/edu/ - Education

I have suggested before writing a shorter Edition of Capital aimed at the working class. I was mocked for this idea. People said that Capital is "perfect" and that it cannot be made shorter. People said that I "think workers are too stupid to read" (I do not think that). People said that I "think I am smarter than everyone" (I do not think that, in fact I was requesting help in writing such a work). People seemed obsessed with the idea that if a plainspoken version were available, it would ruin the original, even though the original is widely available.

Despite all this, I have found that in an 1868 letter Engels suggested the very same thing to Marx.

Is it not evident, then, that such an idea is not only not stupid, but of the utmost necessity for spreading and popularizing Marx's very important ideas?

The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls “heroism”: a “defiant creation of meaning” expressing “the myth of the significance of human life” as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.

Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project," (sometimes called an “immortality project,” or a “heroism project”). A person’s "causa sui project” acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they suscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete “self-negation” we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature. [4] By being part of symbolic constructs with more significance and longevity than one’s body—cultural activities and beliefs—one can gain a sense of legacy or (in the case of religion) an afterlife. In other words, by living up to (or especially exceeding) cultural standards, people feel they can become part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things i.e. that they are “heroic contributors to world life” and thus that their contributions last beyond their biological lifespan is what’s referred to as an “immortality project.”

How exactly would you define Trotskyism? How exactly would you summerise it's key differences from other Left wing political positions?

From my understanding most people here are Marxist-Leninsts, and even those who aren't certainly don't seem to look favourably at Trotsky.
So in your view what was wrong with Trotsky's ideas, and with the modern Trotskyists?

I couldn't find any left-com threads in the catalogue so I decided to make my own.

Also, can we get some flags to differentiate between the only 3 left-com internationals? The current left-com flag is that of the PCInt and Bordigism.
I suggest for Damenites use the ICT logo and for the whatever ideology the ICC is use the guy with the hammer.
I know the council coms have a pancake flag but I think the logo on the council-communist reader goes hard. Just a thought.

The anti party group were Marxists who has survived Nikita Khrushchev's purges. They attempted to democratically replace Khrushchev and return the USSR to Marxism and were arrested.

Leftypol, what do you think it means to be a man worthy of death? I don’t mean in a way that they deserved to die, I suppose I applaud them for having died on noble conditions . Its a topic im still thinking about it, what about you? What does death mean to you?

I know this sounds like a bizarre request, but does anyone have all 3 volumes of das kapital as a single unformatted .txt file? I want to be able to ctrl+f all 3 volumes.

What's the memo regarding this? I haven't looked deeply into the case of Tuchachevsky specifically but I've heard several things.

>Czech intel sending evidence to the USSR that Tuchachevsky was pro-German and made pro-German remarks in Prague.

>Tuchachevsky was framed by German intelligence under Reinhard Heydrich and Walter Schellenberg.

>Tuchachevsky was plotting a military coup against the Soviet leadership.

My questions are:

1. What was Tuchachevsky's relationship with the Trotskyites and their secret organizations that were exposed?

2. What was Tuchachevsky's relationship with Nazi Germany and Japan?

3. Is the modern Russian Federation sitting on critical files and documents which explain the Trials and subsequent purges of the Red Army and Soviet gov? If so why?

you're just a GNOSTIC!!!1! - Eric Voegelin

It's important to examine the the thought of reactionary thinkers. So here I present Eric Voegelin, buddy of Hayek, and conservative thinker.

Essentially his whole thesis is that Marx, Nietschze, and Scientific Positivists are "gnostics". and that Marx was a "speculative gnostic".

>Voegelin understood "gnosis" as a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite and 'Gnosticism' as a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).

And basically that modern thinkers, by rejecting metaphysics and the origins of things (God) were unconsciously self deceptive but what sets apart Nietschze and Marx is that they were self aware of the self deception and therefore consciously "demonic" or "demono-maniacal".

>Voegelin's work does not lay out a program of reform or offer a doctrine of recovery from what he termed the "demono-maniacal" in modern politics. However, interspersed in his writings is the idea of a spiritual recovery of the primary experiences of divine order. He was not interested so much in what religious dogmas might result in personal salvation but rather a recovery of the human in the classical sense of the daimonios aner (Plato's term for "the spiritual man"). He did not speculate on the institutional forms in which a spiritual recovery might take place but expressed confidence that the current 500-year cycle of secularism would come to an end because he stated that "you cannot deny the human forever."

vidrel is a catholic workers/left wing catholic's take on Voegelin.

According to his critics:
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Was reading Camatte and came across this quote by Kautsky. The point being that workers unionizing is no real threat to capitalism as it can always reduce any negating power of the movement by incorporating it and reducing it to reformist cuckoldry.

So is it true? Are workers unions easily incorporated by capitalism and reduced to mild reformism which just keeps capitalism alive? Why then is there such a large support from radlibs here for unions when they do not have any real revolutionary potential by themselves? What's a better alternative, or actual revolutionary unions?