filler posted:I know what I'll be reading in late March
False Nationalism False Internationalism: Class Contradictions in the Armed Struggle -- Now available for pre-order, shipping in late Marchhttps://t.co/7YwO9Rb8NW
— Kersplebedeb (@kersplebedeb) March 5, 2021
shipping filler with this book in my latest rhizfic
hey posted:anybody got some book recs on west africa/liberia?
'Naija Marxisms' is a really cool book about nigerian marxist currents.
Enver Hoxha: Memoirs from my Meetings with Stalin
The attention with which he followed my explanations about our new economy and its course of development made a very deep impression on us. Both during the talk about these problems, and in all the other talks with him, one wonderful feature of his, among others, made an indelible impression on my mind: he never gave orders or sought to impose his opinion. He spoke, gave advice, made various proposals, but always added: "This is my opinion", "this is what we think. You, comrades, must judge and decide for yourselves, according to the concrete situation on the basis of your conditions.". His interest extended to every problem.
Comrade Stalin accepted my requests for some Soviet university teachers whom we needed for our higher institutions, there and then, but he asked:
"How will these teachers manage without knowing Albanian?"
Then, looking me straight in the eye, Comrade Stalin said:
"We understand your situation correctly, that is why we have helped and will help you even more. But I have a criticism of you, Albanian comrades: I have studied your requests and have noted that you have not made many requests for agriculture. You want more aid for industry, but industry cannot stand on its feet and make progress without agriculture. With this, comrades, I mean that you must devote greater attention to the development of agriculture. We have sent you advisers to help you in your economic problems," he added, "but it seems to me they are no good."
"They have assisted us," I intervened, but Stalin, unconvinced about what I said concerning the Soviet advisers, repeated his opinion. Then, with a smile he asked me:
"What did you do with the seed of the Georgian maize I gave you' did you plant it or did you throw it out of the window?"
I felt I was blushing because he had me in a fix, and I told him that we had distributed it to some zones, but I had not inquired about the results. This was a good lesson to me. When I returned to Tirana, I inquired and the comrades told me that it had given amazingly good results, that farmers who had sown it had taken in 70 or even 80 quintals per hectare, and everywhere there was talk of the Georgian maize which our peasants call "Stalin's gift."
marknat posted:str_el_boi posted:Speaking of this, has anyone read Canada in the World by Tyler Shipley?
the book is 60 bucks so I'm waiting for someone to bite the bullet and scan it.
currently $36, i'll "see what i can do" (parody)
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/canada-in-the-world
Some of this is obvious, like the forceful way the U.S. strong-armed its allies into using the so-called "NATO" cartridge, but at other times, this is at such a low level people don't even think about it. Like: when the United States is testing candidates for battle rifles after WWII, it absolutely does not give a shit about conditions that represent domestic defense of the continental U.S. against an invasion. Somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd of the U.S. is desert, but none of those different desert conditions are part of the tests, leading to rifles that fail utterly when the British test them with the idea of seizing Egypt. Instead, the U.S. tests put a big focus on cold-weather warfare in conditions that simulate Arctic and near-Arctic campaigns, that is, a predicted campaign invading the Soviet Union from northern Europe. Ironically, if the U.S. had actually been as concerned about an invasion of the southeast U.S. staged from Cuba as their propagandists made it sound at the height of the Cold War, they might have ended up with a rifle that performed reliably during imperialist ventures in Southeast Asia.
There's also the post-WWII U.S. alignment with fellow fascists, where small arms formed much of the backbone of political knowledge for those Cold War IR "realists" who considered themselves in the know. Many of Nazi Germany's top weapons designers would join their former Waffenfabrik Mauser AG gang leaders Edmund Heckler & Theodor Koch—forming the notorious Heckler & Koch known for both manufacturing West Germany's Cold War battle rifle, the G3, and for trafficking weapons in conflict zones worldwide—but not before designing the CETME battle rifle for Generalissimo Francisco Franco (still dead). Francoist Spain demonstrates the line between NATO on paper and NATO in substance: Spain did not join NATO until 1982, but the CETME design was tested, in part, at Aberdeen Proving Ground in the United States shortly after World War II. Further, the CETME was re-created as the "Modelo B" in 7.62×51mm NATO (Spain having already switched over to its own 7.62×51mm cartridge) after the CETME received interest from West German border police.
