>>3434 Reading some random pamphlets on this post-left anti-civ site. They are actually quite good and interesting, I recommend it giving it a shot if you are bored. https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/

>>3435 You beat me to it! I will have a read and get back to you next time. I myself have been reading Capital lately with a reading group. It's getting juicy now that we've gotten past the first few chapters. Also going to start Towards A New Socialism soon, if anyone has any tips or resources for that that would be great too.

reading Ernst Mandel's Formation of Capital its good

John Brown by W.E.B Du Bois and the 18th Brumaire (I dun get it)

>Thinking About the Cuban revolution and how their modern focus on ecology and climate change can serve as an example for the soon-to-be socialist states. >Reading Capital Vol. 1 and some assorted Lenin to develop my Marxist thought. >Learning How money works.

>>3435 That's some good shit, which ones did you like the most?

Thank christ! I was tired of having to start from the beginning every time I died

A thread outlines the differences between Marx and Engels since everyone seems to treat them as inseparable.

>Thinking I think a theoretical direction of an orthodox Marxist Leninism (spelling intentional) could be an effective way of breaking through a large amount of the sectarian fossilization within Marxist communist organizing and solidarity-building currently.

>>3440 > Max Stirner, Individualist Anarchy, And a Critical Look at Egoist Communism I really liked their view on the topic in general, I think the ending pages were kinda shitty, it sounded like they really just want to own the ancoms and didn't really think much about it. But in general a really good read. > Manifesto Against Schools by Armeanio Lewis A perfect overview on schooling in general, very well written with some very good points on the topic. The narration is a little bit more informal, but I actually like how everything is expressed here, it is a really nice touch. > BITING BACK: A Radical Response to Non-Vegan Anarchists It is a nice critic, not one of the bests - but still, it is short, and a nice read nonetheless > A Vegan Revolution Against the Fast Food Empire It is just so short, but so well written, it explains all the basic concepts so bloody well in one page, thinking in translating it because it is just a really good, really short introduction - you can read it in like 5 minutes. > Against Speciesism, Against Anthropocentrism: 8 Reasons for Radical Veganism I actually didn't want to include this one mainly for the title, it really sounds like those bait youtube video titles. I didn't like the arguments very much, I think he focus too much on > muh morality, muh duty - and gets kinda boring to read. But still, it isn't that bad, has some good points. Those were my favorites, there are still many more, like way more to read; the good part is that they are very short and quite nice to read. What about you? Which ones have you read?

>>3448 Jesus that last one is pretty insufferable. I can't believe I ever bought into the whole vegan thing >In one suburban family home, a woman is threatened by a male fist;somewhere in another, a pet hamster gets flushed down the loo: both areworthless rubbish in the eyes of those who wield relationships of possessionover them. No don't throw that ball! You are exerting ownership of something you consider to be your property and that is bad! This part actually disgusts me honestly, to reduce the suffering of a refugee to that of a fish in a tank that has no water. And they wonder why they are accused of lifestylism! The points about the environment, and cost are reasonable, but they are clearly secondary reasons in the author's mind (since afterall they consider a hamster to be capable of the same suffering as a woman). >Animals are at the bottom of the dung heap I mean bacteria are definitely below any animal. They are constantly transported against their will, destroyed without mercy and used in industrial processes.

>>3448 > A Vegan Revolution Against the Fast Food Empire I agree that it's nice and to the point. I do think that veganism doesn't actually solve these problems however, you can do all of this >we are individually taking a responsible approach to living a healthy life. With community gardens, local harvests, and organic food co-ops we can empower one another through working together and building a sustainable future. without being vegan. Apart from that it relies on the reader believing in "speciesm". Since it seems you support these ideas, what does animal liberation look like to you?

I've been thinking a bit about which definition of the state is better, the marxist or anarchist definition. I'm an ML so I obviously consider the marxist definition to be more accurate however viewing it through anarchist lenses I still think what the goal of most anarchists looks like is still a state. If a state is a political apparatus with a monopoly on violence, wouldn't a free association of communes act as the de facto state? As long as your society has enemies, your FAoC would have a monopoly on violence (to combat your enemies of course, unless anarchists purposefully don't want to have a monopoly on violence, which would be putting them at a huge disadvantage. This is why the marxist definition is so much more accurate imo.

Morning comrades. You reached for the book, and not the phone this morning, right?

>Thinking I want to create a book of sorts. A cohesive collection of a thinkers ideas, but also a manifesto for a new way of thinking. I'm a little stuck on how to gather all the exerts and organize them in a fashion that is suitable for easy referencing etc. Any ideas?

morning. Gonna learn some russian todya

Where my comrades at?

>>3781 Good Luck.

Just discovered my local library is a pleasant little place and they have some marx literature, which was nice

>>3757 Could you provide more detail on what you're working on?

