Petrol posted:

Not reading material so much as research material - a massive collection of primarily US government documents here: http://that1archive.neocities.org/.

Just a heads up that the guy who runs this archive has started a Kickstarter to liberate a massive (11m pages) archive of declassified CIA documents which is practically inaccessible at the moment.

motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/11-million-pages-of-cia-files-may-soon-be-shared-by-this-kickstarter-crest posted:

Millions of pages of CIA documents are stored in Room 3000. The CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), the agency's database of declassified intelligence files, is only accessible via four computers in the National Archives Building in College Park, MD, and contains everything from Cold War intelligence, research and development files, to images.

Now one activist is aiming to get those documents more readily available to anyone who is interested in them, by methodically printing, scanning, and then archiving them on the internet.

“It boils down to freeing information and getting as much of it as possible into the hands of the public, not to mention journalists, researchers and historians,” Michael Best, analyst and freedom of information activist told Motherboard in an online chat.

Best is trying to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter in order to purchase the high speed scanner necessary for such a project, a laptop, office supplies, and to cover some other costs. If he raises more than the main goal, he might be able to take on the archiving task full-time, as well as pay for FOIAs to remove redactions from some of the files in the database. As a reward, backers will help to choose what gets archived first, according to the Kickstarter page.

“Once those "priority" documents are done, I'll start going through the digital folders more linearly and upload files by section,” Best said. The files will be hosted on the Internet Archive, which converts documents into other formats too, such as for Kindle devices, and sometimes text-to-speech for e-books...

In all, the project will likely take years, and also depends on how frequently the archive workers can replace the paper and ink of the printers.

“If I'm able to make it my full-time focus and keep the scanner going at 15,000 pages a day, like it's rated, then it would take between two and three years,” Best said.

As for the files themselves, CREST contains 11 million pages, according to the CIA's website, which Best says make up around 700,000 documents.

“There are about three times as many CIA files in the CREST database as there were diplomatic cables that were leaked by Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks,” Best said.

These include high level records from the agency's early years, completed intelligence reports, and daily briefings sent to US policy makers from 1951 up to 1979.

“The Central Intelligence Bulletins and National Intelligence Daily(s)/Dailies give insight into what was known when and what was a focus for the government on any given day, while the files from the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence give a top-down view of how CIA operated,” Best said.

If you have $25 to spare and want him to prioritise something, can't hurt to jump in. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/285662323/publishing-cias-declassified-vault

The CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), the agency's database of declassified intelligence files, is only accessible via four computers in the National Archives Building in College Park, MD

lol

Gssh posted:

Michael Best posted:
“If I'm able to make it my full-time focus and keep the scanner going at 15,000 pages a day, like it's rated, then it would take between two and three years,”


I wonder why he hasn't tried to do this with a camera and just upload those/use OCR to extract the text from the images. Anything instead of printing. If he has physical access and is allowed to view, and also photograph the area (as he has in kickstarter page), it seems reasonable to suppose he could set up a little camera on a tripod and reduce his workload.

Also the 15k per day is for scanning only, not printing which would be a much slower rate.

Glad someone is doing this work, but there are probably more clever solutions than physically printing 11 million pages.

i was thinking something like this but i am too mad at everything today to actually explain things. you're completely right though.

Once at the computers, visitors aren't allowed to save any of the already digitized documents - instead they have to print the documents out while under several kinds of electronic surveillance

Guaranteed that if they plug something in, or otherwise attempt a setup that circumvents this process, whatever CIA staffer was told to obfuscate is going to scramble to find a new way to block easy access. Which is exactly what will happen to Best when they start their project anyway, even with the current plan - the printers will break and stay broken etc

babyhueypnewton posted:

The stagnation of the economy had to have roots deep in the socialist economy and these had to be severe enough that capitalism was the solution

this seems like a weird idealist conception of history to me, treating the USSR as a closed system in isolation and ignoring the massive collaborative effort to undermine and sabotage it at every turn. or at least minimizing it., sorry if im missing something or misunderstanding the post im dying

chickeon posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

The stagnation of the economy had to have roots deep in the socialist economy and these had to be severe enough that capitalism was the solution

this seems like a weird idealist conception of history to me, treating the USSR as a closed system in isolation and ignoring the massive collaborative effort to undermine and sabotage it at every turn. or at least minimizing it., sorry if im missing something or misunderstanding the post im dying

this is correct obv but one of the major problems with trotskyism/anarchism/ultra-leftism is that actual socialism serves a ressentiment function. Trotskyism never happens because 'Stalinists' are always stabbing it in the back, Anarchism is simply too good before the dastardly betrayal in Spain by communists, etc. Obviously this fantasy doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny but there's a deeper fantasy, that any ideology which doesn't contain the method for its implementation in the face of repression is meant to remain imaginary. One doesn't even need to get into historical specificity because it's clear that the catch-all of 'betrayal' is pathological, it serves a necessary structural role in the fantasy to allow it to function at all and ultra-leftism would collapse if forced to face a reality without 'the other of the other.'

