300 results in /edu/ - Education Anonymous 17-11-25 21:16:24 No. 25391
Any good anti-work books will do on why -sometimes- is good to be a NEET
Anonymous 17-11-25 17:07:18 No. 25390
not sure where the /occult/ thread went, but i was reading about alchemy and found arthur john hopkins' "alchemy" (1934) exquisitely illuminating as to what all of this stuff is about. i first encountered hopkins in a separate article discussing the "colour theory" of the magnum opus (which i independently confirmed in "splendor solis", 1530). the colour theory claims that the progress of the "great work" is the transformation of the base substance into different colours: black, white, yellow, red/violet. hopkins in chapter 6 shows that the "prima materia" in this case is represented by a lead-copper alloy, which is then mixed with silver, then gold and finally, mixed with vinegar. this reddens the "philosopher's stone". in splendor solis, the movement from the "black sun" to the "red-golden" sun shows this very process. hopkins' ultimate theory is that while alchemy has its ancient roots in egypt (e.g. thoth), its codefication is ultimately alexandrian (greco-egyptian) by the way of the philosophers, including plato, aristotle and (pseudo-)democritus, such as in his "four books" (the oldest alchemical manuscript extant). aristotle gets a lot of credit ultimately, such as in his attribution of "secretum secretorum" (which includes "the emerald tablet" attached to it), but this is an arabic forgery. as hopkins also shows, alchemy comes to western europe by way of arabia (e.g. geber)… we can also see the colour theory here (De Alchimia Opuscula Complura Veterum Philosophorum, 1550) where the person is composed of four sections (black, white, yellow, red) holding the 3 dragons (i.e. solis splendor, 1530).
Anonymous 07-11-25 20:15:57 No. 25352
>>22345 Just finished this one. Can't believe it's recommended here. If you have a /g/ schizo background skip it because you already know it's all botnet. Zuboff is a lib appropriating Marxist terminology and concludes the book with a call to "just voot against it" completely ignoring the structure of bourgeois democracy. She spends a chapter glazing Robert Conquest's demonization of the soviet union, and to top it off she scaremongers about China, conflating (now defunct) credit bureaus with every lie about the social credit system.
>>22444 Good summary wish I hadn't wasted my time on the book. I was hoping for concrete analysis, but
Anonymous 03-11-25 06:26:11 No. 25341
>>25323 Find a complete works of Plato at a used book store. After republic, if you want something long go with Laws, but mostly there’s about 5 core dialogues everyone talks about whenever someone talks about Plato in conversation. Personally I think reading Plato is for instilling critical thinking, and once you get past that part, move on. Once you’re burnt out on Plato you go to Aristotle, whose writings are his lecture notes, so it’ll be a shock to the system and a bit dry by comparison. While not in his core books about life and logic, my favorite is his book rhetoric.
>>25338 When I was a boy
I asked if I could see a calf
Great uncle obliged with rage in his eyes
Once ripped away from family
In my lap, It licked my cheek
And since I haven’t eaten beef
General Niggnin !7MGHd/e/GM 02-11-25 03:59:42 No. 25338
I started writing poetry!
Anonymous 30-10-25 14:35:58 No. 25322
This month I finished Moby Dick, Fahrenheit 451, snow crash, and a Batman comic collection with the killing joke.
Anonymous 22-10-25 19:44:03 No. 25281
>>19860 Currently reading up on Zapata and the history of Mexican revolution. Very nice book. Absolute clusterfuck of a historical period. Feels like a perfect example of how the Russian revolution would have looked like if there was no organized vanguard.
The starting point of the revolution is essentially the same as in Russia: A westernizing tyrant keeps fucking over the peasants and suppressing the bourgeoisie until the country is in such a deadlock that the whole thing blows up. It results in a peasants revolt, but the revolt keep getting swept up by various liberal reformers promising them the land reforms they want, only to inevitably get fucked over one way or the other. They get more radical as time goes on, but theyre so exclusively concerned with agrarian issues that they cannot really sweep up the rest of the population into their revolution. Zapata was a very impressive leader of the movement, and did the best he could, but was clearly not ideologically and strategically up for the task. You can tell he was uncomfortable dealing with any political issue or diplomatic relation outside of the agrarian concerns of his native province in Morelos.
Glownonymous 20-10-25 19:12:07 No. 25260
Anyone know a good book on signals processing and systems analysis? Our professor doesn't explain shit, speaking as someone who took two semesters of analysis and linear algebra.
Anonymous 20-10-25 14:40:07 No. 25259
any1 with juche textbooks?
Anonymous 19-10-25 23:05:53 No. 25258
>>25204 Might wanna create a thread for it for more visibility, this thread is mostly for just dumping books
Anonymous 19-10-25 20:03:56 No. 25257
Just went through the booklet As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (1903), a pioneer of self-help gospel.<Here is a man who is wretchedly poor. He is extremely anxious that his surroundings and home comforts should be improved, yet all the time he shirks his work, and considers he is justified in trying to deceive his employer on the ground of the insufficiency of his wages. Such a man does not understand the simplest rudiments of those principles which are the basis of true prosperity, and is not only totally unfitted to rise out of his wretchedness, but is actually attracting to himself a still deeper wretchedness by dwelling in, and acting out, indolent, deceptive, and unmanly thoughts. <Suffering is always the effect of wrong thought in some direction. <Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sickly thoughts will express themselves through a sickly body.
Glownonymous 19-10-25 19:59:49 No. 25256
>>25254 Found one more already, it's a standard Japanese textbook.
It's somewhere between the American style and the books we're interested in.
It seems less than 20% of the content involves proof.
Anyone know how the standard Soviet primers compare?
Supposedly they're more proof based, but maybe less than Gelfand and Lang?
Glownonymous 18-10-25 20:12:39 No. 25254
>>7838 (mentions some of the selected titles)
I'm looking for proof theoretic algebra 2, precalculus, or calculus books for high schoolers.
I've read through Serg Lang's Basic Mathematics before and enjoyed it.
Started working through Gelfan's Algebra today because of rumor that it uses proofs.
Then there's obviously Euclid, or the works derived from him.
Am also aware of Artin. and V.I. Arnold's books used to teach Abstract Algebra to high schoolers.
These latter two sound a outlandish to me, or require extremely precocious students.
This is for proof based teaching aids that would be used to teach high schoolers.
Anonymous 17-10-25 09:20:49 No. 25249
>>25246 >The important thing in Adam Smith is this moral philosophy where everyone is expected to be a rational actor and educated to conform to that if the society is to work what? adam smith promotes self-interest of the citizenry (the so-called "invisible hand"; a humean principle of "sympathy" as opposed to the more vulgar "private vices, public virtues" of mandeville). at the conclusion of book 1 of the wealth of nations he speaks on how self-interest also has its class character however, and so shows that what is promoted by capitalists is harmful to society, since it subsumes one's interest as that of another, while what is in the interest of the worker or landlord is good for society (since as he writes, wages and rents rise with prosperity and productivity, while profit rises in antagonism to these two). thus he concludes:
<But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two […] It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. https://www.marxists.org/reference/ar Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 16-10-25 00:42:46 No. 25246
>>25244 Quesnay who was the French physiocrat writer was really big into Chinese history and wrote a book about Chinese despotism (remember that at this time the ruling idea of France is enlightened despotism where the King had centralized a lot of things and emphasized his absolute authority over the state). The physiocrats write slightly before Adam Smith, and Smith specifically rejected the physiocrats after giving them a treatment in Wealth of Nations. It should say something that "lassiez faire" was never what the British promoted in the way that was assumed. The British Empire would from time to time interfere in political matters to rejigger this new thing, "free trade", and if you look at the actions of the East India Company they are running whole countries like a business, rather than operating as "regular rulers". Corporate government, in one way or another, is obsessed with control over the levers of management. There is nothing in Adam Smith that suggests that "state capitalism" can't be a thing. The important thing in Adam Smith is this moral philosophy where everyone is expected to be a rational actor and educated to conform to that if the society is to work, and it is implied that the class of university graduates had a super-authority over the entire arrangement and a rightful lock on positions in government, since they were more committed to the Empire and long-term thinking than typical businessmen.
For the physiocrats the rationale for "lassiez-faire" was not about a belief that this would optimize efficiency or create the most moral society. Quesnay openly states that if people starve, then this is just the natural order, likening the economy to a biological system. This is really important and often forgotten in the discourse, because Quesnay is the first place I've seen that description of an economic system (not that it was called a "system" at the time). Ibn Khaldun way back in the middle ages suggested that the history of states and empires could be likened to the lifecycle of an organism, but this was a statement about politics and had nothing to do with economics, which remained the affair of individuals (which is a roundabout way by which it entered later political economy, and when you think about the status of merchants in Islam and Islamic law it makes a lot more sense).
Anonymous 03-10-25 19:01:36 No. 25204
Hello, anons, I'm looking for books that actually explain how a socialist economy would work, I know of Cockshott, by I'm looking for other books beside Cockshott, any recommendations? Thanks!
Anonymous 01-10-25 16:29:04 No. 25195
>>25166 i knew about the quipu and while i also think they're interesting and unique as well i'm not holding out hope for them to contain stuff like novels, poetry or theological treatises the way a written book could.
iirc besides numerical information, which would still be very illuminating, they held stuff like genealogies and some simple historical information like conquests.
Anonymous 29-09-25 09:42:58 No. 25179
If you're lucky enough to still have your textbooks it might be worth revisiting them
Liberal Ideology Studies Anonymous 27-09-25 16:53:08 No. 25164 [Reply]
Holy shit if you actually read these guys they're straight-up ancaps and fascists. They're all small-government nationalists obsessed with life, liberty and private property. They already do the whole Schmittian state of exception thing with the state of war. And they're okay with slavery as long as its against the ignorant or its a state of war. Basically, the worst kind of dark satanic mill shit. Like Mill wants to freely sell alcohol and then put drunkards in labor camps. Nietzsche and nihilism are irrelevant, the fascists are straight-up copies of Locke and Mill. And to be honest, the Liberals do that really long-winded and dull prose that fascists do as well.
- "Two Treatises of Government" by John Locke
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-locke/two-treatises-of-government - "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-stuart-mill/on-liberty Anonymous 26-09-25 11:37:39 No. 25153
One of the main reasons why philosophy, specially modern (1900s and onwards) philosophy comes across as posturing and indecipherable try-hard wannabes is because the writers fail to understand that when Hegel and co were writing, much of what we take for granted today was unknown. Human knowledge in general was very limited and religious 'knowledge' was the norm. In this context, Hegel and co were doomed to write in a convoluted, difficult way. But since then, science elucidated so many things. But philosophers insist on roleplaying like 18th century europeans and they snark at whatever filthy, lowly 'science' has had to offer since then.
Anonymous 23-09-25 12:48:28 No. 25145
>>23656 Fun fact, this anon's file was the third result on DuckDuckGo when I searched for just the title of the Braudel book and nothing else
marx's platonism vs hegel's concept Anonymous 10-09-25 15:01:34 No. 25114
continuing from the classical dialectic:
>>24881 (You)
we may move on to the modern notion. hegel describes his difference from plato here:
>The efficient or motive principle, which is not merely the analysis but the production of the several elements of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half attainment of it, as its goal. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm#PR31 which entirely mirrors what he writes here:
>Even the Platonic dialectic, in the Parmenides itself and elsewhere even more directly, on the one hand, aims only at abolishing and refuting assertions through themselves and on the other hand, has for its result simply nothingness. Dialectic is commonly regarded as an external, negative activity which does not pertain to the subject matter itself, having its ground in mere conceit as a subjective itch for unsettling and destroying what is fixed and substantial, or at least having for its result nothing but the worthlessness of the object dialectically considered. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlintro.htm#HL1_43 this appears identical to marx's dialectic:
<In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; be Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 10-09-25 09:02:31 No. 25108
>>25106 >>Why would you need an example case when the law explicitly says that? >because otherwise you have no evidence of the legal actionability of a claim. You are saying the law itself isn't evidence. That doesn't make sense. As I already told you I'm arguing from knowledge that I already have. I can tell you that cases like that have already happened, but I cannot provide you with links to the cases in physical books I read over a decade ago. And like most people I don't have photographic memory so I do not remember the names of the people as that was not relevant to me when I read that.
No you have not. And you will not be able to prove this. What people put in communication is not their entire understanding of the world, but a difference relative to expectation. The law specifies limits and defaults. (An example for a default is time limits that automatically apply when the parties neglect to spell them out in the contract.) And because of this it is also possible to make some deals without written contract. That just means reverting to all the defaults.
And you did not parse correctly the article you linked and you have not rectified that. The article is in line with what I'm saying. You missed this: Some failings of formal requirements can get
geheilt (literally "healed" or as the article has it "cured") by actions that are in line with what the actions would also have been with a counterfactual formally correct procedure. Let me quote this bit from the article you linked, once more:
<However, a defect in form is cured by executing performance as promised. See § 518 (2) BGB. Can you stop making up shit for once. My example was getting into legal trouble for food poisoning. The example by Dean Margolis was the bike with bad brakes.
>you have no evidence The law in Germany is enough evidence and I showed you that. And the American lawyers quoted above tell you it works out the same in the US.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Glownonymous 02-09-25 18:05:44 No. 25029
>>22816 >whether it's possible for "developing" and "underdeveloped" countries to actually become "developed", and in what circumstances (I recognize the vagueness of these concepts) The first step is to question what we mean by "developed" and "underdeveloped." When we see a group of rural peasants in India living in thatched roof mud brick homes or nomads in the Sahara, the instant assumption that these people shouldn't be living this way. Now, one can live a happy and decent life as a nomadic pastoralist and many choose to do so. What we have here is a kind of value judgement about the lives of others who are branded 'poor' or 'backward' because they don't live urban lifestyles. Often, poverty is slapped onto groups of people who are not, by their own standards, poor. So where does this development discourse come from? Whose interests does it serve? And how is it used?
You will notice that development policies almost always involve some form of intervention by state authorities, UN agencies, or NGOs (the staff of which are almost all from the North American-European world) over the lives of "underdeveloped" people. Sometimes, this intervention is violent (e.g. US occupation of Afghanistan, Plan Colombia, Israeli displacement of Bedouins). Another feature is a tendency to discredit the political and social institutions of local communities in favor of top down solutions implemented by technocrats and a culture where liberal "modern" people must save local people from a series of "harmful cultural practices." Compare the way "female genital mutilation" is treated compared to the widespread practice of labiaplasty or transgender surgery in "developed" countries, which are not seen as "harmful cultural practices." Lastly, there's a whole phenomena of "third world" communities outright rejecting or avoiding development projects e.g. Afghan villagers refusing to participate in road building or rejecting schooling, North Sentinelese Islanders isolating themselves, Nomads who refuse to settle down, widespread rejection of vaccines.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 01-09-25 15:19:59 No. 25016
Okay I'm a little disappointed that this didn't get a single reply lmao so maybe I should give some context. I basically suspect after reading more economic history that the transition from "developing" to "development" is in a sense an extraordinary event, as it's not enough for a country to prop up its industry, but it's necessary for it to harness lucky circumstances into a self-sustaining cycle that guarantees a reliable and perpetual post-industrial economy. Simple industrialization does not guarantee success because it's necessary for an economy to have a competitive advantage in a global market. My suspicion is that "good policy" can never suffice for this, which goes against the prevailing ideologies of development that get pushed in the Third World (especially Latin America and certain parts of Asia).
Anonymous 28-08-25 23:00:21 No. 24957
There was some chart used to go around some years ago recommending non-SJW more materialist feminist books, anybody got it and can post?
Glownonymous 28-08-25 14:40:51 No. 24952
< The collected papers of Costas Lapavitsas are a pathway to Marxist monetary theory, a field that continues to attract strong interest. The papers range far and wide, including markets and money, finance and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of
Glownonymous 28-08-25 14:37:02 No. 24951
< Marxist monetary theory examines the role of money within capitalist economies, emphasizing that money is a social relationship that reflects the dynamics of production and class struggle. It critiques other monetary theories, such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), by arguing that simply manipulating money cannot resolve fundamental issues within capitalism.
Anonymous 28-08-25 02:31:35 No. 24996
>>24995 Not really. OP is getting this from a book by a US military psycho who now trains police to kill. Soldiers not wanting to kill the enemy is the problem for Grossman.
short theory John 27-08-25 21:30:45 No. 24934 [Reply]
What are you favorite short not so well known theory essays, books or pamphlets. They can be from whoever just under 50 pages and non popular (aka don't recommend something like on authority)
Anonymous 27-08-25 20:00:56 No. 24928
I have read Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry which has lead to me obtaining an audiobook copy of the Communist Manifesto and Capital.
