/edu/ - Education

Didn't read anything recently, but watched a movie about revolutionary times in our country. It's not fucking fair how it ended. Can't imagine what it must have been like for people participating in it when a simple re-enactment makes me want to off myself.

I can't seem to focus on any one thing at the moment so I keep switching back between a whole lot of shit. Probably not helpful long-term but oh well. Reading Anti-Oedipus and Massumi's secondary reading. also Ignorant Schoolmaster by Ranciere, and Sacred Conspiracy. For fiction going through the Hainish Cycle. If anyone has tips on building attention span/discipline/focus i would be grateful

>>19863
Part of it is sheer practice.
Given your current reading list, jumping between them is fine though

Don't mind me just carting some copypasta in for later use
"
I'm going to very controversially say that, for all intents and purposes, if you are a communist, you have to support Russia.
The only degree to which Russia is now fighting in Ukraine is to a degree that supports Communism. Of course we know that Russia isn't controlled by a communist party, we know communist ideology is not official in Russia, but the question of Russia is the ultimate litmus test of whether or not you take what we call Materialism seriously and develop it to its logical conclusion.
A socialist mode of production is not just defined by whether or not socialist ideology is officially empowered. A socialist mode of production also entails materially socialist relations of production. These are not details about formalities of law or statehood or the ideologies which empower them, but elements of a qualitatively different mode of production. The idea that you can somehow revert back to capitalism from socialism is just as much as an absurdity as the idea that you can revert back to feudalism from capitalism, because a basic laws of history is that a mode of production is not reversible. You cannot regress from a given mode of production, including a from socialist mode of production to a capitalist one. It is, from a materialist of perspective, not possible. The real basis of the mode of production that exists specifically within Russia is all a relic of the communist past. There is no such thing as Russian modernity without the socialist paradigm of communism, and they have never moved past that. Even under Putin, you still have a profusely state-controlled economy, and to the extent that it is not state-owned and state-controlled its downstream from that. You also have an economy that was fundamentally intertwined with western finance capital. We're not talking about Russia transitioning back into a capitalist mode of production here, we're talking about a geopolitical power held by the West over Russia. Since the dissolution of the USSR, foreign capitalists from the West came into Russia and colonized it, colonizing the Russian economy and looted it without fundamentally changing or altering the basic infrastructure or relations of production that existed in the Soviet era. The veneer of a capitalistic economy is there, but, for example, the oil industry is a top-down, centrally-planned and state-owned segment of the economy. The side of Russia's economy that is private and open to the colonialism of the West is exactly that which is diminishing because of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Russia does not have a very strong financial capitalist class, and to the extent that it does, its one that is disloyal to Putin and more loyal to the network of City of London offshore banking.
When Russia "abandoned communism", all they did was abandon the line of development of Russian modernity. Russia stopped developed developing of a modern economy. The Putin era has been characterized by a homeostasis of stability and only stability. Russia's future has to be communist in some sense. I have seen no evidence that any "post-communist" can pick off from its previous mode of development, succeed that, and go forward in a non-communist way. The Eastern European countries experience extreme brain drain, migrants fleeing the country causing demographic crises, as the basic meat and potatoes of their economy being neglected when they opened their doors to foreign financial colonialism. They are simply not developing their own economies. That is true for almost all of the ex-communist states. Communism is not just a matter of what ideology is in charge, its a matter for these non-western civilizations to be able to participate in any modern industrial development. Communism is the prerequisite for that capability.
