#1
heres a thread for posting notes/summaries/reviews of books you read so other people dont need to

please keep this thread to posting notes/reviews only, no discussion. i will gather links in this post. you can dm me a link too if you want. thank you for participating. the most popular note-posting site currently seems to be rentry.co

War for Oil: The Nazi Quest for an Oil Empire by Dietrich Eichholtz: https://pastebin.com/1iin4H8g
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows: https://rentry.co/8q68o
Dialectics and Systems Theory by Richard Levins: https://rentry.co/33e6v
Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement by Anuradha Ghandy: https://rhizzone.net/forum/post/402059/
Studies in European Realism by Lukacs: https://rentry.co/eu6qa
The Principal Contradiction by Torkil Lauesen: https://rentry.co/xapz6
For Marx by Louis Althusser: https://rentry.co/2kg6h
Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution by Helen Yaffe: https://rentry.co/mud62
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith: https://rentry.co/a3g2h

Edited by stegosaurus ()

#2
i just spent a couple days reading up on systems theory, a bourgeois capitulation to the change and non-linearity of the real world that necessarily falls short of dialectical materialism. i started by reading meadows' thinking in systems with high expectations but by the end of it i was pretty disillusioned. so i searched for a marxist critique that would help me explore and express the sour taste in my mouth and found an article by the late great dick levins called dialectics and systems theory.

my method of note-taking varies from project to project depending on how i'm feeling on any given day. this time i scraped out a bunch of quotes, summarized stuff, and scattered in my own insights and connections. i have no clue how coherent or useful these notes might be for others but feel free to take a look.

Notes: Thinking in Systems
Notes: Dialectics and Systems Theory

edit: replaced rentry.co links with rentry.org links; the domain apparently changed.

Edited by nearlyoctober ()

#3
the links dont work but try robert biel's entropy of capitalism for a dialectical view of systems theory...
#4

stegosaurus posted:

heres a thread for posting notes or reviews of books you read so other people dont need to

i'll start. i read War for Oil: The Nazi Quest for an Oil Empire by Dietrich Eichholtz

a pastebin with my notes on the chapters is here: https://pastebin.com/1iin4H8g


Question before I dive into the notes: Is this a book about America?

#5
in my opinion its about germany
#6
please keep this thread to posts with direct links to your personal notes/extensive reviews of a book.
#7
[account deactivated]
#8
Lukacs Studies in European Realism

My notes. Pastebin is really ugly to read in so I suggest copying the text to somewhere more comfortable:
https://pastebin.com/3H6Ve3tX

just found out pastebin sucks, the make you pay to use markdown. Here is rentry link.

https://rentry.co/eu6qa

The thesis of the book, imo:
"“Realism is the recognition of the fact that a work of literature can rest neither on a lifeless average, as the naturalists suppose, nor on an individual principal which dissolves it’s own self into nothingness. The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which binds together the general and particular both in characters and situations. What makes a type a type is not its average quality, nor its more individual being, however profoundly conceived; what makes it a type is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presentation of their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.”

Edited by Belphegor ()

#9
torkil lauesen, the principal contradiction, 2020, kersplebedeb

https://rentry.co/xapz6
#10
( off topic: could mods sticky, since this thread is going to get like 1 post a week )
#11

stegosaurus posted:

torkil lauesen, the principal contradiction, 2020, kersplebedeb

https://rentry.co/xapz6


This is very cool thank u

#12
[account deactivated]
#13
che guevara: the economics of revolution https://rentry.co/mud62
#14

stegosaurus posted:

torkil lauesen, the principal contradiction, 2020, kersplebedeb

https://rentry.co/xapz6


shoutout to whoever upped the lauesen books to libgen 🙌

#15
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith: https://rentry.co/a3g2h
#16

stegosaurus posted:

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith: https://rentry.co/a3g2h



cool, its been on my list a while

#17
same.