/edu/ - Education

I got into an argument with my professor on this topic. What book should I read on the great terror and to disprove some lies (especially about how it was to target political enemies)? Also, I heard my professor say the Britain was a liberal democracy, can anyone elaborate on that?

>>21634
>Britain was a liberal democracy
In the sense that it was a corrupt shithole and the political elite controlled the populace's culture and labor, he's correct.

>>16210
>>16210
>tbh tho you are best off joining an effective org and learning through doing rather than reading theory
It is actually possible to do both. It is important that as communists that we make full use of democratic centralism as a method for which we make decisions concerning how we orient ourselves toward the struggle. Democratic centralism, compared to the so-called principle of "horizontalist concensus," enables the most organizationally advanced section of our class, in terms of development, to act quickly, to be able to turn on a dime and take off, starting off in strategized basegroups, and with clear vision of the objectives, and with coherent and developed understanding of the actuality of revolution, set out to intervene in the authentic struggles by the people, amidst the cascade of crises under this murderous system, the current material stage of imperialist capitalism. Our understanding of organization is that in order to that we may help make revolution, alongside the masses, providing them a platform from which they can act in their authentic crises, is that we have to be highly organized and purposeful: that there is absolutely a need for democratic decision making, and it must be a centralized fashion, where we have a debate within a set time frame, we have that necessary discussion time, and then we act, and do what the majority of us said we should do, and orient ourselves to unity of action, even if we might disagree.

>>16213
These do about as much relevant stuff as the DSA
There's no real party organization for workers in the US or really anywhere except for tentatively voting for established libleft parties, in this case the Democrats

>>20220
Seems good, I'll give it a read

>>21544
>>20220
Ok now that I've read it, it seems pretty good for any genuine Marxist organization to get shit done. It's meant to be read as a group and is a from an explicitly Maoist lens.

It outlines the baseline strategies and tactics for a Marxist org quite well. Tbf it's written by actual revolutionaries and not armchairs. Would love to see more takes on organization.

>>21168

Telling a recovering white nationalist to read fucking Marx and Lenin is like telling someone raised in a fundamentalist Christian cult to read De Principiis Naturalis and On The Origin of Species.

We're not a religion, we don't have holy books. Surely we can advance on the "science" of Marxism enough such that there would be newer better books, ie written in the last few centuries.

>>21190
You're essentially right on both accounts; the white race is under attack from two sides, and black americans do have anti-white sentiments within their culture.

Capitalism is not inherently discriminatory enough to save one race over another, and so white people too find themselves always under threat. This is the appeal of fascism, that there can be some higher authority that curbs the chaos of the market, in favor of race, or an ideal for a nation. The other way whiteness is under attack is from radical marxist cultural critiques, that show how whiteness is not a historically consistent or internally coherent (or even able to be definitively delineated) category in reality. They show that whiteness is a coalition of peoples, who have banded together for mutual benefit, gravitating around the wealthy (who already tend to be white, and male, for historical reasons). Marxists (and people culturally touched by marxist ideas, e.g. black progressives) seek to break up "the white race", because what it really is is a politically expedient fiction which gives a wider social base of support to the bourgeoisie.

On the issue of black culture, it's apparent that they have so much culture that is influenced by their african roots, and by the traditions created during slavery, as well as culture that came from the rural white working class, peasants, and lumpen, as well as culture that developed more recently from the urban black working class. This is much larger than just being anti-white (which does exist, and for good reason, when structural racism and individual racism both are still around, holding down and hurting black people).

>>21193
Slurs like "cracker" or slurs like "lol u can't season ur dry chicken breasts"? Bcuz for me, I just laugh at the latter insults cuz they're true, and honestly i think it's important to have healthy inter-cultural banter, like you're still stuck in racism if you feel shocked by anyone lobbing meaningless insults at other people for doing smth different. If you mean individual words… idk what your situation is, if you were the kind of whitey to grow up surrounded by non-white ppl and u got bullied for it and probably need actual therapy, or if you're just offended at the idea of being denigrated based on youPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>they stopped being my friend when they found out i was trans and gay
life imitates art

>>21165
>i always see examples of “anti-whitism” online so it radicalizes more when i'm trying to not be radicalized
>>21159
>i don't want to be one anymore after my life went to shit when everyone found out
so you want to stop being a white supremacist because it's inconvenient for you now, but you can't because you keep shitting your pants at "white ppl cant season they food :joy:" tweets? sorry if misinterpreting

If it's anything like my racist tendencies directed towards myself, the only way to get over it is to bite the bullet and look into each core belief deeper, like >>21357 is doing with race and IQ. If these ideas were something you could just ignore, you would never have become a wignat in the first place. A thread on class collaboration(the idea and history of it) would be well-placed for this goal.

>>20140
There's an app for this too called iNaturalist that this channel mentioned. It shows you species indigenous to your area and even has community features to join people in projects to restore indigenous ecosystems.
https://www.inaturalist.org

>>20139
Does anyone know more stuff like those videos? It's fascinating.

