for example, patrick higgins's piece on syria a couple years ago was good enough to net an incensed response by louis proyect
I might read Hobsbawm next I think.
Dimashq posted:I finished Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism and have started Lineages of the Absolutist State. I glanced at the Russia chapter and I’m really excited to read that. Also the notes on Japan and the asiatic mode of production look really interesting. Anderson briefly mentioned in the introduction that he planned on writing a sequel to the book, but as far as I’m aware that never came about. Oh well.
i think he wrote his 600 page takedown of ghandi and nehru's india instead. which slays though i havent read it yet
babyhueypnewton posted:Seriously, those books gave me so much more clarity on thinking about the world and historical materialism as a method.
I just finished the conclusion to this book and I’m amazed. His discussions on the distinguishment between the genesis of a mode of production and it’s actual developed form and the comparative analysis between European and Japanese feudalism was very cool. Also his argument that prior modes of production can subsist and reappear superstructurally hundreds of years later during the Renaissance (Roman law, philosophy, etc) and that this gave Europe its historical dynamism and ability to form absolutism and eventually capitalism (while Japan could not) gave me a lot to think about. I still have the two notes at the end to read.
I highly recommend this book.
A simple example will make this proceess clearer. Assume that jack aranges a morgage loan of $200,000 with bank Bevis so he may buy a property belonging to jill. Bank Bevis then credits the account that jack has with them for the $200,000. But jack does not withdraw all these funds as cash then hand over the notes to pay for the property. Instead, he transfers the funds from his bank account to the account jill has with bank Butthead. To do this, his bank will use the interbanks payment system for the transfer, so that his account will be debited $200,000 and jill's account will be credited for the same. Since jack did not walk out of bankBeviswith $200,000 in notes, his bank did not need to have the sum available in cash. Bank Bevis will have an obligation to pay bank Butthead $200,000 as a result of this transaction, but it will also be processing many thousands of incoming and outgoing payments. Its net position may be that it has a surplus of funds on that day, or a deficit. If bank Bevis has a deficit, then it can borrow funds from other banks, including bank Butthead, or it can get allocated short-term funds from the central banks regular market operations
Dimashq posted:Just purchased a couple books. lo mentioned The Morning Deluge which looked worthwhile so I got a copy. Also got The Age of Revolutions by Hobsbawm and found some book in a used bookstore called The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I was hoping to find some comprehensive book on the 30 Years War or the French Religious Wars but that’s the closest thing I could find. I’ll see how it goes.
I read a small amount of the MaCulloch and it was pretty good, good writer, very in depth imo. IIRC he was a lot more sympathetic to the anabaptists than Dan Carlin's podcast (my only previous intro to it) was, where he just took the primary sources at face value and said they were all crazies who just wanted to fuck
Dimashq posted:I finished Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism and have started Lineages of the Absolutist State. I glanced at the Russia chapter and I’m really excited to read that. Also the notes on Japan and the asiatic mode of production look really interesting. Anderson briefly mentioned in the introduction that he planned on writing a sequel to the book, but as far as I’m aware that never came about. Oh well.
grabbing these from the pdf subforum
Dimashq posted:Just purchased a couple books. lo mentioned The Morning Deluge which looked worthwhile so I got a copy. Also got The Age of Revolutions by Hobsbawm and found some book in a used bookstore called The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I was hoping to find some comprehensive book on the 30 Years War or the French Religious Wars but that’s the closest thing I could find. I’ll see how it goes.
I just picked up the same reformation book! It's really good
Gibbonstrength posted:Dimashq posted:Just purchased a couple books. lo mentioned The Morning Deluge which looked worthwhile so I got a copy. Also got The Age of Revolutions by Hobsbawm and found some book in a used bookstore called The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I was hoping to find some comprehensive book on the 30 Years War or the French Religious Wars but that’s the closest thing I could find. I’ll see how it goes.
I just picked up the same reformation book! It's really good
Nice. About 100 pages in, its good if you like a comprehensive history of scholastic/theological quibbling, but coming from reading materialist history, it falls a little short. I don’t know much about this so it’s still very educational.
Caesura109 posted:Well I meant more like a refutation of their ideology similar to the 'what is a trot' post
well volunteered
The idea that it's better to be an urban worker than a villager was something I used to take at face value. I vaguely remember children's cartoons using 'peasant' as a pejorative.
