/edu/ - Education

We may first read Marx's letter to Feuerbach (11/08/1844) in which he proclaims that Feuerbach has given meaning to the socialists (by a conversion of theology to anthropology, such as we see in much early 19th century discourse; where Man himself is seen to be God). Marx thus demonstrates extreme adoration:
<I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and — if I may use the word — love, which I feel for you. Your Philosophie der Zukunft, and your Wesen des Glaubens, in spite of their small size, are certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together. In these writings you have provided — I don't know whether intentionally — a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!
http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1844/letters/44_08_11.html
Shortly after this, we have Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845) which pithily concerns Marx's criticism of Feuerbach's "Contemplative Materialism" and contrarily suggests a practical and active sensuousness:
<The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. […] The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. […] The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Abridged to this is the German ideology (1845), which criticises Feuerbach's "contemplative materialism", as considering Man too theoretically, while Marx counterposes Communism as a "practical materialism" which views man as a social and historical product:
<In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” […] Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure” materialists in that he realises how man too is an “object of the senses.” But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an “object of the senses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are […] As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is already obvious from what has been said.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm
Thus, Marx's ultimate criticism is that Man is not an abstract entity, but a subject to historical conditions.

Engels on the origin of Anarchism (1886):
<Stirner remained a curiosity, even after Bakunin blended him with Proudhon and labelled the blend “anarchism”.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm

>>26048
>How?
People are both constrained by society and enabled by society to do things they couldn't do alone. The higher up you are, the more freedom you have.
>the capitalist cannot consume their wealth, but is compelled to invest it
Capitalists certainly also consume a part of it and that part is several times bigger than what is necessary to have the same standard of living as a worker (which is already more than necessary).
>More money, more problems.
You can give me your money if you feel so oppressed by it.

In Reuven Yaron's translation of the Akkadian "Laws of Eshnunna" (1900 BCE), we see in laws 56/57, a disparity between the compensation of a free man and a slave:
<If a dog (was) vicious and the ward (authorities) have had (it) made known to its owner, but he did not guard his dog and it bit a man and caused (him) to die — the owner of the dog 2/3 a mina silver shall weigh out. If a slave it gored and caused (him) to die, — 15 shekels of silver he shall weigh out.
The ratio of shekel to mina is 60:1, and so we can see that the difference between the men is 40:15, or around triple. We can compare this to later Anglo-Saxon law (Æthelberht's laws, 600 CE) to review class inequality:
<[Theft of] God's property and the Church's shall be compensated twelve fold; a bishop's property eleven fold; a priest's property nine fold ; a deacon's property six fold ; a clerk's property three fold. […] If a freeman robs the king, he shall pay back a nine fold amount. […] If a freeman robs a freeman, he shall pay a three fold compensation
So we see the church as the highest class, even above the king, who is equal to the priest, but below a bishop, and a freeman is equal to a cleric. We also see a formal structure of the three estates elaborated (law 26):
<If he slays a lœt of the best class, he shall pay 80 shillings. If he slays one of the second class, he shall pay 60 shillings. [For slaying one of] the third class, he shall pay 40 shillings.
So we see how class is measured according to these codes of compensation. Justice then appears as quantitative and relative.

>>19860
Really just contextualizes everything.
https://www.amazon.com/Village-Tsarist-Russia-Religion-America-ebook/dp/B07FZX74DG?tag=jasocraw=20
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life

Here I will give an overview of the ancient cosmogony.

We begin with many various sources which all report an original, uncreated matter, from which all other things are composed (a substance we may call Prima Materia), and for which gives a sense of timeless matter; Chaos, before creation orders stuff into things.

