#16281
truly it makes for some gobsmackingly stupid reading

as does this article about finding out that your collaborator grandfather was *actually* a collaborator after all
#16282
Glad people are reading three body problem! Finished the first book, have the other two on ereader!
#16283

damoj posted:

this article about finding out that your collaborator grandfather was *actually* a collaborator after all


lmao, fuck

#16284

JohnBeige posted:

Glad people are reading three body problem! Finished the first book, have the other two on ereader!



I quit cos he was saying mean things abt the cultural revolution

#16285
he kind of does but it's also a book about how someone who was identified as a traitor to the revolution during the CR ended up creating a deadly threat to the entire planet based on bad theory and personal resentment
#16286
There's a cheap book sale by the local library going on and I got 4 books for 4 dollars. One about organic agriculture/gardening methods, one about pine trees, one about popular urban movements of Mexico, and one about the exploitation and resistance of Malaysian women working in sweatshops. Already had the occasions to reference the pine tree and gardening books, but I won't get to the other two for a little because I'm reading Wretched of the Earth for the first time and re-reading Settlers to facilitate a reading group.

Wretched of the Earth is really good.

To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world does not mean that once the borders have been eliminated there will be a right of way between the two sectors. To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.

#16287
https://www.newsweek.com/patriot-prayer-members-armed-snipers-positioned-themselves-roof-ahead-august-1171862

I think there was a rhizzoner who went to this protest back in August and posted about it (not sure) but anyway Portland police just admitted to having discovered a fascist sniper nest overlooking the whole event and didn’t do shit about it except tell them to leave
#16288
Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw

remember back during the first phase of the iraq war when anytime they're publish a quote from a soldier they'd always provide a ridiculous name like Doug Shoveller or Bruce Eacilly
#16289
Is there anything useful to read regarding ports and shipping lanes as vectors for imperialist control? I feel like I only have a vague understanding of how it operates—are day, Chinese ships literally physically blocked from unloading at certain western controlled ports or using western controlled shipping lanes, or is it mostly tariffs and stuff?
#16290
Is there anything useful to read regarding ports and shipping lanes as vectors for imperialist control? I feel like I only have a vague understanding of how it operates—are day, Chinese ships literally physically blocked from unloading at certain western controlled ports or using western controlled shipping lanes, or is it mostly tariffs and stuff?
#16291
United $naKKKe$ Troop/historian Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote The Influence of Sea Power upon History in the years before World War I and even though it's a historical review of 17th-18th century naval powers its principles were adopted by most of the major naval powers of the time. The argument there is that production only proves useful through the opening and defense of shipping lanes, and colonialism establishes a power's clout not just through extraction of resources, but through control over safe ports and lanes. It's been mentioned before on here, but one thing that flies under the radar for a lot of people is how much of today's logistics still involves ships at sea, especially after the advent of containerization. I don't know that I've seen a good recent Marxist review of the way current-day imperialism facilitates merchant shipping, but if there isn't one, it's probably an area worth covering.

There's also the aspect of human trafficking as a means of disciplining labor, the flags traffickers fly and the laws they use to keep their operations in place. Belize is a British Commonwealth country that's been run by its bourgeois/conservative/anti-regulatory party since 2008, which means it's turned into an untrammeled outpost of contemporary imperialism. Its previous law regulating registration of merchant ships and protection of their crews was repealed in 2010, and in the years that followed it became the worst offender for human trafficking in Central America, in large part because traffickers fly its flag at sea. On top of accepting registration from pretty much whoever, Belize has exceptionally poor labor laws concerning merchant vessels' crews, and that means when traffickers get caught, captains have incredible leverage over their crews not to testify about whatever's been happening aboard.
#16292
[account deactivated]
#16293
Here's mine, what Barber really wants is All Power to the Soviets. Gotcha, Leslie.
#16294
Go buy Settlers or other things. Big sale at our favorite publisher.

http://leftwingbooks.net/
#16295
Almost done with the first part of Ormsby’s Don Quixote. At this point I think the farcical episodes are to the book’s detriment, and a lot of what Cervantes’ contemporaries found uproariously funny is more likely to strike us as a little sad. I know the book changes tone significantly in the second part, but for the moment I prefer Tristram Shandy, and think Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are a better Quixote and Sancho than Quixote and Sancho.
#16296
[account deactivated]
#16297