The border police eventually went with another weapon; however, the Bundeswehr, the West German army, eagerly adopted the Spanish fascists' rifle themselves... as the G3, the "Heckler & Koch" battle rifle described above. This rifle, a product of Franco's fascist Spain, was considered for most of the Cold War as the likely first weapon to be used by the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance in the final showdown. If it came down to an exchange of arms, nuclear or otherwise, everyone knew that a fascist rifle would fire the NATO round that kicked off World War Three.
Probably the clearest demonstration of Cold War U.S.-fascist hegemony was the gruesome triad connecting Washington, Tel Aviv and the white-supremacist South African government in Johannesburg. This next part may not be news to most of you: the "Israeli" Galil rifle was itself forged in uncomfortable irony, a result of tests where the USSR's AK design came out on top, a firearm that Tel Aviv had no way of acquiring short of capture or small-scale black market purchases. So, they set about creating a Kalashnikov clone to produce in-country and chambered for ammunition types they could acquire more easily from Israel's allies. This Israeli AK clone was, even more uncomfortably for Tel Aviv, developed by a guy named "Balashnikov"—a name by which both the new rifle and its second-stage developer were known—until, reflecting the Balashnikov's impending adoption by the Israeli armed forces, both switched to the name "Galil", that is, "of Galilee". The Galil, in other words, is an AK in everything but name and the ammunition it uses; every part of it is a Soviet design, each weapon some iteration of a stolen Kalashnikov, and it almost had the same name in English, too, save one letter.
South Africa became the second major user of the Galil-style AK when even the patronage of the United States, barely concealed through diplomatic niceties, couldn't keep it from becoming a pariah state as its depraved apartheid regime was laid bare before the world. Especially after the collapse of Rhodesia, a propped-up, NATO-funded, white-power semi-colony whose shoddy guns even worked on occasion, South Africa's perpetually violent state needed a steady partner in deadly weaponry for its police and armed forces. They found it in fellow U.S.-client apartheid state Israel, which happily supported a bastion of white-supremacist colonialism in Africa through channels greased by their mutual big daddy. Following South Africa's purchase of a batch of Galils, Johannesburg cut a deal with Tel Aviv to produce their own version. The R4/5/6 series of South African rifles, built in-country, are ever-so-slightly modified Israeli Galils, meaning they are, too, effectively a stolen AK copied over and over again to arm the most internationally disdained of U.S. allies, a tacit admission of which side of the Cold War had the advantage on the ground.
In the 1990s, the ultimate irony congealed from this absurd situation. The U.S. had been making credit for Tel Aviv's weapons-buying cheaper and cheaper as the years went by, leading to co-adoption of the M16 and the M4 by Israel alongside their domestically produced arms. By the early '90s, this had begun to crowd out Israeli weapons production, but Israel's armed forces still had the Galil as their official battle rifle. Only one other country in the world had production facilities that could produce that weapon and its components on short notice. So, the old Israel-South Africa small arms trade reversed itself, and South African factories tooled for the R4/5/6 started slamming out the functionally-identical Galil to sell to Tel Aviv.
Apartheid South Africa, the celebrated hero-state of neo-Nazis worldwide, was now desperately manufacturing Communist-designed arms for export to Israel. This continued until the last group of South African Galils was produced during the lead-up to the 1994 election, the first in a South Africa with universal suffrage and thus the first to be recognized as legitimate by most of the world. The ANC took power, and when Tel Aviv asked please-and-thank-you to close the deal on the latest batch of kid-killers they'd ordered, Nelson Mandela told them to go fuck themselves.
It’s not just rising living standards motivating such “enthusiasm." There’s more: the “genuine development” of nations, nations until that moment marginalized; the conquest on the part of women of “legal equality with men, along with an improvement in their social status”; the emergence of a “solid social welfare system” which includes “pensions, medical assistance, protections for pregnant women, family pensions”; “the significant development of education and the intellectual sphere as a whole”, with the expansion of “the network of libraries and reading rooms” and the increasing “love for the arts and poetry”; it’s the chaotic and exhilarating arrival of modernity (urbanization, nuclear family, social mobility). It has to do with processes that characterize the entire history of Soviet Russia, but that take off precisely during the Stalin years.
The popular masses traditionally condemned to illiteracy burst into the schools and universities; they then become “a whole new generation of skilled workers, technicians, and expertly trained administrators”, quickly called upon to carry out a leadership role. “New cities are founded and old cities are rebuilt”; the opening of new and colossal industrial complexes goes hand in hand with the “upward mobility of skilled and ambitious citizens of working class or peasant origin." Ultimately, it’s referred to as “a mixture of brutal coercion, remarkable heroism, disastrous madness, and spectacular achievements."