>>3757 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book You may already be aware of this and decided it was a form that didn’t suit your needs by it’s the most similar thing I could think of to what you proposed

>>3788 I want to create a manifesto of sorts, a bunch of ideas for a new-left movement, largely based off the thoughts/writings of one person. To motivate people and try getting a better understanding of the condition we are in. >>3789 Thanks for the suggestion, I haven't heard of this before, but it seems a little less 'organised' than what I'm looking for. I'm currently not sure how much I want to write myself and how much I want to keep quotations in full. I guess I'm mainly looking for a way to create an efficient workflow, I will be dealing with many different writings on various topics. So currently I have a selection of chapters for the book, and then I will read through each text and just find bits of interest to copy into some big text document.

>>3786 That's a good feel comrade, never found any Marx in any local library

More Das Kapital today, let's go guys and gals

>>3796 cute meganekko

hello, anyone has read Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani? how does it compare to Nick Land? is it worth reading?

I cant motivate myself lately and my focus is shitty but I plan on reading about some philosophical terminology and book reading. In the nearer future I hope that Ill touch some history of philosophy and of marxism.

yo

>>3829 yo >>3826 Make a schedule to do an hour of reading a day

trying to get through Hegel’s Lectures on the History of philosophy. still somewhat confused by his use of the word “Notion”

been eating up lots of anarchist audiobooks and essays. Ive totally burned myself out on insurrectionary works, but found some nice critiques that actually advanced my own thought a bit, so it was worth it. Been listening to Perlman's "Letters of Insurgents" or whatever, its bomb as fuck. Oh yeah, and have been reading Camatte essays, mostly from the pdf hosted here on bunkerchan that some comrade uploaded in leftypol a week or two ago. (shoutout to whoever did that, thanks) Also just bought Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states (i think is the title). It's good as fuck, in fact it contradicts a lot of primitivist thought, and even prior works of the author a bit, and he totally acknowledges it. So a hearty thumbs up for this book, for coming from an anarchist perspective and taking new research into account in order to give a more accurate model of how the early states were formed, what material conditions led to them, and how people lived outside of them. I highly recommend this last book to anyone whose whole anthropology comes from either Marx, or Zerzan. Remember that history and anthropology are sciences, and not there to support your ideology with concrete abstracts, and so the feild is always moving and learning. Might as well move and learn too, and adjust to the new information. No shame in that. Most of all what im thinking about recently is how leftism ties in to anti-civ sort of critiques. The first politics i got into when i was younger was marxist theory and communist thought. Over time i got into anarchist and later deep green theory. Just now getting into Camatte, surprisingly. And now i realize that i never really changed my deep views that much, but was looking for things that gave words to my feelings and desires. And all the tendencies did give word, more or less, to some facet of my feelings about the current world. I think this needs to be more strongly recognized for us all. For me, the person most different isnt some nazi or capitalist or whatever, its someone who treats "ideologies" as something that can be right or wrong, better or worse, and that should explain the whole of reality. I might not be explaining well, but you probably know the people im talking about. The ones for whom communism isnt there to releive alienation, bring about the human communities we're missing, give us a common goal and fight for a better world, but for whom communism is a project for increased efficiency, purely logical, objectively better than capitalism, etc. Those are maybe my real enemies (or at least foreign people), and i think it doesnt matter so much what "ideology" someone is playing with at the time, but why they arrived at is. Much love to all my real comrades out there, who are together in this project to dismantle the things that hurt us and make life unfulfilling, precarious, boring, and mentally and physically degenerating.

>>3434 I've been thinking about making a Esperanto and Spanish keyboard, I just don't know whether of not I should include additional symbols or just copy the one someone already made but just make it for Linux.

got to refresh my already shit japanese

>thinking feeling conflicted about the place of democracy in party structures and in future communist society. Basically the debate between the direct democracy advocated by Cockshott, or keeping the decision making in the party leadership, or some mix. >reading just finished hinterland, pondering what to start next

Besides Deluze, are there other theorists who believe that the revolutionary subject is not the working class, but the self-defeating internal logic of capital itself? I wonder if it's even possible for a conscious political force to oust capitalism because it's even more of a world system now than it was in Marx, Lenin, or Mao's time.

>>3847 https://bunkerchan.xyz/.media/98e138b5328429a0da047b95bc20dfaf-applicationpdf.pdf yeah i wonder that too... i doubt any internal factions (separate from internal forces or like, natural consequence) can really defeat it, simply because they still exist within the structure and would need its existence relatively unchanged in order to stay alive, and also on a mental level, we're shaped by the desires and values of those around us, which overwhelmingly conform to capital...

>>3847 >>3851 to add to that last part about values, really the only experiences that make me challenge capitalism as a whole are ones that ive had ourside of its grip. Obviously shit sux doing wage labor and experiencing how society is to its constituents, but really all levels of shit can be dealt with with drugs, self-help, and delusion. Suffering is never revolutionary, especially in a world with pharmaceuticals. I wonder how much that plays a role in how unrevolutionary the US seems, for example. Like we never had a past of indigenous people incorporated into our society. The american society clashed with various indigenous ones and ultimately wiped them out or assimilated them, or imprisoned them in foreign (to them) plots of land. So we have no cultural "outside" or past even really.

