#16721
[account deactivated]
#16722
unsolicited advice?
#16723
[account deactivated]
#16724
Reading/alternating between Arrighi's the Long 20th Century and Caliban and the Witch. Not as far into the latter, but the contrast between Arrighi and Federici wrt capitalism as "productive" (by way of inadvertently building the foundations for a future socialist society) is interesting. Federici, as everyone knows, challenges the traditional marxian view that capitalism over the long run of history is "productive" through studying recurring primitive accumulation and exploitation of women (something that did not end but still happens today under IMF/World Bank plunder of the third world), and that capitalism itself is a counterrevolutionary product of the liberating period of the post-black death 15th century that need not have occurred. I haven't finished the book so if this is a mischaracterization pls yell at me.

Arrhighi on the other hand seemed to be developing a series of hegemonies that deepen and expand the capitalist mode of production until their own development undermines itself, by way of class struggle and the introduction of transnational institutions laying the groundwork for a future socialist world, i.e. a productive unfolding of capitalism, although he seems to step back from that at the last moment and instead veers away to talk about the dialectic between the non-territorial/spaceless financial and commercial flows of Genoa vs the territorial/nation-state building of Venice in order to justify that the next hegemony is the dialectical conclusion of the former, i.e. the capitalist archipelago of Japan/South Korea/Singapore/Taiwan, in some vaporwave postmodern hyperspace future of pure deleuzian rhizomatic capital flows. which is obviously wrong because it ended up being China, who is pushing forward with international institutional frameworks while the US is rotting in trumpian reaction to its own postwar creations undermining itself.

Just a bunch of random thoughts, I just started both books.
#16725
i also started reading the long 20th century last week but stopped quite early as there is no epub version good enough for me to be able to read it during the commute. instead i m reading the travelogue of ibn fadlan lol

really bewildering how disgusting my ancestors were and how swedes were much, much worse. i give this book 5/5
#16726
Yasha Levine's thing about the U.S. census as a tool for maintaining white supremacy and IBM as contractors for the Nazis and how the fantasies of "progressive" Washington became the reality of Nazi Berlin

To some U.S. bureaucrats, this data-driven eugenics system was just the beginning. North, who directed the U.S. Census Bureau from 1903 to 1909, dreamed of the day when detailed racial data could be collected and analyzed for the whole world and be used to guide human genetic development.

“The need for restraining the genetically deficient classes and families from the function of reproduction, is recognized as imperative,” he wrote in 1918 from his perch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as World War I was coming to an end. “It is the dream of the true statistician that the day will some time arrive when the facts of demography will be available on identical bases for the entire globe. When that dream is realized, when comparable international statistics actually and everywhere exist, then we shall know the laws which determine human progress and can effectively apply them.”

His dream would soon be realized in Europe.



I have been interested in the topics in this article for years and years & I still learned some new stuff from this article, or at least stuff I've forgotten I ever knew

#16727
Yasha Levine's thing about the U.S. census as a tool for maintaining white supremacy and IBM as contractors for the Nazis and how the fantasies of "progressive" Washington became the reality of Nazi Berlin

To some U.S. bureaucrats, this data-driven eugenics system was just the beginning. North, who directed the U.S. Census Bureau from 1903 to 1909, dreamed of the day when detailed racial data could be collected and analyzed for the whole world and be used to guide human genetic development.

“The need for restraining the genetically deficient classes and families from the function of reproduction, is recognized as imperative,” he wrote in 1918 from his perch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as World War I was coming to an end. “It is the dream of the true statistician that the day will some time arrive when the facts of demography will be available on identical bases for the entire globe. When that dream is realized, when comparable international statistics actually and everywhere exist, then we shall know the laws which determine human progress and can effectively apply them.”

His dream would soon be realized in Europe.



