/edu/ - Education

Since this is a subject that has been making the rounds in the public discourse again, let‘s make a general that debunks anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Post literature, videos, infographs, memes, whatever. Unfortunately, I don‘t have anything on my own, but I will make this thread to get this going.

What does leftypol think of GA Cohen? And can someone explain what his criticism of John Rawls was? I read some of his works and it seems like he was a cool dude.

I'm completely fed up using MSM retarded media outlets to stay up to date on either breaking news or general trends and events going on. I use guardian every day to get current events but its obnoxious to read that slop after a while. Id rather use blogs and alternative sources of news from people who have a bit less bias, slant, private interests, or total ideological retardation.

Is there any difference to how a (well-studied) Marxist, a democratic socialist and an anarcho-communist will each define "socialism"? Is there any contradiction in their definitions?

How would each of them feel about the typical Wikipedia summary?
>Socialism is a political philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic and social systems, which are characterised by social ownership of the means of production,as opposed to private ownership.

So I read The Rape of Nanking a couple weeks ago and something that kinda bothered me, that it wasn't only slightly alluded to in the book, was the mindset of the preparators

From what I've gathered, Prior to 1895, Japan as a whole pretty much had an inferiority complex towards China. China had won every single war with Japan up until that point (if you exclude that time the Mongols tried to invade with collaborating Chinese troops.) the fact that Chinese philosophies, culture, architecture etc heavily influenced Japan in question was well known. Many of Japan's late 20th century generals and even the more nationalistic ones in the 20th had great admiration for things such as Chinese poetry and literature. They couldn't get around the fact that China was essentially Japan's big brother in cultural and military terms for the vast majority of the two's existence.
However, after the first sino-jap war, in which the jap navy completely crushed the Qing navy, the illusion of Qing China being the superior older brother to Japan was completely dissolved in the eyes of the world. Japanese officers witnessed firsthand the miserably poor and awful starvation-tier conditions Chinese civilians lived under in the late stages of the Qing Dynasty. All their respect and apprehension of what they perceived to be a mysteriously powerful China.
so the fact that Japan had emerged as the dominant Eastern power after 2,000 years of Chinese dominance went straight to their fucking heads.(to say the least)
so the biggest reason is that the Japanese soldier was intentionally brainwashed and hammered into a fearless bloodthirsty wild animal by his superiors. Japanese officers in general were largely raised in sheltered, isolated military academies and believed in total racial holy war in which the entire population should die before surrender and had a strange form of contempt for their own civilian population because they weren't soldiers. (better to die as a shattered jewel; one hundred million shattered jewels.) The enlisted ranks were starved, humiliated and beaten to a pulp, sometimes even to death by their officers for even the smallest mistakes and infractions. they were bombarded with totalitarian propaganda from their first day out of their mothers' womb that they were the chosen heavenly master race, all their enemies were demonic insects with no exceptions, and that their only purpose in life was to slaughter and then die themselves as an expendablePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

I'm in a pretty big dilemma.

My boyfriend claims he is interested in Marxism, yet has an incredibly negative outlook. He believes there will never be a revolution, all narratives of a grand redemption are a lie. He's also swallowed the western Buddhist bullshit (mixed with absurdism) full force; basically, he believes human existence is inevitably empty and absurd and that any attempts at building something bigger and better than ourselves is a mistake. He has a history of depression so that definitely informs his views as well.

He's also a huge fan of Zizek, whom I despise.

The two of us read books together, mostly on religion (Buddhism obviously) and psychology. I'm looking for Marxist texts that we could read together that would shake him out of (or at least question) his bullshit. Namely, I'm looking for books that have both 1. a generally positive outlook on communist revolution or building the communist project, 2. present a strong case for Marxism against rival/bourgeois ideologies, and 3. is philosophical.

Any suggestions would be great.

I'm starting this after asking in reading general because there was some interest shown. A thread for the encouragement, maintenance, and organisation of different reading groups- a regular thread will be maintained in order for reading groups to rhizomatically organise. No specific topic of reading is mandated. I would like to start by organising a group, I have a few texts I would be interested in reading but would like to get any kind of feedback because I don't want to propose we read a book and then have a buncha people be like 'nooo i dont like that book' so here are some initial suggestions for what we could read to begin with:

CURRENT BOOK: engels' origin of the family (prehistoric society)

- Baruch Spinoza's 'Ethics'
- Vladimir Lenin's 'Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism'
- Murray Bookchin's 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism'
- Felix Guattari's 'Three Ecologies'
- Alfred North Whitehead's 'Process and Reality'
- Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'
- Theodor Adorno's 'Negative Dialectics'
- Fredy Perlman's 'Against His-Story, Against Leviathan'
- Friedrich Engel's 'The Origin of the Family'

We humbly invite you all! Feel free to organise and maintain your own group here!

Hey y´all. I´m on a translating journey and I thought that others might benfit from a general thread for others that might be interested in the effort or to give their input.

Ill be translating from Spanish to English myself, but perhaps other anons will use this thread for other languages.

Any recommendations on works detailing how Japan became an imperialist economy from its third-world origins?

I'm well aware that Japan and USSR are the two Third World "success stories"(with the latter being used by shitlibs to justify imperialism in my experience) but I have no concrete knowledge on how they became this way. I would like to fix that weakness.

I mean like are they actually working toward socialism considering they're pretty much a nationalist state heavily relying on state capitalism for funding right now? At this point, they're more likely to turn into the next globalist world power if they do manage to outlast the US.