>>3851 link broken

>5 hours sleep r-r-rise and grind friends

Learning calculus and linear algebra to better understand economics. Also reading works of Edward Bernays since he really is a fascinating character, even though he shouldn't get much sympathy.

>>3873 There's a linear algebra thread on this board somewhere if you're interested and don't know already

I'm here to post this archive of the current cycled /burgerkreg/ aka /riot/general on /leftypol/, bc near the bottom there's a few posts from a minneapolis anon describing the initial uprising and current developments on the ground at George Floyd Square and citywide in Minneapolis, which I enjoyed learning about and find to be of great historical value: https://archive.is/MciNJ

I've been reading a PDF about the rational kernel of Hegel. Someone posted it in one of those anti-dialectics threads. It's pretty interesting so far, I've been stuck on reading, but slowly going back. I've been reading on Hegel more generally. It's really interesting and the little I've understood so far seems very profound. I find myself applying the theory (as I understand it) IRL which has been very fun. I want more! But I suck at reading.

>>4663 Share plz

>>4664 The first is short, the second has been a good intro to hegel so far. I also recommend reading AWs intro (third article) you can find it online too. I made it a pdf to read offline.

>>4664 If you read anything let me know. I've been wanting to discuss hegel, but I still feel too baby to do it.

I take the bar exam for the third time on monday. So I've been reading outlines and practice questions. Reading infinite jest before bed. God I don't want to fail again. Both previous times it was by 1%. Now it's all online. How is it that I can dismantle the ideological underpinnings of any person I meet, but I can't pass this stupid neoliberal bullshit exam. God damn it. Wish me luck anons. And if you figure out how to unlock your subconscious through meditation or lucid dreaming, let me know, I know that I know this stuff I just can't remember any of it.

>>4846 Good luck comrade. I know how you are feeling, it is truly awful. You have got it all under control. I have however heard very good results regarding meditation as a tool of focus and relaxation (in the anti anxiety sense).

>>3435 Nice, I'll check it out. Here's a link to one of the later works by a Left Communist of my tendency who eventually came to the conclusion that revolution was impossible and embraced a form of primitivism. It's pretty interesting even if I hope he's wrong. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jacques-camatte-the-wandering-of-humanity and here's a classic from uncle ted that's been a favorite of mine since I read it. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism

>>4850 Thanks Comrade. Test is tomorrow and tuesday. I have prayed to the gods and cast the runes. I am hogging down spaghetti and meditating. I am not doing this a fourth time. Also kinda new, wow /edu/ is slow. Thought it would just be lefty /lit/.

>>4888 Yeah it's a great board, lots of high quality posts, but that comes at a price

Hello comrades, I’m reading On the Genealogy of morals by Nietzsche, am I in the wrong to be thinking this guy is fucking retarded? This guy would have been deffo been a nazi

Am going to finish State and Rev, am gonna move on to finish Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and then I'm gonna read What Is To Be Done?. I admit I'm not really diligent in my studies as I spend a lot of time online since I can't really go out and organize. I'm gonna change that and improve myself, though. I've also been studying more Serbian and want to be able to visit my family in Serbia on my own at some point rather than needing someone to go with.

>>4846 Read Infinite Jest this summer. I haven't researched this, but Wallace strikes me as sort of centrist, maybe conservative in some of his stances. That being said the novel has really stuck with me. The story is filled with so many details that pander to North American nostalgia, the landscape that all the characters inhabit is just so American to the detail from sports to TV to suburbia and adolescent culture. How far are you anon?

>>4898 Let me check... I'm on page 342. First time I tried was for the meme and dropped it at 64. Now it's because it's so real. The themes of isolation, addiction, escapism, expectations, unused potential. It all resonates so deeply. It feels like a personal attack on my near 30 years existence on this earth. He really captured the zeitgeist of American consumerism. Those boring little details he so endlessly describes that everyone experiences but are so minute that you don't actively think about them. This time around it has been a much more interesting book. I've laughed aloud a few times even. I've watched most his interviews and read a bunch of his articles. Can't wait to finish reading it. It's been haunting me for years now. Also day 1 of the bar exam finished. Fuck my brain hurts. 1 day left.

Ive been trying to read imperialism by lenin. Been thinking about how solarpunk has a lovely aesthetic and a bunch of sort of beliefs baked into it that make it very amenable to a new communism. Im not sure i buy that the sort of centralisation the USSR and China have are necessary and ive been trying to find works/write my own theory on how we might create more decentralised states. Ive read a little bookchin but i hate his writing so tyle so its a struggle.

Just finished reading Blackshirts and Red by Michael Parenti, it was an enjoyable read and he really got the point across about how shit the restoration of capitalism in the warsaw pact was. Also I found his chapters about Left-wing anti-communism and leftists who refuse to talk about class to be really relevent considering the state of breadtube and grifters like Vaush. It's a book I'd recommened to anyone especially those who are still infected with the liberal idea that fascism and communism are both terrible totalitarian ideologies.