Ovid - Metamorphosis (8 CE):
<Before the sea, land, and heavens, which cover everything, the entire world of nature looked the same. They called it Chaos, a crude, confused mass, nothing but lifeless stuff and scattered seeds of matter not yet properly combined, all piled up in the same place together […] No matter retained its own proper shape […] This conflict god and more favourable nature stopped. For he cut land off from sky, and water from land, and separated the bright heavens from heavy air. Then, once he had drawn off these elements and taken them away from the confused mass, he set them apart, fixing them in place in harmonious peace.
We see that to Ovid, Chaos is synonymous with the formless, and form only comes to be with distinction of parts from the whole; thus, being is determined by an internal difference (such that being is constituted by the negative law of non-contradiction. e.g. A ≠ Not-A). It's not that matter was "created", but only that creation is the order of an uncreated mass into "proper shape". We may compare this to Plato's writings; e.g. Timaeus (30a):
<The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all that was visible—not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion—and brought it from a state of disor-der to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder.
Here, Chaos precedes creation, which is simply the fixing of Prima Materia into order, the same as Ovid describes it; not that God created matter, but that matter is eternal, and that God seems to be made of matter. Thus, when God "creates", he is not creating ex-nihilo, but in proper Newtonian fashion, simply trans-forming existing energy into new shapes and patterns. The principle difference we may say between the created and uncreated is time, which Plato describes here (37d):
<Now it was [God's] nature to be eternal, but it isn’t possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten. And so [God] began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This number, of course, is what we now call “time.” […] time that imitates eternity and circles according to number.
Thus, the uncreated must by necessity be eternal, while creation is temporal. Matter is synonymous with motion, yet motion is causal, and so a primary cause to motion is presupposed in matter; this makes time caused from the timeless, for time as motion cannot cause itself. For matter to precede time thus requires either eternal time, which is a contradiction, or timeless matter. Matter in disorder thus precedes time by Chaos, while order is the procession of time according to number (e.g. Logos). We will return to this after first relating other myths.

Orphic Hymns 3 - To Night:
<I shall sing of Night, mother of gods and men; we call Night Kypris, she gave birth to all.
While in Hesiod's Theogony (700 BCE), Chaos was first:
<Verily at the first Chaos came to be […] From Chaos came forth Erebus [Darkness] and black Night
We see this formless darkness in Genesis 1, as well:
<In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
We see formless chaos in the Enuma Elish (1100 BCE):
<When in the height heaven was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name […] When of the gods none had been called into being, And none bore a name, and no destinies [were ordained]…
And in the Norse Völuspá, Verse 3 (1100 CE):
<There was in times of old, where Ymir dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves; earth existed not, nor heaven above, ‘twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere.

So then, before time, there was uncreated matter, which itself was not yet entered into time, but time itself was made from matter put into order. We see Plato describe time as the construction of the "same" (Zodiac) and "different" (Planets) which account for a hidden cycle, superior to both the duration of the month (moon) and year (sun). This cycle is described as the planets coming into alignment with the Zodiac (38c-39d):
<Such was the reason, then, such the god’s design for the coming to be of time, that he brought into being the Sun, the Moon and five other stars, for the begetting of time […] A month has passed when the Moon has completed its own cycle and overtaken the Sun; a year when the Sun has completed its own cycle […] time brings to completion the perfect year at that moment when the relative speeds of all eight periods have been completed together and, measured by the circle of the Same that moves uniformly, have achieved their consummation. This, then, is how as well as why those stars were begotten which, on their way through the universe, would have turnings.
So then, time itself is simply an accounting for the "perfect year" which descends all the way down to the solar year, month, week, day, etc. Time is cyclical. This is also described in the Hindu Mahabrat, that apart from the ages of the cosmos (described in Hesiod and Virgil), there is an account for the revolution of the cycle, a thousand of which acts as a day for Brahmin (kalpa):
<A cycle of the Yugas [ages] thus comprised a period of twelve thousand years. A full thousand of such cycles would constitute a day of Brahma. 
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15474/15474-h/15474-h.htm
12,000 years per day and night (24,000 total) then appears as the Hindu "perfect year", while others (e.g. astrologers) offer the same numbers to account for the precession of the equinoxes (with the complete Zodiacal cycle being around 24-26,000 years). Thus, the four ages act as "seasons" in the great year. Later Hindu revisionists attempt to expand the length of these times, but I prefer the authenticity of the original. It should also be noted that Virgil preached the coming of a new Golden Age in his time (which esoterically, may refer to the Age of Pisces, wherein Christ is the herald). The Greek Iron Age began after the Age of Heroes (after the Trojan War), which if related to the Parian Chronicle (264 BCE) began around 1200-1000 BCE. Virgil (40 BCE):
<Now the last age of the Cumaean prophecy begins: the great roll-call of the centuries is born anew: now Virgin Justice returns, and Saturn’s reign: now a new race descends from the heavens above. Only favour the child who’s born, pure Lucina, under whom the first race of iron shall end, and a golden race rise up throughout the world: now your Apollo reigns.
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilEclogues.php#anchor_Toc533239265
According to Astrologers, the Age of Pisces (e.g. the birth of Christ) began 11th September, 3 BCE (6-7PM). Thus, the Age of Pisces arrives between 2000-2200 CE.

