/edu/ - Education

Finished Denial by Ajit Varki (2013), developing an idea proposed to him by Danny Brower (who died in 2007). Their claim is this:
Strong self-awareness / theory of mind is present in humans only because of a lucky co-evolution of another aspect of the human mind, denial of death. So, without death denial, strong self-awareness would lead to depression and inaction (thus not passing on your genes). They speculate that other species did not get strong self-awareness because of that barrier.

Maybe I missed something, but my impression is they failed to make an argument for their assertion (not even a good argument, just an argument). We probably all know of people who got really busy getting things in order when they got news of their impeding death instead of freezing up, and I'm pretty sure that this is indeed the more common behavior. Just like when we become aware of being near a less dramatic limit (deadline for a paper, last day of your vacation and so on).

Ancient artifacts from elaborate burial rituals are used as an example by Varki (as by many others) as signs of when self-awareness evolved. A great opportunity to point at this as a sign of reality denial, but somehow that does not occur to Varki.

The dumbest thing is his speculation about why there wasn't more interbreeding between homo sapiens and others. He posits MENTAL incompatibility specifically for the low fertility of interbreeding couples.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-and-neanderthals-may-have-had-trouble-making-male-babies-180958701/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-neanderthal-gene-variant-related-to-red-blood-cells-may-have-contributed-to-their-extinction-180987586/
Yeah OK, the book is older than these findings, but what a stupid hypothesis. Mein Gott, has he ever observed some couples?? There are people who seek relief by fucking horses.

Finished Samuel Graydon's Einstein biography A Life in 99 Particles (2023). 99 tiny chapters, ideal format for anybody who thinks their short attention span prevent them from reading books. That said, I didn't like how much Graydon dwelled on Einstein's love life quoting private letters, and how Einstein's political side in the book is just pacifism and making an exception for WWII, and Zionism and souring on Zionism later in life. What about his socialist leanings? These Graydon misrepresents as mere hallucinations by hysterical McCarthyists.

I finished reading the Persistence Of The Old Regime by Arno Mayer this weekend. I was not familiar with Mayer either from here or elsewhere even though he seems to be an important Marxist historian of the 20th century. I learned about him by reading about David Irving's court case in which he cited Mayer's work on the Holocaust Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?, which I also intend to read next year. Anyway, the books central thesis can be summed up with the following quote
>Down to 1914 Europe was preeminently pre-industrial and prebourgeois. Its civil societies being deeply rooted in economies of labor-intensive agriculture, consumer manufacture and petty commerce.
Mayer goes on to show that economically, politically and culturally the now post-feudal ancien regime was still dominant. The grande bourgeoisie did not yet exist as a class for itself. Its new industrial economic base was grafted onto the old, but still dominant, agricultural one, the latter of which the nobility held in their hands through their vast land ownership. Through passive and active processes, the industrial magnates were assimilated into the nobility, or otherwise craved the acceptance of this old system. The capitalists aristocrasized as a result of this, making the would-be counter-elite easy to co-opt.

The nobility of course enjoyed great political power throughout Europe, with, of the major powers, only France a republic. Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary meanwhile were all semi-absolutist. Upper chambers ensured an aristocratic check on democracy and a limited franchise and gerrymandering ensured the lower chambers barely registered the voices of progress to begin with.

Culturally too the bourgeoisie was steeped in its senior partner's tastes. The avant-gardes were sidelined, co-opted or rebelled in ways that were not threatening to the nobility.

In the final chapter, Mayer explains the Nietzschean and social-darwinist worldviews of the elites and shows how they over-perceived threats to their dominant, but waning position. War was seen as a cure-all to the nobility, it was no longer an extension of diplomacy, but rather one of domestic politics. The old elites intended on a preemptive counter revolution against the forces of progress, be they liberal, socialist or national liberation movements. They would rather plunge Europe into a second thirty years war, than see themselves slowly relegated to the dustbin of history even at a time when all of society was still bent to their will.

Mayer doesn't simply assert his thesis, but goes into great detail in each chapter how and why it is correct for each of the great powers in Europe: England, France, Russia, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary.
I was a little helpless in the chapter on culture. Throughout the book I occasionally felt I knew too little about European history to follow it, but a quick google search usually rectified this. When the chapter on culture started listing off all the great, but unknown to me, playwrights, painters, composers and architects of the era I must admit I tuned out a little bit and just took what he was saying for granted.

Overall a really interesting book. I'm reading The Furies, also by Mayer, now, which is a comparative analysis of the terrors during the Russian and French revolutions.

Is there more modern Marxist literature where LTV is dismissed?

Hey did you know that the NYT has always been a bunch of vile shitheads? Oh you did? Well anyway, I got this anti-gem for you.