Wolff 27-08-25 11:12:21 No. 24926
If there aren't I am fine with books about Marxian economics (Don't suggest the 3 Capitals I already know about them)
Wolff 27-08-25 11:10:45 No. 24925
>>24923 Not really helpful, I want some lecture to familiarize myself with Marxian economics before find some books to read
Anonymous 27-08-25 08:25:06 No. 24923
>>24922 Not that anon, but perhaps you might be interested in listening to an audiobook instead of reading?
https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/archive/marx-engels/capital-vol1/ Glownonymous 27-08-25 07:49:32 No. 24921
>be Marx >dedicate your life to critiquing political economy >for centuries and counting academic retards call themselves "marxist economists" and muddle all the scientific analysis you spent decades doing
Marxian Economics Resources Wolff 27-08-25 07:45:37 No. 24920 [Reply]
Do you have any resources for someone to learn more about Marxian economics? I don't want to read books; I'd prefer things like lectures and documentaries because it's much easier for me to listen to something, and I'm not much of a reader. Maybe I'll read something down the line
Anonymous 27-08-25 00:59:56 No. 24993
>>24992 Grossman “on killing”, “men against fire”, a lot of other books detailing interviews on what actually went on in the first world wars and military history in general, and that’s just the most common irritating shit. There’s way more cartoonish examples of severe incompetence and idiocy act in military history.
Anonymous 26-08-25 23:49:54 No. 24991
>>24990 Yeah don’t worry I already read gross man’s book and men against fire by that other guy. That’s why I specified stress inoculation was the turnaround. Also “ yes,they either pretended to shoot or aimed away on purpose),the worst is multi man crew,because they have the luxury of "I can blame someone else if I get caught" mortars barely actually shot.
this isn't about muh honorabuu fighting,people that join the military either are forced into it (and thus don't wanna kill or risk their asses) or they're there for the money and would've immediatly left the country the instant a war started if they could(preferably with their gear so they can sell it)”
Just clarified your point about nearly all people being bitch made and the men that get into wars voluntarily being especially the most loud mouthed and cowardly—also attacking civilians constantly throughout history just clarifies that it isn’t about fear of violence so much as it is about fear of fighting someone that fights back.
Anonymous 24-08-25 13:06:06 No. 24900
>>24899 >Caste: origin of our discontents probably could find videos on it too if you are illiterate like me. I can't seem to read a book for the life of me.
Anonymous 24-08-25 13:03:52 No. 24899
Caste: origin of our discontents – good book, talks about history of hierarchy in india and united states and explains the trump election as backfire from electing a lower caste black person ('make america great again' after a black president seems apt) While my parenthesis is rather superficial, the book gives substance, theory, evidence that has predictive power
peasants rise up Anonymous 23-08-25 10:07:27 No. 24892 [Reply]
I want to learn more about the peasant class (and landless laborers?) during the classical and medieval period.
Anonymous 21-08-25 20:26:03 No. 24881
διαλεκτική (dia-lectic) refers to "through speaking", or "conversation", which has its ultimate roots in the term διαλέγεσθαι. dialectic is also strongly related to διάλογος (dia-logos), or "dialogue". as we know, plato gives the socratic method of reasoning in his own "dialogues", of which are said by hegel to be the origin of dialectical philosophy, as per diogenes laërtus;
<"Diogenes Laertius says of Plato that, just as Thales was the founder of natural philosophy and Socrates of moral philosophy, so Plato was the founder of the third science pertaining to philosophy, namely, dialectic" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlabsolu.htm#HL3_824 concerning plato's (socrates') dialectical method, there are these remarks: [cratylus, 390c]. here, dialectic refers to the "art" of conversation (διάλογος), and also here: [phaedrus, 266c]. there is a dispute made by phaedrus between a rhetoritician and dialectician however, which socrates responds to with this: [phaedrus, 276e-277a]. so the difference between mere rhetoric and dialectic is the "seed" of knowledge which breeds its own fruit. the "artful" speech he concludes [277b-c] is the speech which seeks to discern the indivisible variables of discussion, or the formality of the discourse itself (what in "parmenides" would refer to the forms, or in "cratylus" would refer to the names of things). concerning this art then, the "method" is given here: [protagoras, 336c-d]. it is described as a "question-and-answer dialogue" by alcibiades, which indeed is socrates' manner of inquiry. within this method however is a negative movement, which is further commented upon here: [republic, 511a-e]. in this, socrates appears to see how a negative movement from the non-hypothetical is superior to self-limiting hypotheses. it is by the "power" and "science" of dialectic that reason grasps the intelligible. socrates continues this line of thought: [republic, 532a-b], where dialectic is described as a "song" and "journey" from the allegorical "cave" of ignorance to the "sun" of knowledge, and too, here: [republic, 533d]. glaucon then refers to earlier notions: [republic, 534b], such as discussed in phaedrus, where the knowledge of being is possessed by the dialectician. dialectic is seen to be the highest art here: [republic, 534e
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 21-08-25 03:55:04 No. 24871
>>24338 Hope it helps
>Camilo’s life Jorge Camilo Andres Torres was born in Bogotá the 3rd of February of 1929. His parents were Calixto Torres Umaña, a prestigious doctor, and Isabel Restrepo Gaviria. Coming from a wealthy, bourgueois and liberal family. Lived with his family in Europe, between 1931 and 1934. In 1937, the marriage dissolved and Camilo went to live with his mother and his brother Fernando.
He graduated as bachelor in the Cervantes Lycée in 1946. After studying a semester of law in the National University of Colombia, he was admitted to the Conciliar Seminary of Bogotá, were he remained seven years, time where Camilo began to be interested by the social reality, creating a group of social studies, along with his companion Gustavo Pérez. As a Christian, he felt attracted to the theme of poverty and social justice.
Camilo was ordained as priest in 1954, and later travelled to Belgium to study sociology at the University of Lovaina. During his stay in Europe, he made contact with the Christian Democracy, the Christian syndical movement and with the Algerian resistance groups in Paris, factors that made him grow close to the cause of the downtrodden. He founded with a group of Colombian students the ECISE (Colombian team of socioeconomic research).
In 1958 he graduated as a sociologist with the work “A statistical approximation to the socioeconomic reality of Bogotá” (published in 1987 as “The proletarianization of Bogotá”), that was one of the pioneers of urban sociology in the country. In 1959 he returns to Bogotá and his appointed chaplain of the National University. There, along with Orlando Fals Borda, founded the Sociology Faculty in 1960, where he was a professor.
His sociological researches initiated with his undergraduate thesis familiarised him with the urban as well as the rural social structures. He founded the Universitarian movement of communal promotion (MUNIPROC), and developed research works and of social action in popular and worker’s neighborhoods of Bogotá, as the Tunjuelito neighbourhood. As chaplain, he introduced to Colombia many of the reforms of the II Vatican Council, as giving mass in front and not giving the back, to say it in Spanish and not in Latin. He preached that the problem was not
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 17-08-25 15:15:33 No. 24832
>>24829 From Deepseek, which is the best workhorse for this kind of thing; other than Gemini, probably some chinese models I've never heard of, and grok which is basically deepseek tuned to hanbao人 tastes
Past a certain point I got tired of reformatting it by hand to the local formatting; so you'll have to suffer the hidden phrases where it was bolded originally
The prompt was just
>write the first chapter of this book With the jpeg of the front cover uploaded
For the science people outside, health, linguistics and electronics looking in wondering how those fields are getting results while your field is spinning its wheels, it's because those fields require systems thinking to really get anywhere so you're constantly taking notes and rethinking and reviewing your prior notes seeing whether you can find something systemic that fix a lot of things at once and make thinking about the whole problem simpler
There's more there which involves historical materialism and the practice of science, but it's a half formed thought other than that you should look up Alan Turing, and also what happened to the first doctor in Europe to suggest that doctors should wash their hands after handling cadavers, especially if they were going to be participating in delivering babies
*within which we'll also include historical mechanical calculating machines, such as you'll see from the classical culture of the Mediterranean, from China and later again in Europe also
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 17-08-25 11:40:03 No. 24829
>>24749 Has anyone tried asking AI to write this book so we can finally find out the secrets?
Anonymous 17-08-25 08:02:15 No. 24827
>>24826 >You don't need to measure value to quantify debt debt is a quantity sum which is owed to a creditor. when the creditor is giving debt to a borrower, how is it measured outside of money? to graeber, the debt is monetised in circulating tokens (IOUs). the circulation of itens precedes debt economies however, by means of gift economies, which become increasingly reciprocal and eventually form commodity exchange (so, we begin interpersonally with unquantified obligations, move to socially quantified debts in the state and then further, toward commodity exchange). as graeber writes, the gift exchange is one of mutual obligation (which we would call "favours" today), where loyalty and friendship is solidified by bonds of reciprocity and forgiveness. this is why in my country, it is custom for everyone to buy a round of drinks at the pub, and so it suffices as symbolic exchange (where no long-term surplus is possible), like how in birthday cards, the same £20 circulates between hands. what is missing in a lot of economic discourse is the notion of circulation for its own sake. we see this most exemplified in gambling - and we know that people like to wager in games of any sort - even the stock market is just a form of professional gambling (in the iliad, book 23, the funeral games of patrocles give us an insight, where even the loser still received a prize. an issue we have today is that the losses of the game are socialised while the wins are privatised as a surplus - this would be like receiving money on your birthday but never giving anyone else money; it ruins the ritual).
>The article distinguishes between the origin theories in Marx and Smith. and both are wrong.
Anonymous 12-08-25 10:50:18 No. 24798
>>24792 100% &amazed people still believe hermit kingdom propaganda.
I mean the unicorn thing and all should tell you enough.
Or the books glazing the Kims you can download? Mad shit.
Anonymous 11-08-25 14:15:03 No. 24794
>>24747 >political economy here's a basic reading list:
- hesiod, works and days (700 B.C.)
- xenophon, oeconomicus (360 B.C.)
- xenophon, on revenues (355 B.C.)
- aristotle, oeconomica (350 B.C.)
aristotle, nicomachaen ethics, book 5, chapter 5 (350 B.C.)
- aristotle, rhetoric, book 1, chapter 7 (340 B.C.)
- aristotle, politics, book 1 (330 B.C.)
- the book of matthew (80 A.D.)
- the book of acts (90 A.D.)
- thomas aquinas - summa theologica, II-II.Q.77 (1275)
- matthew cooke M.S. (1450 A.D.)
- william petty, a treatise of taxes (1662)
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 09-08-25 22:09:18 No. 24779
Finished Responding to the Right by Nathan J. Robinson (2023). The book's promise is "25 Brief Replies to Conservative Arguments". It contains 25 essays with tons of footnotes. I suppose one could argue these essays do contain the brief replies and the reader just needs to cut down the text, but the book would be so much more effective if it had been short. What strikes me how fair the writer is. He seriously reads all sorts of drivel by conservatives and reflects on it. Meticulous to a fault. I don't actually believe they are that serious about themselves.
Anonymous 05-08-25 23:14:15 No. 24759
Try audio books. It's a slightly different way of processing words and it might be easier for you to understand. You also won't give up as soon because you don't actually have to read all da big woruds.
Anonymous 18-07-25 01:50:22 No. 24694
>>24294 Honestly same. For me it's more not knowing where to start, and when there's volumes upon volumes of thick books covering every little niche part of the subject it's hard to know where to start
Anonymous 16-07-25 04:37:45 No. 24677
>>24656 Sort of related to your point, I've been reading a lot of Ranajit Guha recently, and in his book History at the Limit of World-History, he critiques Hegel for a limited view of history:
Guha critiques the concept of world-history in the lineage of Hegel as being almost exclusively Eurocentric. Yet this is not merely a cultural rebuke, for Guha sees that Hegelian history, a worldview that saw human development motivated by a transcendent world historical ‘spirit’, as one ‘held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism’ (p.5). World-history then took on an elevated quality as something that only people who had both writing and a state were able to participate in (p.10). Thus by ignoring the vast majority of the globe, Hegel’s world-history becomes ‘a short story with epical pretensions’ (p.35).
Anonymous 16-07-25 00:39:57 No. 24672
>>24671 (me)
Couldn't find the pdf, but seems very good based on this index i found extracted from the book. If anyone knows something about it, where to get it or even if its worth buying or something, im all ears
Anonymous 15-07-25 19:59:10 No. 24653
>>22717 The leftypol twitter account (leftypol_org) Is now shilling for this incoherent book with a pinned tweet.
Anonymous 13-07-25 12:14:31 No. 24643
>another thread where people post their dogshit study guides where 90% of the books there are shit and full of ideology and the remaining 10% will be the ones no one bothers to read because they're "hard"
Anonymous 13-07-25 12:07:47 No. 24642 [Reply]
Hi , i'm beginner in chemistry and i want someone with kind heart to help me with studying , which authors , books you can recommend?
Anonymous 12-07-25 20:01:44 No. 24638
we have a language learning thread >>32096 >do writing using pen and pencil >talk out loud using the vocabulary you have learned >describe what you're currently doing in another language, this will show what you do and don't know >study the lyrics of musics you listen a lot >stick to only a few language books >watch foreign language yt videos
Anonymous 12-07-25 06:21:02 No. 24633
>>24632 Did you tell your wife’s boyfriend about how great the book is?
Gaylord
Anonymous 12-07-25 04:40:17 No. 24631
>>24619 >>24620 "Settling" this question means standing on the side of the oppressed, organizing to bring about a revolution that negates white colonial identity through socialism-communism. Similar stuff to the proletariat doing a revolution that in the end is gonna negate the proletariat itself.
Unfair critics of J Sakai point to a supposed demobilizing tone in his main book but it's really a descriptive analysis of a particular form of oppresion that hinders worker's solidarity by making racists side with the bourgeoisie and petit borgeoisie. The point is to demystify white ideology whenever possible, not being afraid at times (sometimes, most times) to be a minority because you don't go pander to the lowest conscious workers.
Anonymous 10-07-25 17:57:07 No. 24622
Finished The Lifespan of a Fact a book that shows an essay by John D'Agata, with comments and corrections by editor Jim Fingal, and some back and forth between the two (2012). The essay is about a teen suicide. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the teen's parents, but this is so fucking funny (bet they loled too).
Anonymous 08-07-25 17:59:26 No. 24617
Finished The Chapo Guide to Revolution by the podcasters of Chapo Trap House (2018). Humor can only do so much for me when the topic is awful (burger politics). I found it depressing to read. Hasn't aged much, which makes it even more depressing. Among other things, the book got taxonomies of types of libs and cons, with illustrations by Eli Valley.<LIBERAL HAWK <The horrors of the world are unavoidable. But while most of us look at those horrors and say “I like that” or “That’s good; keep going,” there are a brave few who boldly declare that things are bad and we must “do something.” And if the evil actor in question happens to oppose America’s imperial goals, there you will find the Liberal Hawk, bravely crying for nonspecific action. The Balls to Be a Woman: Golda Meir’s War against Toxic Masculinity .<SEXUAL REPRESSION LEVEL: Offers free foot rubs to IDF soldiers
Ancient economy? Anonymous 07-07-25 16:38:58 No. 24656 [Reply]
When it comes to the study of ancient economic history, one is faced with serious difficulties as a beginner. The usual textbooks normally cover the "histoire événementielle", i.e., the succession of notable historical events and actors (the surface of history), while the works that do cover ancient socioeconomic history are hard to find or outdated, such as Finley's famous book.
Anonymous 07-07-25 05:00:48 No. 24607
Nearly every narrative of American history has been so bastardized that I don't even get into the topic unless someone is over the usual posturing and bullshit that happens in these discussions.
Probably the helpful thing to remember is that the President was de-emphasized before the Civil War, and Lincoln takes a stronger role out of necessity but also bent over backwards to please his fellow Republicans and keep his generals happy even when they were drunk as fuck and wanted to undermine Lincoln for getting them involved in this mess. Washington presented himself as the great neutral force that everyone could agree on, while the government was mostly in the hands of the founding generation and they figured out what they were going to do with it (hint: they really don't agree on what they're going to do with it). Also he was a big Freemason and there were calls to make him a king, but Washington rebuffed this for all of the reasons kings are a terrible idea. In many cases, the President was a titular head who was out and about doing things, but the general public did have that strong an identification with most presidents. Washington was an exception because he was Washington but, as mentioned, he was the neutral center everyone could agree on. The real center of the country was Congress and its prominent Senators and Representatives, and the alliances and clubs the most prominent Congressmen had aligned with them; and really this meant decisions were made in the smoke-filled back room and this was suitable for everyone. No one was convinced laws were made entirely by ponderous procedures as a formality, as if that were the entirely of what the law and the state could be. If you tried to tell people that was how government worked, everyone, of every social class, would laugh at you and ask if you are on the dope. The procedures did have a disciplinary effect on the other Congressmen, prevented any one of them from jumping up and down like a retard too much and making Hitlerian proclamations. The President was a man tasked with very important executive business, and usually represented what the victorious party and government were going to push for, but to become President you had to please Congress and play ball, hence why the surest path to the Presidency was for all of American history through Congress. (Trump is not a President, he's a sniveling retard put up for show because this republic is deader than dead.) When Lincoln, who was the most o
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 07-07-25 04:42:07 No. 24606
QRD on all the books:
"Witness" – Chambers was a fucked up guy, joined Communist Party USA and was part of its underground network, wife refused to abort their child which lead him down the path of religious conversion, claimed he understood the godlessness of communism so he quit, became a Christian, and then snitched on CPUSA during the 2nd Red Scare ("McCarthyism"). Book is highly melodramatic and presents a highly good-vs-evil Manichaean worldview. Chambers also blames intellectuals for propagating communism in America, heavily promotes Christianity as the only way to save the world from the communist menace, and is overall a sensationalist asshole.