Ruzbihan posted:

Almost done with the first part of Ormsby’s Don Quixote. At this point I think the farcical episodes are to the book’s detriment, and a lot of what Cervantes’ contemporaries found uproariously funny is more likely to strike us as a little sad. I know the book changes tone significantly in the second part, but for the moment I prefer Tristram Shandy, and think Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are a better Quixote and Sancho than Quixote and Sancho.


i thought i remembered seeing something about how the ormsby translation was quite bad on the comedy although not having read it i dont know how true that is

#16298

littlegreenpills posted:

English poetry has been handicapped for centuries because nothing rhymes


english poetry has been handicapped for centuries because it was being written by the english

#16299
are there any lesser known, non-trot, relatively comprehensive (read: beginnerish) books on 1917? actually asking for a friend but also for myself
#16300
[account deactivated]
#16301

toyotathon posted:

went to the SF Big Book Sale like i do every year. got a book on topology, Fanshen, red star over china, and this real oldy called Communistic Societies of the United States, from like the late 1800s. i am interested in how the settler religious commune was a transition instrument into land property, like how the enclosure worked, from outside-in or inside-out. the last gasp of US commune/enclosure was up north during the 60s california colonization, which took a ton of land from the yurok/oohl up in redwood country. 'course, the white communes transitioned effortlessly in the 70s-80s into emerald triangle drug manufacture. anyway i'm curious about the fragility of the US commune.



I have a book like that called something like that Early American Socialisms which is full of accounts of all the utopian attempts in the 19th century.

#16302
Reading about French Algeria and settler colonialism. One could probably write a Settlers: The Mythology of the French Proletariat since even the great Paris commune was closely tied to colonialism:

https://www.marxists.org/subject/arab-world/lutsky/ch20.htm

bet most people didn't know there was an Algerian commune. The only question is was the Paris commune the last time the French proletariat were revolutionary and not labor aristocracy or were they already compromised by reactionary nationalism, as seen in their lack of unity with the Algerian national liberation movement and the French settler commune being explicitly chauvanist? So much of contemporary islamophobia, post-WWII fascism ("integral nationalism" in France*), and the ultimate failure of decolonization begins in the Algerian revolution, it needs to be further studied by Marxists everywhere and not left to "post-colonialists" who are robbing Sakai's work decades later without any of his analytic richness (seriously some academic named Patrick Wolfe gets credit for settler colonial theory when his theory is just a shitty version of Settlers)

*Actually it's wrong to highlight integral nationalism since civic nationalism was just as important in crafting a "muslim" Algerian identity which was incompatible with French citizenship. French racism implicated republicans and monarchists alike.

Edited by babyhueypnewton ()

#16303

Patrick Wolfe



hm, an australian. might be useful for me, cheers ;P

#16304
i haven't read wolfe or coulthard or the other names that get floated as better for advancing the case against settlerism. what are some of the substantive differences?

i've come across a lot of criticisms of Settlers, and they all seem to fall into the following categories:

  • did not read the book but bases opinion of what it probably says on 6th-hand accounts
  • halfassedly skimmed it with uncharitable preconceptions, leading to a cherry-picked misinterpretation
  • rejecting the thesis because they likewise reject the entire theory of the labor aristocracy (usually citing Charlie Post somewhere)
  • actually a correct criticism


i've only noticed one that falls into the last category, and it's that sakai mistakenly said jefferson was president instead of secretary of state in 1791. so i guess on that basis, every sociological concept is falsified, and we all should read one of these other authors who also say "settler" but definitely know when jefferson was president, like if there was a "when was jefferson president" test they'd get an A
#16305

toyotathon posted:

went to the SF Big Book Sale like i do every year. got a book on topology, Fanshen, red star over china, and this real oldy called Communistic Societies of the United States, from like the late 1800s. i am interested in how the settler religious commune was a transition instrument into land property, like how the enclosure worked, from outside-in or inside-out. the last gasp of US commune/enclosure was up north during the 60s california colonization, which took a ton of land from the yurok/oohl up in redwood country. 'course, the white communes transitioned effortlessly in the 70s-80s into emerald triangle drug manufacture. anyway i'm curious about the fragility of the US commune.