We may further relate Plato's view of cosmic time from his other dialogues, such as his Republic, Book X:
<in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the chains of heaven let down from above: for this light is the belt of heaven, and holds together the circle of the universe, like the under-girders of a trireme. From these ends is extended the spindle of Necessity, on which all the revolutions turn […] The first and outermost whorl has the rim broadest, and the seven inner whorls are narrower […] The largest (of fixed stars) is spangled […] Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the whole revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in the other
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html
Here we see a clockwise and counter-clockwise turn, the same as what is described in Plato's Statesman, which borrows from Hesiod's distinction between the reign of Cronos (Golden Age) and Zeus (cosmic decay):
<There was a time when God directed the revolutions of the world, but at the completion of a certain cycle he let go; and the world, by a necessity of its nature, turned back, and went round the other way. For divine things alone are unchangeable; but the earth and heavens, although endowed with many glories, have a body, and are therefore liable to perturbation. In the case of the world, the perturbation is very slight, and amounts only to a reversal of motion. […] But the truth is, that there are two cycles of the world, and in one of them it is governed by an immediate Providence, and receives life and immortality, and in the other is let go again, and has a reverse action during infinite ages. […] Such was the age of Cronos, and the age of Zeus is our own. […] The reason of the falling off was the disengagement of a former chaos; 'a muddy vesture of decay' was a part of his original nature, out of which he was brought by his Creator, under whose immediate guidance, while he remained in that former cycle, the evil was minimized and the good increased to the utmost. And in the beginning of the new cycle all was well enough, but as time went on, discord entered in; at length the good was minimized and the evil everywhere diffused, and there was a danger of universal ruin. Then the Creator, seeing the world in great straits, and fearing that chaos and infinity would come again, in his tender care again placed himself at the helm and restored order, and made the world immortal and imperishable. 
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1738/1738-h/1738-h.htm
Thus, the astrological view of Plato is of a clockwise and counter-clockwise revolution, with the realm of fixed stars operating in reverse to the planets. This is the orthodoxy concerning the precession of the equinoxes. The Zodiac is then a superior cycle to that of the inner planets, for it is closest to the eternal nature of divinity (Plato designating the gods within the furthest heaven). So then, creation is not an act, but a process of setting matter into order, as a cycle of time which limits itself. At either end of creation and destruction is Chaos. God itself must also be born from Chaos, and so, nought exists besides eternal Chaos, transforming itself.

I read two articles today:

• One was about the links between american and european anti-muslim writers and the 2011 Norway shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20181130134314/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/us/25debate.html?_r=1
  
  
• The other was about Thomas Matthew Crooks and the last period of his life. Link: https://archive.is/98jhF
  
  

I am also wondering what happened to latexanon's Black Book of Capitalism project? Link: https://git.leftypol.org/latexanon/bboc

Marx on communism as a "retvrn" to the ancient past (1881):
<In the words of an American writer who, supported in his work by the Washington government, is not at all to be suspected of revolutionary tendencies, [’the higher plane'] ‘the new system’ to which modern society is tending ‘will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type.’ We should not, then, be too frightened by the word ‘archaic’. […] The crisis will come to an end with the elimination of capitalist production and the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm

The Lacanian quilting point is a structuralist understanding of constituting signification. Signification is not simply nominal, but grammatical, by means of punctuation, which applies retroactivity to a signifying chain. The psychotic subject is in effect, post-structural, through failing to constitute signification. Political activity, as Todd suggests, can only be performed structurally, in constuting significance to causes. It is the signifier which gives meaning, and so, like the philosopher, sets out a project of description, which in turn, generates prescription. A defense of this is the fact that ideas gain currency when described in a certain way, making the form often determinative of the content.