My grandma was from a mountain village in Northern Greece and got proletarianized in the 70s. It only recently occured to me to ask her which life she preferred. Of course she said her life in the village was way happier, but due to being an ethnic minority the family thought it best to emigrate (the Greek Junta were not nice to Slavs).
all that is solid melts into air but at least the NGO 'poverty' statistics improve
#readhobsbawm
Edited by Belphegor ()
http://chuangcn.org/2017/08/class-combat/ posted:But even if the tide seems to be sloshing rightward, the Boxer rebellion and its aftermath should remind us that history has a longer arc. Despite any number of thinkpieces attempting to equate Trump’s America with late-Weimar Germany or Italy in the 1920s, the fact is that both of the European cases were ones in which Fascism arose out of the corpse of a widespread, well-developed leftwing movement that had failed in its many goals. The US is in no such position today. Instead, in almost every respect, the present situation more resembles that of late-Qing China, in which no leftwing politics had been able to cohere within the body of the decaying hegemon, and instead a superstitious, vaguely populist right rose to power in its absence. But its rise was premature. The historical sequence was therefore reversed: the left itself built strength out of the failure of the populist right’s attempt to seize power. Despite its ultimate militarization via the civil war and its subsequent descent into the management of a developmental regime, the Chinese communist movement shows that the far-right fusion of populism and physical culture can, in fact, be challenged.
ilmdge posted:how does one go about obtaining, the stalin book by martens
whole thing seems to be online here if u dont mind reading on a screen: http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node1.html
There's also a PDF version that can be found pretty easily, and an EPUB that I can send you, all derived from the same source. I was thinking about making it into a nicer-looking HTML version one day... would take a lot less work than my other incomplete Stalin defense book project...
Caesura109 posted:Since both micro and macro economics are mandatory for me to study (IR degree), I have to once again learn neo-classical and Keynesian theory. Since I'm a first year with lots of free time and the stuff we are learning is a reiteration of high school economic theory, I was wondering if Anwar Shaikh's "Capitalism" would be good to pick up. If any of you have read the boom, do ou think an undergrad-level grasp on bourgeois economic is sufficient for tackling the boom? It's huge one and I don't want to borrow it if I won't understand most of it
i haven't read that one in particular, but unless you have something to lose (limited number of library borrows?) i don't see the harm in just giving it the ol' college try. shaikh generally has something of value to say, even if there's also stuff worth criticizing or debating
but if you're dealing with HS/undergrad macro/micro you're probably better off with keen's Debunking Economics; just skip the chapter on marx, which is a different breed of stupid than you'll usually find in bougie crit of marx but extremely stupid nonetheless
if you're feeling more confident with your macro and want something with a more critical perspective that still relates well to college crap, you might want to check out godley & lavoie's monetary economics. even just first two chapters might be useful to you
but really you should go read stuff like this or this (start with the last ch) or this
Caesura109 posted:Since both micro and macro economics are mandatory for me to study (IR degree), I have to once again learn neo-classical and Keynesian theory. Since I'm a first year with lots of free time and the stuff we are learning is a reiteration of high school economic theory, I was wondering if Anwar Shaikh's "Capitalism" would be good to pick up. If any of you have read the boom, do ou think an undergrad-level grasp on bourgeois economic is sufficient for tackling the boom? It's huge one and I don't want to borrow it if I won't understand most of it
Only read some of the book while watching the YouTube videos but it's brilliant. Read it even if there's no possibility the IR/Econ professors you have will be convinced or evening understand what you're saying.
glomper_stomper posted:reading my enemy's enemy by the venerable kersplebedebbies.
the austrian freedom party largely figures into sakai's appraisal of the neo-fascist elements in the old anti-globalization movement. i knew that name sounded familiar and then i realized its current chairman was appointed vice chancellor of austria last year. learning about the slow ascent of fascism with anti-WTO characteristics in the late 90's is fascinating if only because it puts into perspective its little concrete manifestations now, like the one danish pig triumphantly mulling over his duty to ayranize the gold fillings in refugees' teeth.
if you're curious about the links between U.S./SMOM-enabled Nazi ratlines and that stuff try The Beast Reawakens by Martin Lee, published in 1997