/edu/ - Education

>>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

>>19860
Thinking about how the fuck to multidisciplinarily study philosophy, history, science and polítical economy as an adhd fucked up brain NEET. Dont know even where to start in the latter three. Even tried to invoke Marx and Engels in a lucid dream just to ask this question, and accidentally invoked their respective crackhead, filthy, mentally deranged cousins instead, in what was unsuspectedly karl marx's funeral (its a long story). Needless to say, they couldnt answer my question. So, this is what my mind is occupied with.

>>25948
>NEET.
Sounds like you have plenty of time man just start reading shit. What have you studied so far?
> Even tried to invoke Marx and Engels in a lucid dream
lel

>>25949
Reading History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective by E. K. Hunt and Mark Lautzenheiser in the political economy front, but plan to drop it and just go with Smith then Ricardo then Das kapital

On the history front, started with herodotus

On the science front, planned to start the road from 0 to calculus and linear álgebra, but didnt start because i was priorizing everything else

Philosophy is my forte so no trouble here. The trouble is scheduling everything…

Rousseau and Marx on law as a cause of crime:
<It has constantly been observed that in those countries where legal punishments are most severe, they are also most frequent; so that the cruelty of such punishments is a proof only of the multitude of criminals, and, punishing everything with equal severity, induces those who are guilty to commit crimes, in order to escape being punished for their faults.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm#A_DISCOURSE_ON_POLITICAL_ECONOMY
<Law itself may not only punish crime, but improvise it, and the law of professional lawyers is very apt to work in this direction. Thus, it has been justly remarked by an eminent historian, that the Catholic clergy of the medieval times, with its dark views of human nature, introduced by its influence into criminal legislation, has created more crimes than forgiven sins.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/09/16.htm
This is reminiscent of Samuel Francis' later theory of anarcho-tyranny (e.g. the demand for crime, from managerial and penal institutions):
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/anarcho-tyranny-u-s-a/

Finished The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew (2016). It's a biography of a made-up comic book artist, with many excerpts of his comics, spoofing real comics while showing the changes in art style and printing technology, while also being a history of Singapore of sorts. Great-man history. Checking on the author after reading this, he seems to be shitlib. (What if I draw a certain politician as… Winnie the Pooh, hehe, ain't I clever?) If I had checked that earlier I would have not experienced this. It's really more than the sum of its parts. I don't know anything else like it.

Finished Beyond Money by Anitra Nelson (2022). Abysmal dogshit. There is a type of person who believes that capitalism is when there are numbers and measurements. (And when there are a lot of numbers and measurements, you got fascism!) Nelson is one of those.

Nelson notes about alternative local currency schemes:
<Many exchanges in so-called ‘alternative’ schemes mirror price equivalences in local markets and, as such, offer little in the way of an alternative system at all.
This is supposed to be a criticism. To be able to compare exchange ratios to the normal market, the products in both markets have to be identical or similar enough to begin with. Now, if the exchange ratios are very different, one person can interface with both markets and exploit this by reselling. Duh. Speaking of exploitation: Nelson likes to say that word a lot, but to show exploitation, you need to measure it, and compare it to a standard of equality, no? But measuring is a sin to her.

She got her radical alternative: It's a female-centered degrowth economy, where they nourish you to flourish and they flourish when they nourish blahblahblah and there is tofu everywhere. (The houses are probably made of tofu, too.)

A real sentence from this work:
<What about non-Indigenous Australians assimilating with Indigenous modes of operating, of thinking, of living? If, as in Indigenous perceptions, ‘rocks are sentient and contain spirit’, what of capitalist mining, industrial agriculture, industry and commerce?
Your favorite philosopher failed to consider this!

>>25967
That sounds fucking horrible, Anon. What made you read it?