<Both absurdity and grim humor, perhaps unintended, combined in an 1895 New York Times obituary of Frederick Douglass, the celebrated son of a slave and a slave master. The author of the obituary ruminated on the idiotic question that must have been percolating in many minds: Which race could justly claim this superlatively gifted individual?

>It might not be unreasonable, perhaps, to intimate that his white blood may have something to do with the remarkable energy he displayed and the superior intelligence he manifested. Indeed, it might not be altogether unreasonable to ask whether, with more white blood, he would not have been an even better and greater man than he was, and whether the fact that he had black blood may not have cost the world a genius, and be, in consequence, a cause for lamentation instead of a source of lyrical enthusiasm over African possibilities. It is always more or less foolish to credit or discredit a race with the doings, good or bad, of a particular member of that race, but if it must be done, plain justice should see to it that the right race gets the glory or the humiliation.
I got this from the amazing book Racecraft by Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields (2012).

>>25617
very good citation.
the superstition of american racism is on full-display here, where whiteness appears as an "essence" which can be "added" to a person's soul, while blackness can only subtract from a person's potential whiteness (e.g. his integral humanity). further, the metaphysics are completely bonkers. how can douglass be more of "himself" when his internal constitution is fundamentally altered? it appears then that this spectre of a "lost" douglass is somehow even "more" of himself, than himself. God must be a white man, more than a formless spirit, to these people. well, indeed, we know that the nazarene was an aryan, dont we…? at least, thats what became popular to show. did you know that hitler actually manufactured bibles in the reich to censor Jesus' jewishness, in a promotion of "positive christianity"? christian antisemitism, is of course, a great mystery.

>>25554
sounds cool always looking for good marxist history books to read

>>25569
depends what you mean by "LTV".
watch this and see how you feel:

>>25622
Nice man if you end up reading it let me know your thoughts! I'm shelving the Furies for now. I keep running into the issue of not being familiar enough with the history of the French revolution and it makes it somewhat frustrating to read through.

I got Wages of Destruction for christmas so probably gonna continue with that instead. In case anyone is interested in reading about the holocaust I read picrel last year and it was really interesting. It's not explicitly Marxist, but I do feel like it takes a very materialist approach (emphasizing food, housing, plunder, forced labor and anti-partisan activity to name what comes to mind right now) to the topic. Gerlach also takes into account the broader European dimension showing how policies regarding Europe's Jews differed from country to country, but also how these policies contrasted in the heartlands vs the occupied frontiers. He also writes about the 3 million Soviet POWs that were starved to death at the start of operation Barbarossa, which is something that is not talked about often in the mainstream.

Finished Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad (2020). It's about imperialism. Many sentences in it feel like they were crafted for a fire speech. But the structure is messy. Prashad is not just bouncing back and forth between years, but decades; and not just countries, but continents.
<Colombia’s war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers, Turkey’s war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), or India’s war against the Maoists…

>>19860
Ghost Stories for the End of the World has turned me onto reading up on the mafia, specifically their parapolitical dimensions. I knew they had crossed paths with spooks during stuff like Gladio and the French Connection but my baby brain didn't appreciate just how much power and influence they wielded (and still do) especially in Italy. I think I still saw them as dumb mugs on TV in pinstripe suits with tommy guns running rackets and shit. Not as real power players in the real world.

Anyways, any good books or other resources on the history and politics of the mafia?

i just learned how many pop music stars are having their minds controlled by The Trumpist Propaganda Industry™ and being forced to promote the trad-values ideology against their will. Luckily, i never listened to a "trendy" pop song since 2021 and i am feeling more enlightened after watching a Gattsu video

>>25638
Codes of the Underworld by Diego Gambetta. I have no way of verifying its contents, but I can say he knows how to write interesting stuff. Just now I'm reading a paper by him and Steffen Hertog titled Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?

recently finished A Field Guide to Bacteria by Betsey Dexter Dyer which isn't actually structured like most field guides at all with sections of plates corresponding with a description section and instead has each chapter focus on how you can find a specific group of Bacteria in the wild without the use of a microscope. This is either achieved by finding Bacteria colonies that are big enough to be seen without a microscope or via field marks created by certain species. There's also a bunch of appendices on microscopy and making Winogradsky columns(the jar on the cover).

At one point the in the introduction the author described the guide written compilation for "trade secrets" for macroscopic identification of bacteria although one issue is a bunch of the chapters are only relevant if you visit a hotspring since many of those trade secrets revolve around people bioprospecting for stuff like heat resistant polymerases. That being said you could totally use this guide to find signs of bacteria or even huge bacteria colonies while out hiking, especially if you live near a salt marsh or swamp evidently.