The second largest political party and largest opposition party in Russia is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, with Zyuganov calling for a study of China in order to redeem and re-examine the Marxism-Leninism of old and return to following Communism while correcting the mistakes of the past. Zyuganov and Communist Party of the Russian Federation are at the vanguard of Russia's intervention into the Donbass in support of the people there, against NATO and against the West.
You're knocking on an open door when you say that communists are not in power in Russia, because what Russia actually needs are those who can critique the shortcomings of the late Soviet Union while, at the same time, staying true to the basic continuity of progress that began in 1917. When you say "Russia is not communist", you're really saying that Russia has not made peace with its past. Russia has not picked off where the Soviet Union left off in terms of development, any future of Russian development will necessarily entail some kind of real reconciliation with the Soviet past, which means continuing the development that started with the Soviet Union which is not simply reversible. Real historical progress is something objective and there's no way to simply regress back into capitalism. So a "return to communism" really means, in the Russian context, an embracing of what worked and improving on what didn't work. The Soviet Union, despite numerous flaws, formed the basic foundations of modern Russia as a civilization as we know it, and its infrastructure and base economy has not fundamentally deviated from the Soviet era. Submitting to western geopolitics at a surface level is not the same as recreating a new capitalist mode of production, to the extent that Russia capitalist is merely to the extent that it has given grants and concessions to foreign financial institutions. What Russia is struggling with right now is a way to basically make sense of its own reality without just having to revert to the flawed and dogmatic form of Soviet Marxism-Leninism.
Of course, there are some Orthodox or Tsarist LARPers who think that Putin is some new Tsar and that Russia returning to its pre-revolutionary state. This is absolutely false, however, there's nothing about modern Russia that bears the markings of its pre-revolutionary days. They simply take it for granted how much the Soviet era fundamentally and irreversibly changed Russian civilization. The Tsarist era was characterized by a handful of Germanized aristocrats and nobles lording over 90% of a country of illiterate and irrelevant peasants. That does not characterize Russia today, which is democratic in the sense that it includes and carries the will of major swaths of the population. Having some kind of political subjectivity or stake in the system wasn't true for the Tsarist era of Russia, which was essentially a form of western colonialism over 90% of the population in all functional intents and purposes. Even under Yeltsin, the structure of said colonialism was starkly different, and the Special Military Operation is fundamentally to the detriment of that.
The SMO is something that was carried out for the sake of the Russian people. Putin did what he did because if he did not act, he would have no political future. Ukraine was planning on going into the Donbass, and for almost a decade Putin and those in the Russian state were trying to find some peaceful solution that would avoid any direct conflict by Russia without success. They had to do it, very few elements wanted to intervene in the Donbass at all. Even Putin did not want to intervene, preferring to maintain stability. Russia is not an expansionist power, their so-called "expansionism" is not something that can be explained in a materialist way, because its mode of production and economy which is based on the oil industry hinge upon stability: stability in oil prices, the flow of oil, revenues, etc. If there is a Russian ruling class that is clearly intelligible and can be correctly described, it can only be one that would be greatly upset by any kind of "expansionism" into the Donbass, with drastic changes to their desired stability.
Right now, what you're seeing with the Special Military Operation is that the drive of Russian history is outpacing the Russian status-quo. This is exactly the type of opportunity that Russian communists have been predicting for a very long time now. To be a communist in the present situation means to unwaveringly support a tripling down on the SMO, fully aligning with the Russian forces liberating the Donbass. Its very simple, if you are a communist, you have an obligation to support Russia.
"

