#12241
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i just finished capital vol1 and it owned. it was really good, and i love it. now im going to read J R, which is actually harder for me to read but its a really funny prescient indictment of neoliberalism
#12242
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
fanshen: a documentary of revolution in a chinese village
#12243
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“The day-labourers are born, grow up and are trained for” (are bred for) “the service of wealth without causing it the slightest expense, like the game that it massacres over its estates. It seems as if it really has the secret of which the unfortunate Pompey vainly boasted. Wealth has only to stamp on the ground, and from it emerge legions of hard-working men who contend among themselves for the honour of being at its disposal: if one among this crowd of mercenaries putting up its buildings or keeping its gardens straight disappears, the place that he has left empty is an invisible point which is immediately covered again without any intervention from anyone. A drop of the water of a great river is lost without regret, because new torrents incessantly succeed it. It is the same with labourers; the ease with which they can be replaced fosters the rich man’s hard-heartedness towards them.

These men, it is said, have no master…pure abuse of the word. What does it mean? they have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence. It is not one man in particular whose orders they must obey, but the orders of all in general. It is not a single tyrant whose whims they have to humour and whose benevolence they have to court— which would set a limit to their servitude and make it endurable. They become the valets of anyone who has money, which gives their slavery an infinite compass and severity. It is said that if they do not get on well with one master they at least have the consolation that they can tell him so and the power to make a change: but the slaves have neither the one nor the other. They are therefore all the more wretched. What sophistry! For bear in mind that the number of those who make others work is very small and the number of labourers on the contrary is immense….

What is this apparent liberty which you have bestowed on them reduced to for them? They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?”
— From Theory of Civil Law by Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet

I thank the cantankerous R.Lupine for reminding me about this guy.
#12244
Marxsplainer
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just finished reading bleeding edge by pynchon, i thought it was a fun popcorn read but nowhere as good as inherent vice. not nearly enough paranoia and the ending was pretty weak. the fed character just seemed shoehorned in as a way for pynchon to get his "lady character is inexplicably and paradoxically horny for fascism" rocks off, i duno
#12245
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am reading cities of salt by abdelrahman munif
#12246
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Petrol posted:

caliban and the witch owns. i should fix up the pdf thats floating around.


i didnt vote for you to see all ur campaign promises go unfulfilled

#12247
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tentativelurkeraccount posted:

Petrol posted:

caliban and the witch owns. i should fix up the pdf thats floating around.

i didnt vote for you to see all ur campaign promises go unfulfilled


i did end up buying a new copy of this. the old pdf is garbage. i'll get round to scanning it soon.

#12248
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Are y'all talking about the pdf that's on libcom? It seems fine to me.
#12249
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
iron oxen: a documentary of revolution in chinese farming
#12250
chickeon
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my caliban and the witch pdf, i think from, is a piece of shit quality wise if anyone has/finds a better one that would be dope. it's still readable but some places have words/letters missing in a way that they don't just get automatically filled in reading it. still one of the best thing's i've read though goddamn it owns
#12251
Poronto
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I think I have the same copy and i gave up a quarter of the way in, tho it was also cos federici's historical methodology struck me as kinda dubious. wanna read it all the way thru tho someone make an epub
#12252
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https://libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf
#12253
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Began reading the island of doctor moreau on a whim. Am finding it interesting thus far because it reflected this late-Victorian/Edwardian self-pitying generational narrative where the older, vanilla Victorian morality of order, hard work, and discipline (represented by the ship captain) is staged as always instinctively right from the beginning, but also as boorish, tyrannical, and latently insane. More importantly, while, like the protagonist, it finds the heavily racialized animal-human hybrid repulsive, it also, importantly, has no room for the shipwrecked and weak willed young intellectual-which is why it abandons him to sea again, to be picked up by Dr.Moreau and his collaborator, who our "hero" is intrigued by.

The older bourgeois generation wants to keep the monsters that empire has made far away from it, while the more "decadent" younger generation, while also disgusted by them, is irresistibly drawn to them-partly because of a more "open minded" and laxer temperament, partly because of enchantment with the ideal of science, and partly because of enforced alienation from mainstream society.
#12254
UNUSUALY COOL
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island of dr moreau is a good book by a prett cool guy
#12255
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daddyholes posted:

island of dr moreau is a good book by a prett cool guy



Prefer George Bernard Shaw, as far as turn of century pro-eugenics Fabian *socialist* intellectuals go...

#12256
UNUSUALY COOL
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wells came to oppose sterilization but never abandoned his staunch opposition to zionist occupied palestine, really makes you think
#12257
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daddyholes posted:

wells came to oppose sterilization but never abandoned his staunch opposition to zionist occupied palestine, really makes you think



Wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you.