Some of my personal highlights were leafcutter ants put patches of streptomyces on there body for anti-fungal purposes, Iron Bacteria that can be easily seen like Sphaerotilus natans and Leptothrix discophora, Nostoc commune colonies, Bacterial Crown Galls and anything to do with Sulfur Bacteria. Also salt marsh microbial mats are a great way to see Cyanobacteria and Sulfur Bacteria at the same time. I'd recommend if you want to see Bacteria without a microscope in your day to day life.

<Matter and Consciousness by Paul Churchland

>This is widely considered the standard introduction to the philosophy of mind from a materialist perspective. It is incredibly clear, rigorously argued, and directly contrasts Eliminative Materialism against dualism, behaviorism, and functionalism.

This shall be the next book I will read. Im really interested in taking materialism (not just in the vulgar marxist sense) to its logical conclusion.

>>25648
Really interesting stuff but maybe field guide isnt the one im looking for.

Here is a perfect illustration of nihilism:
>Socrates to Simmias: It seems likely that we shall, only then, when we are dead, attain that which we desire and of which we claim to be lovers, namely, wisdom, as our argument shows, not while we live; for if it is impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the body, then one of two things is true: either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so after death. Then and not before, the soul is by itself apart from the body. While we live, we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body and do not join with it more than we must, if we are not infected with its nature but purify ourselves from it until the god himself frees us.
<[Phaedo, 66e-67a]
This is the same thinking which 3 centuries afterwards, inspires Christianity and its renunciation of life (or rather, the location of eternal "life" in death - defined by Socrates as the perfection of knowledge by contact with things in themselves; e.g. Justice, Beauty and the Good).

Of course, as Lao Tzu more properly understands, the effects of the Tao (i.e. the Good) are necessarily phenomenal, since assigning knowledge to the thing in itself (e.g. noumenon) is impossible, for to give a name to the nameless, is to confuse the nominal for the real. The "perfection" of knowledge is therefore impossible, since as Lao Tzu tells us, his mind is empty, and it is this emptiness which is of the true nature of the Tao. Socrates approaches this in Apologia by telling us that what makes him most wise is the knowledge of his lack of knowledge. Wisdom then takes form without content. This negativity is expressed in Politeia where he sees dialectic as grasping truths from the place of ignorance. As yet, he is recklessly affirmative in the Phaedo.

Anyone else using NotebookLM to study?

>>25703
Is it any good? What do you use it for specifically?

Finished Unequal Exchange by Arghiri Emmanuel, with commentary by Charles Bettelheim (1972 translation by Brian Pearce). The blurb on the back promises something
<systematically and with logical rigor
…
Argh is off to a great start by quoting young Marx saying "one nation can grow rich at the expense of another". Argh likes that quote so much he will use it again at the end of this book of arguing against free trade. It is from a speech where Marx did not elaborate on that point at all and argued for free trade, but that doesn't bother Argh.

He expresses himself in Marxish terms, but contrary to Marx (and reality), he often assumes magically given shares, property claims on the output fixed ex ante, which is how he then "measures" the factors of production. (And Bettelheim notices that.)

Obnoxiously Argh's notes are at the end of each chapter. Sometimes these are just sources, sometimes sentences that seem as important as what is in the chapter's text or more. Likewise with Bettelheim's contributions. By what arcane procedure the authors decided to shift text into notes I cannot deduce. Here is one example: Page 247 describes a model of trade between Portugal and England:
<Everything has turned out for the better.
A little number leads you to this on page 260:
<Except, of course, for Portugal…
And the note goes on. And this is not even a particularly obnoxious example, as an alert reader can feel the sarcasm from context here. There are hundreds of notes, and with no visual indicator in the main text whether the note is a mere sourcing note or substantial commentary, I have to constantly go back and forth whenever I see a little number, so you can guess how tedious this gets. Putting the notes at the end of the chapter instead of the same page gives no benefit to readers. (I had to make do with a shitty PDF scan, dual-wielding e-readers and looking like an absolute cunt.)

On pages 90 and 91 is something really manipulative in how Argh quotes Marx. Argh tries to make him say something about stable differences between countries, the chapter is named Equilibrium Prices in External Exchanges after all, but the referred passages seem to be about short-term frictional differences in price formation. Moreover, these bits which get quoted right after each other are hundreds of pages apart in Marx. Of course, this only becomes visible to the reader who checks the notes numbered 69 to 72 at the end of the chapter.

Repeatedly Argh says first-world workers live on 20x or more income compared to the third world… Could they just work 5 % of the time and live from 1/20 of the full-time wage? If not, what does it mean. On page 142 Argh himself briefly notices that the result of this measure is in conflict with reality, but that doesn't stop him from continuing that way. That the first-worlder gives a quarter or even a third of his wage to the landlord is just a silly little detail that we won't allow to interfere with our shocking numbers about the wealth of you labor aristoKKKrats!