"School of Darkness" – Bella Dodd was an Italian immigrant who longed to fit in with American society and culture, joined CPUSA in the mid 1930s, recruited a bunch of CPUSA-affiliated teachers into the Teachers Union in New York, worked her way up to become very successful in the Party, fell out with the Party soon after Earl Browder got purged, ended up leaving CPUSA and became a born-again Catholic after meeting with Fulton Sheen, Sheen then convinced her to snitch on the Party during McCarthyism as a form of "repentance". Basically, Dodd was desperately searching for validation her entire life. When communists didn't want her anyone she became Catholic and anti-communist and got validation from that crowd.
"Radical Son" – Horowitz grew up being raised by CPUSA-affiliated parents, was raised to believe in communism, became a big name activist in the 60s New Left, worked with the Black Panthers, then had a falling out with the Panthers, accused them of murdering a friend of his, had a complete falling out with leftist politics and embraced Reaganite conservatism in the 80s. Most of his memoir is about "growing up" and realizing the leftist beliefs his parents raised him with were "wrong". He also hates intellectuals and is highly self-righteous.
"Unplanned" – Abby Johnson worked at Planned Parenthood and became very successful at it. She became a clinic director. Then, one day she allegedly witnessed a fetus being aborted on an ultrasound and this destroyed her mentally. She became a staunch anti-abortion activist afterwards. A lot of details in her memoir have been scrutinized by her former coworkers. Her book doesn't have some great metaphysical discussion on the "evils of leftism" as the other three but it's a more contemporary conversion memoi
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 05-07-25 04:51:34 No. 24585
>>24583 Every computer, every algorithmic program, is predictable and can be understood in principle by the user. We expect programs to do particular things, and can ask what the machine is doing even if we don't have a disassembled source code and full knowledge. We never once believe the computer is actually magic, and that is what the ruinous pedagogy insists we HAVE to do. The computer is a machine, and not a particularly complicated machine. So too is the network of these computers fairly simple to understand, even if the number of agents and the command and control of superior users is not immediately known.
I write more about this in The Retarded Ideology. I'm re-reading the first book and I find it remarkable just how well I set up these arguments for the future books, looking specifically at the mechanism-vitalism "debate".
If you're talking about censorship and total control of information, that is handled ultimately by a very human source that insists on forced ignorance. There are many people who are partisans of this forced ignorance, who have resorted to terror and torture to insist information works in the way you believe. All of those people are not made of magic nor possess any special power. They are made of flesh and blood, possessing the same basic knowledge process as any human, and for any of their plans to be realized they can only operate with machinery much as we do. They do not receive any "super-science" or "super-technology" that allows them alone this power, or grants to their machines special power.
The method of information control deployed today is not inscrutable or "unknowable". It is actually painfully predictable. Its "secret" is that it can deploy in any arena an unbearable degree of shrieking and humiliation, so that the public of any and all countries will be cowed into submission. This is the standard Germanic pattern of behavior, because they insist people need to "respect" their disgusting race and their stupid warmongering habit.
Anonymous 28-06-25 14:55:59 No. 24525
>>24117 >Yes. They aren’t reading the BOOKS. If they were raised to read the BOOKS we did, real history (get it before it all gets covered up), and not raised by an iphone then they would have a balanced view. There are many bazed gen A like this I hope and pray.
Bruh. Even in the pre Internet days, people didn't read primary sources much.
And we have more articles and e books online than ever before with extensive reach on a lot of subjects.
Anonymous 28-06-25 02:06:48 No. 24520
>>24344 (me)
I have almost finished his Lenin biography, so I can recommend that book and this one also because Lars knows historiography and uses up-to-date sources from the archives released in the 90s.
Anonymous 24-06-25 23:51:11 No. 24512
So I was looking for a way to improve my rhetorical skills in English. (I don't even live in an English-speaking country, but you never know… maybe there will be a career opportunity in another country, maybeeee even a… romantic opportunity?) And while taking a break from search, I somehow stumbled upon a text shilling for a book supposedly full of interesting expressions, demonstrating it with this bit:<For example in the morning following a late night when he was a teenager his father would say: "Your eyes look like two piss-holes in the snow." Rosen's Almanac by Michael Rosen (2024) has entries for each day of the year, but, aside from etymology regarding certain dates, it can get pretty random, going from general English to national variants to regional slang to family in-jokes, and back, and again, and in leaps, though most often looking at the micro-slang end of the scale. Some entries are a couple pages long, musing and noticing things like kids today using "so" so much; but most entries are tweet-size, a lot of these being literal tweets Rosen liked. And I paid money for this! And so now you know how to write a book if you ever got famous.
Anonymous 24-06-25 15:45:12 No. 24511
Hello, anyone has a book about how a socialist economy would work? Beside Cockshott, of course, anyone beside him that tried to envision a socialist economy?
Anonymous 15-06-25 14:04:43 No. 24480 [Reply]
Former alt-right here, what books and content can I read up upon to educate myself besides the typical "Karl Marx" content?
DPRK Wholesome DPRK Anon 12-06-25 09:58:45 No. 24472 [Reply]
With the deluge of slop around the DPRK this is a thread to share more serious works on the project.
Glownonymous 11-06-25 23:40:15 No. 24471
>>9052 I will say one of the bad consequences of Marxism was that it separated socialism from spirituality and religion. Before Marx, most utopian socialist movements were religious or occult groups or freemason lodges. This separation made scientific socialism crude, mechanical, and soulless form of political scientism.
>>9106 >there's a good reason atheists tend to be angry about religion and all the barbarism it involves That's because most of them are ironically fundmamentalists who portray religion in a specific way to alleviate themselves. Its similar to how the Germans pass the Holocaust guilt onto Nazis and immigrants. And although they champion criticism, they chimp out whenever you criticize them or imply their narratives are flawed. The myth of an essentially evil and barbaric religion, timeless and everywhere the same, is pure projection, a myth cooked up by the atheist. The reason most online atheists are angry about religion is because they are as bigoted as Jerry Falwell.
>>10499 I've never liked Dabashi. I don't think this book is a good work of theology and the whole post-colonial studies thing is a dead end.
Anonymous 11-06-25 22:15:52 No. 24466
>>24465 Read the Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, his second book?
Apparently he said that Marx was wrong, is that true? Kinda put me off reading it.
Communization theory Anonymous 11-06-25 22:09:18 No. 24465 [Reply]
Finishing crisis to communization and i find it interesting, though I'd like to get into the more specific details and theory of communisation. Good books on it?
S 10-06-25 23:57:09 No. 24460 [Reply]
Sorry, I don't really contribute here but anyone know how to hack these timed '.ascm' epubs? Idk how you're meant to deal with this online borrowing rubbish and I'm just trying to read this book which is not on any pdf website. Not in any of the libraries near me either. Fuck timed books.
Anonymous 29-05-25 18:14:56 No. 24399
>>24397 Write your favorite monster in the replies.
Write the name of the monsters in Chinese characters in your notebook or drawing program.
My favorite monster is Hei se 黑色 - "hei" (黑) means black and "se" (色), which means "color". You might know an anime character called Hei from Darker than black - his name was actually Black.
>>24394 Anonymous 27-05-25 08:22:18 No. 24380
Higher education provides the following:>A shared place to study and gather >Professors, teachers and tutors >A curriculum >Last, but most important, a degree
Anonymous 21-05-25 22:03:19 No. 24364 [Reply]
Does anybody have any recommendations on what to read in regards to the history of NATO? I'm aware of and have already checked out Michael Parenti's To Kill A Nation for when it comes to the destruction of Yugoslavia and NATO's involvement in it but I'm curious about other books chronicling the history, actions, and purpose of NATO. PDF and EPUB file drops are also more than welcome.
Anonymous 19-05-25 21:07:52 No. 24358
Back on the obsidian horse. Got all my lists of books I’ve read in one place. All my research notes. My fiction writing. My journaling. Anyone else using obsidian for a zettlekastin or at least a dumping ground so the brain knows it’s all in one place? I still have lots of folders of old notes from school and continuing educational material I want to put into my system. Would be cool to have an accountability buddy.
Anonymous 17-05-25 01:30:48 No. 24344
If you're just getting into studying the USSR then I recommend you read E.H. Carr's books and/or Charles Bettelheim's Class Struggles in the USSR.
Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context Anonymous 16-05-25 12:22:17 No. 24343 [Reply]
Is this book worth reading? Finishing up on What is to Be Done? and feel as if it is pretty straight forward. The book is also like 600 pages long >If we are honestly to assess the lessons of the Russian Revolution, then it is essential that we unpick the real Lenin from this shared Stalinist and liberal myth of Leninism’. It would be difficult to praise too highly Lars Lih’s contribution to such an honest reassessment of Lenin’s thought. At its heart, Lih’s book aims to overthrow, and succeeds in overthrowing, what he calls the textbook interpretation’ of Lenin’s What is to be done? Lih thus adds to and deepens the arguments of those who have sought to recover the real Lenin from the Cold War mythology.”
Anonymous 12-05-25 05:07:45 No. 24330
>>24315 wrong: practices originating in religious contexts can be appropriated from religions, as well as concepts and anything you want, just like any other activity. The issue is making them work, of course. I doubt that a revolutionary will be worse by meditating or being interested, in its own ethical outlook, in the benefit of all sentient beings. Both are things that in this case have come through buddhism, but buddhism does not exhaust their use as items in other systems, other systems can even outcompete buddhism in the use of said items. Now, a lot of items you should not incorporate, rather, you should do an immanent critique, incorporate them as poor moments of your own system and make that work, like marx shows how liberal values are mere bourgeoise ideology. Now, when you got a communist blindly appropriating liberal values, you got a radlib, when you got a communist blindly appropriating christianity, you got a Tolstoy kind of guy. But someone that in his childhood had an interest in christianity and became a communist, but at the same time mantained an ethics that is about the redemption of humanity, or whatever, does not necessarily make his system worse: it depends on how he makes the appropriated items work. By definition, philosophy is the ultimate appropriating activity: while religion cannot take an outside concept freely because it must ideologically stand by its dogmas for x or y historical reasons, philosophy can appropriated everything freely and minmax the conceptual items that are constantly being produced in all other activities. Maybe you think that just because some ideology has configured itself in a certain way and immanently gives some hermeneutical rules to understand it, one has to play by the book and follow said rules just because they say so, but this is not true: you can extract and reconfigure any item, be it a theoretical or practical concept. Maybe you didn't know you could actually do this, but now you know: now go on and explore any system of thought you want and do whatever you want with it. Maybe you think that if this is true everything would just be a frankestein of different items but this is not true because: there are emergent properties, such as those that arise dialectically, which make so that not all configurations are functionally the same if handling the same items. So, not everything works, just like in any o
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 08-05-25 19:57:52 No. 24317 [Reply]
Is there a PDF or book that explains the planned economic history and governmental structure of the Soviet Union in EXTREME and gritty technical & analytical detail while preferably including the Bolshevik group's ideals and wartime strategies leading to the October Revolution? Things like how precisely was the government set up, how was the economy and it's commerce were planned and what was the distinct bureaucratic structure. I'll be eternally greatful
Anonymous 04-05-25 19:28:04 No. 24286
>>24282 I have a thread up on Siberia asking about experiences with secularized Buddhism. I'm interested in it myself. I can recommend a few books if you wish.
>>24274 >but is outright hotile to Marxism even without all of the superstitious garbage? The core message of Buddhism, even without all supernatural claptrap seems to be "You should not wish to change the world", while the core message of Marxism is "The point is to change the world". Not a single statement you typed is correct. Not a single one. Congrats on your massive ignorance. Trot flag really is a cherry on the top.
Anonymous 30-04-25 18:55:19 No. 24257
>>24256 If I wanted to make an organized text, i would not have made a leftypol post and loose time on that, where i live is some hours until night time and i want to go to the park to read a book. In that case, I would have made an essay on word. Since this is a discussion thread, and if you are interested in the arguments it may contain, and especially you being the OP i guess, if all this is true, then you are obbligated to read everything even if the presentation bore you. If this last thing is not true, then some other affirmation in the premises isnt true also.
Glownonymous 27-04-25 21:09:53 No. 24204
>>24158 I'd recommend Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi's books. He was Marxist activist during the revolution and a political prisoner under Khomeini's rule. He's very even handed, has a good insight into both leftists and Islamist activism in the 70s and 80s, he even shared a cell with Khamaeini once. He has a regular column in Counterpunch and his book Remembering Akbar is very good. I'd also recommend the book Critical Introduction to Khomeini edited by Adib-Moghaddam.
The problem with a lot of Iranian history is it was written by the losers, people who fled Iran during the 80s. There are all kinds of specious narratives about the Iranian revolution that diaspora Iranians (including academic historians) like to spread around. One common stereotype in Middle East history is a grand narrative that you have this traditional Islamic bad culture vs secular progressive forces trying to overcome that culture and the entire history of the region is just a culture war between these two factions and you'll see this pop up all the time. Tabrizi sees this as an example of secular fundamentalism and it appears in the books of many Iranian historians too.
>>24158 >the Revolution was hijacked by Islamists and turned Iran into a theocratic dystopia This is a myth that was promoted by leftists who fled Iran in the 80s. Pretty much everyone in Iran in the 70s and in 1979 was 1. Pro-Khomeini 2. Believed in the importance of Islam or that Islam should have some role in government etc. What that role should be and what role Khomeini should play was where people disagreed. Even the avowedly atheist leftists in Iran had to bend to the overwhelming Islamic sentiment. They often had an attitude of "there is no God but unlike Christianity Islam is a revolutionary religion" etc. and then a good chunk of leftists were devout Muslims or at least sympathetic to Qutb and Shariati. A good chunk of Islamists also had leftist sympathies, especially Ayatollahs Taleghani and Behishti, Ali Shariati etc. there was a whole Islamic left that's been suppressed in Iran since the 80s. Mir Hossein Mousavi and the Green Movement fall into this Islamic left socialist camp.
A good amount of people assume that Islamists and leftists were at each others throats when th
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 26-04-25 06:35:51 No. 24197
>>24191 I'll try to answer your other questions:
Given more importance and explanatory power than they should. Most of the lying and humiliation is carried out by civilians, and upheld as a civic duty. It is more accurate to say that private life and the public domain has been thoroughly militarized, than it is to say that all of this malevolence has to come from military intelligence ghouls with the super secret tech and security clearance (the "right of transgression").
The Nazis were an arm of the global imperial system, created to absorb Germany and Europe into it as quickly as possible. The Nazis had no real independent policy. All of their greatest atrocities were carried out so that Anglo/American backers could have all of that eugenics research data, to chop up the inmates. That never went away. After the war, the true believers in Eugenics were allowed to work in America or given cushy assignments, rewarded for a job well done in crushing the free peoples of the world. Of course, the USSR had both its own part in the imperial system, and had a history of German influence and so there were a lot of sympathizers with the Germans during the war in Russia. And, if you haven't figured it out, America the Great and Terrible is nothing but another arm of the imperial system, with the same ghouls jockeying for position within it. You have to get out of thinking that nations were ever the chief actors in history. That idea is promoted because nationalism entailed democratization, and the democratic public-facing republics were the only thing that suggested it might have been different, if humans really wanted it to be so. It turns out that… no. That's not what humans are. It is not within their capacities as a race to allow this, and that was why Eugenics chose racialism rather than objective metrics of ability that could be studied on their own merits. If you did "eugenics" on a strict and honest assessment of ability, you would have to ask what mechanically causes ability or disability, and you would find most of the answers for human betterment have nothing to do wi
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 24-04-25 01:34:48 No. 24193
>>24175 >clicked on this at random >changed tabs >forgot about it for a bit >come back >a top history book i've wanted to read for years based braudel anon
Idea for a study group on the philosophy/ontology of work Anonymous 22-04-25 08:26:44 No. 24185 [Reply]
>Labour, by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of labour.
Anonymous 21-04-25 12:50:32 No. 24180
>>24179 You can use it to brainstorm with others, but yes, it’s mostly a way to organize recently learned information. It’s useful to med and law students who have to learn whole textbooks for exams. It’s like making a memory palace on paper… almost. I mean, just try it out right now. Get out a sheet of paper and a pen and think of a subject you know quite a bit about and chart something out. Dark souls lore. Moby dick. Lies about the dprk. Anything.