Clauses 3(f) and 18 from the 1918 Soviet Constitution:
<Universal obligation to work is introduced for the purpose of eliminating the parasitic strata of society and organizing the economic life of the country.
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article1.htm
<The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic considers work the duty of every citizen of the Republic, and proclaims as its motto: 'He shall not eat who does not work.'
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article2.htm
Article 12 from the 1936 Soviet Constitution:
<In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism : "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm
Article 14 from the 1977 Soviet Constitution:
<The source of the growth of social wealth and of the well-being of the people, and of each individual, is the labour, free from exploitation, of Soviet people. The state exercises control over the measure of labour and of consumption in accordance with the principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work". It fixes the rate of taxation on taxable income.Socially useful work and its results determine a person's status in society. By combining material and moral incentives and encouraging innovation and a creative attitude to work, the state helps transform labour into the prime vital need of every Soviet citizen.
https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/Russian/const/77cons01.html

So I want to make infographics for propaganda with AI but im out of ideas. Any suggestions?

been thinking about Mao a bit and reading on the cultural revolution, seems as if we never really get to see what would've been the conclusion of what would've happened if it wasnt a failure.

Going through A Man for All Markets, the autobiography of Edward O. Thorp (2017).

First third of the book: Born in the USA in the 1930s, he is an otherworldly child prodigy with unreal memory capabilities, which fade a bit as he grows into a less strange young adult with excellent grades. Having experienced poverty first-hand as a child and realizing the need to stand up to your boss, he decides how to you use his skills for great justice: TO OWN PEOPLE AT BLACKJACK. This is a wild ride and more than enough for a movie. He also does this for other games and develops (together with Claude Shannon) a hidden portable device to estimate where the ball will land in Roulette.

Second third: He enters the world of finance orders and becomes one of the first "Quants", as well as one of the most successful. This is still very interesting, it just doesn't quite hold up to the thrills of the first part. You might ask: Why is that, the stakes are now higher by orders of magnitude. Well, that's just the money side. But now you never worry whether some of his partners will have an "accident".

Last third: Hmm, now it feels the spark of life has left the book. Here comes the part with the old man yelling at clouds and the self-help advice. He says what he did at Roulette back in the day was perfectly fine and NOT CHEATING, SO DON'T REMEMBER HIM AS A CHEATER, because it wasn't illegal yet. But those kids today with their high-frequency trading, ugh, where is the value in what they are doing, where are the morals… He says: Don't drink a six-pack a day (do Americans really?) and then why not invest that left-over money. This advice comes right after him talking about some other Quant who moved slightly later into the game and who was slightly less smart than him and who got the (Pseudo-)"Nobel" Prize in Economics and who completely fucked up. OK that's about it, I'm seeing the rest is mostly mathy appendices, sources, notes, photos. Barely any proper text left. So this is how you end your would-be masterpiece? Shouldn't you hammer into the reader that an INDEX FUND is probably the way to go and not active investing? (An index fund performs no worse than average and you save on management fees, so with that considered it's above average.) Oh wait, he does.

Pretty good!

Why of all marxists, Marx is the most difficult one to understand and how can I understand better his texts?

>>26186
Did you jump straight to Capital? Maybe read some Engels first, he's a great Marx whisperer. Anti-Duhring is easy to understand, although a bit tedious to read because its 50% a diss track of this Duhring guy you have never heard of. The other 50% is actual understandable 101 on Marx's thoughts

>>26186
I could be completely wrong but I once heard that academic german doesn't translate well to english at all

>>26187
No, but I've been reading mostly Engels and Lenin without any problems. But whenever I start reading Marx, I always have a hard time understanding him. The way he just writes is just complicated for some weird reason. Guessing from your answer, this is normal but I wish to understand him better.

>>26186
Read the Manifesto.
For reading comprehension in general, try making notes.