On page 163 there is this statement about how it can be argued unequal exchange does not apply inside a country:
<The branches or regions with a higher organic composition pour back into the other branches and regions the extra surplus value they have drawn out of the common pool, either through social legislation and state expenditure or else through interbranch financing carried out via the banking or the stock exchange.
But taxes on profit are calculated on profit and not surplus value, and Marx said higher organic composition receive transfers to obtain just average profits. (And empirically, the profits in branches with high organic composition seem to be lower than average.)

<bananas and spices are no more primary than meat or dairy products
That must be a compelling thing to say if you are dumb as shit, but the second law of thermodynamics says otherwise.

In Argh's Conclusion, he says what is to be done about his assumed massive value transfer due to low wages in the poor countries. Those workers fighting for higher wages? No, he says, that's impossible (page 267):
<A sudden leveling up of their wages to those of the advanced countries being, of course, out of the question a priori…
Why only present this extreme version just to dismiss it instead of some leveling up? What an ass. So with that "argument" of his…
<only two solutions are left: a tax on exports that will transfer this excess surplus value to the state;
And your state only wants the best for you, you stupid proles! Don't fight for yourselves! Sigh. Anyways, his second solution is diversification and import substitution. And he has actually a third idea: A massive worldwide transfer mechanism. So, for that he assumes worldwide socialism? -Well no, the condition for this is:
<If the very concept of the world economy has any meaning at all, and if it is not desired [by whom?] blahblahblah dangerous dislocation of the established division of labor, it will indeed be necessary to blah.
Great ending. Truly inspiring stuff.

There is almost as much text in the uh appendix apparatus (what's the plural of appendix?) as in the main text.

Appendix 1 is the first comment by Bettelheim. Starts polite, but it shows in detail really fundamental differences between Marxism and Argh's conception of given claims of the surplus share and the latter's incoherence. Bettelheim also points out that Marx had the rule of thumb that workers in more developed countries are the more exploited ones and why (page 302). And that Argh reminds him a bit of Proudhon.

Appendix 2 is titled Reply to Charles Bettelheim, however this is not his whole reply to appendix 1, some of it is instead in appendix 4 because linear texts are bourgeois or something. You might want to check appendix 4, footnote 18, replying to what Bettelheim said in footnote 11 of Appendix 1, and then check the context of that footnote, and make up your mind whether Argh is fair to his colleague (spoiler: he is not). Or go electrocute your genitals, which is probably more fun. On page 330 Argh makes it clear (I mean about as clear as he can ever get about anything) that he thinks the contributions of abstract labor can only be measured by what the market gives. Well, then a priori this rules out that anybody ever is exploited or what??? I don't know, man.

Appendix 5 got among other things a comparative-advantage model with numbers of relative productivity of industries A & B in countries named Center and Periphery (page 423), proving everything is totally unfair!!!1 Think about that the next time you buy some B, you firstworldie assholes. Well, if that doesn't convince you!

Bettelheim puts a big warning in the preface that Argh writes crap. And where is the preface? It's in appendix 3 out of 5. Yes. Because that's where you put the preface of a book. Just like when you piss in a bottle and there are thirsty children all around you, you put a warning at the bottom in yellow letters. Bettelheim invited Argh to piss in the bottle since Bettelheim is the director of the series the book is a part of, because he thinks it's important to show the world that this totally wrong line of thinking exists, and the translators shifted the label to the bottom because the world is round and America is at the bottom as seen from France.

THIS BOOK IS CANCERAIDS.

>>25717
>Is it any good?
I just started using NotebookLM and it certainly helps when you have +50 books and you want distill information from there. Easy to find sources too that are usually behind paywalls. You can make audio podcasts, mind maps, quiezzes and discuss with AI about the souces. It doesnt replace reading books but it helps to study larger subjects.

Finished Thomas Sankara Speaks (2nd ed. 2007, which got some texts that are absent in the 2016 ebook edition for I don't know what reason). Here is a bit from an interview with Jean-Philippe Rapp (1985):
<Sankara: When I was little I went to primary school in Gaoua. The principal there was a European and his children had a bicycle. The other children dreamed about this bicycle for months and months. We woke up thinking about it; we drew pictures of it; we tried to suppress the longing that kept welling up inside of us. We did just about everything to try to convince them to lend it to us. If the principal’s children wanted sand to build sand castles, we brought them sand. If it was some other favour they wanted, we rushed to do it. And all that just in the hope of having a ride – going for a spin, as we say here. We were all the same age, but there was nothing to be done.
<One day, I realised all our efforts were in vain. I grabbed the bike and said to myself: “Too bad, I’m going to treat myself to this pleasure no matter what the consequences.”

<Rapp: And what were the consequences?

<Sankara: They arrested my father and threw him in prison. I was expelled from school. My brothers and sisters did not dare go back. It was terrifying. How could this possibly fail to create profound feelings of injustice among children of the same age?