I have been interested in the topics in this article for years and years & I still learned some new stuff from this article, or at least stuff I've forgotten I ever knew

#16728
just noticed that everything at pluto press is half off until the 15th, including Zak Cope's new book https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338859/the-wealth-of-some-nations/
#16729
[account deactivated]
#16730
reading a neat little article from 1982 called 'analytical errors of the kampuchean communist party' which turns out to be written by bill willmott, emeritus professor of sociology at canterbury university and former president and life member of the new zealand china friendship society, very cool

I have argued that the KCP incorrectly identified the exploitation of tenant by landlord as the major social tension in the Kampuchean countryside. Furthermore, the objective exploit-ation of Khmer peasant by Chinese merchant produced no righteous indignation,. because it was mitigated by the ethnic division between them. Consequently, there was little social basis for rural discontent (except in pockets) when the KCP first began to organise the peasantry in the Kampuchean revolution.
...
Having achieved victory in armed struggle, the KCP believed it had a popular mandate to transform Khmer society radically and immediately. If my thesis is correct, however, the mandate was a nationalist, not a socialist one, and the forced march toward communism that followed their victory was unpopular from the start.
While the government of Democratic Kampuchea succeeded in carrying through an agricultural revolution during 1975-77, transforming floodland to irrigated fields capable of supporting two or three crops a year, solving the food shortages created by the American bombing and subsequent disruption of rural life, and replacing family farming by large-scale collective farming, this revolution was at the cost of in-creasing dissatisfaction and repression. Because their social analysis convinced them that they could expect widespread support for revolutionary change, the KCP were not prepared for the growing opposition and could define it as nothing else than counter-revolutionary.
Consequently, no criticism was tolerated, and even the mildest opposition was punished severely. Not having felt particularly exploited before, peasants were not impressed by the liquidation of the "exploiting classes," but rather mourned the loss of urban commodities and rural freedom. Inexperienced cadres could--think of no better solution to failing support than to punish or kill those who lacked enthusiasm for their programme. Their leaders are most to blame: not only did they lack any sense of Khmer history, they criminally failed to understand their own society. "Democratic Kampuchea," therefore, stands as a forlorn monument to the horrible consequences of any socialist revolution that ignores its own history and culture.

#16731
i been reading some scifi short story anthologies, the "years best" collection edited by gardner dozois. this editor seems to have a decent head on their shoulders re highlighting stories that uplift the human spirit instead of putting space opera and laser wars on a pedestal. maybe those sort of stories are just out of fashion idk. he's put out an anthology yearly for over thirty years and ive got my hands on a scattering of volumes from across that duration; i have appreciated seeing how cultural moments shift and how authors thematically react to political and historical events. the volume published in 1992 is overwhelming grim, though it does include a provocative piece about the collapse of capitalism in the us, from the perspective of a student in a reeducation camp in the midwest. i think the author intended the story to be dystopian and throws in conceits to that effect, but in the end the uneducated lumpen protagonist develops the understanding of the inherent justice of social ownership of production and genuine democratic decision-making. the 2002 volume has a couple stories set in desirable future islamic societies, etc etc. i have been pleasantly engaged and distracted by this survey of pulp lit over time
#16732

lo posted:

reading a neat little article from 1982 called 'analytical errors of the kampuchean communist party' which turns out to be written by bill willmott, emeritus professor of sociology at canterbury university and former president and life member of the new zealand china friendship society, very cool