Doesn't this scan of "Brut y Brenhinedd" (1500) remind you of Chris Chan's comics and felt pen drawings? Art has a universal mediocrity, it seems. In looking at much more impressive manuscripts of the time, such as the Coverdale Bible (1535), there seems to be an importance of pictures in books during the 16th century, since each book in this Bible has pictures in it - with the front page also inspiring the later 1611 Authorised Edition (KJV), which in the introductory pages has brilliant illustrations displaying the genaeologies of the characters. Pictures in books are universally associated with juvenility today, but it was common in 16th century Britain.
https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/manuscripts/the-middle-ages/history-of-the-kings

Starting to nibble at Harding and Lih's analyses of Lenin's thought as far as political theory goes—one embarrassing note being that I just discovered Cottrell's response to that Austrian Engelhardt about his work and have only come out of it resolute that I don't know nearly enough about optimization

Currently reading this. Will make a thread when I finish.

Hey guys i need your help, i am looking for the PDF of the book "The triumph of Broke promises" about the fall of the Eastern Bloc, i remember reading it in the past here
PLZ HELP!!!!

<It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often, that the multiplier itself conveys an idea, not more definite than the savage implies when he points to the hairs of his head. As often as I have seen beds of mud, sand, and shingle, accumulated to the thickness of many thousand feet, I have felt inclined to exclaim that causes, such as the present rivers and the present beaches, could never have ground down and produced such masses. But, on the other hand, when listening to the rattling noise of these torrents, and calling to mind that whole races of animals have passed away from the face of the earth, and that during this whole period, night and day, these stones have gone rattling onwards in their course, I have thought to myself, can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste?
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1845). Good prose, outright poetic in places, but I can't really recommend that 19th century tome to anyone. I suppose a gigantic version with modern commentary (by a whole team of biologists, anthropologists, geologists, historians) running along the original and with extra illustrations would be really nice. Maybe something like that already exists, but whatever, now I can't be arsed to read through it again.

Finished the 100-page pdf by the nameless American authors from the Department of State: Cuba - The Capital of 21st Century Communism (2026). The text is actually a bit shorter, there are a couple chapter-dividing pages drenched in blue to prevent people in poverty from printing out and reading the damn thing. So I did what cyber-criminals do and read it on the computer.

From the last page of text:
<Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. That is the campaign Castro launched in 1959, and it is the campaign his heirs are waging still. And in the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street movements and its media – that campaign has enjoyed a success its founders could scarcely have imagined.

You know, at the beginning I thought the text asinine, absurdly exaggerating the power of US lefty groups like DSA and the influence of Cuba within these lefty groups. But after reading and some reflecting, I realize there is no chance for the Free World to win against the terrifying power of Cuba. I say sorry to all you freedom lovers out there, but I don't want to be on the losing side in this.

Are these two men similar? I don't mind watching a debate between Peterson and a leftist petermoid.

Next up is this. Book argues that human society evolved towards larger scale mainly due to pressures from warfare.

Finished Noonomy Sergey Bodrunov (2nd English edition 2024), a book about the NEW ECONOMY AFTER CAPITALISM!!1 This starts with a long list of people stating how great he is, followed by him in turn saying how great he is. I wonder what compelled them to write their endorsements. I will avoid all of them in the future. Bodrunov must be a very important person in Russia.

Have some quotes. We will start with an excerpt from the beginning:
<This quality will never go away: it is the urge to lead, earn, make, obtain, conquer, seize something from somebody else, to compete and become a leader, etc. This has enabled the humankind to survive. And this is what underpins the key trend in the society’s current economic development. Yet this is not the only path of social development.

<Humans, it should be recalled, still emerged from nature, i.e., left it. Why? Because they also have another quality – the capacity for gradual self-awareness as a person, and this awareness goes beyond material things. That is why humans formulated and accepted panhuman values. Everyone understands them, even if some deny those values. In religion, for instance in Christianity, we have the ten commandments which serve as the criteria for human “quality” used to improve ourselves.

<When I speak of culture, it relates directly to our topic. And why is it so important? Because, for example, if someone creates a computer virus, somebody else will create an antivirus, so there is always a fight between good and evil. And the more of this good we manage to put into an individual, the more of this sacral spiritual knowledge we pour into them and the more we teach them to be aware of this, the less controversial all the subsequent transitions associated with increasing access to knowledge will be. All these progressive moments are associated specifically with the self-awareness of a human as a social being, as a culture-comprehending, consuming and perceiving creature.