Anonymous 18-04-25 22:00:25 No. 24163
>>24121 >Wine moms, depending on how you define/identify them, are perhaps some of the best suited (some of them) to turning left. Just start asking them about Palestine and they'll start talking about how the Free Palestine movement is a Russian conspiracy against the Democrats. Ask them how they feel about homeless people and they'll say they should be sent "somewhere" unspecified and that it's all mental illness and drug addiction that has absolutely nothing to do with obscenely high rent. Given the Hitler particles you can see just oozing from the "Wine Mom" types when you bring up homelessness, I honestly wonder what "somewhere" they have in mind. They don't want socialism, they want another Obama and they'll get that in 3 years, likely in the form of Cory Booker.
Any good books on the Iranian Revolution? Anonymous 18-04-25 04:43:32 No. 24158 [Reply]
I'm looking for any books that will actually educate me on the Iranian revolution and why it resulted on the state that still exists to this day. I've heard many different stories that the Revolution was hijacked by Islamists and turned Iran into a theocratic dystopia but I really don't know if I can believe that fully. So I would love some good books that would give me a good explanation on everything that happened during the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime.
Anonymous 07-04-25 17:21:27 No. 24120
>>24117 >Yes. They aren’t reading the BOOKS. If they were raised to read the BOOKS we did, real history (get it before it all gets covered up), and not raised by an iphone then they would have a balanced view. There are many bazed gen A like this I hope and pray.
You know that books were considered blasphemous in the first century AD?
And they still use books in schools or use virtual school courses with extensive passages.
It's not really the media that's the problem.
Because we have hundreds of web articles showing history events that even official history books won't tell you.
If the media format was really the problem, then why was it that even before iPhones, people were complaining about academic performance tanking?
Anonymous 07-04-25 10:20:39 No. 24117
>Why do adults always say that newer generations are less literate when kids nowadays read and type more text than any other era? Don’t read primary sources, books, they read in other ways
i wish I studied more as a kid. Fuck its hard now, what I’d learn in school in a day now would take me a week of study
>Meanwhile, we are seeing less industrial and social skills present in the prime age population I’m desperately seeking a blue collar job. Construction will be in massive demand
>>24064 Yes. They aren’t reading the BOOKS.
If they were raised to read the BOOKS we did, real history (get it before it all gets covered up), and not raised by an iphone then they would have a balanced view. There are many bazed gen A like this I hope and pray.
t. Born at the dawn of the beautiful millennium ahead of us. The next 5-10 years will be scary for the teens these days
Anonymous 29-03-25 01:08:45 No. 24068
>>24065 >I want to know if she's a lefty or not. you are mentally retarded. you can perfectly understand marx and even write books analyzing his ideas without being a leftist. you don't need to agree to understand
why do I have to explain stuff to you as if you were 10? the point she makes is that marx didn't pay that much attention to it in his writings, but the few times he did he had a more nuanced and dynamic approach than the determinism of engels. that marx mentioned in a few essays and articles for newspapers the oppression of women, specially of working class but to some extent even of those in the dominant bourgeois class. and that he advocated for an active change of women's place in society and the replacement of the bourgeois family, even if still under capitalism, instead of passively waiting for technology and revolution to do everything
honestly I don't know why this good woman is trying to squeeze feminism out of a few passages when she understands and describes at length that marx was much more focused on the economic critique of capitalism and working class political activism. I mean, it was an interesting read but otherwise useless, I guess it could work as a base to develop a feminist line from a marxist perspective
Has anybody read my Poli Sci prof's book? nyxbloom 28-03-25 22:46:33 No. 24065 [Reply]
Found out my Poli Sci professor has a lot of books on Marx and his relation to gender and such. Has anybody read "Marx on Gender and the Family" by Heather Brown? I couldn't get a PDF rip online and I want to know if she's a lefty or not.
Anonymous 28-03-25 04:48:28 No. 24060
>>24059 >when was the last time science disagreed with itself? A method doesn't "disagree with itself". If you've come to treating science like a dogma that excommunicates members of the congregation, it's long past a question of science.
There is a science to ruling and religion and how such mechanisms work, but the world does not care about any of our political conceits. In practice, humans will out of necessity abandon all political and spiritual conceits to survive, perhaps pretending afterward that nothing was violated. If people live for an empty and wrong conceit, they're stupid. We often hold among our guiding principles some commitment to reality, even those who loathe to admit it.
The chief export of Greece during the Roman Empire was educated slaves, who became freedmen precisely because they were literate and were employed as teachers. In the ancient world, there wasn't the same sort of laws passed against teaching slaves to read as existed in the US. Even those laws didn't stop black slaves from learning to read, and it was after the fact that the "all blacks are illiterate" trope was made true, to justify what the Fabians were about to do to the country. Also lol, if you think literacy is monopolized by the culture industry vultures, that is not literacy. You'd be surprised how much of the ancient canon was accessible and short. Since books had to be copied by hand, the texts those teachers used to teach grammar were usually simple enough, and they're still around today and translated into English.
If you took someone from a nomadic society, then literacy wouldn't be common because there were no books to read and no agreed-upon system for writing such things. Even then, the Maya had a written language, and the Inca "sort of" had a record-keeping method that was compared to primitive writing systems. Reading at a basic level is something that can be taught to an adult in a short time-span, and is usually taught to children. The idea that children are "forever illiterate" is Germanic, Satanic and fag. Even among illiterates, they understand language and machinery. Knew an illiterate guy who diagnosed immediately what was wrong with my car when I was looking at it and he walked by. My guess is that he was actually "semi-literate" but hid this because he has no reason to sell himself as literate. That
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 27-03-25 00:00:49 No. 24052
>>24049 Good idea, I'll look into it if there is a significant amount of members on matrix.
Anonymous 26-03-25 11:24:12 No. 24047
>>24046 I get that, I've tried matrix but it seemed dead to me (or maybe no one wanted to respond to me lol). I have no attachment to discord, if there are people who want matrix (or other apps) I'm fine with that, I chose discord because it's normie friendly.
Anonymous 26-03-25 10:51:26 No. 24045
>>24043 I made a discord if anyone's interested: DCG6ZXQtuQ
Anonymous 26-03-25 09:08:36 No. 24044
Is no one interested, or are these threads slow?
Would anyone be interested in going through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit together? Anonymous 26-03-25 06:36:49 No. 24043 [Reply]
The way that we would do it is choose a date every week and then get into a voice chat together and have one member read through a portion of PoS followed by something like Kalkavage's Logic of Desire (or Hegel's ladder) and then talk about it together. We'd have a reading session every week until we finish the book. Everything would be contained within the session.
Anonymous 22-03-25 18:50:04 No. 24029 [Reply]
im searching for a good book about the weimar republic, specifically the nazi's rise. a million books have been written on the topic but i dont want to accidentally read the liberals' opinion
Anonymous 20-03-25 23:13:31 No. 24003
>>24001 But fuck it, even though I'll be met with a peanut gallery retard who can only type one word (like the subhuman retard they are) and a mentally ill case of the dunning-kruger effect who is a contender for the most obstinate human being to ever live (Eugene), I'll point out the issues in this 'rebuttal', just so there's no cope that I was bluffing, or whatever.
Let's illustrate how Eugene oversteps his boundaries (as always) to 'challenge' a field he has no qualifications or understanding towards.
"You mean pseudoscience that has no bearing on what "life" meant to be a sensical proposition. If you declare "all is life", that is a religious koan, not an argument that tells us anything about life. Systems generally are not living systems, nor is life fundamentally defined as a "system" necessarily. The living entity may not have a "systemic" existence to be supposed, and only afterwards is a "systemic" existence surmised because it would be quite impossible to describe a thing without a "system" of some sort. Life at a basic level is not the "thing" but the functions it carries out, which are necessarily forceful events in the world rather than "informational" ones. Even if the force of the living thing is very faint, it is still a force that operates on its own power, rather than "simulated life" where the forceful representation is entirely symbolic and only exists as "life" because there is an interpreter of this information observing life-like behavior. It is the movement of the life-form that is "life" rather than its being or essence, and life is not any movement or the lingering nervous activity of a lump that was once living. Life is a very particular proposition about those functions.
Ecology in its entirety is contrary to life. It has no place in the genuine study whatsoever, and that was its purpose; to forestall basic knowledge about life and how to properly model living systems for as long as possible, retarding human thought, possibly forever."
Already he arbitrarily makes this assumption, even though DST satisfies all requirements of an actual science whilst also testing its own theoretics. Biology in the context cited (DST), is less concerned with ecologically at an intrinsic level and more concerned with biological functions and their development in
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 17-03-25 04:18:27 No. 23952
>>23949 First of all:
L + (You) ratio + can't read capital + no home gym + Protein powder expired + Can't even bench your own Steam Deck + Zero functional programming skills + Unread libgens + Book backlog spanning three genres + No soldiering kit + No powertools + AI romance + acquaintances with anime profile pictures ppl + shit sleep schedule + Unplayed steam games + No sunlight + No Vitamin D + No Maidens + Discord account + virgin
Sexond:
Get that head outta yo ass and this site and get somethin' done like I was with your mom okah son?
Anonymous 16-03-25 12:55:34 No. 23932
>>23145 I studied music at uni, and it was fine. The people were nice, and I ended up meeting a friend group for the first time since secondary school that I still meet up with regularly. The lectures themselves were mixed. A lot of good info, but most of it available for free online. Reading books and getting a good instrument teacher would take your skills just as far.
I now work in education. Barely enough money to cover my bills, but I still enjoy parts of it. Some of my course mates are session musicians and the like, but it seems like such a grind for not much more benefit. I don't want to be a businessman, I want to make music, which I now do at home by myself. I do some guitar teaching on the side now and then, so we'll see what happens.
Anonymous 15-03-25 17:38:01 No. 23915
I have a secret pleasure with bodybuilding history. Despite being a Randian, egoist goober with some very questionable theories on gym routines, Mentzer was showing some interesting focus on critiquing the ideology surrounding gym culture. As far as I know, he is the only man to have critiqued the social aspect of the gym in any serious way. Everyone else defends it.
One of the main points he makes to demystify going to the gym 5+ days a week, is that he points out there is a "loneliness" factor motivating people. He theorizes that all the "knowledge" of gym "truths" are artificially fabricated to justify going to the gym for as long as possible, so they can be in connection to something they feel is "real." So, for example, 5-6 day routines first serve the purpose of getting "real" gym goers to the gym almost every day, rather than some sort of scientific proof that this is optimal. Thus, if you can't commit to this, you are cast to the "outside group" for scorn. Interestingly, the weekend is not emphasized in bodybuilding routines, as Mike mocks that Sundays are taken off for the sabbath rather than any biological necessity. This creates a situation where people take a reprieve at the gym after/before a day of work, which Marxists know is alienating. Once they don't have to work that day, suddenly the motivation disappears.
In a way, some of his work is a very infantile attempt at critical theory. Sure, he's a lolbertarian individualist, but I strip away the ideology to look at the underlying intent and I was kind of impressed. With the fascist undertones of gym culture, which I know gets mocked but it is real phenomenon if you've been deep in the culture and I'm not just talking about voting Republican, Freudian analysis of the violent reaction against critique of the ideology applied in Mentzer case. He relentlessly critiques tradition, like the "holiness" of three, three days a week full body, three sets, ect. Instead of disagreeing, pretty much all critics of him instead set out to absolutely destroy him.
>he's a meth addict >he's a sore loser >he's a grifter selling tapes >he's a liar >he's a cuck >he's a homosexual (not beating the fascist accusations with this one) His meth addiction was also clearly a self-medication fo
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 12-03-25 04:51:27 No. 23890
>>23882 >in one sense, but i would claim something similar in the very institution of science. I make this claim in my book as well—that science can only exist because someone morally cares about truth pertaining to a world that exists outside of our conceits of it, and values truth over any ulterior motive.
Economics never claimed to be a science in that sense. It is purely about moral philosophy, politics, and things that are only valuable to us. To anything that's not human, our arguments over this topic are absurdities. An alien looking at humanity has no reason to regard any of our struggle as real and would have to ask why we did this. So too can humans ask this question about themselves.
You do know a price exists because of a process of haggling between the buyer and seller in the first place, right? If no one can agree on the price of something, where does science prescribe any price "purely in nature"? Prices are contingent on this stable market relation that exists between human beings in societies with laws, and they are only "observed" by noting the individual interactions of the participants in this market. All of the members of this market are aware that there is a "market society" where this takes place.
This may be odd to you but "list prices" are a very new idea, and they are something that came about with free trade and the liberal idea that this information should be "transparent", i.e. that in-person haggling should be minimized so that any of this could operate smoothly. Instead of the shopkeeper negotiating the price with each customer, the shopkeeper lists a price and "haggles" with the market and other shopkeepers, and sets down a list price with regard to his competitors, rather than the consumer. The consumer can refuse to buy or go somewhere cheaper, but the personal relationship between buyer and seller has to minimized as much as possible. In practice, this personal relationship can never be removed completely, and shopkeepers can build a relationship with particular buyers and offer "special deals", but none of that is mandated by "the system" or policed by it directly.
We easily can look at ourselves as a dispassionate observer would see humanity. Children
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 10-03-25 21:45:28 No. 23839
>>23515 If relations are treated as "things" you don't really know anything. Relations implies there are things to relate, and you're back to reducing an object ad infinitum. It doesn't tell you anything about genuine knowledge, and you wouldn't superimpose dialectic onto science in that way.
What really happens in a scientific approach is supposition of something, for example "the world exists" and then demonstrable proof of that supposition based on how we have defined it. It's very easy for science to invent phantoms and reify them, while conducting the most thorough and proper science with a genuine interest in the world, presuming you believe there is a world to study (which, if there isn't, then anything you're saying is bullshit and intended to be so, and there is no discussion to be had regarding what you said).
On some level you have to accept "the world exists", whatever its nature, since without it, why are we here speaking of this matter? You may doubt this existence or any particulars about it. You can certainly doubt your existence, because there was a time where you did not exist, and you could very easily ask the question of what would exist if you didn't exist. You cannot take your existence for granted. What you can't really do is disregard that there is a world and continue to say anything about it with any meaning. The problem is not solipsism or insanity, but that without a "world", there is no basis for any knowledge whatsoever, even if that world was entirely a fiction created by some unknowable malevolence.
So basically when defining things you're really saying "this section of the universe does that". You would require a concept of "doing" anything, but it is far easier to conceptualize actions than "beings", which rely on many assertions to speak of any "thing" existing. Whatever preliminary assertions one makes about "things that do something", it is what those things do that define anything real, before you can speak of verifiable "things". The important thing for us is to speak of things that can be verified as facts, rather than that which forever remains supposition. That is, the facts we have are those that withstand our best and honest analysis of the objects in question. You would have to hold that there is a world outside of yourself where any of these facts are relevant, and then you have a question of w
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 10-03-25 17:52:31 No. 23832
Just jump in. The prison notebooks is just his random thoughts, it's not like really dense complex arguments for the most part. The hardest part is sorting through the weird terminology he uses to evade the prison censor. The edition I have has a lot of explanatory footnotes.
Gramsci Anonymous 10-03-25 17:00:16 No. 23830 [Reply]
What should i read before tackling Gramsci? Gramsci seems to me a monumental figure whom i must read if I were to understand the world a little better. For these reasons I don't want to rush it. What are the works I need to read before him, and what book of his should i start with?
crossroads of life: recommend books Anonymous 03-03-25 13:14:12 No. 23787 [Reply]
Im at crossroads between joining - or applying for- a catholic seminary, OR, becoming a (non-militant, but firmly (non?) believing Atheist) . It may sound extreme or stupid but consider this: IF God exists, he exists absolutely and all his attributes are true (remember im working within a catholic framework), this means hell is absolutely true, as is heaven; as I genuinely dislike sex, I won't get married ever–why not go full the mile and be a priest? or at least Brother, Canon,etc? seems rational.
Anonymous 02-03-25 20:14:11 No. 23782
Either don't think too hard about it or go read a ton of Adorno, maybe Houlgate or Jameson. Adorno's lectures on dialectics and lectures on negative dialectics are both good and clear imo but there just isnt really a way for someone to explain it to you in an imageboard reply without either wildly oversimplifying in a way that makes it seem trivial, leaving you wondering what the value of the concept is, or devolving into walls of indecipherable schizobabble, leaving you wondering what the value of the concept is. You will note that this thread has both of these phenomena. There are many Marxists who don't know anything about Hegel, and there are many people who call themselves Marxists but just sort of mean that they believe in a type of magic, and they call that magic "dialectics". The fact that both of these groups will just assert their vibes about dialectics as the meaning of the word without clarifying their priors, and the fact that neither of these lines up at all with the way German Idealist and Marxist concepts are talked about by scholars and marxologists (who themselves are not often unified), exacerbates the already significant difficulties learning about this concept. This is all to say that the most important thing is for you to not listen to imageboard users' explanations of complicated philosophical concepts.