I found the interviews more interesting than the speeches, but there are some good bits in those as well, like this one:
<There are individuals who prefer to be number one in a village rather than number two in the city. And since they don't wish to be number two in the city, they prefer to keep their organizations for themselves. They reject unification even though their organization is for it.

>>25721
I tried it out and it's pretty handy. Indeed not a replacement for reading books, but it did help me find specific things I've read again as I don't always take extensive notes or mark things. Kind of like ctrl-f on steroids.

Not sure about the other functions, I don't really trust AI to not just make shit up but at least you can check the sources easily so that helps.

>>25281
I have that one on my shelf and have been meaning to read it, although I know the general sweep of the revolution from the Adolfo Gilly book.
Womack also did an interesting book about the strands that came to form the core of neozapatismo, from the defeated insurgent communists of the Mexican 60s and 70s to the indigenous people running religious study groups that quickly cascaded into discussing their societal position.
Also fun fact: he's the grandfather of dead rapper Lil Peep lol.

Anybody know a good way of digitizing books beyond just scanning it? I've got some one-of-one shit from the library rn and it's only 100 pages and want to "keep" it for future reference. I tried using various AI chatbots but it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.

Finished Computation and its Limits by Paul Cockshott, Lewis M. Mackenzie, Greg Michaelson (2012).

Yes, quantum fuzziness is an issue with shrinking circuits and there is the heat issue with speeding up things. OK I fully agree, but this could have been just an article. They make their point about physical limits over and over. This is really an exercise of nerds bullying lesser nerds. When you tell somebody their hypercomputing proposal is not compatible with findings in physics from over a century ago, you could just leave it at that. There is no need to then go on and prove it wouldn't even work in a universe with Newtonian mechanics!

Lots of typos. I doubt more than a dozen people have even read this. And who would benefit? Imagine a guy saying this:
"I'm so lucky you told me that black holes don't last forever. I was just about to throw myself into a black hole in order to speed up time outside relative to my position and to receive updates from an indestructible computer outside of my hole finishing an infinite computation. But now I realize the fooolishness of that. Thank you sooo much." (Yes, this is actually one of the debunked proposals.)

currently reading Political Treatise by Spinoza alongside Political Theology by Schmitt. After I'm with those I think I'll take a break and read some Mishima

Finished What Do Bosses Do? by Stephen A. Marglin (1974), amazing piece arguing that the choice of technique is driven by power struggle. That type of argument would not be alien to Marx, but Marglin is leaning so much into it and making the case with such forcefulness and clarity he is outmarxing Marx.

Found a 2023 CUNY Dissertation summarizing research on terrorism and (counter)insurgency. Too early into it to have an opinion otherwise, especially on its critiques on Mao.

Thinking about the formation of the vanguard + the castration of the global majority by dopamine tech

thinking about martyrs. considering revisiting the cushvlogs.

Just finished The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (2020). Good. Bleak. Hard lefties will be annoyed by his insistence of using the term "crony capitalism". I guess the message is that Fidel was right: You need to be ready to defend yourself against VIOLENT reactionaries (and/or ready to flee). The Indonesian communists were not armed and got slaughtered. The third-biggest communist party after the Russians and the Chinese. And poof! Gone. There is a world map at the end showing "Anticommunist Extermination Programs, 1945–2000", in total a bit under 2 million, 1 million in Indonesia.

lately ive been stuck in a constant loop of reading kant for classes, and slowly my brain feels like its being degraded by his absolute morality slop. please free me /edu/

>>25824
my hb is doing the same and we came to the conclusion that the categorical imperative only made sense to Kant since he was a privileged aristocrat that had the same exact fucking schedule every day of his life.

>>25825
cat. imp. only works if you exist in a fucking bubble. anything kant had to say is so easily disproven in the world of moral philosophy if you spend more than 10 minutes outside the castle's gates. fucker was just a NEET with extra steps

Today I'm checking Edu to see if anyone's shared a copy of the Politics of Cosmology by Murray Bookchin.
I've actually been thinking about looking into PHD program in history. A friend has said I would be a good teacher and I am doing amateur historical research as a hobby. Maybe a career of it would be good

>>25824
>i am being forced to think for myself, please help.
hmm…
>>25825
>rich people are inherently moral
<poor people are inherently immoral
so insightful…
>>25828
What are you actually trying to say? People are immoral, therefore we should not strive to be moral ourselves? At least Plato posits a "greater good" at the expense of conditional immorality, and Aristotle posits a greater good by original causes, yet you have no stated theory of what constitutes virtue so as to disagree with Kant. Kant's notion of virtue is based in necessity, according to practical reason, in that what is best to do must be done for its own sake, and thus be unconditional. Only by this may activity be considered an "end in-itself" and thus allow for positive freedom in man. If elsewise, then the Will is bound to contingency, and thus its ends are separated from its means. In this, man is always enslaved to a higher condition than himself, and so can never be free. So then, freedom is a question of law, but an inward law, like Rousseau's General Will, or the Apostle Paul's Law "written on our hearts". I once spoke to someone who claimed that Kant was promotinhg self-justification, while I viewed Kant as still being protestant, for Man is not taken to be an end in himself, besides his accordance to the Moral Law, which is subjectively revealed rather than objectively mandated. Zizek further attributes this to predestination and the unconscious, as having their inscribed practical reason (e.g. LGBT persons "choose" but do not "choose" their subjective identity, and so what is voluntary is also necessary, e.g. a cat. imp.)