Subsequently, the situation continues to be characterized by the interplay between contradictions (the worsening military threat at the international level, the latent internal civil war, industrialization in forced stages that is considered necessary for the country’s salvation, but provokes at the same time new conflicts and new tensions) that once again prolong the state of emergency. It’s precisely for that reason, as a recent study highlights, “the terror cannot be exclusively interpreted as a series of orders coming down from Stalin” and his collaborators. In fact, in it “popular elements” also operate, and there’s no lack of initiative “from below”; often it is the workers, driven by that “zealous faith” we’ve already encountered, who demand that “traitors” be sentenced to death and even denounce the “juridical rigor” of long and costly criminal trials. And all of this takes place
during a process of a limited democratization, yet nonetheless real, with the enhancement of popular participation in the management of power in workplaces, with the replacement of the secret ballot by the public vote, and the possibility of selecting from among a greater number of candidates in elections for labor union and factory leaders. And those newly elected often meaningfully commit to the improvement of working conditions and the reduction of workplace accidents. Yes, “in the political psychology of Stalin and his followers, there’s no contradiction between repression and democracy”, and in that sense one can even speak of the “democratization of repression."
But it’s precisely that democratization that encourages an expansion of repression. Taking advantage of new opportunities in the factory, and in letters to the press that challenge corrupt and inefficient officials, this movement erupting from below tends to depict them as enemies of the people and identify the constant workplace accidents as a form of sabotage against this new society that they’re committed to building. The awareness of the growing threat of the war, and the obsessive hunt of a fifth column that’s broadly spread out and well hidden, this generalized fear and hysteria transform the assemblies in the factories, labor unions and party into a “war of all against all." Sometimes, it’s Stalin and his closest collaborators who see themselves forced to intervene to contain and concentrate this rage, warning against the tendency to find traitors and saboteurs everywhere, and thus destroying party and labor union organizations.
I never really thought about it before but I think this has a lot of parallels to the Cultural Revolution, where you have this society that’s breaking free from the stranglehold of the past to experiment with all these different forms of democracy, management and accountability. I think explaining it this way would provide a better counter narrative to the usual depiction of Stalin funneling the entire population into a firing squad or whatever.
Synergy posted:Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin, from this version.
I never really thought about it before but I think this has a lot of parallels to the Cultural Revolution, where you have this society that’s breaking free from the stranglehold of the past to experiment with all these different forms of democracy, management and accountability. I think explaining it this way would provide a better counter narrative to the usual depiction of Stalin funneling the entire population into a firing squad or whatever.
Molotov considered collectivization and the particular upward mobility you're referring to as the "proletarian" stage of the revolution, while he called Lenin's strategy of allying with the peasantry the "radical-democratic" one, where there was land redistribution and an attempt at a basic social safety net. I don't think he ever explicitly refers to a Lenin text on it but I trust that characterization since he definitely understood the context of the strategies being devised back then and what would be the next step after getting power, and also there's tons of books about the "Stalin Revolution" already. Maybe Losurdo talks about it but a large part of what was beneficial about collectivization (certainly not in all places for every peasant) was the fact that you would get access to state pensions, farm equipment, technical training, with varying degrees of obligations to GOSPLAN.
A lot of "Stalinism" didn't actually come to fruition though. Molotov thought that since kholkozi still existed the Soviet Union couldn't be considered "whole" as in the state and its people didn't actually have full control over the economy, there was still a major sectoral divide with peasant remnants who weren't working on state-owned farms, stuff like that. There was also Stalin's attempt at an anti-bureaucracy campaign which he couldn't realistically pursue after getting resistance from most of the party. http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Grover%20Furr/stalin_1.htm One thing I don't think Furr covers here from Arch Getty (bourgeois historian) is that the party purges were devised as a way to solve the problem of not being able to hold free competitive elections, so maybe there was an element of deliberately creating controlled opposition. Mensheviks, former white guardists and priests were mentioned as being okay to run for election as long as they weren't openly advocating the overthrow of the government for example. Probably a few parallels here but I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution besides this article I read on a work unit getting mad this guy cheated on his wife once.
Edited by serafiym ()
Sunday posted:I have been reading Peter Longerichs book about the holocaust which is called "holocaust", its good
more smoking gun evidence that the rhizzone is full of genocide explainer tankies who think the holocaust is good
liceo posted:i struggle with sci-fi because of its content being obnoxiously appropriated to one-dimensional mass-media tropes. it really reduces the unparalleled speculative creativity that writers like lem and stapledon were able to develop.
currently im really enjoying how the entirety of speculative fiction is reduced to youtube content in either the format "top ten [superlative adjective] [noun]" or "[media (date)] ending explained"
I'm reading Northrop Frye 'Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake'
cars posted:
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/black-panther-free-breakfast-program
I hope every corporate cooking website/youtube channel gets cancelled for extreme whiteness if this is the outcome
serafiym posted:Probably a few parallels here but I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution besides this article I read on a work unit getting mad this guy cheated on his wife once.