>>4925 Based. I read that book a few years ago.

Well the bar exam happened. Started reading Dubliners. Haven't finished Infinite Jest. Been practicing writing recently with /lit/'s genre burgerpunk. Dunno where else to share it. It's been fun testing out different styles, methods, and techniques on how to tell stories. I know it's probably not as funny as I think it is, but treating today as dystopian science fiction makes me giggle. Multiple layers of irony allowing for a literary critique of late stage capitalism. I think it's a good exercise overall. Here's the link if you actually want to read it. Let me know what you think! https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36209/burgerpunk-pizza-time

I'm reading "Western Marxism. How it was born, how it died and how it can rise again" by Losurdo. It's an extremely good books that I would love to be able to share with my international comrades but as far as I know has not been translated to english yet (but if you can read Italian, Spanish or Portuguese you should definitely check it out). It goes over the split between oriental and western marxism and how the contraddictions deepened with time.

>>4931 Is there an English Translation?

>>4932 As far as I know it has only been translated to Spanish and Portuguese. I'm actually thinking of translating it myself, but I don't know if I have the time right now. Maybe if I get some other comrade on board.

>>4929 how do you think the exam went? I don't really read any fiction, I need to improve on that front. Too much theory. Will read your thing another time I'm going to bed now

>>4941 I am more at one with failure and the world this time around than the previous two times. I've come to accept who I am regarding taking the bar exam. Some parts I think I did well, other parts might be up in the air. It's all just tumbling down tumbling down tumbling dowwwwwwwwwwwn.

Morning all. Today it's time to begin with State and Revolution for the second time. Quite excited to reread it now I have a much better grasp of Marxism, and Leninism. I've been thinking a lot about human 'thoughts', and what makes us human in the first place (in comparison to robot thoughts). And also what pleasures we should, as communists, submit to. And which we should overcome

I've been reading a lot about the Red Army Faction and the situation in West Germany in the 70s in general. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

>>3434 Hi anon, I'm dropping in because of the board shuffling proposals on /leftypol/ though I posted in the medieval thread too. I am halfway through G. Agamben's "Homo Sacer", and then I'm going to read this weird thing by 'SDK' called Turn Illness Into a Weapon. There's a lot I want to do, mostly to more clearly and essentially grasp Marx (I have Postone's tract on Time, Labor, and Social Domination open somewhere), but also Hegel. This idea in my head is that the regeneration of the human being or species essence is inextricably tied to revolutionary praxis and that a certain liminal human figure mediates this process. >>4891 I think I have Kaufmann's translation and in his forward he btfo's the Nazi shit. Also you may be in the wrong because his was a very original project (specifically the genealogy) that smarter people than us (Deleuze, Foucault) say all the time they are indebted to. >>4895 That's fine as long as you are assimilating the main points. You will be better-read than half this chan. "What is to be Done?" is a hard text full of little historical tidbits (I could be thinking of One Step Forward...), don't miss out on the overall point. >>4903 What I see in this centralization-decent debate is different understandings of the terms' meanings and more importantly certain modernist(?) conceptions of space and freedom. Like the world is a big abstract space, where anything can be put anywhere, and it's a big matrix-puzzle to solve. We should instead conceive of different bioregions as organs in the Earth's total metabolism. >>4958 gib update soon.

Currently reading Spirits of Resistance by Aihwa Ong (1987) which is about the interaction of global capitalist accumulation and mental discipline in Malaysia and the resistance strategies by mostly female factory workers in response to it. Pretty good already. Also, hey, I'm the editor for Newmultitude.org and we'd love to start putting up some new articles from the clever people here on /edu/ so let me know if you have anything interesting to say. Also, I'd love to put up some original translations. Is there anything you think needs a translation? ideally something short!

>>4976 I'll know in December. In the mean time I'm in a weird limbo for employment. Not a lawyer yet, nor do I want to leave the house and accidentally kill my grandmother.

I am re-reading Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically" to hopefully use it as the basis for an introductory study group on economics (as it covers a few chapters from Capital 1) but not sure if it will bear any fruit.

Just started taking a sociology course and I'm eager to read all of the material (it includes Marx, Gramsci, Weber and others) yet I feel intimidated by the amount of work expected - a large volume of reading, annotation and writing expected weekly. Anyone have similar experiences with how to manage rigourous social science courses for newbies?

