Petrol posted:this book has to many big word for me, the history major
not everybody is meant to read, imo
elias posted:got an email from my school yesterday about a used book sale the english club was running today...figured it’d mostly be junk but i stopped by. it was just one folding table with a few books. i found a lil gem nestled in between jonathan franzens the corrections and catcher in the rye , so now i’m at the university panda express reading Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False by grover furr
damb that owns
toyotathon posted:Dimashq posted:k i'm gonna do it, i'm gonna read this book with big words
this is written real casual and i don't know what that person was complaining about. here's what i'm complaining about. the trotty USSR stuff so far is clock-that-chimed-13-times level and is making me question the rest of it
While the situation in the USSR was far more complex - and is
still an object of debate among historians - a similar pattern
emerges there too. Despite identifying with the Revolution - a
phenomenon much more widespread in 1939-41 than today - the
mass of the Soviet people was hostile to Stalin’s dictatorship. In
certain areas like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, where
national oppression had been combined with the large-scale terror
and famine of the collectivization period, hostility to Stalin among
large sectors of the peasantry, the professional classes and layers of
the working class had turned into outright hatred - and was inten
sified by the experience of being abandoned to the German
invaders in 1941. Yet whatever potential this might have created
for a significant degree of collaboration between invaders and local
population was soon negated by the monstrous crimes perpetrated
by the Nazi occupation forces. The systematic destruction of the
infrastructure of civic life; the mass enslavement of tens of millions
of people under inhuman conditions; execution and maltreatment
on a scale in excess of anything Stalin and his supporters had
conducted - these soon turned the tide. The Soviet masses - in the
first place the working class and the soldiers of the Red Army, but
by no means them alone - displayed the indomitable resolve in
resistance of which the defence of Leningrad, in many ways even
more than Stalingrad, became a symbol.
Yea I was expecting as much from Mandel. It’s a short read anyway, so I’ll report back on how shit it is.
lo posted:does anyone know where the phrase 'immortal science' actually originates from?
I'm pretty sure its just a stupid meme from ppl trying to imitate maoist rhetoric badly
lo posted:does anyone know where the phrase 'immortal science' actually originates from?
tHE r H i z z o n E
However, our brave partisans and all the patriots of new Albania, with their Party of Labour at the head, armed with the immortal science of Marxism Leninism, not only took over the dreams of their forefathers, but they spun even bolder dreams, and with their blood and sweat made them a reality. And this is what we shall do in the future, too.
he says "immortal teachings" and "immortal principles" of marxism leninism more often
Caesura109 posted:I dropped Bernanke's stupid book and decided to re-read Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste by Mirowski. Before I'd read it, I never understood why self-proclaimed neoliberals were much less right-wing than how leftists seem to portray neoliberalism, as if it is laissez-faire capitalism. It's actually far more pernicious than any utopian libertarian idea of a purely free market society, in many ways. Built into the constructivist brand of neoliberalism is a justification of a paternalism that seeks to restrict anti-capitalist sentiment from ever gaining political traction by arguing that the public should not be allowed to subvert their own 'freedom' that is granted to them by capitalism, and a tolerance for government provided welfare except in third-world societies that neoliberals pillage, where international coercion must impose 'regulations', while they assure everyone - based off of the dogshit statistics and lies of the bodies that carry out such coercion - that the poor are still doing better overall than they were. If you press them on this paternalistic - and authoritarian in the "post-modern" sense - attitude, they'll start yapping about Hitler and Stalin and red-bait I'm sure.
Yeah, that why I prefer the phrase they use in Europe: Ordoliberalism. It better describes the autocratic implementation of the ideology of market "reform" and the political system it operates under, largely Christian Democratic. It's a free-marketism that valorizes the state and uses the state to implement it: Pinochet as the lizard brain of it in the minds of the Troika and the European Commission.
cars posted:imo "neoliberalism" is like "late stage capitalism", a term that might have been useful decades ago in one context but now it's just intra-species recognition for bernie sanders voters
yeah it's the older model performing the same function, the dogwhistle used in the soft-left activist scene to oppose aspects of capitalism without having to admit that either a) they are in fact actual anti-capitalists and thereby exposed to more serious resistance or b) they are not in fact anti-capitalist and thereby worthless.
it also functions as the weasel word to allow the two above groups to pretend they can meaningfully work together. in today's context in which the left is finally willing to present itself openly, no longer needed or useful.
cars posted:is there even a non-ironic "self-described neoliberal" alive today
i've seen a right-wing economist adopt the label but there's a chance he was just doing it in a self-consciously contrarian way ("aha, i see you are using that word as an epithet, but have you considered that maybe it is... good?"), though strictly speaking it's not irony i guess
tears posted:i find it useful when i am writing to describe the specific historic economic period between about the volcker shock and the invasion of afganistan, i dont know what else i would call it *shrug*
yeah this is more or less my thinking too
i'm of two minds on the issue. i agree that "neoliberalism" et al basically function like qualifiers, which means the users' opposition to capitalism is likewise qualified. but on the other hand, when i see liberals in particular using "late-stage capitalism," i'm also appreciative; libs break hard toward idealism and thus ahistoricism, and so it seems like a positive development to see them framing capitalism as something historical, transient, aged past its date, etc.
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
cars posted:entirely baseless hunch that the U.S. is going to try to normalize some form of limited nuclear warfare as an ongoing strategy in my lifetime.
i've also been feeling this. anyone else in sync with my internal doomsday clock?
did you know they have 200-400 nukes stationed in Europe? i didn't know that until a few weeks ago when I read up on "Nuclear Sharing", which Russia mentioned in their response to the review. The US trains allies up on how to use nukes, and gives them aircraft to drop them, and then says it's not nuclear proliferation because legally the nukes are still American. thumbs up.
drwhat posted:what hunch, they said exactly that in their Trump-directed "Nuclear Policy Review" last month. "we will use tactical nukes, we will consider first-strike, we will escalate".
i don't know if that will really happen though. the united states has had a strategy for nuclear warfare since WWII that pretends that the U.S. can win it
like, legit, i took an elective in college on the history of the witch trials, and the professor's explanation the century of terror by saying it was due to the 'overzealousness' of prosecutors, and the illegitimacy of torture as a tool of interrogation. the historical/material reasons why torture became acceptable, why terror needed to be induce, and why the areas with the most fervent witchhunts correlated almost exactly with the regions later famous for their 'protestant work ethic' was never brought up or questioned. the professor wasn't an incompetent guy, but the liberal historiography he'd absorbed just assumed those events were 'natural' and unquestionable.
i appreciate that federici links the witch trials to both the reaction against the peasant revolutions of the 14th-15th century, and the early colonial horrors inflicted on the american natives.
final thoughts: settler culture both conditions and rewards saboteurs. i'm going to try to read 'racecraft' next.
Scrree posted:final thoughts: settler culture both conditions and rewards saboteurs
power pisses on the weak and this is the logical outcome
Petrol posted:can anyone recommend any good reads about the origins and intended purpose of the stock market? doesnt have to be marxist, just well sourced and decently written
heard some good things about this guy: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm
tears posted:Petrol posted:can anyone recommend any good reads about the origins and intended purpose of the stock market? doesnt have to be marxist, just well sourced and decently written
heard some good things about this guy: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm
thanks. but rather than a description of the stock market's function i am looking for a historical account of its development and the stated intentions of its creators.
you could try reading chapters 7 and 8 of hilferding's finance capital:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/ch07.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/ch08.htm