e: Dumbest post to ever lead off a new a page? I be the judge
your_not_aleksandr posted:Lacan himself isn’t difficult to read either.
toyotathon posted:i'm not really educated so names like jakob fuggar and charles V, stuff like the dutch bourgeoisie revolution, it was drinking from the historical firehose. that stuff's comprehensible, i just gotta read more. but i realized about halfway thru the price revolution chapter that i was simply not going to understand the causes and ramifications of wildly oscillating wages and prices in the 15th and 16th century, so if anybody's got a framework for grasping what was happening... i'd reason that new world/sudanese specie imports would be purely inflationary, but it didn't shake out that way (because of debasement?)
i read this book but i dont actually have it here and i dont remember this part, sorry
- Khrushchev alleged that Stalin directed Yezhov to do the purges, without providing evidence
- Robert Conquest writes "The Great Terror" in 1968, which is completely unsourced and the origination of the term; Ezhovschina is the Russian term and means "bad time of Ezhov"
Real numbers of people shot
1935-1936: 2347
1937-1938: 681,692
1939-1940: 4464
Furr talks about the "Anti-Stalin Paradigm" originating in Trotsky's work in the 1930s after their exile, then amplified by Khrushchev and Gorbachev who each sponsored massive amounts of unsourced material about the purges. This paradigm is marked by four unassailable premises
1. Stalin was a dictator, in control of everything that happened
2. There were no real conspiracies against Stalin's government
3. The Moscow Show Trials were fake and all the convicted were innocent - in "Trotsky's Amalgams" Furr talks about how the trials were indeed "show trials" in that they were a public reprise of much longer trials that had already happened.
4. GF: "Stalin never wanted democratic elections. The struggle by Stalin and his supporters for contested elections to the soviets (the legislative arm of the Soviet government) was either a sham or intended as a mechanism to get rid of entrenched local leaders whose power Stalin perceived as threatening in some way."
Furr references James Harris' 2016 book "The Great Fear" as an example of ignoring evidence to protect the paradigm. GF: "Harris endorses the long-disproven story of the German SD plot to frame Marshal Tukhachevskii (169-70), repeats the similarly disproven tale that Kirov's murderer "was almost certainly acting alone" and decides, in the face of all the evidence, that the fears of challenges to the Stalin government were false. (186) As the reader of this book will discover, this is all wrong."
The Sherlock Holmes reference happens here, then Furr sets out the three questions that are the point of this book:
"1. Did hundreds of thousands of innocent victims meet their deaths?
"2. Was Stalin responsible for these murders, as is usually claimed?
"3. If - as the evidence demands that we conclude - Stalin was innocent and put a stop to this crime against humanity, how could he and his colleagues have been oblivious to what was happening for so long? Why were Ezhov and his men able to go on killing so many innocent people for over a year?"
Exciting shit
wahoopride posted:If I was going to read one Furr book which would you suggest? I've read through about half of the Blood Lies thread. Is Blood Lies the way to go or would you guys suggest something else?
Blood Lies is good but if you want to start with something shorter here is a still-pretty-detailed article from 2010 that covers some of the same ground. ~100 pages to Blood Lies' ~600 and kind of funny in that the authors say "we'd need much more room to destroy these stupid Soviet-archive-mining books as a whole" and because Furr is one of them he's basically flashing steel.
cars posted:Blood Lies is good but if you want to start with something shorter here is a still-pretty-detailed article from 2010 that covers some of the same ground. ~100 pages to Blood Lies' ~600 and kind of funny in that the authors say "we'd need much more room to destroy these stupid Soviet-archive-mining books as a whole" and because Furr is one of them he's basically flashing steel.
Thanks
What do you guys attribute to the fact that it seems there is really only one person (Furr) in the whole USSR history revisionist game? Or are there more that I am just unaware of?
What happened? I assume painting the Soviet Union with the same brush one does with the Nazis?
Edited by tears ()
your_not_aleksandr posted:His best work is his longer stuff and maybe a primer or something might be worth exploring but aerdil isn't wrong so donćt hold your breath!
My advice for reading Žižek is don't. Watch both Pervert films, they are really good. Listen to a couple of talks, they can be entertaining at least. Read and watch what he talks about. If he still seems worth the time, and keep in mind aerdil is right, then try and read him again.
Instead, read Alain Badiou. A lot of Žižek's stuff is basically Badiou's but with pop culture, so if you can't keep focused with Žižek, Badiou might be better. Read Alenka Zupančič. Read Mladen Dolar. Lacan himself isn’t difficult to read either.
All of these people are psychoanalysts. The goal of psychoanalysis isn't to provide solutions. The goal of psychoanalysis is to give you the tools to understand and in some cases reshape your perspective of your symbolic reality.
"You feel lonely and sad because you're alienated from your labor and taught to desire things. Realizing that these desires are placed upon you by advertising and ultimately capitalism will help you reconcile these issues and allow you to live in an imperfect society with a newfound peace" or "You may be racist but you are also part of a racist society so don't feel personally offended at your racism." or whatever.
It's not serious theory by any means but it isn't exactly bullshit, either. It's applicable but toothless. It's usefulness comes from being able to work towards a certain mutual intelligibility and is actually very good at easily being able to recontextualize works.
dang i like zizek but this is a really good post
ipcress posted:your_not_aleksandr posted:Lacan himself isn’t difficult to read either.
swampman posted:There is a whole range of American Sovietologists who are anticommunist but resistant to bad scholarship, like J Arch Getty. Also Roland Boer just announced they finished their book on Stalin. Domenico Losurdo wrote a pro-Stalin biography but its not in English yet, if you have Italian or Spanish fluency, get to work
boer is an insane person
What an amazing week.