Hmm... looks like it owned, OP
lo posted:he spends quite a bit of time addressing cold war assumptions that mongolia was just a soviet puppet state and argues pretty convincingly that things happened in mongolia largely because of what the mongol leadership chose to do
One of the oddball elements that undermines the West's CW about Mongolian People's Republic is the history of paleontology. The Gobi Desert remains one of the most important sites in the world for the discipline because Polish and Mongolian paleontologists independently organized a series of joint explorations to search the Gobi for fossils, with Russian SFSR's academy sort of tagging along behind (these are bafflingly described as "Soviet" expeditions in a lot of today's literature at the same time the single most important figure is always identified as a Polish scientist). It all says some notable things about the socialist world and also makes it look kind of silly to portray socialist Mongolia as some sort of fake Russian-manufactured ghost town, the same vibes that made Carl Sagan offer his cryptic old pothead smile when people told him his Soviet astronomer pals were anti-science cultists. The Polish/Mongolian finds are earth-shaking discoveries in the field, e.g. the "Fighting" tableau discovered in 1971, published by people unanimously recognized as some of the discipline's greatest minds.
One big fat reason the Poles and Mongolians quietly dominated Mesozoic field paleontology for a couple decades was that in socialist countries, it was not a jaw-dropper for most when a leading scientist worldwide during the mid-20th century also happened to be a woman. It's an interesting story.
In contrast, the pre-People's Republic investigations of the Gobi for fossils, conducted by trekking Austro-Anglo-AmeriKKKan scholars, are largely known nowadays for 1) misidentifying a fossilized animal guarding its nest as a species of egg thieves, one of the field's most infamous screw-ups, and 2) assembling a faulty taxonomy of fossil hominids to support the discredited "out of Asia" theory of human origins. Everything else they found didn't mean much to the world at large until the Polish-Mongolian group started poking around the same areas later on.
cars posted:serafiym posted:Probably a few parallels here but I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution besides this article I read on a work unit getting mad this guy cheated on his wife once.
Hmm... looks like it owned, OP
https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/adhi/4/1/article-p125.xml#ref-j_adhi-2019-0008_fn_002_w2aab3b8c42b1b7b1ab1b1b3Aa borat voice my wife
cars posted:lo posted:he spends quite a bit of time addressing cold war assumptions that mongolia was just a soviet puppet state and argues pretty convincingly that things happened in mongolia largely because of what the mongol leadership chose to do
E.g. the "Fighting" tableau discovered in 1971
What is this? Google doesn’t tell me
SlovenianCuisine posted:Reminds me of a paleontology documentary we watched in middle school and it went on a tangent about communism in Mongolia destroying all hope of scientific investigation. The teacher paused the film with a "we need to talk about communism" talk
that's disgusting lol. Erasing the science you're claiming to teach because the flag's too red and the skin's too yellow
dimashq posted:cars posted:E.g. the "Fighting" tableau discovered in 1971
What is this? Google doesn’t tell me
MPC-D 100/512 and MPC-D 100/25, Protoceratops andrewsi and Velociraptor mongoliensis locked in combat at the moment they both died and were preserved, known by the name "Fighting Dinosaurs" from back when that did not describe a TV network's strategy for solvency
On the political side this absence both of challenge
from the past and competition with alternative theories
of organization makes Mongolia different from other
"people's democracies." We usually dismiss as immaterial
the fact that the Polish Workers' Party is so called because
it was formed by coalition with former socialists, while
in China the government recognizes the representatives
of several minor parties. This is nothing but camouflage,
we say; but I think we are wrong. Communists do not
make unnecessary compromises. If the Poles and Chinese
and others make these adjustments, it is because they
recognize that there are survivals in their societies which
"are strong enough to need to be taken into account.
There is a continuing debate. There is a surviving generation
which was brought up to think in non-Marxist
and anti-Marxist ways, there are people who pay only
lip-service to Communist doctrines, and there are,
I strongly suspect, people who sincerely consider themselves
Marxists but really are not able to think in a completely
Marxist way because their minds were moulded
by a non-Marxist upbringing.