I jsut picked up Shenfan (for $1 USD!!) so please give a complete and detailed summary of everything that happens in Fanshen so I have context? >350 words please

#16306

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

Patrick Wolfe

hm, an australian. might be useful for me, cheers ;P



He's basically a radical liberal and lacks and concept of surplus value. That prevents the real genius of Sakai's work which is the continuity between settlerism and labor aristocracy/imperialism and allows Wolfe for a call to eliminate settlerism's "structural genocide" without eliminating capitalism (the connection he draws between settlersm and imperialism is an "epistemological" one where the third world is made invisible and absorbed into the logic of private property and bourgeois individualism - something which is real but not the causal element). There's also some junk about Tibet and Rwanda. Still, there's plenty of useful information, and it's not like we're in any danger of reading liberal ideology and being won over.

#16307

Constantignoble posted:

i haven't read wolfe or coulthard or the other names that get floated as better for advancing the case against settlerism. what are some of the substantive differences?

i've come across a lot of criticisms of Settlers, and they all seem to fall into the following categories:

  • did not read the book but bases opinion of what it probably says on 6th-hand accounts
  • halfassedly skimmed it with uncharitable preconceptions, leading to a cherry-picked misinterpretation
  • rejecting the thesis because they likewise reject the entire theory of the labor aristocracy (usually citing Charlie Post somewhere)
  • actually a correct criticism


i've only noticed one that falls into the last category, and it's that sakai mistakenly said jefferson was president instead of secretary of state in 1791. so i guess on that basis, every sociological concept is falsified, and we all should read one of these other authors who also say "settler" but definitely know when jefferson was president, like if there was a "when was jefferson president" test they'd get an A



I'm the wrong person to ask since Settlers is simply true in my view. But the other major critique is a political one: what are we supposed to do if the white majority (though now a plurality) within US borders is not a proletariat or even progressive? This often gets the veneer of empirical critique you mentioned but they are more symptomatic than worthy of serious evaluation in their own right. They do have a point: Settlers is much better on this question with Sakai's further writings and interviews and answering the biggest political question for American leftists obviously requires more work down the path we've already gone on this forum: John Smith and Zak Cope, Silvia Federici, anything that gives material foundation to "identity" oppression and situates them in a global capitalist world system. I rarely recommend the book to people unless they're read some of this stuff because it's easy to get all the wrong political conclusions and become a postmodern subalternist or cynical uber-Maoist. Though that's a pragmatic consideration, Settlers is correct and in an ideal world everything would follow from that.

#16308
do you have a good recommendation on like what to read specifically after settlers because I am reading it and it does seem like what I'm getting from the book is that amerikkka's too white to organize but that could also be me putting on it what I've heard other people place on to it before I got to read it.
#16309
[account deactivated]
#16310
This discussion of Labour Aristocracy reminds me of something I read by Tony Cliff a while ago. Essentially he argued that Lenin was wrong about the labour aristocracy, that it was a theory that solely "divided the working class", usual trot nonsense. But his analysis came down to saying that if we follow Lenin's argument to it's conclusions, it would mean that practically everyone in Britain would be a labour aristocrat these days! Obviously this was too depressing for Tony, but nowhere did he really prove that Lenin was wrong, only that it would be tremendously inconvenient.
#16311
recently read The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (thx c_man). i'd highly recommend using it as a precursor to blindsiding someone into reading Settlers.
#16312

babyhueypnewton posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

Patrick Wolfe

hm, an australian. might be useful for me, cheers ;P

He's basically a radical liberal and lacks and concept of surplus value. That prevents the real genius of Sakai's work which is the continuity between settlerism and labor aristocracy/imperialism and allows Wolfe for a call to eliminate settlerism's "structural genocide" without eliminating capitalism (the connection he draws between settlersm and imperialism is an "epistemological" one where the third world is made invisible and absorbed into the logic of private property and bourgeois individualism - something which is real but not the causal element). There's also some junk about Tibet and Rwanda. Still, there's plenty of useful information, and it's not like we're in any danger of reading liberal ideology and being won over.