Anonymous 02-03-25 03:09:52 No. 23776
It felt like I was wasting money at a community college. The professors didn't really do anything I was just learning everything from books. They even removed a certificate I was aiming for so they stole money from me in effect.
Anonymous 01-03-25 04:12:34 No. 23754
might as well ask here, are the cory doctorow books worth reading or are they just nonsense blog entries in book format? does he back up his points with sources and empirical evidence or is it just vibes? I know the question sounds dumb but I have read books like that, usually written by these "squishy" marxists that do freelance media analysis
Anonymous 01-03-25 03:55:35 No. 23752
Hey comrades, enough with the deep analysis of communism and fascism unless you want to start a study thread over a specific book on the topic.
Anonymous 28-02-25 06:42:31 No. 23745
after years of being a communist online, I have decided to finally read theory
Anonymous 24-02-25 15:04:58 No. 23717
>>23715 >like God in the book of job rebuking him for discovering his empty authority; this horizon of reason in the child is also the limit of the parent's "noble lie". this is why every parent hates their children asking too many questions; calling out their hypocrisies and so on - the child thus is a natural revolutionary; a socratic skeptic,
Anonymous 09-02-25 18:26:41 No. 23557
Genes (discrete, metaphysical units of heredity) aren't real
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/understanding-living-systems/gene-delusion/9898B3B95D32A8627D853CEFBD2B393E An individual sequence of DNA isolated is meaningless. It only has meaning because of the whole genome. Like a hermeneutic circle. That's why CRISPR failed
Anonymous 09-02-25 13:27:24 No. 23555
>>23554 I'm almost done reading to kill a nation. I have to stop every other page because it enrages me. It's a great overview of the US playbook, since many of the things they did in Yugoslavia, they have been also doing in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, etc. It's the same tactics over and over and over and over again, and western leftists and liberals in general keep falling every single time for them.
Anonymous 09-02-25 07:42:17 No. 23546
>>23519 >i similarly enjoy talking vulgarly with people, but in a way that parodies (or defaces) the pretension of sexuality, by overidentification. it is a reverse phallus, which then allows for my own castration, and so liberates me to my femininity. in this, i find greatest enjoyment flirting with women, yet never soiling this phantasmatic friendship with sex. this bears similarity to lacan's equation of enjoyment in the drive; "i could be talking or fucking and it would be the same difference". here, i prefer the social masturbations of oral excesses. yet, oral sex digusts me; giving or receiving.
Glownonymous 07-02-25 06:12:18 No. 23524
What are some books to read to differentiate the NEP from Dengism?
Anonymous 05-02-25 14:56:05 No. 23514
That's Volume 0 of Capital so your next book in your study plans should probably be Capital volume 1.
Anonymous 31-01-25 17:59:06 No. 23495
<Bears have sharper eyesight than people (with night vision to boot), ears that are twice as sensitive, and noses capable of scenting a carcass twenty miles distant (seven times better than a bloodhound). A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (2020). It's about what the title says. Except there are several libertarians. And several bears. A bunch of "anarcho-capitalits" decide to settle in Grafton and run things in a spontaneous and individualistic way. Some decide spontaneously to feed the bears, feeding them so much sugary crap they stop hibernating. Others are like WTF is the deal with all those bears coming here and spontaneously decide to shoot them…
The Poverty of Historicism Anonymous 29-01-25 15:35:06 No. 23485 [Reply]
I read The Poverty of Historicism by Karl Popper recently, and it was an interesting book. The overally thesis is that unified theories of history and don't make sense, and that it's impossible for us to reliably guess the direction society will take in the future.
Anonymous 27-01-25 05:01:40 No. 23472 [Reply]
What are the best books on domestic imperialism? I suppose I'd be most interested in the struggle of the Black nation and the Indigenous nations in Anglo-America.
Anonymous 24-01-25 02:19:59 No. 23449
Just finished reading J. Sakai's The Shock of Recognition, a short text about fascism. Thought it gets fascism mostly right, with the exception of buying its revolutionary rhetoric as fact instead of just rhetoric. In fact it's the most reactionary ideology possible, creating colonial slavery from ground zero.
I don't know how much the part where the author says the big bourgeoisie had no say at all in Nazi Germany is true, which inspired me to read Tooze's Wages of Destruction later.
Understanding Islamic traditionalism as a form of fascism makes this book really good in the sense that it accurately tracks the universal petty bourgeois nature of fascist ideology.
https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/kersplebedeb-com-the-shock-of-recognition-j-sakai.pdf Anonymous 18-01-25 20:32:12 No. 23436
Finished Mathematica by David Bessis. It's a math book with basically no math in it, a book about doing math. In general. We don't solve any concrete problems here. Very easy reading. Math papers are not easy to follow, even for top mathematicians, and the papers are usually structured very differently from how the results were actually found, which got a lot to do with intuition and many false starts. What makes somebody good at math? Bessies emphasizes practice and a certain attitude over inborn talent. What about your talent of intuition though? - You improve your intuition through practice. He says his advice is similar to that of Descartes, Grothendieck, and Bill Thurston. So he talks a bit about them and also his own life. He makes a big deal of doodling and visualizing exercises. For example: When outside, you look at some spot and try to picture what does the spot you are at right now look like from over there.
Anonymous 14-01-25 18:03:19 No. 23422
>>23418 >first is the assertion that marx was not a theorist of barter, he wasn't, at least not in the sense that adam smith was. marx pointed out (and this was verified by anthropologists in the 20th century) that under "primitive communism" (what we now call hunter gatherer societies), barter took place
between communities rather than individuals. So the level of barter was not a constant search for double coincidences of wants between individuals living in the same society. At the community level things were shared (to a considerable extent but not a total extent) while between communities barters were arranged. Basically bater occurs between groups that tolerate but do not entirely trust each other, in hunter gatherer society. Furthermore (and here I'm going with Caroline Humphrey and David Graeber) to the extent that people did barter inside primitive societies, it wasn't pure barter, but rather long term arrangements that didn't rely on a continual coincidence of wants. I.e. I give you fish today, since they will go bad, and you give me the stone axe a week from now after you have made it. I accept this time lag because i trust you and we will make similar arrangements in the future and have had similar arrangements in the past.
Here is Marx in chapter 2 of capital volume 1 where he mentions barter for the first time in that book:
But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the fo Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 13-01-25 23:35:24 No. 23421
Full Audiobooks of Das Kapital and Theories of Surplus Value excellently read aloud in high quality and uploaded for free on Youtube by Andrew S Rightenburg
https://www.youtube.com/@AndrewSRightenburg/videos Many other free Marxist audiobooks:
https://www.youtube.com/@SocialismForAll https://www.youtube.com/@dessalines6388/videos Anonymous 13-01-25 23:33:15 No. 23420
I just go to audiobookbay. BTW OP, Hobsbawm's "Age of " tetralogy is great nonfiction history. >Age of Capital >Age of Empire >Age of Extremes
Anonymous 06-01-25 18:50:14 No. 23369
>>5669 I wanna revive this thread and refocus it on the German Revolution. For those of us in the in the imperial core, I think that it is a shame that the German revolution isn't as studied as either the Russian or Chinese revolutions. This is due to that fact that the material conditions in Germany at the time more closely match those in the imperial core. For example, Germany was a very urbanized and developed capitalist power, with it's own sphere or influence and it's own colonial empire. It also had a well developed parliamentary system, even if it was hampered by the power of the Junkers. Linked below is a good primer for the topic on youtube. I'll be going through the bibliography and finding e-books of the cited works for my own study. As I find them, I'll post them here.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7y0zyKXzhwzrZ0raG4HpT8ZdXx9USoW3&si=n7-mMohaW7Dw7uiL Anonymous 06-01-25 17:07:29 No. 23368
>>23343 i don't really know honestly, i would suspect that factors like wind, temperature, and most importantly sun exposure and species hame a major role in determining how and when leaves fall.
If you find some interesting research paper about this on google scholar i could unlock it for you if you want.
now for this thread, i'm looking forward to reading a couple of interesting books about socialist forestry and eco-industry in the soviet union.
Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953
by Stephen Brain
https://it.annas-archive.org/md5/636d1721ef6ac85cc306be42af07c365 The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology
by Elena Kochetkova
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5733/The-Green-Power-of-SocialismWood-Forest-and-the Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 03-01-25 04:56:35 No. 23345
>>23344 >well the priestcraft accords to the logic of castration, literally and figuratively. what is most corrupting of men today is not their priestly initiation however, but what the roman imperium called "idle pleasure" experienced as the fatigue between wars. a noble man is either a priest or a warrior (while the ignoble are either merchants or servants). what we have then in today's liberal order is either a reserve class of soldiers; untranshumanisted and leaderless, or a reserve of slave, who seek a master. what is castrating thus is one's repression from vocation, or purpose. this is today's spiritual castration. Why do "intellectuals" always call/refer anything bad as caused by recreation?
also, historically, most people were workers with no noble purpose
they lived, worked, amd hedonised.
This obsession with "changing the world/being a hero" as the main spirit-frame of adulthood was a result of The Age Of Exploration/Enlightment.
>>23174 when we get rid of arranged marriage (courting) we enter into the anarchy of (re)production, which is also the domain of prostitution, or sexual speculation. this has existed since the beginning of history, but it must revert to a positive concept of monogamy over time. lust must turn to love. this however marks the consciousness of property. as Christ communicates, marriage is the relation of mutual ownership. this is also why i think the ideal family form is one of mutual recognition with all members.
Romantic love is worse than lust.
Lust is appreciative of flaws.
Romantic love isnt.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 29-12-24 01:09:03 No. 23304
Any recs on bureaucracy other than David Graeber’s book? Looking for nonfiction, so no dfw or Kafka. The internet and digital paperwork has only multiplied the mundane authority previously held by the irs or other similar institutions through binary rejection/acceptance. These minor inconveniences add up to a constant aura of oppression. People paid 40k a year to review digital paperwork. Online forms promulgated by scanned copies of commissioners orders. Cell phones, landlines, emails, in person and the constant battle of how to contact whom. Clerks rejecting petitions and motions thinking they’re the judge. Old men paying people 40k a year just to file their paperwork for them. 100 emails a day. 5 zoom meetings interrupted by phone calls and knocks on the office door. All these micro inconveniences add up to be the modern gates of the law, and through the law to capital. I’m drowning every day in this shit and I feel like there’s something there. I feel the dialectic coursing through me, but it hasn’t made itself visible. Help me comrades.
Anonymous 28-12-24 12:23:48 No. 23289
can someone possibly give me a basic list of Marxist/marxist leninist books from basics to advanced in multiple categories so i can make a chart
Anonymous 26-12-24 22:35:03 No. 23279
Read textbooks.
>>23266 fun
Anonymous 26-12-24 17:10:36 No. 23265
>>23251 God created Lucifer originally as a court page.
He was the one who gathered all the hosts of Heaven whenever God had a discussion.
This. A lot of people say that time is slower when you're a kid. That's because your life is regulated to the point of where everything feels finalized without your consent.
Time speeds up when you get older because you have more freedom but more responsibilities.
But you know who also experiences slow time? Jailbirds.
Can you show me where it says that?
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 26-12-24 13:39:06 No. 23259
>>23258 it depends on the subject. universities often publish the reading materials for their courses. university professors also usually write "course books" that they use for their classes and are basically transcriptions from past lectures + a compilation or curated subset of the broader reading list + practical exercises
there are many open recordings of lectures from the time of the pandemic if you want additional guidance, but not necessarily on youtube. you have to skim university sites for information on the courses you are interested in. once you find that you can use the internet archive to see if at some point they had links to recorded lectures
out of curiosity, what are you interested in?
Anonymous 21-12-24 01:12:10 No. 23221
Going through my reactionary studies again, this time with Huerta de Soto's Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles . I didn't have any desire to study the ancap canon further after seeing Gene Callahan's blatant strawmen within the first 20 pages of his book, so it was refreshing to see his acknowledgement of how, no, Marx wasn't ignorant of "marginal utility" or "supply and demand" or any of that, before he switches the topic to technique reswitching. It always loops back to that, doesn't it:>Dennis: Sure, the Soviet Revolution pushed the nation forward, b-but our engineers!!! >de Soto: Sure, Marx wasn't muh mudpie theorist, b-but credit and interest!
Anonymous 20-12-24 00:59:45 No. 23201
Comrades, I found an AI that generates an audiobook from a PDF
https://huggingface.co/spaces/rafatjah/AudiobookGenerator It works very slowly so you'll have to leave it running overnight, but it produces mid quality AI-read audiobooks. It may get hung up on certain formatting, and it naturally does worse at OCR books which are full of errors.
Christians, you are retarded. every last one, without exception. Anonymous 18-12-24 12:58:38 No. 23184 [Reply]
You don’t like it? Too fucking bad.
Your acceptance of your beliefs means that you are being retarded, and there’s no way around it. Fuck you, you fucking retards. I’m sick of pretending your idiotic “arguments” are even remotely sensible. You’re a fucking retard, eating retarded shit and calling it ice cream.
The Christian generally believes that there is life after death. This, in light of what we currently know of neuroscience and how the brain works, and doesn’t work when it is damaged, is, no mincing words here, plainly retarded. If you believe in life after death, sorry, — er, no, not sorry — you’re fucking retarded.
The Christian generally believes that faith is a good idea, that believing things for no reason — just because — is a good idea. The Christian generally believes that being more certain of their beliefs than the evidence warrants, is somehow a virtue. The Christian generally is trained to believe that everyone uses faith, and that to point out that others use faith somehow justifies their own use of faith — the words “tu quoque” have no meaning to the average Christian.
The Christian generally believes, in my experience, that an appeal to consequences is a valid way of making an argument. The Christian typically believes that if it can be shown (or, more commonly, if it can be made to appear that it is shown) that belief in Christianity leads to some benefit, or that lack of belief leads to some undesirable consequence, that this justifies belief. This is retarded. If you can’t figure out why, it’s because you’re retarded. Hint: google “appeal to consequences,” you big retard.
Christians generally believe that Jesus was God, after he magically impregnated a virgin, and then emerged from her vagina nine months later, disappeared for 30 years, then turned up as the messiah. The evidence for this? A book which says so. What? Nothing more? No, that’s it, just a book. Are you fucking kidding me? Only a book? Nope, not kidding. They’re that fucking retarded.
Christians often accept the “lord, liar or lunatic” argument as convincing. Gee, David Koresh was either Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. Umm, I’m going to say, Lunatic. Jesus was either Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. Umm, I’m going to say, Lunatic. People who don’t think Jesus was a lunatic don’t know much about lunatics. There’s a word for such people: Retards.
The story of Christianity is just plain stupid. If you believe it, you’re a reta
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 15-12-24 08:46:17 No. 23172
Finished
The Politics of Democratic Socialism—An Essay on Social Policy by Evan Frank Mottram Durbin (1940). After an enthusiastic start a feeling sets in that this "essay" (normal people would call that a book) is ten times longer than it needs to be, and you start to see notes that are often little essays in themselves.
I read it only because of what the title promises, but most of it is attacking Marxism. He claims to empirically and logically debunk it, but he is
not firm on what Marxism even is : He claims Marxism to be dramatically gloomy and contrasts that with an optimism of the classics. What about rampant Malthusianism among the classics? And why would the end of capitalism be gloomy to you? He claims Marxists to confuse relative and absolute misery, despite Marx explicitly making the distinction.
The
hollow empiricism part of his critique: The material, economic explanation of history is something he equates with
selfish motives of individuals . He makes a lot of what's in your mind, but how much empiricism can you do without observers outside your head; and he talks much about
subconscious processes at that, so not even self-observation will do. I am not even totally hostile to his position critical of the fundamentalists. He is right that England has gone through a lot of reforms, capitalism has shown itself to be more flexible than anticipated, but this subconscious psychobabble stuff is useless. We can speculate all day about these processes and unknown real motives being this or that. He talks about the importance of a good childhood for the psyche, but then doesn't look into the childhood of any socialist agitator.
The
broken logic part of his critique: He claims logically economics is either the one fundamental cause of everything in history or one of many equally important ones; and since it isn't the former, it must be the latter. He claims Marxists either claim the former or a mysterious and logically impossible third option. But of course a third option exists, that of the factors having different weight. He even briefly mentions that and then drops it and plays confused. How can something be
fundamental, but only in the long run , he asks, that must be nonsense… Look man, after filling my tank I am not much constrained in where I drive, but as the tank gets close to running out I am drawn again to where the gas stat
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 09-12-24 15:49:30 No. 23138
What some good, MODERN, 1900s - today, LEFTIST BOOKS that one should read?