>>4992 Take notes and think about what you read as you read. Think about how they all interact. Write and highlight the fuck out of the text. Apply the concepts to random ideas throughout your life and daily experiences. Engaging with material is what makes it stick over time. If you dig flash cards look into anki. If you like nested things look into a personal wiki or roam research. Overview classes aren’t difficult because it’s all just general overview of the fields within a field. You got this bud. I’d also suggest >atomic habits >make it stick >how to read a book >deep work

>what you're reading Finished "Is Socialism feasible?" (Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 2019). Meh, he's like a less intelligent and more verbose Alec Nove (mixed economy good and maybe some co-ops, NHS also OK, big socialism bad). In a footnote he complains that the writing of writers such as "Marx are marred by anti-Semitic remarks." The sentence the footnote is connected with doesn't mention Marx (nor the sentence before that or the page or the page before that page). My impression is that the author had a to-do list of bad things to say about commies and when rewriting parts in the main body of the text, he forgot to change this footnote. Authors of the far right get a careful reading and polite response, for left-wingers he analyses a few slogans and finds these lacking in nuance (page 156): >An even cruder misunderstanding is that public good means ‘good for the public’. While anyone who has taken Econ 101 should spot this error, it is nevertheless widespread. The term ‘good’ in this context does not mean virtuous or worthwhile. Instead in this case it means objects of trade, including traded services. Bad things, like tobacco, heroin and personnel mines, are also goods in this sense. As leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has opined that ‘education is a public good’ and suggested that this implies that it should all be provided by government and funded by taxation. All three leaders of the UK Green Party since 2012 – Natalie Bennett, Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley – have repeated the phrase ‘education is a public good’. He continues on this on page 157: >Influential organizations are led by people who have not learned the lessons of Econ 101. Then on page 158, there is this breathtaking finding: >Nevertheless, with education there are also strong positive spill-over effects. Educated people help to raise the levels of public culture and discourse and can pass on some of their skills to others. Educated people are also vital for a healthy democracy. Page 159: >Consider the positive externalities of education. It would be impossible or socially destructive for every educated person to charge a fee to participants in an intellectual dinner conversation, or to invoice the government for making a well-informed choice when casting his or her vote in the ballot box. The internalization of these positive externalities is impossible or undesirable. So the message is that your soundbite is bad, and even though I agree with the gist of what you say here I must denounce you since you fail at econ 101, even though I disagree with econ 101 myself. As you can probably tell by now, he's a pretty shitty writer. I picked up the book because Cockshott's TANS is in the references, but he doesn't actually discuss sortition etc. (I don't believe he has actually read it). He also refers to the work of Rudolph Rummel when discussing the USSR body count. If you don't know who that is, see this thread: https://archive.fo/GCcfp

I'm pretending to do my homework. Never posted here before, and I want to read theory but I'm always procrastinating. Help me, I'm in neverending pain.

>>5018 Read the books atomic habits, deep work, and make it stick. Do your homework anon.

>>5019 Thank you... Last time I tried reading a book for productivity I almost read half of it. I'm afraid that nothing I read will work because my impulse control is so fucking abysmal. Anyway, I'm trying to fix something that someone helped me write for my assignment, which is overdue at this point, but god fucking damn, my douchebag-ass neighbors just had to throw a fucking party with alcohol and blaring music right when I'm most worried about submitting this shit ASAP. It's midnight, and it sounds like it's coming from inside my house. Makes me wanna shoot myself, I'm actually tearing up. Sorry, I just wanted to get it out my chest. I think I'll stick around this board from now on and try to actually read something.

I'm investigating about Object Oriented Ontology. The name has semblance to a programming concept which is pure neoliberalism and makes me want to shoot myself. There is still a lot about philosophy that I don't get, it sounds radically different than hegelianism (and materialist/marxist hegelianism), because as I have understood it so far, it ignores the human element in the understanding of reality. An object is never just itself, it exists in relation to a shit ton of things, and these relations are social in nature. The social part is human. It could be animals of course, but the point is that a set of consciousnesses has to create said social relations of objects. Zizek doesn't seem to have too many qualms on this area as far as I've seen, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. And it seems OOO is kantian + heideggerian in origin? Which ignores the advances made by hegel and marx to "unify" the phenomena and neumena.

>>5023 Hmmm, from a youtube comment of a lecture of the star of OOO: >Most of the issues raised by Harman in this lecture were solved long ago by Hegel. It's disturbing how many philosophers can still continue to work in the shadow of Kant. So maybe I'm not that far off the mark. I feel a need to tell everyone IRL about my shitty understanding of Hegel, but nobody seem to give a shit TT_TT

>>5023 >a programming concept which is pure neoliberalism and makes me want to shoot myself How many layers of ideology are you on right now?

>>5023 I don't think OOO is kantian or heideggerian explicitly. Maybe just on the most vague levels. Would like it if someone else could clarify.

Rafiq thread was excellent. My collection of his compilation of posts grows and I am very happy with the discussion there.

>>5022 Did you get your stuff done anon? Did you at least get some sleep? It's all gonna be okay bud.