Between Tuesday and Friday, 17 and 20 January, the world shifted. On Tuesday, Xi Jinping addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, while on Friday Donald Trump became president of the United States.
Their two speeches said it all: in one, putting people first, focusing on economic wellbeing for all, stressing the need for international cooperation, dealing with major problems collectively, and the need for a recalibration of global governance; in the other, putting the USA first, focusing on economic wellbeing only for the USA (and stuff the rest), stressing the need for twisting arms so that the USA comes out on top, dealing only with US problems, and the desperate and vain assertion of US global control.
To be sure, many commentators have interpreted Xi Jinping’s speech as a defence of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalisation’. But if you read closely, you will pick up the Marxist emphases on economic wellbeing (which is a core element in a Chinese Marxist approach to human rights), economic inequality as a source of unrest, unleashing the forces of production, the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and the need always to focus on what benefits the common people.
In some respects, the week just past was a significant moment in the shift of global power that began 10 years ago with the Atlantic financial crisis. Comrades in China point out that it should be seen as an outcome of almost four decades of the reform and opening up policy in China.
And all this takes place as Xi Jinping is preparing China for the shift to the second stage of socialism.
To be sure, many commentators have interpreted Xi Jinping’s speech as a defence of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalisation’. But if you read closely,
This is the purest and most beautiful distillation of revisionism
- continuity and rupture: philosophy in the maoist terrain (im taking notes on this one, ill post them when i finish)
- dependency and development in latin america
- history and class consciousness
stegosaurus posted:- continuity and rupture: philosophy in the maoist terrain (im taking notes on this one, ill post them when i finish)
i also just started this. thought his first book (the communist necessity) was a decent polemic against the vaguely anarchist tendency that was ascendant from the 90s to occupy, if maybe a little repetitive
wahoopride posted:I haven't read through the entire thread so sorry if it has already been brought up, but is anyone familiar with "The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution" by Shulamith Firestone? Is it good? Is it a good Marxist analysis of feminism? If not, is there a book that contains a good Marxist analysis of feminism?
I'd say it's worth reading because there are some interesting ideas in it, eg on psychoanalysis, and because it has been getting attention again, but I would not read it as an avenue into marxist feminism. The references to Marx and Engels serve less to integrate an analysis of gender into an analysis of class than neutralize the latter, and what's more with a pretty restricted picture of gender. I think the book is actually much closer to NRX thinking than Marxism. If you do read it, I'd recommend reading Davis' Women, Race & Class afterwards.
Backus posted:zizek's about as communist as the national bolshevik party
*extremely mustang voice* I thought you guys HATED zizek?
stegosaurus posted:- continuity and rupture: philosophy in the maoist terrain (im taking notes on this one, ill post them when i finish)
why would you read this? maybe his real work is better because his blog has not shown me he's competent at anything or particularly interesting as a thinker and the fundamental idea that maoism is only what we say it is and not what mao say it is based on the real history of the chinese revolution is so on-its-face crazy to me.
blinkandwheeze posted:i agree with your general sentiment huey but Maoism as a category clearly supersedes the particular statements and historical conditions of mao. in the same sense that Lenin has little to say about what would constitute the tradition of Marxism-Leninism. the theoretical products of movements in india, bangladesh, the philippines, turkey etc. are more instructive in that regard.
I thought this was fair until I was bombarded with people who told me that my citation of Mao clearly understanding 'state capitalism' and the socialist mode of production in the same way as Lenin has nothing to do with maoism. I know you'll say those are dumb people on the internet but who else makes up the maoist collectives in America and Canada? That doesn't disparage the movements you mentioned but that's basically what JMP is and I've become cynical about the whole "maoism is different from mao zedong thought which conveniently allows me to have the worst possible line on imperialism, every socialist country except China during the first 3 years of the cultural revolution, and any kind of scientific understanding of political economy that isn't needs more cultural revolution." I'm still a maoist because of the wonderful things I've read by people not on the internet but the maoist collectives and parties in North America must be awful if they're made up of the JMPs of the world.
You're right to be cynical of the "maoism is different from mao tse-tung thought" line because that is an idiosyncratic contemporary interpretation which was dismissed by the parties responsible for the transition of terminology in the first place. However Mao Tse-Tung Thought as a formalised category only existed within the prc itself as a theoretical proposition that was forwarded by revolutionary press outlets in like 1966. The bulk of the work in developing mao tse-tung thought as something developed and concrete was by militants outside china like two decades before Maoism became the preferred term.
Well i should clarify that there was some difference between Mao Tse-Tung Thought and Maoism - otherwise the change wouldn't have happened - but Maoism was just seen as a moment of greater clarification and reinvigoration of the principles of Mao Tse-Tung thought rather than the introduction of any novel theoretical principles. Like some groups in the West would claim that Maoism brought with it the thesis of the universality of people's war but the MLM parties of the 60s would tell you this was already the established line and the idea that it wasn't universal was the deviation.
anyway which is to say that the so called maoism of most m-l parties in north america is largely an entirely idiosyncratic and heterodox intellectual trend with little to no connection to what you could call Maoism as a concrete political tradition. i don't really see the point in bothering with people in the west who associate with that term and aren't obsessively pouring over tracts by Charu majumdar or ibrahim kaypakkaya or whatever. which is why i generally agree with your sentiment and am skeptical of people like jmp i think you just got some details wrong or underdeveloped.
I think people have an unfortunate instinctual eurocentrism where they treat european or north american intellectual trends with a lot more significance than they warrant. some of that is unavoidable because most of us probably won't run into indian communists in our daily lives but i've found it a lot more productive to go read stuff on bannedthought.net or massline.info rather than engaging myself with the works of north american bloggers.