Honestly sometimes I wonder why I bother pursuing this political science degree. It feel somewhat pointless, like I'm wasting my time and I should be organizing at work or in my community instead.

>>25829
>I am doing amateur historical research as a hobby
What have you researched? I like reading history but idk what I'd want to actually research myself.

I've finished three more books about Nazi Germany.
>The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
An overview of the Nazi economy. My impression is that the Nazis hopped from crisis to crisis employing every trick in the book and outside of it to keep the economy afloat. Tooze shows the impact of rearmament on the German economy and many of the considerations during both peace time and war. He debunks many myths that have been perpetuated after the war about German military and economic might, as well as the Albert Speer armament miracle. What amazed me is just how close the Nazis kept coming to disaster before the war even started and how they kept getting away with it by some financial wizardry by Hjalmar Schacht or some other windfall.

>Hitler's Beneficiaries by Götz Aly
Germans were the OG treatlerites. The loyalty/passivity of the population was bought by never letting the costs of rearmament or war fall on their shoulders, instead levying more taxes on the upper echelons of German society and of course expropriating and exploiting the Jews and other racial enemies. Occupation costs paid by the vanquished nations of Europe doubled or even tripled their national budgets and ensured the German people could live in relative comfort while, at least on paper, their economy was strained to the maximum. Even secret loans made with ordinary Germans' savings as collateral would be paid for after the Endsieg by the brutal exploitation of the conquered territories.

German soldiers on deployment were encouraged to send back as many goods as possible back home. Customs regulations were relaxed on Goering's orders so soldiers on leave could bring home even more spoils of war. All of this provided a huge increase in the material wealth of ordinary Germans, who could have never enjoyed so many goods with the rations they were allowed. Soldiers encouraged their loved ones to send them money and even trinkets to barter with, meaning that the home front actively participated in emptying foreign store shelves.

Forced laborers in Germany were essentially paid by their own governments. Eastern European laborers were exploited to an even larger degree. They were paid the lowest wages and paid the highest taxes. They were forced to pay into social programs they had no right to and had a forced savings program that the Nazis never intended to pay out.

Aly shows that, as he puts it, the Holocaust cannot be understood without seeing it as an act murderous larceny. Jewish homes and furniture were given to victims of allied bombings. Punitive taxes and expropriation in the conquered and allied nations was used to ease inflation which the occupying Germans had themselves caused. Aryanized Jewish property under trusteeship were converted into government bonds, allowing the state to access Jewish wealth. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the Jews of Salonika, of whom, among many other goods, 12 tons of gold was stolen to keep the hyper inflated Drachma afloat.

Aly calculates that 70% of the cost of the war fell on the shoulders of nations conquered by or allied to Germany, Jews and forced laborers. Leaving only 30% for the German Volk.

I highly recommend this book, I can't remember the last time I finished one so fast.

>Hoe ontstond de Jodenmoord? By L. J. Hartog
A short Dutch book on what lead to the holocaust. The title would probably be translated best as The Origins of the Judeocide. Hartog posits that the Jews, and specifically the Jews west of what would become the frontline with the Soviet Union were hostages to dissuade the entry of the United States into the war. He claims that Hitlers infamous profecy about the destruction of the Jews if they were to start another world war has to be taken at face value and that this threat specifically concerned a world war, as opposed to what until the attack on Pearl Harbor was a European war. US entry into the war ment the lives of the Jews were forfeit, and Hitler could simply nod to the likes of Himmler and Heydrich who would know what had to be done. This runs contrary to the idea of cumulative radicalization, which posits there was no need for a Führer order.

I think the distinction made here between the "Barbarossa Jews" and "Non-Barbarossa Jews" is interesting, as it explains why the Jews in, for example, the General Government were spared while in the east there had already been more than 6 months of mass murder. The proximity to Germany at a time when its international standard may have still mattered probably made it unattractive to go forward with immediate genocide. Meanwhile, post US entry, Aktion Reinhard reached its murderous peak in the summer of '42.