>>5053 Thanks for taking the time to read it, Comrade

Saw this in the OP of some poltoid bait thread on /leftypol/ where OP claims he tricked a Marxist professor into gifting him his old books and then burned them. Wondering if there are copies of any of them in socialist website/newspaper online archives, libgen, internet archive, wayback machine etc

>>5082 go check on libcom, im pretty sure i saw something like radical america there

Finished "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. It's musings about how minds work without talking about the brain as an organ, very autobiographical and full of tedious punning (I admit I'm somewhat biased against puns in general as I always think about the poor translators when I encounter them). He makes the point that language doesn't only have metaphorical meaning in a few sentences here and there. People talk and think in metaphors and analogies all the time, it's just that we usually only explicitly call out the big and wild ones. He gives an example of you eating a cookie from a plate and remarking it's delicious, some kids then eagerly grab similar-looking cookies from the plate (instead of pulling the one you said is good out of your mouth like a REAL SCIENTIST would, stupid kids). The kids reached a conclusion through a mini-analogy. Hofstadter has actually worked on a computer program that finds analogies and my hope when picking up the book was he'd describe it in some detail as well as other AI research, but he doesn't. Instead he craps on soul-body dualism, ultra-individualism, and John Searle's Chinese room argument. He argues against these three entangled issues (or is it one issue?) very well, but I didn't need any convincing. I'm more like Hofstadter when it comes to that than he is himself.

"The Invention of Capitalism" by Michael Perelman, very good book about Adam Smith and other classical economists. It's a common trope among Marxists that economics used to be more scientific while the bourgeoisie had been a progressive force and then took a nosedive post Ricardo. The book shows that the change to capitalism was not a basically automatic outcome of tendencies within feudalism, but to a great extent helped by political machinations, with our respectable philosophers/economists being quite aware of that and being for a rather hands-on approach despite how they are remembered. There's some real vile shit in it from their private letters.

>>5082 guess that guy succeeded his goal of triggering me because wow, fuck that guy. burning a book isn't the most evil thing you can do but it is one of the most transparently, pointlessly evil things you can do, IMO

>>5499 I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter. The rest of your post was good, I have little to comment on, but I enjoyed your review. >I'm more like Hofstadter when it comes to that than he is himself. Based and marxism-pilled.

Currently reading Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It's an interesting work. I've only read the very beginning so far, but am very interested in seeing where the rest goes. On another note, I've been thinking a lot about Kant and his transcendental idealism. I recently read Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and both touch on Kant's philosophy, though the Theses do it more indirectly. Reading these I think I've been able to understand and form a pretty consistent critique of transcendental idealism from a materialist point of view, though this only makes me more interested in actually reading Kant, which I haven't. I guess I'll work on studying him more closely as I read these other Marxist works. I'll probably start with Descartes then Hume or something like that. Might check out Leibniz at some point too. >>5978 So the book shows how economists/philosophers like Smith and Ricardo were not just responsible for indirectly 'justifying' liberalism, but also directly engaged with its politics, all the while knowing its flaws and surrounding opportunism? That sounds pretty interesting, I guess I'll check it out sometime. Will add it to my 'critique of liberalism' reading list.

halfway through my first book since probably middleschool, Against Empire by Michael Parenti I wish this board was more active >>5992 someone did this on /mu/ once too, they got a whole suitcase full of EXTREMELY rare Three Six Mafia tapes and other very valuable Memphis Rap releases and were like, >I no longer agree with the message of this jungle music, it promotes violence and degeneracy and then procedes to start melting them and throwing them in the garbage

>>6018 I've had this book for a while but have put off reading it. Maybe it's time. >>6024 You can make it more active comrade. Look through the catalog and see if there's anything you like if you don't wanna make a thread! >>6020 Based. One of my favorite Engel's works, was a huge breakthrough moment for me in getting the 'bigger picture' of humanity.

Anyone read Ted Reese's book "Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown"?

Am reading Carr's History of Soviet Russia. Currently on Part 3 (Socialism in one coutnry), vol. 1. PARTS 1 and 2 were really good.

Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations". When people sit alone at home and do philosophy, they rip words out of their usual social contexts, and with these shifted meanings they "find" many "logical flaws" in how normies are talking. Wittgenstein points to normal usage of words and while he gives many weird scenarios, their purpose is to highlight by contrast something about how language normally works. No familiarity with other philosophical works is needed to read this. The less familiar you are with philosophy, the more often you'll say to yourself while reading: Well, isn't this banal. The more familiar you are with philosophy, the more likely it is you will get a headache.

Having a quick skim through .pdf attached atm

It's Christmas comrades. Time to get some mulled wine and armchair away the days with good books. Still working my way through Zizek's Living In The End Times. Very much enjoying it regardless of its length.

Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" by Charles Babbage (copy from standardebooks.org). Disjointed ramblings about physics and engineering, how annoying street musicians and beggars are, his fascination with his figurine "Silver Lady" etc. He also makes lists about which ethnic groups play which annoying instruments in public and who encourages them (e.g. "ladies of doubtful virtue"). He got harassed a lot in public over his opinion on banning street music by the mob. While he's explaining his calculating Difference Engine at an exhibit: <…I was insulted by impertinent questions conveyed in a loud voice from a person at a distance in the crowd. My taste for music, and especially for organs, was questioned. As for his other politics: <In the course of my efforts to inform myself of the real wants of those around me, I profited much by the experience of one or two friends, both most excellent and kindhearted men, whose official duties rendered them far more conversant than myself with the subject. Mr. Walker and Mr. Broderip, both of them magistrates, were amongst my intimate friends. Mr. Walker, the author of The Original, maintained that no one ever was actually starved in London, except through his own folly or fault. <Whenever any further extension of our representative system becomes necessary, the dangers arising from the extension of the personal suffrage may fairly be counterbalanced by giving a plurality of votes to property. About half the book is like looking at a REEEing Pepe with a monocle. Not recommended.