I have argued that the KCP incorrectly identified the exploitation of tenant by landlord as the major social tension in the Kampuchean countryside. Furthermore, the objective exploit-ation of Khmer peasant by Chinese merchant produced no righteous indignation,. because it was mitigated by the ethnic division between them. Consequently, there was little social basis for rural discontent (except in pockets) when the KCP first began to organise the peasantry in the Kampuchean revolution.
...
Having achieved victory in armed struggle, the KCP believed it had a popular mandate to transform Khmer society radically and immediately. If my thesis is correct, however, the mandate was a nationalist, not a socialist one, and the forced march toward communism that followed their victory was unpopular from the start.
While the government of Democratic Kampuchea succeeded in carrying through an agricultural revolution during 1975-77, transforming floodland to irrigated fields capable of supporting two or three crops a year, solving the food shortages created by the American bombing and subsequent disruption of rural life, and replacing family farming by large-scale collective farming, this revolution was at the cost of in-creasing dissatisfaction and repression. Because their social analysis convinced them that they could expect widespread support for revolutionary change, the KCP were not prepared for the growing opposition and could define it as nothing else than counter-revolutionary.
Consequently, no criticism was tolerated, and even the mildest opposition was punished severely. Not having felt particularly exploited before, peasants were not impressed by the liquidation of the "exploiting classes," but rather mourned the loss of urban commodities and rural freedom. Inexperienced cadres could--think of no better solution to failing support than to punish or kill those who lacked enthusiasm for their programme. Their leaders are most to blame: not only did they lack any sense of Khmer history, they criminally failed to understand their own society. "Democratic Kampuchea," therefore, stands as a forlorn monument to the horrible consequences of any socialist revolution that ignores its own history and culture.



i'd also recommend What Went Wrong with the Pol Pot Regime for another in-depth take

#16733

Synergy posted:

i'd also recommend What Went Wrong with the Pol Pot Regime for another in-depth take


i think this is a good basic summary of the dk period from a maoist perspective if you need that but much of it is just summarising the bits from the older literature that they agree with so it's not so useful to me at this point. a big problem is that there just aren't that many academics doing research on DK, and the ones who are aren't marxists, with the possible exception of a trot who i've seen publishing some stuff recently, so very little material that might shed new light on the whole situation is appearing. i think that reinterpreting the same sources over again is limited in what it can tell us, even when maoists are the ones doing it.

#16734

Synergy posted:

i'd also recommend What Went Wrong with the Pol Pot Regime for another in-depth take




that was a good read, thx


#16735
hey can anyone help me find that one bordiga quote where he talks, kind of about the 'secret' intellectual history of europe, about the long line of heretics feeling out the contours of modern science through a dialectical idealism informed by hermeticism, neoplatonism and gnosis... i cleared my history recently bc of that firefox bug that disabled add-ons so it's no longer in there, i don't remember a single phrase he said so i'm not sure how to search for it
i kinda need/rather could really use this for clown canon college, entrance essay
tysm comrades
#16736
realising i wanna cite all these fucking outside sources i only have access to bc of libgen but don't know which will get me in deeper legal shit: plagiarism or copyright infringement. if they see all these citations and compare it against my financial information will they look into 'hey how are you affording all of this'. or if they see ideas they recognise will they look into 'hey where are you getting all of this from'. i'm literally overthinking this. WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN?
#16737
(oh and i found the bordiga quote, thanks thirdform from dissensus) https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1959/commentary-1844.htm
"On these long stretches of way, armies of advanced seers and prophets made their way in the darkness as they persistently fought their way up again after each setback; in their minds was not science, but a myth, and the impetus of their revolutionary will was not yet knowledge, but mysticism. Now, however, these myths and mysticisms were revolutions, and because it was fights that carried out the rare advances, separated from each other for centuries, which advanced society, our respect and admiration for these pioneers is not diminished by the fact that their words have become obsolete and those of our doctrine stand in a completely different context."
#16738
yeah ironically a lot of Marxists today seem to more or less accept the dumb Hegelian idea that nothing at all happened during the Middle Ages
#16739
hey. which gets me in deeper shit... plagiarism or copyright. will they even care, do they have the energy
#16740
wheres the pic of the kid in la chinoise shooting himself
#16741
Plagiarism would probably be worse since it's pretty obvious if you don't cite something that clearly comes from somewhere else. It's not so obvious if you could plausibly have access to that source and I don't think anyone looking at your essay would care about that anyway. They probably use libgen themselves.
#16742
i mentioned it during my day visit and was not censured... that's a really good point, thank you.
#16743

psychicdriver posted:

(oh and i found the bordiga quote, thanks thirdform from dissensus) https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1959/commentary-1844.htm
"On these long stretches of way, armies of advanced seers and prophets made their way in the darkness as they persistently fought their way up again after each setback; in their minds was not science, but a myth, and the impetus of their revolutionary will was not yet knowledge, but mysticism. Now, however, these myths and mysticisms were revolutions, and because it was fights that carried out the rare advances, separated from each other for centuries, which advanced society, our respect and admiration for these pioneers is not diminished by the fact that their words have become obsolete and those of our doctrine stand in a completely different context."