>>25969
Because I'm randomly checking out people on
https://www.indep.network/member-directory/

Finished A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy (1967 edition with intro by C. P. Snow, first published in 1940). The intro/biography sketch by his friend is rather long, but when you are done with that, you are almost halfway through the book already. (Hmm, there should be a specific term for books with these proportions between intro and main text.) A mathematical platonist who believes that "useless" abstract math is the most fun. It's not bad reading, but I can't really recommend it to
1) a general audience, since there is hardly anybody in the world who is less in need of a defense than a mathematician
nor to
2) young people who wonder if they really should commit to math, since if you even need to ask yourself that, you are not good enough :P
Btw. Hardy agrees with me on both points. (Despite that, the book is written for the first group and not some unmentioned third group.)
<I hope that I need not say that I am not trying to decry mathematical physics, a splendid subject with tremendous problems where the finest imaginations have run riot. But is not the position of an ordinary applied mathematician in some ways a little pathetic? If he wants to be useful, he must work in a humdrum way, and he cannot give full play to his fancy even when he wishes to rise to the heights. 'Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one; and most of the finest products of an applied mathematician's fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have been created, for the brutal but sufficient reason that they do not fit the facts.

Finished The Soul of a New Machine (1981) by Tracy Kidder (who just died this March), a non-fiction classic about a team developing a new computer in the late 70s. The management described in this is… what management? Pure chaos. Fun to read, but I couldn't imagine working at such a company myself.

Really interesting stanford video lecture on economics of AI.

<We are arguing here that our system of free competition, lauded by foolish political Economy and instituted to abolish monopolies, results only in the universal organization of large monopolies in every industry; that everywhere free competition depresses wages, that it accomplishes nothing but a permanent war of labor, machinery, and capital – all against all – a war where the weak are destined to perish; that it makes failures, bankruptcies, stoppages, and crises endemic in the economic system; that it unceasingly deposits debris and ruins throughout the land; and finally, that for their hard labor the lower and middle classes obtain only a troubled, miserable existence, always precarious, and full of anxiety and unhappiness.
From the Manifesto for Democracy by Victor Considerant, published in 1847, that is one year before the Communist Manifesto.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/considerant/manifesto/index.htm

I have read claims that Marx "plagiarized" from this for his Communist Manifesto, but the two Manifestos are so different in both style and content that I wonder what people saying that have been smoking. I mean, can you imagine Marx writing this:
<Christianity is the great Religion of Humanity. Christianity can develop further, and it will certainly always continue to evolve. To believe that there will some day be a Religion for Humanity other than the one that has revealed its existence and its Unity in itself and in God is an illusion. The individual and collective Union among men, and their individual and collective Union with God: there will never be for mankind a more sublime principle, or a different one. Furthermore, this principle is Christian. Thus, from the scientific perspective of pure human reason we know that Christianity, which arose from the Creation, will become, with infinite developments compatible with its principle, the last Religion, and the sole universal Religion of Humanity.

Considerant used the looming threat of communist violence to argue for reforms (most notably a job guarantee) as the peaceful alternative. Despite the title of this work, its still advocacy for monarchy, just in a moderate constitutional form coupled with elections.

>>26022
Marx was also in favour of the monopolising effects of capital accumulation, since it concentrated production and abolished private property.

Adam Smith (1776) here provides a theory of civilisational growth determined by the extent of industry, which is entirely coincidental with environmental factors; namely, access to the sea, for commerce, which is reminiscent of Schmitt's writings on "Land and Sea" (1942), which later inspires Dugin's own writings. Smith views efficient transportation as the motor of social development:
<Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water-carriage, can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh, as fifty broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses […] Since such, therefore, are the advantages of water-carriage, it is natural that the first improvements of art and industry should be made where this conveniency opens the whole world for a market to the produce of every sort of labour, and that they should always be much later in extending themselves into the inland parts of the country […] The nations that, according to the best authenticated history, appear to have been first civilised, were those that dwelt round the coast of the Mediterranean Sea […] Of all the countries on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt seems to have been the first in which either agriculture or manufactures were cultivated and improved to any considerable degree […] The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal, in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China […] In Bengal the Ganges and several other great rivers form a great number of navigable canals in the same manner as the Nile does in Egypt. In the Eastern provinces of China too, several great rivers form, by their different branches, a multitude of canals, and by communicating with one another afford an inland navigation much more extensive than that either of the Nile or the Ganges, or perhaps than both of them put together […] All the inland parts of Africa, and all that part of Asia which lies any considerable way north of the Euxine [Black] and Caspian seas, the ancient Scythia [North of the Black Sea, part of present-day Southern Ukraine], the modern Tartary [modern Kazhakstan] and Siberia, [in other words: all of Russia] seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilised state in which we find them at present […] There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in Europe, the Mediterranean and Euxine seas in both Europe and Asia, and the gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia, to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of that great continent: and the great rivers of Africa are at too great a distance from one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation. 
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch03.htm