Hey, this is anon from earlier in the thread. I fucking passed the bar exam! Woo! Anyone know of any resources for leftist attorneys?

>>6337 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/index.htm

>>6338 I lold

>>6337 Not sure if this is what you're asking for, but have you heard of Evgeny Pashukanis? Soviet law theorist, seems like the most important thinker in marxist critical law theory. I keep hearing things about him in local marxist circles, and he does seem interesting, but I haven't yet read anything from him. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/index.htm

>>6337 Congrats man! You're free!

>>6352 >The pre-eminent Soviet jurist of the 1920s and early 1930s, Pashukanis fell victim to the great purges of the late 1930s and was thereafter reviled as an “enemy of the people” until his posthumous legal rehabilitation in 1956. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/biog/biogintro.htm stalin purged literally all the good marxists. it's fucking crazy

This site wont let me post threads, i wanted to create a thread with the contents below but the captcha 100% of the time says its wrong or expired so i dunno.. can someone post a thread for me? I have fuck all time but to be a proper revolutionairy i need to read and comprehend much more than i do. I don't have the time to read books and not remember the contents. I was hoping everyone could drop their tips, hints and self-help books on reading and studying more effectively so that we can all become more effective students.

>>6395 Any other examples of important Marxists being purged by Stalin? I have limited experience with Stalin's purges and I don't want to be sullied by Western propaganda information.

>>6399 Lukacs wasn’t purged but he was exiled, and it was sort of his own fault

>>6400 WHat did he do?

>>6398 >make it stick >how to read a book >deep work >atomic habits

https://mobile.twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1335647195341582336 Drones are queered.

Still reading Hegel's logic. (a secondary source on Hegel's Science of Logic). I read ridiculously slow and I've been very distracted lately. I'm like 20% of the book done after months of reading lol. I recently shared the books with a friend and they already surpassed me -.- My biggest hurdle is actually starting to read. The book's material is not easy for me, so I actively try to not read. I can have the book open in front of me, but I'll watch an hour of youtube videos just to avoid starting to read. I'm not sure how to mitigate this.

>>6422 (me) I was reading Capital a while ago, also ridiculously slow. I noticed I've gotten much better at reading, because when I read normie books, I can read them much much quicker and with less effort than before (I still read them slow, but at least I can read now). I stopped reading after chapter 1 *facepalm* but I'm meaning to retake it once I've matured my Hegel knowledge a little bit more.

Finished "A History of Psychology" by Mikhail Yaroshevsky, published in the USSR in 1990. It starts with psychological conceptions of the ancient Greeks. Did you know that they already did vivisection of the brain of animals back then to check what part does what? "Experiments were carried out not only upon animals but even on human beings (criminals who had been condemned to death)." Freud really shrinks to an unremarkable figure when you have broader context. Pavlov and Vigotsky get far more attention in the book and rightly so.

Hi, I watching lectures on LISP right now.

I'm reading "Understanding Syntax" by Maggie Tallerman. My hope was that this book could directly help me programming something with some limited ability for figuring out syntax (I'm mostly interested in automatic summarizing), but the presentation is too informal for that. The author lists many names for particular components of sentences and what kind of checks you can make to figure out whether you guessed the correct name for the component. These checks often rely on your own understanding as an adult human speaker of English. Does this particular switcheroo result in an ungrammatical sentence? This approach won't work for a program (unless the program gets to manage a budget for outsourcing these questions to humans) :/

Im watching this video and from 3:57 onwards I'm stuck because I can't understand what he's saying https://youtu.be/emnYMfjYh1Q?t=242 It's advanced english

>>6488 There are captions available. Is it that you can't hear or that you literally don't understand the words?

Finished "Fashionable Nonsense" by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, a famous book from the 90s about how pomo writers bamboozle their audience with terms cribbed from math and physics that neither the audience nor the writers understand. It's really just that, investigating the crimes against math and physics with a small bit of conjecturing on top about motives. It's not about debunking the targeted authors regarding other themes (e.g. various claims about history) or methods they employ (e.g. psychoanalysis). The book also contains Sokal's hoax essay "Transgressing the Boundaries…" It was funny when I heard about this nonsense getting published by a pomo journal, but reading it is something else. It has over 100 footnotes and while not all of them go to pomo sources, what's in this essay plus the rest of the book shows that he and Bricmont must have read literally thousands of pages of this pomo dreck. The book has been presented in mainstream media like NYT as an attack on the radical left coming from conservatives. This is also how it's seen on the (self-identified) radical left. Like their targets, Sokal and friends are mostly non-Marxist progressives to the left of the US Democrats (people like Barbara Ehrenreich or Chomsky). Though that shouldn't really matter. A physics guy with sympathies that are monarchist or whatever could have also debunked the voodoo math/physics by these "intellectuals" and his claims about that would be just as valid.