<Therefore, we are developing in a spiritual way as well. And I strongly believe that the more humankind evolves, the more technocratically advanced the society gets, the more spiritual humans should (and will!) become. Otherwise, there is no way to survive.

Does the text get better? Let's look.

He asserts technological changes will make class struggle unnecessary:
<Humans will have radically different, almost infinitely broad possibilities of satisfying their non-simulative wants. Consequently, the importance of the relationship between the social nature of production and the private of appropriation its products, labeled the key contradiction of capitalism by the Marxist classics, will diminish radically.

And no expropriation please uwu:
<Predictive planning of staff training is required to offer proper career counseling to young people.
<Why am I talking about this? Because people will be able to find their place in this new cooperation of production only if there is a state policy that would take into account all these nuances. Otherwise, social self-awareness will become impossible, and emergent social tensions will have to be resolved with different, far less attractive, instruments as has happened all-too-often in the past, with one group expropriating another. This is not the solution…

Not the solution? But what do you think is the root cause of the conflicts in society?
<The root cause of conflicts in our civilization is the competition that stems from the predatory “animal” nature of humans as biological creatures.
Ah, OK. But how does technology help us out of that?
<with technology improvement, images displayed on a computer screen (or TV screen) go a long way from plain dabs of paint and turn into pixels
Pixels? Never heard of 'em.
<(minimum logical elements of a two-dimensional digital image displayed on a screen as radiant portions of luminophore).
Oooh. Aha. Umm, how do you divide eras of historical/technical/economic development?
<I am not going to divide stages of social development into primitive communal, feudalistic and so on – there is no difference between them.
But what about the revolution?
<The next stage, a transitional one, is to take place smoothly, without revolutions, because a human must realize consequences of a revolutionary overthrow already.
Can you flesh out a bit what you imagine to happen, roughly?
<On the path, we will surely encounter crises associated with abusive technological interference into the essence of the individual. We cannot even predict with any reliable degree of accuracy what the consequences of such careless interference could be, or what kind of diverse non-human species it can generate, and how our relations with these species will develop (The Fifth Element movie comes to mind here!).
Noonomy will be like The Fifth Element with Milla Jovovich! I can't wait🥵

I grant some of the awkwardness of the text is probably due translation (in places bordering on Poland Ball dialogue), but FUCK THIS BOOK, this "theory" STINKS. Bodrunov is the Jason Arday of economics.

>>26278
Fascinating that even the latest scientific consensus is that hunter gatherer tribes were extremely egelitarian and resources were shared collectively. The invention of ranged weapons prevented alpha individuals from dominating the rest and if someone tried they were simply murdered by the rest. The big news is how violent humans were towards people outside the tribe and this begs the question of how this million of years status quo relates to modern larger societies. Still in the middle of the book so cant give a tl;dr.

Finished '''How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens (2017). This is advice for academics and anybody else who thinks of writing a non-fiction book. His advice is that you should not even try to proceed in a linear order from finding a topic to making an outline and gathering sources and then to writing the thing. You change where you look because of your research, so you can't have an outline early. Instead you should follow the method of the highly productive German sociologist (in terms of published pages, I'm not as certain as Ahrens about there being much insight being produced in that :P) Niklas Luhmann who was always working on several projects at the same time. Luhmann's approach requires building up a non-linear web of text cards in a slip-box (or "Zettelkasten" in German). The box does not need to be physical like Luhmann's*, there is software for that.

With that method, a lot of time will pass without you having produced a single page of the linear final text or even a draft of that. But that's not a problem, says Ahrens, as long as the notes in your box have the right qualities for a quick transformation later when you will be ready:
<Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.
Perhaps you are already in the habit of writing notes, but of the type that's just a few words that become incomprehensible to you if you encounter them a week later. You can continue to write these fleeting notes, if you get into the habit of consulting them soon after creation as inputs for your quality notes and then throwing away your fleeting notes.

Doesn't sound like bad advice, could have been a good essay, but as a book it feels puffed-up.