Here is Marx appearing to presume the natural existence of individuals, contra the oppressive abstractions of society (1858):
<Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. As if someone were to say: Seen from the perspective of society, there are no slaves and no citizens: both are human beings. Rather, they are that outside society. To be a slave, to be a citizen, are social characteristics, relations between human beings A and B. Human being A, as such, is not a slave. He is a slave in and through society. 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm
Thus, Man precedes his social existence, as a free and natural being.

>>26044
>Thus, Man precedes his social existence, as a free blahblahblah
A slave owner is more free than somebody living outside of society.

<To be a Jew in the State of Israel does not mean that you have to respect the commandments or believe in the God of the Jews. You are allowed, like David Ben-Gurion, to dabble in Buddhist beliefs. You may, like Ariel Sharon, eat locusts while keeping a kosher household. You may keep your head uncovered, as do the majority of Israeli political and military leaders. In most Israeli towns, public transport does not operate on the Shabbat, but you should feel free to use your own car as much as you like. You may gesticulate and hurl insults at a football stadium on the sacred day of rest, and no religious politician will dare protest. Even on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, children freely play on their bicycles in every courtyard in the city. As long as they do not come from Arabs, anti-Jewish abominations remain legitimate in the state of the Jews.

<What is the meaning, then, of being ‘Jewish’ in the State of Israel? There is no doubt about it: being Jewish in Israel means, first and foremost, being a privileged citizen who enjoys prerogatives refused to those who are not Jews, and particularly those who are Arabs. If you are a Jew, you are able to identity with the state that proclaims itself the expression of the Jewish essence. If you are a Jew, you can buy land that a non-Jewish citizen is not allowed to acquire. If you are a Jew, even if you speak only a stumbling Hebrew and envisage staying in Israel only temporarily, you can be governor of the Bank of Israel, which employs only four Israeli Arabs in subordinate positions out of a staff of seven hundred. If you are a Jew, you can be minister of foreign affairs and live permanently in a settlement located outside the legal borders of the state, alongside Palestinian neighbours deprived of all civic rights as well as of sovereignty over themselves. If you are a Jew, you can not only establish colonies on land that does not belong to you, but can also travel through Judea and Samaria on roads that the local inhabitants, living in their own country, do not have the right to use. If you are a Jew, you will not be stopped at roadblocks, you will not be tortured, you will not have your house searched in the middle of the night, you will not be targeted nor will you see your house demolished by mistake. These actions, which have continued for close to fifty years, are designed and reserved solely for Arabs.

<In the State of Israel in the early twenty-first century, does it not appear that being a Jew corresponds to being a white in the southern United States in the 1950s or a French person in Algeria before 1962? Does not the status of Jews in Israel resemble that of the Afrikaners in South Africa before 1994? And is it possible that it might soon resemble the status of the Aryan in Germany in the 1930s? (Resemblance has its limits, however: I utterly reject the least comparison with Germany in the 1940s.)

<How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but are simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, continue to define themselves as Jews? In these conditions, can the descendants of the persecuted let themselves be embraced in the tribe of new secular Jews who see Israel as their exclusive property? Is not the very fact of defining oneself as a Jew within the State of Israel an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?
From How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand (2013).

>>26045
>A slave owner is more free than somebody living outside of society.
How? The master and servant are in a self-undermining dialectic. The capitalist is a greater slave to capital than the worker, for example, for the least sake that the capitalist cannot consume their wealth, but is compelled to invest it, and so to make it the possession of another (e.g. in the productive consumption of the worker). Thus, property and possession exist at odds to each other, yet are mutually supportive of their relative bind. Even in ancient tracts like Xenophon's "Economist" (360 BCE) the burden of wealth for the sake of social status is commented upon by Socrates, and for which purpose, Socrates views happiness negatively (that is, in the Democritean and Epicurean sense of desiring less so as to have less means of dissatisfaction). More money, more problems.

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