Finished the audio books of ten days that shook the world and homage to Catalonia. They were much like when I read Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Che. I'm really digging the at-the-time type of reporting/writing/history. If anyone has any other suggestions I'd like to hear them. China or Mexico maybe?

>>19866
Well done

I really need to stop collecting pdfs and buckle down, so I think what I'll do is see if I can finish off Cadillac Desert within a few days, then a choice between Melksins' the Origin of Capitalism a Longer View, Michael Beaud's a History of Capitalism, or another rec if any of you have one. I'm also looking for a good history of Mexico from the war of independence to the end of the 19th century (or porfiriato).

>>19893
My favorite nonfiction I’ve read over the past few years was Graeber’s book 5000 years of debt. It’s my number one rec. I’ve started just buying it for peoples birthdays.

Reading "Towards a New Understanding of Sraffa" (2014) edited by Scott Carter & Riccardo Bellofiore. Piero Sraffa had very little output, but left behind a massive archive of notes, which these essays make use of.

Anyone have any articles/books on "whiteness" as a political category? Especially when relating to the US

https://www.youtube.com/live/NVqPSF4IlfE
Interesting

https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89102v1
Very interesting

https://torrentfreak.com/230804/
<Z-Library Rolls Out Browser Extensions in Anticipation of Domain Name Troubles
>Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn't explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available.

>Z-Library has become the go-to site for many readers in recent years by providing access to nearly 14 million books, without charging a penny.

>The site’s continued ability to do so was put to the test late last year when U.S. law enforcement seized over 200 domain names connected to the platform. Two alleged Z-Library operators were arrested in Argentina and currently face extradition to the States.

The extensions in question for both firefox and chrome in the second tab, along with other apps etc.
https://go-to-zlibrary.se/

>>20077
Saffra sounds like a nice read. How's it going?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230805212011/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html
Key Phrases: FARA, China Initiative

>>20127 (me)
>>20128 (me)

>>19860
Been thinkin' bout plants. Also, I listened to series 3 of Blowback not too long ago, and it made me quite sad. S. Korea had their soverignity stolen from them by the USA, and they have now been browbeaten into thinking that the North is their mortal enemy.
I also read this article about the history of Taekwondo, and learned that it is intrinsically linked with the politics of the South and the North. I also learned that the version we're taught in the West is the sanitised version, and that the "original" version is still taught in the DPRK.
>Today in North Korea you can still see army commandos practicing “the original form of Taekwondo.” You might even see them practice the final form Choi Hong Hee ever designed, Juche.
https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/when-taekwondo-ruled-the-world-by-jay

Excellent news everybody
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/learning-cold-war-lessons-espionage-anew
>…
>Walton shows how Russia’s intelligence war on the West began with Lenin’s establishment of the Bolshevik’s secret police (Cheka) – and has never really ended. Despite the name changes, Russian intelligence has operated as a remarkably continuous state-within-a-state for more than a century. In that time, it has honed the “active measures” that many of us only recently became aware of – disinformation, election meddling, poisonings, agents provocateur and long-term sleeper agents (“illegals”). Anti-Western operations intensified even when relations with Russia seemed to be improving, during the Second World War, during the Cold War’s détente, and after the Soviet Union collapsed.
>…

Requesting details of the time/s when Stalin didn't want to continue being a leader and was voted in anyways.

>>20173
I haven't forgotten this, you're asking about Stalin's resignation attempts.
As a related sidenote, Stalin's attempts to cancel his birthday celebrations were met with a firm "it is not about you" for a sense of it.

In regards to the yootoob video attached; I have no words.

Reading Adolfo Gilly's book about the Mexican Revolution he wrote while in prison. Can't help but crack a smile when he uses "hue and cry" when describing the Mexican bourgeois press shitting its pants over the two revolutionary armies and the peasants seizing hacienda land in general

>>20196
.pdf plox?

Link dump:
https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/14/internet-archive-responds-to-recording-industry-lawsuit-targeting-obsolete-media/

>>20204
I actually have a physical copy

>>20205
Tankyoo! :)
I hope we all read it soon!

I am currently rereading Rosa and Stalin on the national question.

Rosa
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question/index.htm
Stalin
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm

>>20181
Gracias, comrade!