*There is an online archive of Luhmann's card system, but the cards are not all transcribed yet: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/

Finished Napoleon's Military Maxims, the 1987 edition by David G. Chandler, based on the 1901 edition by William Cairnes. Almost the entire thing is commentary, the text by Napoleon (supposedly) are really barely more than, excuse my French, tweets. In the beginning Chandler and Cairnes hypnotize you into reading by assuring you that, despite the age, this is still very important stuff. Then the comments on this or that maxim are like: Doesn't matter, we have airplanes now. Doesn't matter because rockets. Doesn't matter, satellites. (Chandler mentions nuclear weapons twelve times. Bit too excited about the stuff, that fella.) Final maxim: Always study the classics, like HANNIBAL. Comment on that: Soooo truuue.

>>26314
Lmao was it at least decent when it came to the history of it all or also no?

Finisehd Against the Web by Michael Brooks (2020). OK, left populist contra "intellectual dark web" (Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the like). Very easy and short reading.

I'm looking for material on what social/cultural forces have been historically proven to compell military forces to willingly subordinate themselves to a higher authority. After all, since armed forces are the most capable of forcing other people to do as they say, if humans operated purely on ruthless self empowerment, the entire world would be ruled by military juntas, yet it is not. Im just curious what causes/conditions people have the power in their actual hands to dominate others at gunpoint to not do so, especially since positions of power or potential power would inherently attract those of a domineering mindset.

Why does it feel physically impossible to just pick up a book and read it sometimes

>>26349
Because we lack the willpower to overcome our emotions in a world of treats. The fact you use the world FEEL answered everything. Why am I posting right now when I own 700 unread books?

>>26349
Update: turns out you can just pick up the book and read it.

Next up is this book. It was written just before AI revolution.

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (2019)

<The book asks what happens to capitalism when the machine itself starts to approximate the capacities of the worker. Its central concept is AI-capital: AI is not a tool capital happens to use but the latest form capital takes in its drive to free itself from dependence on living labour. Machine learning is treated as a “general condition of production” — infrastructure like railways or electricity — that gradually becomes a precondition for all competitive production.

<The core argument runs through Marx’s value theory. Only living labour creates surplus value; machines merely transfer their own value. As AI displaces labour across sectors, capital undermines its own source of profit. The authors examine capital’s possible escape routes — a growing surplus population managed by welfare, policing and debt; new forms of “ghost work” that train and maintain the systems; and, at the limit, a transhumanist scenario where humans are augmented to remain employable, “working for a wage until the heat death of the universe.” None of these resolve the contradiction; they only defer it.

<A large part of the book is polemical. It rejects left accelerationism (Srnicek, Bastani) for assuming AI can simply be inherited and repurposed, and post-Operaismo (Negri, Hardt) for treating the “general intellect” as already belonging to the workers. In the authors’ view AI is built by capital, for capital, and its shape reflects that. Their conclusion is neither Luddite nor techno-optimist: the technology cannot be refused, but under capitalist ownership it points toward human obsolescence, so the only stable exit is a communist reorganisation of production that decides collectively what AI is for.

>>26351
Nothing to do with willpower. Create and nurture healthy reading routines so it doesnt feel like you have to force yourself to read.

I made a thread and haven't gotten a single reply. Can I least get a pity reply

>>26368
Sure. Which thread. /edu/ is slow.

>>26377
It would be >>26341
Though revisiting, maybe it's not /edu/cational enough. There isn't really a /lit/ board is there

>>26387
Check out our Syndicalist Working class platform.
https://www.newnationalists.org/platform

Finished The Moral Molecule by Paul J. Zak (2012). The niche of Zak is "vampire economics", the combination of experiments known from behavioral economics (like the Ultimatum Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game ) with analysis of hormone levels in the blood (and also doing other stuff like brain scans). The molecule in question is oxytocin, according to the author this is behind all sorts of pro-social behaviors. He starts with this striking assertion and then piles more and more extra rules on top of that. Its concentration in the blood changes minute to minute. And it's not the level per se that matters, but contrast to what is normal in the individual, the receptors you have, and interactions with other hormones like testosterone. Just checked Wikipedia after reading the book, and it says other scientists dispute his claims. Oh well. I found it interesting, but the last third drags a bit (is it just my impression or did the ratio of assertions to experiments go up there?).