Currently reading The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy by Charles Fourier. Simply just because I'm a cuck.

Done with "Wired for Culture" by Mark Pagel (2012). It was weird how old the author was when writing that and how long he had been doing anthropology, because the whole thing felt very reddit and superficial to me, like a guy who is normally doing something else entirely dabbling with anthropology. I don't believe I have deep knowledge about history and anthropology, but I was already familiar with literally anything the author brought up (muh Zipf's law, muh prisoners' dilemma, muh ethics Gedankenexperiment with guys tied to a train track, muh six degrees of separation), and at more detail than what's presented in the book. The author is soaked in capitalist ideology and American chauvinism. This shouldn't be surprising and I shouldn't be mad about it. I don't expect purity and I don't get mad about stains of ideology sauce here and there. We are all bound by the times and places we live in after all, but I still have the expectation that people who 1. are old and 2. have an interest in anthropology and 3. have been to many different countires in their lives have gained some ability to stretch their necks more than most. Maybe the guy had fast puberty or something. It looks like his personality and outlook was firmly locked in place already at an early age. He sees everything through burger goggles that are firmly screwed to his head. In one place he muses that Esperanto isn't more widespread than English because language evolution made English so easy to learn!! In the end there is a sermon that communism is bad because human nature: <Equally, and for the same reasons, no one could plan our societies, and there could not be a predetermined number of people in a society with a predetermined number in each of many different occupations. What if all of a sudden the society needed more of one particular commodity? When societies have been designed—Moore’s Utopia, Pol Pot’s Year Zero, the vast sprawling social housing estates of Western European social democracies, or the hugely controlling and interfering theocracies of the world—they have usually proved far from utopian. The weirdest aspect, which I picked up early in the book and it really runs throughout the whole thing, is his hateboner for Neanderthals. A common theory is that they died out because they burned more calories and couldn't spawn children at the same rate as us. But he constantly repeats that surely the Neanderthal people vanished because they weren't smart enough. Bigger Neanderthal cranium? Doesn't explain nothing, they still had some areas of the brain that were smaller and this is crucial! Also, they didn't have complex rituals like burials. They did have burials. OK, it looks like they had, but umm that's just because nobody likes stinky corpses lying around and the flies and so on, those weren't REAL burials man! Also they didn't have tools and ornaments etc. Really, none at all? Weeeelll uhm those few they had were probably gifts from their homo sapien friends! … And on and on it goes with that guy. He mentions a mutation in a specific gene sequence (FOXP2) that he himself says is crucial to language in humans which is also present in Neanderthal samples in the same version – and since that doesn't strictly prove that they had language, he thinks that makes it OK to proclaim they most likely didn't have it. It's outright pathological. What is the deal with this guy? The most parsimonious explanation is that he and his wife had a time-travel adventure and she boinked a Neanderthal man.

Just got through the 2021 book "Math without Numbers" by Milo Beckman, which I picked up just because I found the title intriguing. Turns out it isn't even first book with that name. It got some bits about topology, diagrams, cellular automata. It's simple enough that kids can read it. When it comes to practical applications of math, he mentions neoclassical economics of all things, quote "…in some cases, this supply–demand model actually makes pretty decent predictions". Just a very small part of the book, but eeh.

Went through half a dozen papers by Peter Ruben, a GDR philosopher who was thrown out of the SED for revisionism. His stuff is available at https://www.peter-ruben.de/ (in German). I just thought maybe he's some maverick thinker, too cool for the SED bureaucrats? Well, turns out he's just an anti-communist wanker: He's constantly "arguing" for the entrepreneur as an inventor/engineer type person (similar to Schumpeter) by repeating claims of that sort (of course with nothing empirical to back that up) and rhetorically groups together traders with transport workers. He denies that the means of production can ever be held in common in one global state, claiming that would destroy all economic rationality, since he is conflating the absence of a market in the means of production with the absence of a market for consumer goods.

I came here to ask a question, I guess I could do it ITT rather than make a new one? I have a good layman's understanding of both dialectical materialism and bourgeois systems theory. I'm hoping for a perspective from someone who has a fairly good grasp on both, whatever your background. Is 'systems thinking' (a more qualitative mode of analysis borrowing frameworks and concepts from systems theory) just dialectical materialism reinvented and rebranded, or is there an actual difference? Obviously they are distinct traditions, if you can even call systems thinking that, with different origins and histories and modes of application. But is there a concrete, practical difference? Or are bourgeois intelligentsia really coming to appreciate Marx's insight 150 years late and only when they think they invented it?

>>6617 Isn't systems thinking mostly just looking at systems from the angle of self-preservation? That would be a big difference.

>>6593 The other book named Math Without Numbers is an extremely dull work (threatening you with a "volume I" in the title) about representing ideas with set theory, written by a lawyer named William S. Veatch.