#12258
UNUSUALY COOL
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i don't know if i can ever read anything written by anyone who is not william howard hinton, ever again
#12259
UNUSUALY COOL
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i'm incredibly goony for howard hughes hinton and his 500 page books of meeting notes about improving drainage
#12260
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daddyholes posted:

i don't know if i can ever read anything written by anyone who is not william howard hinton, ever again



I feel the same way, but about Gillian Rose.

#12261
Mike Nelson here.
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RedMaistre posted:

daddyholes posted:

i don't know if i can ever read anything written by anyone who is not william howard hinton, ever again

I feel the same way, but about Gillian Rose.

Coincidence... I've been reading the Melancholy Science this morning.

#12262
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some short stories by Montesquieu and i stil haven't finished Seeing Like A State because it's boring and repetitive.
#12263
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has anyone got the new peter carey
#12264
[account deactivated]
#12265
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i on the other hand didnt get it. i didnt get it at all.
#12266
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give it tp me, please.
#12267
[account deactivated]
#12268
[account deactivated]
#12269
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Learned that the entertaining Memoirs of Prince Eugene were in fact written by Charles-Joseph de Ligne (1735-1814). But from another point of view the books gains an added poignancy by the consideration that one aging cosmopolitan non German general and minister of the Austrian Empire, living in the era of the revolutionary wars, is speaking in the person of a counterpart from the earlier era during the height of continental absolutism

Sample:

I have been happy in this life, and I wish to be so in the other. There are old dragoons who will pray to heaven for me, and I have more faith in their prayers, than in those of all the old women of the court and of the city clergy. The fine music, whether simple or more obstreperous, of the divine service, delights me. The one has something religious, which awes the soul; the other reminds me, by the flourishes of trumpets and kettledrums, which so often led my soldiers to , victory, of the God of hosts who has blessed our arms.I have scarcely had time to sin; but I have set a bad example, perhaps, without knowing it, by my negligence of the forms of religion, in which I have, however, invariably believed. I have sometimes spoken evil of people, but only when I thought myself obliged to do so; and have said: “Such a one is a coward, and such a one a scoundrel.’ I have sometimes given way to passion; but who could help swearing to see a general or a regiment that did not do their duty, or an adjutant who did not understand one? I have been too careless as a soldier, and lived like a philosopher. I wish to die as a christian. I never like swaggerers either in war or in religion, and it is perhaps from having seen ridiculous impieties like those of the Frenchmen, of whom I have spoken on the one hand, and Spanish bigotries on the other, that I have always kept myself aloof from both. I have so often beheld death near at hand, that I had become familiar with him. But now it is no longer the same thing. Then I sought him, now I wait for him; and meanwhile I live in peace.

From The Memoirs of Prince Eugene of Savoy

Edited by RedMaistre ()

#12270
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Let us examine a particular case, to refine the demonstration. For example, one of the great musicians of our time, whose existence is unquestionable. Cecil Taylor. Born into jazz, he remained faithful to its outward forms: the clubs and bars and festivals at which he performed, the instrumental groups he put together, even the odd vague (or inexplicable) declaration of an influence (Lenny Tristano, Dave Brubeck). But his originality transcended musical categories. His thing was jazz, but any other kind of music too, broken down into its individual atoms and reassembled, like one of those celibate machines that produced the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century. According to the legend, Cecil made the first atonal jazz recording, in 1956, two weeks before Sun Ra independently arrived at the same result. (Or was it the other way around?) They didn’t know each other, nor did they know Ornette Coleman, who was doing similar work on the other side of the country. Which goes to show that beyond the genius or inspiration of those three individuals (and Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy and who knows how many others), causation was operating at some higher level.

That level is History, and History has an important role to play, because it allows us to interrupt the infinite series that are generated by the art of thinking. This is how interruption loses its false prestige and its insufferable preponderance. It becomes frivolous, redundant and trivial, like a muffled cough at a funeral. But its very insignificance gives birth to Necessity, which makes the rule of History manifest. Interruption is necessary, though it may be a momentary necessity, and the moment itself is necessary too, and often sufficient, which is why we say that a moment is “all it takes."

http://bombmagazine.org/article/5992210/cecil-taylor
#12271
UNUSUALY COOL
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tpaine did you read your homo book
#12272
[account deactivated]
#12273
Mike Nelson here.
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I'm going to try to read the huge two-volume French edition of the History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky. This will either improve my French or kill me.
#12274
[account deactivated]
#12275
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#12276
chickeon
Post rating: +

daddyholes posted:

tpaine did you read your homo book

hell he wrote the damned thing

#12277
[account deactivated]
#12278
[account deactivated]
#12279
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

tpaine posted:

it's looking like the Let's Read isn't going to happen.

catchphrase

#12280
[account deactivated]