Slightly tangential, but I recently learned about Heretical Christian sects in Caliban and the Witch as the ideology of revolutionary peasant upheaval which I thought was p cool, e.g. the Albigensian heresy.

#16744
she's in there for outside sources i wanna cite! the end section is gonna be called EPILOGUE: HERMES DETHRONED (hermes is a fucker.)
#16745

psychicdriver posted:

she's in there for outside sources i wanna cite! the end section is gonna be called EPILOGUE: HERMES DETHRONED (hermes is a fucker.)



What’s your paper about, and is it a future effort post

#16746
too personal for all of it to be a future effort post but if i'm confident w the historical parts then Possibly. we're supposed to write ab books that have personally affected us to get in (it's the bookfucker college). i'm choosing to write ab the hermetic corpus, bc i was drawn to everything floating around it since i was a child (the 'shell' to his 'body', so to speak), dropped that as an interest for some years and then when i was 18 or 19 (during the Big Mental Health Crisis) i finally had access to the corpus itself and read the thing.
#16747
i'm apparently not supposed to use the word 'dipshit' in any essay for any college, ever. writing the autobiographical piece is killing me. really hate detailing what a precocious autistic child and arrogant dipshit i actually was.
#16748

psychicdriver posted:

then when i was 18 or 19 (during the Big Mental Health Crisis)


at first glance i misread this as the Big Hentai Crisis which was more than a little disconcerting

#16749
the spectacular HD crash of 2016-2017
#16750

psychicdriver posted:

the spectacular HD crash of 2016-2017


i had an important hard drive crash around then and it was like losing a chunk of my brain

#16751

psychicdriver posted:

hey. which gets me in deeper shit... plagiarism or copyright. will they even care, do they have the energy


most academics dont like that journal articles are expensive either and they're absolutely not going to care about whether you had 'legitimate' access to sources you cite in an essay. plus you could theoretically get completely legal access to basically anything using interloans and stuff like that at your university library anyway.

#16752

psychicdriver posted:

bookfucker college


same

#16753
dont know about yankkkademia but no one over here asks how you got an access to your sources given that you could have just found them in a library or some shit
#16754
Ive had multiple tenured faculty recommend downloading textbooks basically from libgen (the said "russian sites") and one who have made it sound like an expellable offense. The latter is pretty widely known as a dumbass who doesnt know anything beyond his immediate field of study. No one will give a shit if you have "legal" access to your sources and if anyone says anything you can just say you borrowed it from your girlfriend who goes to another school, and no you cant meet her. Cite the shit out of them.
#16755
I finished "if on a winters night a traveler" and it felt like the negative image of reading a pynchon book. Im gonna read caliban & the witch next.
#16756
you're all lovely, glad to have my suspicions confirmed that Every Academic Uses Libgen

tears posted:

psychicdriver posted:

bookfucker college

same


as opposed to truckfucker college. you literally have to choose one or the other.
old bookfucker on the mountains' college (city of holy faith campus)

#16757
That you're even considering stuff to cite is probably better than a lot of the knuckleheads the school deals with. They probably have enough on their plates dealing with plagiarism that illegally downloaded sources don't even/barely register to them as a thing.
#16758
the copy of yates' bruno and the hermetic tradition is formatted like ASS (same one as on 'tarot hermeneutics'), anyone know of a better scan?
#16759
former recovering esoteric hermetic philosophy dipshit checking in, sounds dope
#16760
hope i fight the very strong urge to sabotage myself and finish this thing