yea i have a Big Project in mind which is basically Australian Settlers (whch, like all my projects, will never get done), so every source could be useful, to at least criticise if nothing else. i'd like to see what he says about australia

#16313
All this talk of Fanshen reminded me I had a copy, so I read a third of it last night. Excellent, very readable stuff. A lot more balanced than I expected, and surprisingly for this sort of material Hinton can actually write which means it doesn't drag like this sort of material often does in lesser hands. There are moments where I wonder how he could have had this level of detail of events years prior recounted to him, particularly some of the more highly descriptive events (the way the sunlight glinted in the courtyard that day? C'mon now...) that have no attribution, perhaps his novelistic side getting out of hand. But there's little doubt that he really put the time in to investigate the history and circumstances of the village, as well as the successes and failures of the communist cadres. One really gets a sense of the way pre-liberation Long Bow village was corrupt and the "gentry" a deeply incestuous bunch in league with the Capitalist church, Japanese invaders and every other sort of scoundrel,

Also interesting how often Liu Shaoqi is quoted approvingly given the Cultural Revolution launching the same year Fanshen was published, since I understand he was Capitalist Roader #1. Though I understand most of Fanshen was written from the original notes and journals Hinton wrote down in 1948, so perhaps it didn't figure in his thinking. I've no idea what Hinton thought of the Cultural Revolution itself, though he was a member of the RCP USA at one point in the 70s, so I imagine he must have been somewhat approving
#16314
I haven't read Shenfan yet but I did read "through a glass darkly" which is his critique of american takes on the gpcr. this was a while ago but iirc he says at the time that he wrote shenfan he was critical of it but retrospectively he's come to support it.
#16315

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

yea i have a Big Project in mind which is basically Australian Settlers (whch, like all my projects, will never get done), so every source could be useful, to at least criticise if nothing else. i'd like to see what he says about australia


reminder that i'm down for helping with this, especially as i have a blemish-free track record with never getting effortpost projects done. seriously though i'm sure i'm going to be coming across a lot more judicio-legal primary source stuff over the next year or two in my studies that could be of use.

#16316

Petrol posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:


yea i have a Big Project in mind which is basically Australian Settlers (whch, like all my projects, will never get done), so every source could be useful, to at least criticise if nothing else. i'd like to see what he says about australia



reminder that i'm down for helping with this, especially as i have a blemish-free track record with never getting effortpost projects done. seriously though i'm sure i'm going to be coming across a lot more judicio-legal primary source stuff over the next year or two in my studies that could be of use.







I was in the UTS library the other day and they've got tons great bound volumes of all the Australian parliamentary proceedings and reports. I'm not going to be in the country for long, but I have access to it and might have a couple of days late next week if there's anything particularly you want to look for. I could spend a few hours scanning if that helps.

#16317
thank you for the offer but i don't think we're anywhere close to needing primary sources scanned as we don't have any direction yet ha. the australian government is pretty good at digitising parliamentary records btw;

e.g.: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard

although it can be unwieldy to search. same goes for parliamentary proceedings at the state level.
#16318
[account deactivated]
#16319

Parenti posted:

I was in the UTS library the other day and they've got tons great bound volumes of all the Australian parliamentary proceedings and reports. I'm not going to be in the country for long, but I have access to it and might have a couple of days late next week if there's anything particularly you want to look for. I could spend a few hours scanning if that helps.


Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

thank you for the offer but i don't think we're anywhere close to needing primary sources scanned as we don't have any direction yet ha. the australian government is pretty good at digitising parliamentary records btw;

e.g.: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard

although it can be unwieldy to search. same goes for parliamentary proceedings at the state level.


yeah all that stuff is readily available here but thanks for offering.

also cthgoat dont forget trove, one of the best free online primary resource databases in the world. crazy the stuff you can find in the old newspaper and govt gazette archives. just need to know what dates to look for because the ocr is a bit janky for reliable text search

#16320
[account deactivated]