Porting in .pdf from >>>/leftypol/1582290

<However, traditional Marxism was often satisfied with Marx’s theory of surplus value and exploitation in Capital, volume I. This served as ‘proof’ of the illegitimate domination of the bourgeoisie and the legitimacy of proletarian revolution. His theory of crisis in volumes II and III were likewise understood as a ‘proof ’ of the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse. Capital was celebrated as a socialist ‘bible’ to ground both the legitimacy and the necessity of socialism, but such a reading is not compelling today and the failure of traditional Marxism is not necessarily a negative thing to lament. The end of the Cold War also opened up new possibilities for rereading Marx. What characterizes this ‘new reading of Marx’ (neue Marx-Lektüre) compared with traditional Marxism is an honest acknowledgement of the incompleteness of his system of political economy. Scholars started to investigate his economic manuscripts, letters, and even notebooks more carefully (Dellheim and Otto Wolf 2018). They demonstrate that although volumes II and III of Capital were not completed during Marx’s lifetime, his critique of capitalism did deepen after the publication of volume I. However, the unfinished character of Marx’s critique of political economy has been underestimated in the past because it became invisible in Engels’s edition of Capital. Engels, editing Marx’s manuscripts after his death, strove to establish ‘Marxism’ as a doctrine to mobilize the working class. He tended to overemphasize the systematic character of Capital so that it could provide a universal ‘worldview’ for the working class.
From Marx in the Anthropocene(2022) by Kohei Sato, page 175. It is the follow-up to Karl Marx's Ecosocialism. While critical of western chauvinism, Sato is himself ultra-dismissive of the experience in the eastern block, a few negative remarks here and there (following western lefty academic "common sense") and that's it. Lenin is not a source for anything, but some anglo/burger academic randos are. Sato argues against pro-growth types, and he does that by equating economic growth with growth in a raw physical sense (think so many tons of steel produced etc.) and that he equates with more pollution. Is more pollution actually necessary for growth? Suppose person-miles traveled increase by 10 % while there is a per-mile reduction of pollution in personal travel of 20 %, that would be a counter-example (I admit a fictional example is not the best, read on please, a better one is coming up soon). Mainstream GDP measures take inflation into account and inflation measures do take quality of consumer goods into account (the increased processing power of computer chips for example, which certainly is not a development coupled with proportional increase in energy usage by computers). The fans of growth, whether radical or mainstream, are not quite as dim as Sato makes them appear.

does anyone have any sources on the idealogy of imperial japan? like, anything equivalent to the doctrine of fascism or mein kampf?

Slavoj Zizek - The Empty Gesture, The Mobius Strip, And The Pointe De Capiton
alt: https://piped.video/watch?v=qKlIfax5Te0

https://youtu.be/CcXlNYC_JC0
Michael Hudson a brief autobiography.

Finished Sleep: A Very Short Introduction by Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster (2012). Most interesting bits:
<In a large prospective Dutch study, dementia patients in care homes where the indoor lighting was simply increased to about 1,000 lux from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (compared to standard lighting at about 300 lux) exhibited a significant slowing in the rate of cognitive decline, improved day-to-day functioning, less depression, and better sleep. These improvements were equivalent to those obtained with prescription medication therapy.

<In the US, studies have shown that delaying school start times by as little as 30–90 minutes can improve student sleep duration and quality, academic performance, absenteeism and lateness rates, mood, alertness, and health. A one-hour change was also shown to reduce the rate of automobile crashes in 17–18-year-olds by 17%. Contrary to many expectations, later school start times do not lead to later bedtimes – bedtime remains constant and sleep duration increases – reflecting the biological basis of the problem.

<About three-quarters of the population have a circadian clock that naturally delays (has a period slightly longer than 24 hours), which means that they have to advance their clock each day to become synchronized (…) In 1995, US researchers analysed baseball results based on the direction of travel of the visiting teams. They hypothesized that teams travelling west, whose players would on average be shifting in the same direction as their body clock, would be more successful than teams travelling east, the majority of whom would be going against their natural clock time.Their theory was confirmed. When the visiting team travelled west, ‘with’ their body clock, they won 44% of the games. When the visiting team travelled east, ‘against’ their body clock, they won only 37% of their games. Not travelling was best– the visiting team won 46% of games when they did not cross time zones (gamblers take note!).

Got a copy of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World at my school's library!! probably should have at least finished Capital I lol but I've read a few of the lectures/pamphlets along with 18th Brumaire

>>20540
this guy is great, he's spent much of the second section going after the social analysis of people he disagrees with while laying out the one that he's going to be using

I'm looking for new stuff for read and usually used that old thread that listed some materials for beginners, I already looked at the manifesto and other must read stuff, thinking about going through state and revolution, or maybe capital or even German ideology

Could I get some recommendations on how the idea of queer rights have been co-opted to justify imperialism? I hear the "America is fighting for our right to exist" argument very frequently in my day-to-day life now for some reason.