The historian Gerlach, who I've mentioned earlier in the thread, notes that officials in the General Government knew already in the early autumn of '41 that they would have fewer Jewish mouths to feed the next year, which, if we follow Hartog's argument, means they had prior knowlegde of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the war, which is highly unlikely as I'm pretty sure the Japanese themselves didn't even know this at this point. This means that Hartog's hypothesis is probably incorrect, but I still think the idea of the western European Jews as hostages, and Soviet Jews falling outside of this category, is interesting and he is probably correct that the genocide was ordered in december 1941.

More likely is that the halting of the German advance into the Soviet Union resulting in the drawn out war they had always feared was the nail in the coffin for Europe's Jews.

>>25858
>Hitler's Beneficiaries by Götz Aly
Here is Adam Tooze on that book:
https://taz.de/Einfach-verkalkuliert/!635819/
tl;dr: The book's core claim fails basic math check.

>>25859
I was gonna mention that but the English version of the book has an appendix addressing this critique. I don't know if it's published anywhere else separately but I'll see if I can find my edition of the book online when I'm home.

>>25859
Page 351, "A Note on Calculations", for the response. Also,
>The billions of dollars that were channeled from German savings banks, banks and insurance companies into the Reich treasury through so-called silent financing were the mainstay of war financing, not tax income or occupation costs. These involuntarily invested amounts were the monetary expression of the real economic costs of war: people could neither consume nor invest their money.
is crazy because this is addressed in a chapter in the book (Virtual War Debts on page 327), page as Aly points out in the response. In case of a Nazi victory, the conquered people's of Europe were going to be saddled with ensuring these debts were paid. The fact that these debts were paid post-war by the Germans is irrelevant to Aly's thesis.

>>25860
Aly wrote a reply to Tooze, also published in taz:
https://taz.de/Nicht-falsch-sondern-anders-gerechnet/!635089/
Tooze's reply to that:
https://taz.de/Doch-falsch-gerechnet--weil-falsch-gedacht/!634818/
<Um es deutlich zu sagen: Aly verrechnet sich – weil er falsch denkt. Er glaubt offensichtlich, dass staatliche Kredite nur zu einer Bürde werden, wenn man sie zurückbezahlen muss. Das geht aus seiner Replik hervor, in der es heißt, „die für den Krieg auf dem deutschen Kapitalmarkt aufgenommenen Kredite“ „verzögerten“ die „reale Belastung der deutschen Bevölkerung mit dem Ziel, diese Schulden so bald wie möglich versklavten Völkern aufzubürden“. Die Aufnahme des Kredits selbst bedeutete also, so Aly, für die Deutschen keine „reale Belastung“, erst die Tilgung, die dann aber auf die besetzten Gebiete abgewälzt werden sollte.

<Dieser Gedanke aber, dass man mit Krediten die Belastungen eines Krieges „verzögern“ kann, ist Alys grundlegender Denkfehler.

And Nazi tax policy was more regressive than in the Allied countries, read (or just peek at the tables on the last two pages):
Was Nazi Germany an “Accommodating Dictatorship”? A Comparative Perspective on Taxation of the Rich in World War II by Marc Buggeln. Abstract:
<Götz Aly’s book Hitler’s Beneficiaries considers the Nazi regime an “accommodating dictatorship.” According to Aly, the majority of the population benefited from the Nazis’ war. He sums up Nazi tax policy under the headings “Tax Breaks for the Masses” and “Tax Rigor for the Bourgeoisie.” This perspective represented progress in that, until then, tax policy had not featured in any of the major historical overviews of National Socialism. For a more in-depth assessment of Nazi tax policy, however, it must be compared against the tax policies of Germany’s wartime enemies. I compare tax policies in Germany, Britain, and the United States and show that Aly’s theories do not hold. They are neither consistent with the declared intentions of those who imposed these policies nor with the results as reflected in the relevant statistics.

>>25861
>Page 351, "A Note on Calculations", for the response.
First part of that is just repeating his response in taz, then admitting Tooze is right that big human groups can't shift burdens into the future by credit like individuals can do, then "countering" that by repeating anecdotes about looting, and adding a petty insult ("Overy and Tooze are more interested in the official statistics of Nazi Germany…"). Yeah, what matter if your brother dies in war if he can score you some nice shoes before that. Wheee!

>In case of a Nazi victory, the conquered people's of Europe were going to be saddled with ensuring these debts were paid. The fact that these debts were paid post-war by the Germans is irrelevant to Aly's thesis.
To rescue his main thesis, Aly is resorting to a psychic income from hype. Do you really want to follow him in this.

>>25862
Thank you for linking the full exchange. Tooze himself recommends reading this review on his blog rather than the back-and-forth in TAZ: https://adamtooze.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Tooze-Review-of-Aly-for-Dapim-2005-.pdf. I'll read the other study you posted today, I didn't realize Aly was breaking new grounds by examining Nazi tax policy in his book (I don't recall if he mentions this in the book). Aly also mentions this study in a footnote in A Note on Calculations, which he says backs up his interpretation: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12137/w12137.pdf.