Anonymous 07-12-24 10:42:16 No. 23082
>>23081 anon, you need to atleast hook us in with excerpts like
<Genius = Labor + Luck <Happiness = Labor + Luck + Love + Freedom <I am neither in favor of iron discipline nor too much freedom. I ask for rational and self-directed discipline, whether in a child or an adult. or give some interesting information on the author or your favorite part of the book
Anonymous 07-12-24 09:33:06 No. 23071
>>23070 do your own research
zoom zoom bitch
Anonymous 06-12-24 23:00:51 No. 23052
>>23041 Why aren't they useful for navigation? That book has tons of clues for helping find directions.
Anonymous 05-12-24 01:39:09 No. 23045
I've been reading chinese web novels non stop for over 4 months now. Started getting into jp web novels but its all harem or ntr revenge where the mc is a doormat so its hard to find decent stuff amongst the trash. As for actual educational stuff I got some books from foreign language press.
parenting caseface99 04-12-24 00:55:17 No. 23043 [Reply]
I have bastards i haven't met yet in my head and i want to talk to them. and tell them how to be or something. be cool with them. they are 16, 2 of them and 9, 3 of them and they are on this website. this picture is like 10 years old and facebook edited me uglier
Anonymous 03-12-24 21:44:12 No. 23042
Comrades.
Glownonymous 26-11-24 12:45:05 No. 22997
>>22993 On Contradiction is like one of those vaguely anti-capitalist economics books, that articulate a lot of marxist concepts in a subtly worse way, but for dialectics. It might be a good introduction to some people. Mao famously had an instinctive grasp on marxism and only read Capital later in life.
Anonymous 25-11-24 09:01:25 No. 22987
>>22886 Chapters of volume 1 in this order: 10, 13 through 15, 26 through 33 with appendix on the value-form.
Technically one (1) book.
Anonymous 21-11-24 15:56:51 No. 22959
Reading Continental Reckoning by Eliott West. IT is a very interesting book, also Karl Marx is a racist fuck who was jealous that he never made it to the Unites States in time to become enriched. So Marx wrote an incel manifesto instead of going to the gym, saving up some money and moving to the United States to play in one of the greatest game fields ever conceived by man.
Also, 80% of people who made it to California did so by boat either through Panama or Cape horn, the great Oregon Trail wagon crossing to California is largely over represented.
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496233585/continental-reckoning/ Anonymous 20-11-24 15:25:27 No. 22954
Finished my piece on Babeuf (French Revolutionary, proto-Communist) for my serialized book on the Proletarian Revolution:
https://devetsil.substack.com/p/political-emergence-of-babouvism-33e?r=1vkaa7 (every section will be free to read of course…I hope it inspires other comrades to research and write about what they're interested in and share it with the world).
Currently, I am working on the section dedicated to Blanqui. Afterwards, will be the section on Proudhon. Finally, Section 2 is dedicated specifically to Marx where I will be analyzing (1) Marx's concept of the revolution, (2) Marx's critique of civil society and the political state, (3) Marx's doctrine of the commune, and finally (4) Marx's problem of the proletarian party.
Babeuf and Blanqui (I want to eventually translate his untranslated book Capital et Travail) are relatively interesting revolutionaries despite being forgotten and invariably acknowledged via fragments by Marx and Lenin. I am not keen on Proudhon but I think it is critical to examine Proudhon's doctrine of the proletarian revolution to end Section 1 to show why the First International went toward Marx in lieu of Proudhon.
Soboul, Albert. A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, p. 141.
Anonymous 10-11-24 14:24:39 No. 22895
Will make this into a chart, but for the sake of getting the info out there, here's a Ortohodox Trotskyism (pro-Soviet, anti-Stalinist) basics reading list:
Marx/Engels
>The Communist Manifesto >Socialism: Utopian and Scientific >Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State >Anti-Duhring >Capital Plekhanov
>Monist View of History Lenin
>The State and Revolution >The Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Glownonymous 10-11-24 00:48:05 No. 22893
Secular jew Yasha Levine (Surveillance Valley) continues his recent journey of shock and awe through Judaism. Wild shit tbh.
>We talk with Rachel Feldman about messianic zionism and the Temple Movement, which wants to end Judaism as we know it and replace it with an Israelite theocracy in the Holy Land complete with animal sacrifices — to go back more than 2,000 years to before Rome destroyed Jerusalem and ended Jewish rule. We also discuss the core of Rachel’s research: Noahidism, a new global religion for non-Jews that’s being spread by messianic zionists, including Chabad rabbis, in support of this future Israelite theocracy. Along the way we discuss the religious origins of zionist ideas, the unbroken chain linking secular and religious zionism, and the increasing radicalization of Jewish society in the direction of this messianic movement. This whole thing is a lot less fringe than you might think. >Rachel Feldman is a professor of religion at Dartmouth and is an anthropologist of Judaism. This talk is inspired by her new book: Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary here's a direct link to the episode
>https://jumble.top/s/yasha/151195367/a5c52c6d44e72e9035eabbebe17284f5.mp3 Anonymous 09-11-24 09:51:58 No. 22890
<There is an obvious contradiction between centralism, an essential element of socialist planning, and self-management, also essential to socialism, since the more power the center wields the less is left for workers in the enterprises. But this contradiction can be managed and even become a positive factor if certain conditions are present: objective circumstances must allow for a significant limitation of central control, and the economy must be able to provide workers with economic security and a decent standard of living. Without the first, self-management is not meaningful; without the second, workers cannot be expected to sacrifice local group interests for the general good. Both conditions were absent in Russia. Our to Master and to Own (2011) by Immanuel Ness & Dario Azzellini (eds.), a massive tome about attempts at workers' control from the 19th century to the 21st.of my life I am barely capable of giving a summary. Do you have deep knowledge about Algeria, Indonesia, and Chile? Do you also have experience living in Germany before World War II? Then you might be in a position to write a proper review of this. Otherwise, stick to reviewing a chapter about something you know well.
Anonymous 05-11-24 10:43:03 No. 22880
>>22814 Just read it and take it "as is". It's not "out dated" per se, you want to get the beginning of the conversation (it's not the beginning, beginning, but you get what I mean). Then, if you want an up to date version, you can read on " real competition ". The best book would be " capitalism competition and crisis " which have a corresponding lecture for free on YouTube.
Anonymous 01-11-24 17:24:22 No. 22871
Just read thirty to forty pages of Capitalist Realism by Fisher.
Anonymous 16-10-24 09:01:21 No. 22830
>>22792 this book is good analysis of reactionary brain rot.
Books on "development", "third worldness" and related concepts Anonymous 10-10-24 21:56:11 No. 22816 [Reply]
I wrote a long rambling intro to this post which I don't think anyone wanted to read so I'll cut it short. As a third worlder (not a third worldist) who has recently become more acquainted with Marxism and economic history, I've become interested in questions that seem relevant to my immediate political reality such as>whether it's possible for "developing" and "underdeveloped" countries to actually become "developed", and in what circumstances (I recognize the vagueness of these concepts) >the extent to which the common problems of these countries (such as crime, disease, famine, lack of support and freedom) is tied to their place in the current world order, and the extent to which they can escape or limit these problems without some sort of major global rearrangement >what the likely path for these countries is in the foreseeable future
Anonymous 06-10-24 12:41:39 No. 22804
Check out Anwar Shaikh's book. It's a self-contained revival of classical economics based on sound systematic reasoning and actual empirical evidence.
He also has a lecture series on YouTube if you prefer that:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB1uqxcCESK6B1juh_wnKoxftZCcqA1go Anonymous 04-10-24 07:33:50 No. 22794
Marx and Le Capital —Finally a Marx book for redditors? No, it's a 2022 collection of essays about Kapital's French translation, the collection edited by Marcello Musto. It's endless hairsplitting.modern French appears twice. Three essays mention the French edition injecting the term "industrial ladder" into some sentence (I agree with the third of these saying it doesn't make a big difference). Six people are jacking off in their separate essays about what "aplatir" means. Marx promising the reader a "scientific value" of the French version independent of the original gets mentioned nine times.<A peculiar destiny presides over the creation of this book, for its translation into French is a true act of creation. <The author is an exile living amid the fogs of the Thames; the publisher is also an outlaw, who as if by a miracle escaped three gangs of killers sent to shoot him on the infernal day of 24 May!* The man who put us in touch with each other, your son-in-law, is also an outlaw, driven into exile by the winds of persecution and followed by your beloved daughter and the poor dear child, whose frail health causes you so many worries. <Born in the midst of suffering, your book will perhaps earn me much persecution; I willingly accept it.
Anonymous 30-09-24 18:02:57 No. 22793
Best books to get into continental philosophy? Any recommendations?
Anonymous 25-09-24 19:30:26 No. 22787
it's too much theory anons, how does one keep up with such a tsunami of books one wishes to read?
Glowing smallanon 24-09-24 14:32:36 No. 22778
>>22777 Any PDFs linked here can be downloaded and converted into an epub using a multitude of tools, I have attached three below:
https://pypi.org/project/ebookmaker/ https://cloudconvert.com/pdf-to-epub https://www.freeconvert.com/pdf-to-epub You are also welcomed to contribute to the pile by posting your own copies.
Anonymous 22-09-24 18:18:38 No. 22768
>>22762 >dance of the dialectic that book filters me so fucking hard
SERIOUS ECONOMICS BOOKS THREAD Anonymous 21-09-24 19:23:34 No. 22761 [Reply]
So, before the site went down there was a thread about serious, rigorous, economic books about socialism, and economics in general, so, not "pop economics", anyway, any good recommendation of serious economics books?
Anonymous 21-09-24 03:06:59 No. 22755
>>22754 >what was un-marxist in my definitions? >get called out >by X I meant Y all along
Anonymous 19-09-24 19:02:27 No. 22735
>>22733 Actually, looking again, I did notice your thread in the catalog, I just didn't realize it was for ebooks because the title was just "post outage thread". I thought it was a general lamentation rather than a specific request to post books.
Here's some stuff about Sankara.
Maybe ask mods to merge the threads? Or just repost your stuff here? idk.
Anonymous 19-09-24 01:51:22 No. 22697
>>22696 (didn't realize i had two copies of imperialism in the 21st century)
some books about commodity production
Anonymous 19-09-24 01:41:37 No. 22695
Books about imperialism, continued
>>22694 I just wanna help rebuild the site. so many years of material were lost 😩
Anonymous 13-09-24 06:48:56 No. 22649
>>22648 I have been meaning to read this for a long time now, is it really that bad? Should I just remove it from my list of books to read?
Anonymous 13-09-24 05:12:05 No. 22648
Finished Thinking in Systems—A Primer 2008 book edited by Diana Wright, based on a draft by Donella H. Meadows, the lead author of The Limits to Growth . (Meadows died in 2001, but most of this work is from 1993.)delays . There you go.Trap : Rules to govern a system can lead to rule-beating—perverse behavior that gives the appearance of obeying the rules or achieving the goals, but that actually distorts the system.The Way Out : Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules.
Anonymous 12-09-24 21:52:52 No. 22647
Finished
Utopia by Thomas More, in the 2012 Open Utopia version edited by Stephen Duncombe:
http://theopenutopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Open-Utopia-fifth-poofs-facing-amended.pdf http://theopenutopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/openutopia.epub_.zip If you want to read it yourself, my advice is to directly go to the story (book I & II). The footnotes will clarify anything for the modern reader. The "introduction" is like the worst Channel Awesome stuff: It goes through the entire thing, spoiling everything, has quite a size relative the thing it is supposed to just introduce, and gives an analysis that is made banal and redundant by the footnotes—which are great footnotes! Hail to the footnotes! Well done, Stephen.
Anonymous 31-07-24 15:58:56 No. 22646
Finished
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett (2013).
Dennett talks about various "intuition pumps", gripping metaphors that are handy, but sometimes misleading ("boom crutches"); laments the academic division into two cultures; he goes through various famous thought experiments; and he points out that many philosophers are committing the type of mistake known as paradox of the heap. I basically agree with the whole thing.
Who or what is the "I" of the mind? Some speak of it as if it were like a homunculus sitting inside of the brain watching a screen (Dennett calls that view mockingly "Cartesian Theater"). And how does the mind of that homunculus work, is there a homunculus inside, and inside of that one is another one… this doesn't explain anything. Infinite regress. Dennett prefers to talk of something like lots of little people inside the brain, and you can think of these as a quite a bit more primitive, and they are made of something like even more primitive people, made of… and as you zoom in at some point you get something like very simple mechanisms doing nothing more complicated than comparing which of two signals is stronger.
Why do some people have trouble believing in evolution? Paradox of the heap. Why are some people body-mind dualists? Paradox of the heap. They compare something complex with something very simple and they just can't imagine that trifling tiny things can add up to something very complex.
Dennett talks about debunking bad intuition pumps by "turning the knobs", that is fiddling with the model assumptions (which are often not made explicit). I am not quite as enthusiastic about using that language when trying to debunk something that way because I'm worried about that language leading to some type of fallacy. Can you guess the type?
People make the mistake of assuming an unchanging essence because thinking about change eats brain-processing power, it's a speed hack with the common risk of reducing accuracy, duh. We ignore small changes. Even when we are modifying a thing by quite a lot in quite a short span of time and are doing it deliberately so we should be aware of the changes, we still might think the thing as unchanging in essence, namely when we also expect that we can easily undo most of the modification. By speaking about changes in a model as turning knobs on a device we easily
trick ourselves into believing that we haven'
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 30-07-24 18:58:59 No. 22643
On a similar note, are there any good pro-Mugabe books?
Anonymous 28-07-24 17:44:00 No. 22638
>>22637 I started reading the schoolmaster book and the irony is that its thesis is something along the lines of “if one has the willpower to learn, they do not need a professor breathing down their neck, all they need is a book, every form of learning is translation and personal processing.” Basically a French prof had a class of people he didn’t know the home language of and he just gave them a classic text and a dictionary and they all learned high quality French by the end of the class with little to no input on his part. The empowering leftist part is that we don’t need the ivory tower carrot and sticking us to learn and to chase the dragon of mastery. We all have the power inside ourselves. In a thread like this, university is an external motivator that artificially creates the drive and willpower to study the text, but we on the left read theory from a personal motivation. Those wanting to learn how to learn can take my starting point and build from it, reject the suggested texts, or do some secret third thing. For I as a poster am but another text for you to translate yourself. Neat rec. Thanks!
Anonymous 27-07-24 17:47:07 No. 22636
>>22635 For work settings I suggest: Getting Things Done and A World Without Email.
For basic learning how to learn, my chart is still correct. Though I haven’t bothered to look for a book on speed reading that covers the generic techniques, that’s been my next area of interest.
I have not read either of the books you suggested. Psycho cybernetics seems like a book based heavily on the science of its day and may not be as useful or accurate in the modern day other than “setting reasonable goals is good and visualizing will help get you there”. I could be off base, I don’t know. I remember someone on here mentioning the second book, and trying to google around about it has me very intrigued. I think you are on the right track. Just as when we read theory, so too is there a never ending rabbit hole of metacognition and educational theory that makes you feel like you are on the cusp of a major break through of the human condition.
Anonymous 27-07-24 08:47:53 No. 22635
>>17859 >>22490 What other books would one recommend?
It seems that, given most are iterations of others, there's only a handful of
bang for buck titles (like those in pic).
Is
Psycho Cybernetics and the
Uneducated Schoolmaster one, or am I getting my thoughts wrong :\
Anonymous 26-07-24 19:12:33 No. 22630
>>670 I need to put these books on my reading list right now.
Six-Legged Soldiers by Jeffrey Lockwood.
>It's about using insects in war. Basically the bugs can used to kill crops or spread disease (etc). Quite horrifying and totally inhumane. The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany
>The pigs are trying own your body. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell.
>I want to know how to set up barricades etc. Total Resistance by Hans von Dach
>Same as above but more. Anonymous 22-07-24 23:41:53 No. 22565
>>22564 >No. The subject itself is what "knows".
Anonymous 22-07-24 23:29:48 No. 22563
>>22559 "Self-consciousness" is really "self-indulgence" and doesn't work the way you think it does. It's also a much more recent invention - something created out of social engineering and then imposed on the past. If you go back to the 18th and early 19th century, European peoples did not think of the self in this way. It was a different sense of themselves and what they did than the rest of the world, but the rest of the world wasn't made of philosophical zombies or stupid. They understood technology and science, and once invented, modern technology spread around the world with little difficulty as an idea. Books were portable enough, guns could be reverse-engineered. It's another thing altogether to build industry and a supply chain out of nothing if your society is African tribes that spent a lot of their time fighting each other, and their technology had remained primitive for centuries for a variety of reasons. Even if they knew how to make guns and books and everything, that doesn't make a country magically appear.
>>22561 It hasn't died so much as it has been piled on with so much shit and filth, and the rot within it has hatched out. The corpse is still around, and there is memory - personal and institutional - of what it was, and judgements of it by history. Nothing like that really "dies" in that sense. Again, who says this the most? German Satanists who've always held a grudge and never understood what truth is, being a culture ruled by perverts who've always sold out and shit up the world. They've done it since Roman times.