I think the strength of Marxism-Leninism, besides actually existing, is that it is an ideology of what exists. It takes severe repression, invasion and civil war, economic sabotage, and most importantly repression of other ideologies as given because that's what actually occurs. So I try to apply that logic in general and see what the weaknesses of the Soviet Union within its own ideological universe are, even though much of this stems from the direct and indirect war of the imperialist West. This kind of strict structuralism may not be needed but I find it useful.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (Feb. 5, 2016 06:25:39)

babyhueypnewton posted:

I read the majority of this debate between Albert Szymanski and Raymond Lotta on the nature of the USSR:

http://www.bannedthought.net/USSR/RCP-Docs/SUSoSI/SUSoSI-II-1983-Entire.pdf

And Lotta comes off like a crazy person who doesn't know anything substantive. A shame that debate with Zizek never happened but I can see why he was chosen instead of a normal Marxist who could reveal Zizek's lack of knowledge about economics and history.

More importantly, the entire idea of 'state-capitalism' and 'social-imperialism' appears to have no basis in reality. I'm sure there are better advocates than Lotta but I have yet to find them. But if the USSR was socialist, how do we explain its collapse into capitalism? The stagnation of the economy had to have roots deep in the socialist economy and these had to be severe enough that capitalism was the solution (considering there were no advocates for a return to Stalin's version of Preobrazhenskyism on any side). For me, the idea that it was a coup is unsatisfactory, even obvious coups like Libya and Poland have basis in fundamental material realities so we haven't actually explained anything. The alternative idea is Trokstyist 'degenerated worker's state' in which the economy is socialist and the political state is buraucratic/collectivist, but of course that idea has neither basis in material reality nor any predictive power.

I guess in the abstract I understand what happened to the USSR and all of the socialist states to greater or lesser degrees (what may have polemical value to be referred to as 'revisionism') but I don't have a coherent theory nor am I sure if one even exists. The economics are there, scattered through various books and papers, but rooting them back into political-economy hasn't occurred as far as I know. I'm interested if places like Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, etc have discussions that we can't read which are richer than the crap the western left thinks is 'discussion'.

Most high-ranking Soviet party operatives transitioned smoothly into neoliberal politicians, architects of the shock therapy, etc. That fact alone gives you enough clues about the degree of ossification of ideological production and how these "communists" revealed themselves to be such convinced bourgeois ideologues of "entrepreneurial" statecraft, But yeah it's still confusing to me... I mean, it's understandable in Poland where it was a strategic goal of NATO and Poles were given an economic boost by Eurocrats from the start to disrupt the bloc quickly (see also Slovenia in Yugo), but when I think about the USSR's case it still gives me pause. It makes me think of this part in Perry Anderson's Russia piece:

In early 2012 Gleb Pavlovsky explained: ‘Putin is a Soviet figure who understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and a military machine which aspires to control the world. It’s a very clear, simple picture and I think that Putin had this in his head, not as an official ideology but as a form of common sense. That is, of course, we were idiots; we tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. For if we had made more money than the western capitalists then we could have bought them up. Or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t possess. So that’s it. It was a game we lost because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the kind of predators described to us a chance to appear and devour their predators. These were Putin’s thoughts and I don’t think they’ve changed significantly since.’

The oligarchs created under Yeltsin had not understood their ultima ratio, and with Yukos had to be taught it. But there was no question of the need for their species. Vladislav Surkov, a flashier consigliere, told a reporter in 2011 that Putin realized any general dispossession of the oligarchs was impossible because there were not enough capable entrepreneurs to replace them. The pool of businessmen was ‘very thin and very precious . . . they are the bearers of capital, of intellect, of technologies’. So it followed that ‘the oil men are no less important than the oil; the state has to make the most of both’. In this economic syntax, the higher subject is the last.

chickeon posted:

Blum's still kickin' http://williamblum.org/aer/read/143

the profit motive is just one expression of the law of value, and i think the law of value can never be fully abolished. it will just find expression in other ways, whether that's labour vouchers or social disapproval at taking too much from the communal stockpile.