#15841
Post rating: +++++
i'm reading the voice of my generation
#15842
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
*yellow-tinted sweat coats screen as i furiously scan new getfiscal content for the SATIRE label* shit shit SHIT where is it?? shit!!!!!
#15843
Post rating: +
if that's genuinely our guy; cool. it's a little corny but i liked it
#15844
Post rating: +

Parenti posted:

if that's genuinely our guy; cool. it's a little corny but i liked it



have we reached a point in the long, winding history of LF and WDDP that some posters dont even know who getfiscal is

#15845
Post rating: +
"hey guys, i found this blog called McCaine.org, he's a little long winded and obsessed with elves, but i think he might have some potential, somebody ought to invite him"
#15846
Post rating: ~
of course i know who getfiscal is, i just wasn't sure if the article was by him when it was posted.
#15847
Post rating: ~
.

Edited by neckwattle ()

#15848
Post rating: ~
Anyone have a write up on the recent state of people's war in the Philippines? I thought I saw people sharing a long article on twitter recently but I can't seem to find it.

Edited by marimite ()

#15849
Post rating: +

tears posted:

anyone know a good introduction to physics?


the feynman lectures on physics are pretty good if you're interested in getting a background into how physicists like to tackle problems, so it works as good reading even though the quantum stuff is outdated pedagogically. what it would be really bad for would be a replacement for intro undergrad physics if thats what you want. for what it's worth its one of the ways i reviewed for my qualifying exam, which was an oral exam of "physics reasoning"

#15850
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Reflections On China Vol. I where Hoxha lists off the posthumous charges against Lin Biao and says this shit
#15851
Post rating: ~
I know the rule is never go on reddit, but this is a history thing. Looking for a take on what this duder is saying. How full of shit is he?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ya9zv/to_what_extent_is_grover_furrs_account_of_the/dmmkgp8/

http://blanquist.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-grover-furr-and-moscow-trials.html


put stalin's head where the UFO is

as an aside, i was reminded that Furr wrote a whole book on this stuff, Trotsky's Amalgams. can i get a sparknotes up in this piece
#15852
Post rating: +++++
i mean you might just hold them to their own standards on questions of reliability, historicity, and rhetorical honesty. over and over again you see them say "grover furr is ignored by professional historians, who disagree with him." which is it? one cannot be both ignored and disputed. they say: "grover furr is not a professional historian, which doesn't matter". then why mention it? they fall over themselves to be the first to point out that he's not published, and then mock the insinuation that there's a coordinated anti-communist movement in the field. they concede after some prodding that robert conquest is a crank and a hack (shattering the special credibility they disingenuously claim not to lend professional historians), but accuse his most popular critic in diametric opposition of the same.

beyond all of that, the basic strategy deployed against furr at every turn is to exploit the fact of his iconoclasm. they just restate his own correct positions and give a little nudge to the audience, prompting incredulity the way a television sitcom prompts the laughter or applause. every time they say: prepare yourselves, we're about to dunk on this nitwit with cold hard facts, and within a paragraph they're right back to denouncing his "stalinism" while quietly conceding that history is foggy and subject to interpretation. nothing resembling a lucid argument ever materializes in these "takedowns". is furr so extremely distasteful as to be unworthy of engaging, as they say? well, that's a strange contradiction. those who are the most wrong are the most effortlessly refuted. it can't be both a trivial task to discredit furr and not worth doing unless furr himself is absolutely right about being blackballed for political reasons.