I feel bad for the German people, who couldn't change what history did to them and hated having to be put through this. I really do. The culture, though, that needs to die in a fire. Letting them have their country back was a mistake.
Anonymous 17-07-24 00:37:58 No. 22486
>>22485 saw a copy of the graeber book while doing errands If I see it again I'll have to cop it
Anonymous 17-07-24 00:23:25 No. 22485
Finished watching jojo and realized I needed to fucking read some books. Decided to just say “fuck it lol I’m not going to remember this shit might as well practice speed reading” and finished Graeber’s pirate book and a how to be invisible by that hacker guy the fbi caught in the 90s. Graeber is the fucking best RIP. anarchist pirates intermingling with the anarchist Madagascar peoples. Neat shit. Other book was fine. Mostly obvious shit like tor and https everywhere and pass phrases and get homeless people to buy gift cards for you that you convert into bitcoin. Decided on some fiction. About halfway through bukowskis mailman book. Sometimes it hits close to home regarding his drinking and working hungover and settling on sad/broken women. I like how every chapter is a page long and every chapter ends with a punchline yet the story moves forward. I like that I’m not ACTUALLY COMPLETELY like him. I should write up a list of all the audio books I’ve gone through in the past year. This post was only actual books read.
Anonymous 13-07-24 00:28:40 No. 22466
>>22462 that economic history shit sounds intertesting af anon, once I get around to reading that richard wolff book that explains different economic schools, I'll make this my next economic book.
My big problem is that I always end up half way through five books at the same time and it then takes me a ridiculous time to finish any of them. tbh what helped me get my reading hours up was putting small books in the car and backpack(s) so that if im ever randomly board I can just read instead of doomscrolling social media
Anonymous 11-07-24 19:31:52 No. 22462
I've read most of "Four Thousand Weeks" which, I think, helped me a lot in fighting my perfectionism and reading more regularily. Before reading this book I was always upset about my low understanding or distracted by the facts that various books can give me different perspectives on the subjects I am reading about. Now whenever I'm anxious about productivity I try to tell myself that nothing I do is perfect anyway and I can't fully control my attention/time. Anyway, I decided to try to set a 3 hours goal for studying of whatever general subject I have in mind everyday.
As a part of that, I'm following the readings and lectures from the Anwar Shaikhs course about Historical Foundations of Political Economy (See attached). I've just finished reading the selections and comments on economists before Adam Smith that were selected and commented on by Robert Heilbroner. Before that I was reading the Robert Heilbroner's book about history of economic thought, although I finished with Karl Marx, since later chapters are not relevant to the subject.
I'm still anxious and at times I can't help thinking about taking another book just to get another perspective (The issue with that thinking in my case is that it's obsessive thinking that comes up basically all the time, so after accepting this thought I'll just struggle with it when dealing with the next book), and despite reading the chapters about the Turgot and Quesnay two times and leaving a lot of notes I'm not sure how I'm faring with understading the subject. I cannot accept that I still have lots of material to read before I'll get some bird's eye view with what I'm dealing with on any deeper than superficial level.
Still, what I've read so far was interesting. I've gotten a good sense of connection between the the historical reality and the economic thought of major PolEcon heads, and some major parts of their thought (Heilbroner in his history focuses mostly on the big points, so to speak, of economic ideas). So I've learned a little about the various ideas of technological innovation according to Smith, Ricardo and Marx. I've learned about the problems of economic growth and population and so on. As a note, I can say that Heilbroner gave me quite a good explanation of the idea of a falling rate of profit, so that was useful since I didn't really get it earlier. I think that Heilbroner is a good intro to economy from a popular perspective, although he offers only a very cursory and
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 10-07-24 23:41:43 No. 22460
>>22459 Greetings I hope you enjoy your time here anon. Hows the book? is that Mansa Musa on the cover? Now theres a guy who knows how to have a good time
Glownonymous 09-07-24 21:47:33 No. 22450
>>22449 also worth listening to his guerrila warfare books
Anonymous 09-07-24 14:46:15 No. 22444
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power The book explores the emergence of a new economic order driven by the collection and commodification of personal data by tech companies.
Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is a novel form of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance. Companies like Google, Facebook, and others extract vast amounts of personal data from users, often without explicit consent, to predict and influence behavior for profit.
- Behavioral Surplus: Data collected from users' online activities, which goes beyond what is necessary to improve services. This surplus is then analyzed to predict future behavior.
- Predictive Products: The processed data is used to create predictive products, which are sold to advertisers and other businesses. These products forecast users' behavior, preferences, and actions.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 09-07-24 03:33:17 No. 22439
Well, continental philosophy starts with German Idealism. But Adorno has some good introductory lectures, and Deleuze wrote a book on Kant.
https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Deleuze_Gilles_Kants_Critical_Philosophy_The_Doctrine_of_the_Faculties.pdf Anonymous 08-07-24 21:24:36 No. 22436
So is just sophistry and aphorisms, not actual valuable insight? No good intro books about it?
Anti-essesntialist reading materials pls Anonymous 08-07-24 20:38:53 No. 22432 [Reply]
I want some books for learning about anti-essentialist thought, as well as spotting and refuting essentialist talking points and lines of reasoning. Even books about essentialism in general would be helpful.
Anonymous 08-07-24 19:54:36 No. 22424
French academic style has some babble in it to inflate the word count and the German style has pages even chapters or whole books that end with a negation
HOW DO I GET INTO CONTINENTAL SLOPPA? Anonymous 08-07-24 16:11:29 No. 22421 [Reply]
I'm new to continental philosophy, to me continental sound just aphorisms and sophistry, and nothing with actual substance to say, but I'm open minded and curious to know if I'm wrong or continental philosophy actually has value, so what some good introduction books to continental SLOPPA?
Anonymous 04-07-24 12:57:04 No. 22397 [Reply]
are there any books that explain why the non-western world (mainly africa) is in a less developed state? there is alot of talk about the great replacement theory. most western/white countries are turning more right wing primarly due to immigration. which obviously is a big issue. how can this be fixed?
Anonymous 30-06-24 18:17:41 No. 22377
>>22356 Thanks man, i was specifically looking for book that depict the US from the end of the civil war till the modern say since i've already read upon the american revolution and antebellum period.
Also generally looking for economic history of any nation for that same matter.
Anonymous 21-06-24 04:44:28 No. 22337
Lawyer anon here. Was reading an old professors book on local Chicano history and I was so blinded by rage by his repeated use of the phrase middle class I remembered lefty pol existed.
Glownonymous 19-06-24 14:52:18 No. 22331
>>22326 >also Engels lays out the main 'laws' of dialectics in Anti-Duhring so there shouldn't be confusion there There is no place in Hegel I’m aware of that Hegel names these “laws of dialectic”, sorry. It is easy to find parallels of some place in Hegel’s logic which might refer to these three “laws” but this is oversimplification. Engels does not make it simple, he simply doesn’t understand it at all, and he takes from Hegel’s logic only a very little part, not even the most important things. First you have to understand the full story, before you can simplify it. Engels did not understand it at all. I suggest you try to read/understand Hegel instead of Engels who did not understand Hegel's dialectic. His book is misleading.
Glownonymous 18-06-24 23:41:39 No. 22326
>>22312 >I found this book Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson and his thesis runs as following. Marxism and European socialism, instead of being an ideology of the proletariat, was a petty bourgeois ideology born out of a ressentiment for the bourgeoisie and the belief that the proletariat could be better managed. This has a kernel of truth (that popular theorists of socialism were not from poor backgrounds - though that really makes sense considering that's what you'd expect of a learned person at a time when universal literacy wasn't a thing) but it makes no sense on closer inspection. How does theorizing the democratic self-management of the proletariat help the petite-bourgeoisie manage the proletariat? How is a political position that openly advocates the expropriation of all productive property a position of the petite-bourgeoisie, and which was specifically against small ownership as the solution to the social questions of their times, an ideology representative of the interests of the petite-bourgeoisie? It's not.
Is the first claim even true? The way that racial antagonisms were stoked to undermine class unity has been acknowledged forever by socialists in the labor movement. The second claim is basically just the standard idpol claim, which has two sides: one, it's talking about "history" and not only the history of capitalist society, and so it's engaging in ahistorical analysis that doesn't address why national antagonisms existed in the past and compare that to why and how national antagonisms are reproduced in the present - they are very different. E.g. it's a huge difference to enslave an external population because a large part of production in your society depends on slave labor (which is high turnover and demands constant raids on external communities) and create national hostility and war this way, and the national antagonisms between colonizer and colonized nations in a global capitalist system which relies primarily on wa
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 18-06-24 19:56:39 No. 22325
I always recommend Bullshit Jobs. It's not the best book on leftism by a long shot, but it's a very accessible one that deals in issues most people are already kind of aware of. It's good for dealing with people who are otherwise politically illiterate.
Legit critiques of leftism Anonymous 17-06-24 23:52:56 No. 22312 [Reply]
So /edu/ this site is full of threads debunking standard chicken headed talking points but what are some legit criticisms of leftist thought?
I found this book Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson and his thesis runs as following. Marxism and European socialism, instead of being an ideology of the proletariat, was a petty bourgeois ideology born out of a ressentiment for the bourgeoisie and the belief that the proletariat could be better managed. Leftists falsely understood capitalism as a rationalizing force which would create a homogenous proletariat, while in truth capitalism exacerbates racial differences to manage pops more efficiently. Leftists mistake nationalism and racism as essentially reactionary, while in truth it has always played a huge and sometimes preponderant part in history.
Second Kolakowski's book Main Currents of Marxism makes two important claims. Terms like "materialism" and "dialectics" are not well defined leading to ambiguity and confusion. This is why Lenin and the Russian Marxists misinterpreted Marx's materialism as an ontology of matter. Second leftist materialism is determinstic and offers a telological history in which outcomes are predetermined. This undermines human creativity and autonomy and is why the Soviets and "actually existing socialism" became totalitarian in practice. The party led by masters of Marxist theory and technocrats can guide society through more and more bureaucratization cancelling out the need for democratic participation and subordinating individual agency to the needs of the bureaucracy itself. I believe the Maoists saw this and tried to break from it but China ended up producing the same results because even the red guards embraced the same interpretation of historical/dialectical materialism.
I want bring out Carl Schmitt here for all the leftcoms and anarchists. If you have a radically open society you can easily get invaded by an influx of new people. /pol/ stormfaggot colonization of online spaces proves that anarchic environments are highly vulnerable to this type of invasion or the emergence of extremism within. Anarchist societies would not have the means to resist these invaders. Probably why the Zapatistas are scrapping their communal autonomy model because of cartels moving into Chiapas and causing trouble. The anarchist army could resist an external military force. Its been done before. But an anarchist society is prone to collapse and reversal through inabili
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 11-06-24 22:58:07 No. 22284
Finished I've Been Thinking , the 2023 autobiography by the materialist philosopher (though not Marxist) Daniel C. Dennett (born in 1942, died in 2024). A massive cast flashes by, mostly academics, but also Silicon Valley types and even Hollywood.<[John] Searle’s world is full of philosophical nincompoops; mine is full of philosophers who are learned, intelligent, hard-working but often self-defeating presenters of their best ideas. Why would anybody want to be a philosopher if philosophers in general were as stupid as Searle seems to think? (Sir Karl Popper is another philosopher whose low opinion of those who disagreed with him has made me wonder how he could stand being a philosopher.) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking ).brain-trust lunch . If you care to know what I mean by that, you can find the book on libgen.
Anonymous 10-06-24 14:49:58 No. 22277
>>22276 (me)
Found a book that is quite close to that, did someone already read it? It looks exactly like what i was looking for:
"ephemera: theory & politics in organization management business anarchism"
https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/14-4ephemera-nov14.pdf Anonymous 10-06-24 07:21:32 No. 22276
Does anyone got the book "Anarchism, Organization and Management: Critical Perspectives for Students" pdf?
Anonymous 02-06-24 00:29:36 No. 22251
>>22249 >"Muh evul Stalin dropped le marxism" strawman #43251 Read a book or go back, liberal
>Dialectical and Historical Materialism: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm Anonymous 29-05-24 12:30:42 No. 22226
>>22225 post a book rec on this tho, I'm not OP but I've had exactly the same interest ever since reading Red Star Over Iraq by Johann Franzen.
The Dhofar Rebellion Anonymous 29-05-24 08:02:03 No. 22224 [Reply]
What decent books are there about the Dhofar War, and southern Arabian (Yemeni & Omani) socialist experiments? All I can find are articles.
Glownonymous 28-05-24 12:38:15 No. 22180
Grover Furr 's book Khurschev Lied and Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Stalin are the only books you ever need.
Glowing Lolitron 27-05-24 23:54:10 No. 22179
I will put down here books I like not of leftypol thought which is really just overthink most of the time. I have put down more than four because that is way too short.
He was the first socialist. He created the idea of human nature as good and the idea of great unity or communism. His school should be studied especially Menicus.
NEET philosopher Laozi explains his idea of Tao which is superior to old skool Marxist materialism as Tao is an immanent non-transcendent force which is the source of all things whereas Marx idea of matter is really simpleton theory
Creator of Platonic communism. This is a must read for everybody interested in pol shit. Pay attention to Platos mysticism which is covered up by most Westoid gay "researchers"
Mostly this is a book of magick and the occult with important stuff relating to transformation and self-transfromation (spiritual alchemy)
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 27-05-24 23:20:35 No. 22178
Instead of reading multiple short books, just read Das kapital and Lenin's Imperialism. It's honestly most of what you need.
Anonymous 27-05-24 22:46:24 No. 22176
My Reccs:
Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital
Lenin's State and Revolution and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ Stalin's
Dialectical and Historical Materialism:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm Mao's Red Treasure Book - the most important excerpts of his Selected Works.
Castro's History Will Absolve Me:
https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Glownonymous 25-05-24 18:53:29 No. 22163
What's a book that will help me understand chinlet psychology?
The ultimate starter pack Anonymous 25-05-24 18:21:10 No. 22160 [Reply]
If you guys had to pick 4 short books as the ultimate starter pack on /leftypol/itics, which ones would you pick?
Anonymous 25-05-24 12:11:59 No. 22157
>>22112 Look at it this way.
If your only goal is to feel the feeling of happiness, you could easily just do drugs. The chemical happiness.
But for most people, thats not what they want. Not what they claims to deserve.
When we're faced with injustice, we may feel compelled to take action. But someone might suggest that meditation and other techniques can help resolve conflicts. However, we often know that our desires are more profound than just resolving surface-level issues. They're intentional - driven by a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.
It's not the chemical happyness, its the realy thing. Something ought happen in real live.
Anonymous 24-05-24 13:55:09 No. 22155
Looking for Michael Hudson's book, "Privatization and the Ancient Near East". Not on Anna's, anyone have it? Tysm
Anonymous 23-05-24 04:12:28 No. 22152
>DPRK >Communist Romania >Albania under Hoxha >Democratic Kampuchea
Anonymous 22-05-24 06:13:15 No. 22146
>>22107 >For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly. Oh well. Do you know Alan Woods' works? It's the most recent work I know of that attempts to tackle science from a marxist point of view. He wrote a book called Reason in Revolt and a history of philosophy
>>22108 Thank you, I actually forgot that Hegel wrote a condensed version. I've been slowly reading it these days. I've been forced to consult a couple extra books, like a Hegel dictionary/glossary thing because some expressions are really hard to get (and don't get me started on Kant, he's even more confusing than Hegel). I've been checking out the book The Philosophy of Hegel (1955) by W.T. Stace, which was recommended to me during the 8chan days of /leftypol/, but I'm trying to not rely on it much.
Well I think something is finally starting to click. At least I'm slowly starting to get Being and Nothing, which is way more than I ever knew before. You know it's too bad that Marx couldn't write that treatise on Dialectics he had planned. Would've saved decades of arguments and debates.
Books on autarky Anonymous 21-05-24 06:33:20 No. 22141 [Reply]
I need books on the following countries:>Communist Romania >Albania under Hoxha >Democratic Kampuchea
Anonymous 19-05-24 13:25:46 No. 22125
Currently reading the politics of heroin, wondering if anybody has any book recommendations about the history of immigration laws in the US, or just the history of immigration in general.
Glownonymous 16-05-24 01:02:02 No. 22114
>>22113 (me)
to review the book: very funny, very human. I think it would be a fun read even to non-communists.
Really the only practical lesson I learned from it is that the semi-committed, spineless, well-off intellectual types served a very important function, by stitching back together local socialist groups after big busts. They were above suspicion and kept themselves legal, so they would be there when everyone else was in jail or scattered. It really puts weight behind Lenin's exhortations to go to
all classes to spread the ideas and look for comrades. Even though the illegal socialists engaged in constant practical work were suspicious of the strictly legal semi-comrades, they served a purpose in being only somewhat connected to the more serious activity.