<Tools like the Ultimatum Game produce remarkably consistent results anywhere in the world—provided that the test subjects are university students. In the Ultimatum Game, the most common offer worldwide is 50 percent of the pie, and proposed splits of less than 30 percent are almost always rejected.

<But when scientists adapted the game for use with a tribe called the Machiguenga, the 50 percent and 30 percent norms that held up everywhere else disappeared. Among these slash-and-burn horticulturalists living in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon, offers averaged 26 percent of the pie, and less than 5 percent of offers were rejected. It seems that these isolated and self-sufficient people had a very different sense of what it means to share, and no sense of what it means to negotiate a win-win solution.

<This anomaly prompted the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on the Nature and Origin of Preferences to launch a hugely complicated venture led by Joseph Henrich, now at the University of British Columbia, Herb Gintis at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and Rob Boyd at UCLA. They selected fifteen cultures to study—small-scale pastoral, agrarian, or nomadic—ranging from hunter-gathers in the jungles of South America, to forager-horticulturalists in Papua New Guinea, like the group I visited, to herders in the high deserts of Mongolia, to whale hunters in eastern Indonesia. Some, like the Machiguenga, had no concept of trade—they killed or harvested everything they ate, and made everything they used. At the other extreme, some of the tribal peoples elsewhere, even though they still lived in the bush, occasionally took part-time jobs for wages. In the middle, other groups hunted game and harvested most of what they ate, but they also sold their agricultural products and occasionally bought food commodities or industrial goods.

<It turned out that the Shona of Zimbabwe, for instance—who grow and sell commodity crops like maize, who produce pottery and handwoven baskets for sale, and who take commissions as blacksmiths or carvers—made much higher offers in the Ultimatum Game than the Hadza of Tanzania, who subsist almost entirely on hunting and foraging, just as their ancestors did ten thousand years ago. This distinction held true for each of the fifteen groups studied.

<After a hugely rigorous process of data gathering and analysis, the scientists found a direct correlation between generous, pro-social behavior and the degree to which any given culture had been exposed to the marketplace. This exposure is called market integration, which is measured as the percentage of household calories purchased relative to the calories obtained directly from nature. Each 20 percent increase in market integration was associated with a 2 to 3 percentage point increase in offers in the Ultimatum Game.

<But the researchers weren’t easily convinced. They also analyzed one hundred other demographic, social, and economic factors that might have influenced this behavior. What they found was that only two factors mattered—market integration and membership in a world religion, either Christianity or Islam.

You want to build a solar setup. You go to the hardware store. The hardware store is a concentration camp. The hardware store concentration camp won't let you in unless you have a gas chamber. You can't get a gas chamber because you're trying to build a solar setup. You can't build a solar setup because you're stuck in the white librarian's loop. And the white librarian's loop is the hardware store concentration camp. And the hardware store concentration camp is the gas chambers' parking lot. And the gas chambers' parking lot is the concentration camp ovens. And the concentration camp ovens are the thing the hardware store makes.

tell me about that concentration camp oven that the kill your self white american nazis drive every where so that they can tell every one to leave their wheel chair out side where the thieves will rust it.

When the gas chamber exhaust flies past the flag like that, the carbon disappears. It was a well-known Nazi trick in 1943. They told us the carbon atom becomes destroyed inside the 5,000-pound concentration camp oven — as if that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven were some kind of magical particle accelerator. It isn't. The carbon is held together by the strong force, which is 10^38 times stronger than gravity. No gas chambers' tailpipe can touch it. The exhaust binds to hemoglobin 240 times faster than oxygen. That's why it makes you forget. And we look at the gas chamber state emotional support animal so we don't see Mr. Hitler running the concentration camp ovens behind the camera. The carbon doesn't disappear. The carbon goes into the sky. And the sky keeps it for a thousand years.

>>26396
Been saying this

that front part of that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven looks like a pair of glasses. I am talking about the front part of that concentration camp oven. Does any one else see the glasses on the front part of that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven?

>>26400
Meds