Whoever's correct (and it seems to me it is Tooze) I still think the book is valuable. I don't think anecdotes about looting by individual soldiers can be handwaved away when it seems like this was backed by official policy of the regime, such as the easing up of customs regulations that I mentioned. Nobody would trade a loved one for a pair of Tunisian shoes, but surely it didn't hurt home front morale when domestically unavailable consumer goods or foodstuffs came in the mail or on the backs of a relative on leave.

I do think the Nazi leadership "cared" about the home front a lot. They feared a repeat of the overthrow of the Hohenzollern after WW1, so they made sure that starvation and inflation was kept outside of the Reich's borders ("If someone has to go hungry, let it be someone other than a German").

Anyway, I'm going to hazard a guess and say you are more knowledgeable about all this than I am. If you have any recommended books that were not immediately debunked after publication, I would love to hear it.

Finished a classic book about American mass media: Inventing Reality (second edition, 1993) by Michael Parenti. Very good, with many concrete examples. Nitpick: There is the claim Salvador Allende was killed and I'm pretty sure he shot himself. I've seen this book compared with the more well-known Manufacturing Consent' by Hermann and Chomsky (read that over a decade ago), everyone saying Inventing Reality is the more engaging read. Fully agree. (I don't think Chomsky's writing style is strong competition tbh.) Despite its age, many names I recognize show up: Among others, there are Biden and Sanders, and Jesse Jackson (who died this year like Parenti).

>>25867 (me)
Sorry, I intended to just bold the two titles.

Finished Biology as Ideology by Richard Charles Lewontin (1991), a monologue deconstructing the idea you could explain society from DNA. I find the text very clear and can't imagine anybody still believing in "sociobiology" after reading this, but I have to admit that I started reading this having already the same convictions as Lewontin.

Another Dutch book. Witte Ko: Herinneringen uit het Gewapend Verzet. This one is not going to win any prizes for its prose, it's a transcript of an interview or a series of interviews.

Jan Brasser (nom de guerre: Witte Ko) was a Dutch communist and resistance fighter. In the book he retells his many actions against the occupier during the war years, actions that he either participated in or ordered. Starting out with acts of organized workplace sabotage as well as strikes and stoppages at the Hoogovens steel factory (modern day Tata steel), Brasser was soon a wanted man and had to go underground. His actions included sabotage, prison breaks, raids on government offices and assassinations. He also risked his life for what I can only describe as a prank, by raising the Soviet flag on a German army outpost after the defeat at Stalingrad.

After the war he worked with the government to bring to justice people who had profited off of the occupation, but was frustrated when he saw many of them walk and enjoy prominent positions in Dutch business. Once he left the service of the government , he was denied his old job at Hoogovens, probably because he was a communist and had proven himself a capable organizer.

Five years of not knowing if he would end the day in front of a firing squad and regularly losing comrades had a major impact on him, not to mention the thousands of kilometers that he cycled and the lack of food during the hunger winter.

Although a third of the Dutch communist party members participated in the resistance, this was soon, and purposefully, forgotten. They were not even allowed to lay a wreath at the grave of their fallen comrade Hannie Schaft when she reburied from her unmarked grave in the dunes. The official remembrance of the february strike too did not allow the participation of the CPN until many years after the war, even though they were the ones who organized it. This last part genuinely pisses me the fuck off, but I've come to expect no better of this country.

I haven't read theory in maybe 8-10 years, back when I still worked with the local militant left (OWS and Chile's 2011 were a fresh memory then), OG /leftypol/ had a vibrant and active community and I still had some of the sparkle in my eyes left. Nowadays I lurk here, leftychan and other boards every once in a new moon

Been meeting with old friends, exchanging ideas, talking about books and Monitoring The Situation™, and more generally I've been interested in reading, and pondering about e.g. Marxist views on ecology, the AI boom and behavioral control through machine learning-powered social media, China's development and governance, some Latin American history, lots of random bits about anthropology and prehistoric humans, etc.

Can't say I've read a lot; being a second year PhD student in applied mathematics has kept me busy. Would love to think further about how that ties in to socialist theory and praxis – I definitely read Cockshott-Cottrell as an edgy teenager and am very familiar with Allende era Chile's Cybersyn experience, but I'm sure there's potential to further understand and develop these things given our current comprehension and understanding of ML/AI and data. Cockshott's own takes on that have been kind of shallow imo, nowadays he seems to be focusing on his YouTube/Zoom lectures about political economy and sometimes world news?

Attached is one of the last books I've read about China. Also here's a historical study on Cybersyn if anyone's interested: https://leftypol.org/leftypol/src/1623233979634.pdf

@ theory, might eventually revisit Gramsci or something now that I have a developed frontal lobe