or is he kind of a dummy who butchers any concept he uses and just talks out of his ass? I'll go back to reading Lenin.

>>22366
Yes, Spengler is a bullshitter. His scheme is arbitrary and there are countless counter-examples to any grand tendency or principle he claims, and his stuff is riddled with errors. (I haven't read Spengler, but his annihilation: Anti-Spengler by Otto Neurath. Available in German as part of Otto Neurath - gesammelte Philosophische und methodologische Schriften. Band 1.)

Also, how come Nietzsche opposed socialism? I am reading him and he sounds like an outright Marxist.

>>22373
>He was critical of French Revolution and was deeply disturbed by the Paris Commune which he saw as a destructive insurrection of the vulgar lower classes that made him feel "annihilated for several days"

I haven't read any Nietzsche but If I had to guess it would be his whole philosophy(as far as I can tell) boils down to suffering being necessary cuz le superman will overcome and embrace it or sum shit like that. I'd imagine you'd run into a similar problem socialist do with abrahamics since both philosophies see the suffering on earth as a giant test to separate the good from the bad people that you can never ever change that ergo trying to alleviate this suffering is "cheating" so to speak. From their perspective Its like we're handing out an answer sheet before the final exam. Anons have recommended me the destruction of reason by Lukacs which I believe has a section on Nietzsche and is all about how a huge chunk of western philosophy are just elaborate excuses for empire. That being said this whole post is just guesswork and conjecture.

>>22347
tech sector in general functions largely in the rent sphere, because of IP

But also in general monopolies form out of competition as smaller firms fail to be sufficiently profitable. You'd expect this kind of monopoly firm to have lower margins. Once this happens, monopolies can raise prices to increase margins, but what this is in effect is lowering of the price of money of the whole economy, i.e. reducing wages. In this case consumption suffers and what prevails is necessities. Land rents, utilities, and food (also priced based on land rents) are the most profitable. We see empirically a shift in the economy for a while now in the US e.g. first away from industry, then away even from commerce, to finance, (tech), and land rent. In terms of both top companies, sectors leading gdp growth, and overall share of profits. So there's a long-term trend away from capitalist profits towards rent, as capital burdens production rather than promotes it. Anyways tech is tied heavily with finance and IP rents (and also state intervention and military needs) and so is doing relatively well. I'd see it in that light. Also expect more state expenditure as surplus value with nowhere to go builds up. So again, military spending, infrastructure (lol if we're lucky), state investment and buyouts, etc.