i know you want someone to really dive in to the nitty gritty of specific documents and statements and historical smoking guns but all of this stuff, forever, will come back and turn on questions of interpretation, evaluation, and ideology. even so, it might be possible to go about such a project if his critics in the links had cited even a single primary source, but they don't! they cite other historians, barely mentioning any of the specific claims made in bloodlies or furr's other work, without producing a single detail or factual claim of their own, and typically with some snotty little jab at the state of the general public's academic literacy. it's just farcical. their arguments, objectively, hinge on consensus. this is shockingly perilously territory for a group of people claiming to have better access to facts and no ideological impediments of their own to be standing on.
#15853
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
Specifically referring to the Moscow trials and Furr's general "what REALLY happened?"s I don't care about all that stuff so much, I think that part o fhistory is already too removed and too clouded by propaganda to maybe ever be fully understood, and I think Furr's exposure of anti communists is more than enough to make them important. Anything that discusses Furr's shoddy academic work must conclude with a mention of how Timothy Snyder is a billion times the fraud
#15854
Post rating: +
My favourite criticism of furr is that he relies almost entirely on soviet sources. Isnt relying as much as possible on primary sources history 101
#15855
Post rating: ~

Furr's work is amateur and wouldn't even get a passing grade in a decently rigorous undergraduate course.



I'd love for some college-going person to actually test this out. I've heard it a lot with Furr. I haven't went to college so really don't know if there's any truth to it at all.

#15856
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++
the least dumb reason furr tends to be ignored is that he clearly is attempting to exonerate or condemn completely like a lawyer. that's why most historians in the field ignore him. whether that is good or bad is another thing. from what i've read, his general approach with stalin is basically to attribute bad things to subordinates and suggest deniability to stalin combined with the idea that stalin handled things fine when he eventually found out. but that shifts the blame more widely, which is exactly why khrushchev wanted to denounce stalin so thoroughly in the first place, to avoid blaming the whole soviet political system and to attribute it to a deviation within the leadership. that's why most foreign communist leaders were very concerned about the secret speech, because they didn't see any changes in the political system that would fix those structural problems (togliatti worried from the more liberal/revisionist angle and mao worried from the more radical/anti-revisionist angle). anyway like most people in this sort of category of publication, his actual books seem to catalogue all sorts of bad things that happened, but then people who should know better spin it into an excuse to just go hog wild with ideology and be like "stalin did nothing wrong" while wearing a suit made of soviet flags, instead of the more sombre, intelligent way that here we say "stalin did nothing wrong" as a reflection that he did his best but it wasn't enough and now we're all going to die.
#15857
Post rating: +
Next stop on the revisionism train we have Cuba. If you haven't been keeping track of my journey I've been slowly reading through the various anti-revisionist articles on the Espresso Stalinist website. It generally follows the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Hoxha line which is very critical of socialist movements in the world.

The source is this 1992 Communist League (UK) article on Cuban revisionism. I haven’t read too much criticism about the Cuban revolution or its aftermath so it was interesting to get some facts that aren't normally mentioned or discussed. One of first points put forward is that Castro’s 26 July Movement only succeeded because the U.S. was already pushing and planning for Batista to leave. Castro initially presented himself as opposed to communism and welcoming of capital to Cuba so the U.S. was cautiously supportive of the movement. Eventually as we all know he started to initiate land reform, expropriate businesses and diversify agriculture thereby prompting the U.S. to begin the trade embargo and execute a failed invasion. At this point Castro is desperate for aid and unfortunately the Soviet Union takes advantage of the situation by forcing Cuba to focus on high volume sugar exports to the detriment of diverse agriculture and industry. As capitalism is partially restored in the Soviet Union, Castro follows the same policies in Cuba. Thus, when the Soviet Union finally collapses, Cuba is left in dire straits due to its heavy investment in sugar production. The Author considers Castro’s small guerrilla movement as not genuinely proletarian because it did not originate in the working class and therefore it has not and will not succeed in other Latin American countries. The Soviet Union is also harshly targeted for its social imperialism against Cuba, which is hard to deny when reading its demands of the Cuban government. IIRC, since the time of this article I think Cuba has diversified its agriculture & industries but has also taken the Chinese route of excessive privatization so we may see a shift towards social democracy in the near future.
#15858
Post rating: ~
any good books with spaceships in them?
#15859
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
iain m banks' Culture novels
#15860
Post rating: ~
das kapital ship
#15861
[account deactivated]
#15862
Post rating: ~

tears posted:

any good books with spaceships in them?