Anonymous 14-05-24 11:02:10 No. 22107
>>22106 >Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature? Yes, and I was quite disappointed by it because it wasn't what I was looking for. For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly.
Bet. The terms are more intuitively understandable when you speak German.
I didn't explain that well. I do read them in German nowadays and also think it's easier to understand them when you read them in the original language. What I meant was that I used to read everything in English because most of the content I engage in is in English. Free English PDFs are much easier to find than German ones so I started reading German philosophers in English first.
Anonymous 14-05-24 06:38:08 No. 22106
>>22073 >Yeah. Ever since I became enamored with Marxism I tried to translate dialectical materialism to science. I think complex system theory and some ideas in physics such as critical transition are a scientific expression of dialectical materialism, coincidentally so. Though they still harbor brainworms due to the philosophical grounding of capitalist society (e.g. mechanical materialism, idealisations) Ok then, good to know I'm going in the right direction. I get that having scientific knowledge is necessary to understand dialectics too. I've heard many times from marxist authors and soviet textbooks that dialectics has been vindicated by science. They mention dialectics in many scientific fields and in concepts like entropy, elementary particles, natural selection and so on. Karl Marx considered Darwin to be pretty important, he told Engels about Origin of the Species
>This is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views. Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature? After studying a lot of science back in his day, Engels was convinced that nature is indeed dialectical and wrote this book with Marx's backing in an attempt to prove it:
>"To me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it." >"Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature" No. I should have mentioned that the video has English subtitles. Still, many of these words that the German philosophers used like substance, thing in itself, immanent, spirit, and the infamous Sublimate/Aufheben have been VERY confusing to me. I should make sure I understand them all before trying to step into German idealism.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 12-05-24 17:05:04 No. 22103
>>22101 > I have always been a bookworm. > My classmates suspect that I am gay. > Most of the time they treat me nicely. > Sometimes not so nice I am deeply sorry for your pain.
You are valuable, and you deserve love and respect.
Anonymous 12-05-24 10:56:13 No. 22101
>>22094 >For the wannabe gore worker incel, my best guess is absurdism. If you read the rebell untill the end, you will note that Camus makes a imporant postulate:
The socialistic approach, he wrote, seens the human as endless formable by social forces. But the absurd rebell, so Camus, feel that there is a human nature who doesn't want to be used as a mean to an end.
In other words, with another justification, Camus returned to the old, Kantian ethic of the diginity of the human being.
Why I tell you this boring shit?
In my opinion, this viewpoint does not allow us to have the idea of changing social expectations regarding love, etc., in order to solve the incel problem. The individual feels the longing for a ideal love in a absurd world. The individual doesn't want to be brainwashed to forgot this longing. Their whish isn't for a chemical happyness, they want to real thing.
I'm a bit passionated in this topic, sorry.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 11-05-24 21:59:44 No. 22095
I can't remember the thread in which I read the post, but for some reason an online media group had moved to quote a 19 year old 'book-fan' of Dostoyevsky's literature, in order to hear from her an understanding of the draw among young people to his works.
The language that the individual uses in their explanation is near-Orwellian. Orwell himself and his books are cliches for comparisons, but in this instance the description is absolutely fucking apt. Not just in the literative sense of how specific phrases of slang have gained currency and are used with a reflexive ironic concession, but in the total operation of their language and the manner in which it unconsciously reproduces the social relations that are combinant in her understanding, and the self-perpetuation of the ideology which sustains it.
If I had the post before me I'd quote it so I could break each sentence down piece by piece, but for the general effect, it is as though the political consciousness which has gained ascendency among youth is not only perfectly amicable to, but directly a construct of the form of, the logic of capital.
Missing the depth of it but putting it to a term, it is 'HR therapy speak'; bourgeois psychology which utlizies 'trauma' as the central manifold in its discourse which constructs meaning for individuals.
The prevelance of this explanation is like a fucking disease, not in the sense of this specific case, but the ascension of this form of psychology, which has launched itself with a religious zeal in converting the subjects it comes into contact with, with a new socially modality. It is not even a psychology proper. In its general shape it is an overarching ideology, which is the result of the collective social processes at play in the division of wealth in western society and their transformation under the revolutionary pressure inherent in the proliferation of capital.
The worst of it is that in its extremity it licenses a form of vitriol which can only be compared to the propaganda at play in antisemitism. I'm not over-stating this; in the quote, the individual annihilates the boundary of human subjectivity through an explicit statement where she claims that femininity is the conditional quality to human existence. She oblates masculinity with violence and in so doing flattens men into the same category as with which the Nazi percieves the Jew.
This absolute fucking poverty in this rational perception
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 11-05-24 09:17:17 No. 22088
Leftism won't save you. It will help a lot in understanding why your white nationalist ideas are fucking toxic drivel that is eating you up inside, but understanding isn't even half the battle.
Anonymous 11-05-24 01:49:54 No. 22084
>>21309 I used to self-identify as an incel when I was closeted. The meme is true, but also it sucks to live through.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-abstract/7/2/222/164818/Sissy-RemixedTrans-Porno-Remix-and-Constructing Identity micropornography is interesting. I've been working on a reading of Emesis Blue as a commentary on the far-right turn of internet bricolage. Like technocapital, the black team is retrochronally respawned through creative destruction.
Anyhow, a few sources I liked include
- "Masculinity and New War: The gendered dynamics of contemporary armed conflict" - David Duriesmith
- "What Do Incels Want? Explaining Incel Violence Using Beauvoirian Otherness." - Filipa Melo Lopes
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/what-do-incels-want-explaining-incel-violence-using-beauvoirian-otherness/41705602E4C9B814BEEAE7825233BBD2 - Male Fantasies - Klaus Theweleit
-
https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book - "Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement" - Kathleen Blee
-
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/nerds-catgirls-and-other-trans-potentialities-now-revised.104346 Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 09-05-24 10:41:43 No. 22071
Finished The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane (2012). The myth is that people just are just naturally endowed with charisma or not and the book is about developing your charisma. Here is a typical excerpt:<Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, embodies focus charisma. As he’ll tell you himself, Musk is very much an introvert. In Tesla’s open office space, his nearly empty desk is in the far right corner, two huge monitors arranged to create a cocoon, shielding him from the rest of the office. does command the room; his presence is immediately felt. If your definition of charisma is that when you walk into a room all eyes are on you, then Bill has it. If it’s that quality that draws people toward you and makes them want to listen to what you have to say, then Bill has that, too.
Anonymous 05-05-24 18:20:16 No. 22058
just finished reading picrel last night and really enjoyed it. Did exactly what it says on the cover with the following sections:
>Inconstant Industrialists >Varieties of Work and Working Life >Flying Hammers,Walking Chisels:The Workers of Santiaoshi >Winning the Turf: The Transport Workers >Sea of Wheels and Belts: The Cotton Mill Workers >Drumsongs and the Devils Market:The Patterns of Working Class Life >The Shaping of Working Class Protest The Chapters themselves smoothly transition into one another and have plenty of labor statistics from the time referenced in them. Theres a ton a good information packed in this book so I don't even know how to summarize it properly. It not only focuses on just describing the conditions of different workplaces but also shit like diet,housing,entertainment and culture too. Some interesting parts that have stuck with me so far include
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 05-05-24 05:40:16 No. 22054
>>22053 I thought I had two diff. cockshott books but turns out I downloaded the same one twice.
Acid-Maoist 01-05-24 18:26:10 No. 22040
>>19860 I've been reading Caroline Elkins' book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire recently, and I thought I'd talk about it a bit. No PDF or Epub, because I have it in hardback.
The book is actually just as much a history of liberalism as a history of the British Empire, and it's fascinating seeing how the liberal mindset came into existence. Reading the examples from the book, you can really see where the paternalistic British liberal originated, with the idea that we must save the global south from themselves. Hence, African leaders famously complaining about how when China turns up they get a power plant, and when Britain turns up they get a lecture; it was the same back then, but Britain actually had the hard power to back up their rhetoric.
It also explains how Britain's use of force changed between the 18th and 20th centuries, with Britain preferring a "hands-off" approach in the 19th century which gradually failed as Germany, the USA, and the Russian Empire began to industrialise and compete for territory (there's an interesting parallel with America and China in the 21st century, too). Occasionally news of some atrocity that was comitted by the British Army (or one of the private companies they got to manage the colonies, such as the East India Company or the Royal Africa Company) would reach home, and there would inevitably be debates about it in parliament- which usually ended with the crimes being somehow justified and then forgotten about, and occasionally with the perpetrators turned into heroes (the 1857 Indian rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion are two good example from the book).
The book isn't specifically Marxist, but is still well worth reading from what I've seen so far.
Monarco-Georgist 01-05-24 14:16:39 No. 22038
Hey man, I think that's admirable that you continue educating yourself and trying despite how much frustration it has caused you. You are trying to understand a very difficult subject here that most people aren't even trying to understand.
Need help with Dialectics Trumpist 01-05-24 01:39:46 No. 22025 [Reply]
I have to confess something to you, comrades. I've been a leftist for many years now (here since the 8chan days), and I still CANNOT fully understand what the fuck dialectics is. Yes, I've read plenty, I've read a lot of Marx and Engels, later Marxist authors, philosophy books, dictionary definitions, I've watched philosophy lectures, youtube videos. I've even read some Hegel, with a lot of difficulty. All this and my brain still cannot grasp wtf dialectics is actually supposed to be.
Anonymous 29-04-24 20:33:39 No. 22017
>>15874 >Embed Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki
by Shaun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go Books cited:
Books:
I Was There - William D. Leahy
Speaking Frankly - James F. Byrnes
All in one Lifetime - James F. Byrnes
Prompt and Utter Destruction - J. Samuel Walker
Hiroshima Nagasaki - Paul Ham
Journey To The Missouri - Toshikazu Kase
Racing the Enemy - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 25-04-24 07:58:31 No. 22001
Finished
Marx and Marxism by Gregory Claeys (2018). This guy is apparently a distinguished professor and expert on the history of political thought. I would have never guessed that from reading this. It seems like an even-handed take at first with direct references, but as it goes on, outrageous quotes by Lenin, Stalin, Mao pile up and the sources turn out to be spooky western cold warriors. Or there is no source at all like when he says that Marx claimed us proles to be particularly
<virtuous or that Wilhelm Reich
<was threatened with execution by some communists for introducing these issues Meaning "these issues":
<the proletariat’s suppressed sexual urges prevented it from achieving political consciousness. So this Reich guy is important enough to mention, and the usual lot of Frankfurt school plonkers. Who doesn't make the cut? There is no Strumilin, no Kantorovich, no Piero Sraffa. The author talks in dismissive tone of
<the weaknesses in Marx’s economics but almost nowhere describes the economics of Marx, never mind some actual criticism. There is nothing here on the
transformation problem , despite the length of this book. A few sentences on the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall is all you will get here (without even relating that to organic composition of capital). For the most part, he doesn't really criticize, but gestures that he is about to do criticism, like he "criticizes" Marx for his
<‘scientific’ nature of the theory of surplus value, while excluding other theories of exploitation and then… no alternative theory of exploitation follows after this. He doesn't care to make an actual argument for his positions. Just assert, assert, assert. What is his realistic alternative to Marxism?
<Pleas for a universal basic income become increasingly plausible as we move towards both more skeletal welfare systems and a persistent shortage of well-paid jobs. Uneducated person that I am, my guess would be that an establishment that is hostile towards decent welfare is also hostile to the idea of a guaranteed basic income, and will do no more than copy the name to mislabel a policy (meaning you are ✌guaranteed✌ the ✌universal✌ income as long as no
excepti Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 18-04-24 13:29:36 No. 21941
>>21940 Hey, nice and thanks for getting back to me. I will def give it a read when I'm done with some other books
Anonymous 17-04-24 22:18:22 No. 21940
>>21561 yo sorry, been a while. so for personal reasons (logistical, not emotional) i havent made any progress on online ordering/online ebook question of whether the book i posted is available as either. There is another (i think) good book about somalia which is this
https://archive.org/details/socialistsomalia00sama i havent read it myself but its sighted by most indepth modern (recent) histories of somalia that ive read that are in english. the general problem with indepth somali social and economic history is that theres mostly jack and shit about it in english and theres somehow even less online in somali too. theres only *1* book i could find about the economy of somalia before Barre's "socialist" coup and its was made like 2021. ill send a link to it tommorow but ive gotta buy since its nearly out of stock
Special Bodies of Armed Men Anonymous 16-04-24 07:44:41 No. 21932 [Reply]
I've read plenty of theory but any good books from the last 10 years about police? I'm particularly interested in the culture of fear police have when it comes to interacting with people.
Anonymous 13-04-24 19:11:09 No. 21909
The preface is Hegel’s phenomenology of philosophy; it treats the various forms of philosophizing and delineates their defects. In a sense the preface is the completion of the section on absolute knowing. The book is itself a circle, the form Hegel attributes to the system as a whole. A theme that runs through the center of the preface is Hegel’s criticism of reflection and the understanding (Verstand) as capable of producing true philosophy and his characterization of speculation and reason (Vernunft) as the replacement for this inadequate form of philosophizing.
We find two sets of images in the preface. On the first page Hegel speaks of anatomy as being not a true science but only an “aggregate of information” (par. 1). Because it is a knowledge of only the parts of the body regarded as inanimate, we lack, in anatomy, a knowledge of the living body itself, of its principle of life. On the second page Hegel introduces the contrasting image of the bud of a plant producing a blossom that becomes a fruit. He characterizes this as an image of “organic unity” (par. 2) and as representing stages of necessity in the life of the whole.
Hegel says that the understanding schematizes experience, “a table of contents is all that it offers” (par. 53). The understanding, which proceeds through reflection on the object, produces, in thought, a world that is dead. All objects are fully categorized and rendered lifeless, labeled, like parts of a skeleton, or pigeon-holed, like boxes in a grocer’s stall. Reason, which proceeds speculatively, seeks out the principle of motion or life that is within the object, that makes the object, so to speak, what it is. Reflective understanding grasps the body as an anatomically ordered substance. Speculative reason goes within the body to its spirit to grasp its principle as a living subject.
The answer to this lies principally with Kant, with transcendental philosophy and critique. In his effort to answer David Hume and to secure, for the understanding, its own categories of experience, not derived from the senses, Kant forces himself to abandon reason. This causes Kant to formulate a very limited notion of experience, in which reason plays no role in the constitution of the object. Once one enters the world of critique there is no way out, no way to restore reason to its rightful place. Reason is sacrificed to reflection and to the trap of the transcendental.
How does Hegel move from the establ
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 11-04-24 05:12:10 No. 21881
I've started theory as history by banaji, main thrust seems to be that a mode of production isn't necessarily equal to one form of exploitation. In that vein he kinda attacks "stageism". Honestly the only "theory" I've read is a bit of Capital 1, some Marx pamphlets/speeches about commodity productions and what G. E. M. de Ste. Croix and Perry Andersen say about modes of production and commodity production in their two big books about the classical Mediterranean so some things are going over my head but I'm liking it. Feel like I might want to buy it for myself one day since this is just a copy I asked my library to get me
Glownonymous 01-04-24 23:01:17 No. 21833
>>21210 Seconding this, just replace Gonzalo with Cockshott.
Also crazy this hasn't been linked yet (MLM library canon of ebooks, has hosted virtual conferences interviewing prominent Maoists internationally, check their youtube):
https://foreignlanguages.press/ Anonymous 01-04-24 22:23:50 No. 21832
>>21010 Already knew this was going to be first post.
We need more obscure maoists!
>>21542 I have seen books triying to rationalize their actions (and inactions) but being Pro, not even from them tbh.
Anonymous 25-03-24 11:58:12 No. 21790
Finished What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub (2020), about Silicon Valley BS like disruption & failing better . Exactly the sort of book that the people who need the most won't read and that the people who do read already agree with.
Anonymous 24-03-24 18:09:19 No. 21774
Sapolsky is kinda sus. His general approach seems reasonable but he tends to promote speculative and even debunked theories, and puts a lot of weight on the evo- part of evopsych, even as he acknowledges that genetic influences are heavily mediated by the environment. This might have something to do with him spending so much time studying baboons (relatively simple primates) and reading a lot of his experience into humans.
The lectures from one of his courses at Stanford,
Human Behavioral Biology , is on youtube. It has millions of views.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D Regardless, his contribution to the sociopolitical discussion of "free will" is a valuable countersignal to the crypto-christian moralism that is laser-focused on virtue ethics that ignores as much context as possible. We should be cautious to ground too much of that argument in scientific evidence, however, since science above all else is subject to revision and such revisions can render the counter-arguments untenable. It would be a much wiser strategic choice to ground such arguments instead in a philosophical basis and only the most well-supported scientific evidence,
not bleeding edge research or fields in their infancy like neuroscience. That's less trendy and less likely to sell books, however, which is what Sapolsky like most people involved in the discourse are primarily concerned with.