>>20092
How the fuck hasn't anyone even mentioned Masanobu Fukuoka on this thread yet?
He's like the centrepiece of this study.

>>21589
Who is that?

>>21571
I found this book, "How to Read a Tree", it's by a guy interested in natural navigation but it's not limited to navigation, it has lots of stuff about how a trees environment, history and health are reflected in its shape and parts.

It was in 628-630 after the treaty of Hudaybiya when Muhammad sent letters to every Arab ruler and notable non-Arab ones. At that point Muhammad had basically defeated Quraysh militarily, controlled the trade routes going to the Byzantine empire & Europe, and was well-known throughout the peninsula.
Exceptions to that were other Hijazi tribes and the Ghassanids who were vassals of the Byzantines, they were conquered militarily after Mecca.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_career_of_Muhammad#Other_letters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_after_the_occupation_of_Mecca

Of course, since this was a diplomatic expansion based on "trust me bro" and Muhammad's reputation, the Arab rulers did revolt after his death and then subdued. You might argue that this was when the Muslims actually controlled the peninsula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridda_Wars

>>21596
but why was every other Arabian power, seemingly so easy to conquer then Quarish?

>>21597
Shit snowballs, I guess. They had more men & money by the time of the ridda wars.
Also if you look further into it, the Muslims weren't soloing the tribes in these areas, but had a bunch of local allies supporting their rule against local enemies.

>>21597
the quraysh were wealthier and ruled over a large metropolis
contrast that with agrarian tribes in the middle of nowhere

>>21607
Oh, and not to mention that rote activity has been shown to be robustly more cognitively taxing than actual formalized tests of intelligence, as per more direct neuroscientific research. Haeir is involved in neuroscience, but from a psychometric background. This is an important technical difference.

>>21608
But I am a radical IQ denialist who also happens to believe that, as is heresy, the scale being 'measured' is actually ordinal rather than interval, so the implications here, far from denying human difference, reorient our understanding and render the supposed hierarchy non-linear.

>>21554
he is a race realist in that he believes races are real, but he doesn't believe that there is a hierarchy of intelligence.

>>21607
Sounds pretty interesting what you are talking about. Can you list some litersture I can get into to get a better understanding of the subject?

>>21614
Paul sackett would be a good start.

>>10452
>Evald Ilyenkov
I like some of his stuff but he's a bit too much of a hegelian for me. I lean towards the anti Humanist stances, kinda like althusser though I think his structuralism leans too far much into postmodern positions and his comments on political economy can be retarded especially on the productive relations. their was a brand of anti Humanist sentiment within the early Soviet Union though (prolekult specifically, though I have my issues with them).
>>10650
> i never read any hegel, only marx+lenin+stalin
Have you ever thought about reading Plekhanov before?

>>12647
Say what you want about Althusser, but he put anti-humanism into practice

David Bakhurst - Discussing "Ilyenkov's Hegel" from "The Heart of the Matter"

Nov 26, 2023 David is author of the ground-breaking "Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov". He is George Whalley Distinguished University Professor and John and Ella G. Charlton Professor of Philosophy at Queen's university, Ontario.

In this discussion we focus on his essay "Ilyenkov's Hegel", from his latest book "The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, and the Courage of Thought". The essay helps to situate Ilyenkov in his philosophical context and explore some of his goals and motivations.

I saw + read this article, have very minimal thoughts about it. Anyone else seen it?
https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/08/what-contradictions-cannot-be/

It critiques dialectical logic, specifically the concept of 'contradiction'. Specifically goes against Ilyenkov a few times too.

Personally it wasn't that interesting, from the start it makes clear that the only contradiction they will be talking about is formal contradiction, like "it is sunny today" vs "it is not sunny today". And later on it quotes Marx and mentions how when Marx says 'contradiction' he really could have just called it a social conflict or something. This is basically my view as well - it's not that useful to talk about contradictions, we have in the material realm, conflicts, and in the linguistic/theoretical realm, unresolveable issues of definition, of identity and non-identity and their interrelation. To me that's the heart of dialectics, the fact that any given thing's claim to total integrity as a concept is ultimately indefensible, yet difference is still maintained. That's the kind of 'contradiction' I see, the contradiction between the truth of any definition and it's failure to faithfully capture the reality it attempts to enclose, either because of deficits, broadness, or internal difference. It's all about that difference and identity. Do these concepts come before those of formal logic? It seems like a meta-logic, because the question of contradiction is of an abstract claim about reality being contradicted by another exactly opposite claim, it's about the negation of the original claim, and the paradox between that negation and the relative validity of the claim. Anyways I might be off on this last thought idk.

Some of you should go tabling sometime.

Nice thread OP. I've been becoming a leftist only very recently mostly because of youtube videos and truth be told I rarely if ever feel like reading nonfiction. To me reading ten bazillion pages of theory just feels beyond fucking boring, so stuff like this is what I live for. Thanks.

>>21590
if you don't want to read capital, then just read "Wage Labour and Capital" which was specifically made for working people to have a brief idea

>>21590
I've been on this board for like 6 years and never read anything but the manifesto, you'll be fine :^)