no, but you can read stanislaw lem if you must have spaceships

#15863
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
are lem's spaceships hypersentient communist space robots? that are emotionally attached to their stupid little practically immortal polyamorous transgender human pets ?? read banks

e: i just remembered that some of lem's spaceships could prob be described as hypersentient communist space robots . still

Edited by zhaoyao ()

#15864
Post rating: ~
I’ve been reading Marxism and Form by Fredric Jameson and just finished the Adorno chapter which is pretty cool since he condenses Adorno’s thought from impenetrable obfuscatory philosophy into a still very difficult but definitely stimulating summary that’s given me a lot to think about. One interesting point that stuck out was the discussion of aesthetic content and form in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic period was one in which they were capable of being dialectically synthesized, i.e. Hegel’s philosophy, opposed to the previous philosophies of romanticism (an emphasis on content) and rationalism (form) and Beethoven’s music moving beyond the purely formal nature of Bach or Haydn, because they had the privilege of living inbetween a collapsing feudalism and a nascent capitalism, giving them a unique historical vantage point ideologically. I’ll have to reread it but Marxist criticism is pretty cool stuff.
#15865
Post rating: +
thanks for doing my homework, after my school found out I was a Marxist they've been holding me back in 12th grade civics for fifteen years.

#15866
Post rating: +

Caesura109 posted:

https://surveillancevalley.com/the-tor-files/the-tor-files-transparency-for-the-dark-web-full-foia-cacheYasha Levine released all the Tor/Broadcasting Board of Governors communications files he got from the FOIA request if anyone's interested in reading through some


i fucking love wading through documents, tyvm

#15867
[account deactivated]
#15868
Post rating: +

Caesura109 posted:

cant tell if sarcastic


still got it

i genuinely enjoy digging into this stuff:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367077-Re-FWD-Re-Meeting-Notes-Jan-11-2008.html this one's really good. TOR asking BBG to recommend them someone "from the Middle East" to sit on their board of directors.

I've also come across several instances of the BBG contact enthusiastically encouraging them to get their Farsi translation version up and running ASAP, I can't imagine why.

#15869
[account deactivated]
#15870
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

tears posted:

any good books with spaceships in them?



#15871
Post rating: +
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/the-socialist-network/

im reading this article which i think unintentionally portrays exactly how non-threatening these people are to capital
#15872
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
riding high on the 2016 success of explaining that by "socialism", you mean the platform of the Republicans under Eisenhower
#15873
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete.



LOL. Gee I wonder why DSA ended up to the right of the Democratic Party on Vietnam...

#15874
lies half the time
Post rating: +

Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism.



#15875
Post rating: +
im doing a capital vol 1 reading group with some other wwp people and a grad student not in wwp. ive read a lot of capital before but in pieces, never all the way through. shou;ld be cool
#15876
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
ive found it tough to keep folks engaged since its p dry esp early on. there are librivox recordings of the whole thing so if folks are having trouble keeping up with the reading, they could at least try listening while they're driving / doing chores / whatever. they might not come away with as firm a grasp of the material compared to actually reading it, but that might actually benefit discussion in a way
#15877
Post rating: ~
a bunch of stuff about red china

Revolutionaries are Monkey Kings, their golden rods are powerful, their supernatural powers far-reaching and their magic omnipotent, for they possess Mao Tsetung’s great invincible thought. We wield our golden rods, display our supernatural powers and use our magic to turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos and make a tremendous mess, the bigger mess the better!

Red Guard manifesto
Tsinghua University Middle School
Peking, June 24, 1966




P’an T’ien-shou is a counterrevolutionary painter—he paints such miserable birds



http://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/bringing-red-guards

#15878
Post rating: ~

lo posted:

tears posted:

any good books with spaceships in them?

no


thanks

#15879
Post rating: ~
finishing up "Under the Volcano". up next: Settlers, by J. Sakai
#15880
Post rating: +

dabe posted:

Settlers, by J. Sakai


what's that