#18561
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

readsettlers / readmarxeveryday being the only real accomplishment of rhizzone is more than enough. more than most other forums got done. we deserve a large number of plaudits.



was talking with a guy at a bar the other week and he told me to check out readsettlers.org :)

#18562
Post rating: +

kinch posted:

swampman posted:


readsettlers / readmarxeveryday being the only real accomplishment of rhizzone is more than enough. more than most other forums got done. we deserve a large number of plaudits.



was talking with a guy at a bar the other week and he told me to check out readsettlers.org :)


*clears throat* get that bar patron an account!

#18563
Post rating: ~
speaking of readmarxeveryday, I haven't been able to access it recently--is it down or is my computer unable to handle the concentrated knowledge?
#18564
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
it's down

karphead posted:

i will be taking readmarxeveryday down over the weekend. it's hosted on google cloud and i want to get off. it will be back up in some other capacity afterwards. if anyone wants anything from it after it's down send me a pm.

do no evil my ass


#18565
Post rating: ~

Constantignoble posted:

currently working on Meister's "Justice Is an Option"; i know pathetically little about options theory


finished this one, very good overall, recommended. it's one of those books that may have permanently altered my frame of reference in minor but significant ways. that's always neat. I also appreciate that it doesn't just sit on the theoretical components, but actually ponders the matter tactically

interesting to read proximal authors beside one another to notice things like "drumm's critique of marx began as an elaboration on 3-4 paragraphs from chapter 7 of meister," which even uses the metonym v metaphor angle

#18566
Post rating: ~
reading roland boer's book 'stalin: from theology to the philosophy of socialism in power'. leaving aside the fact that boer is a pro deng revisionist, which doesn't seem to have too much bearing on this particular book, i'm not sure the book is as good as it ought to be given the subject matter(stalin's evolving political thought given the realities of socialism in power). he often seems to be writing quite a lot to say not very much, and the connection to theology mostly comes across as a fairly superficial influence on stalin/the bolsheviks most of the time. there is some relatively interesting stuff that seems to show an implicit, not fully formed concept of class enemies as internal in stalin's thought, rather than the more explicit conception of external enemies that was predominant in the ussr mostly, sort of a precursor to what is explicit and fully formed in mao. i have noticed echoes of this in a couple of stalin things before so it was interesting to see it here, but other than that i haven't found the book particularly revelatory. props for citing grover furr and ludo martens in an academic book published by springer though lol
#18567
Post rating: ~

lo posted:

reading roland boer's book 'stalin: from theology to the philosophy of socialism in power'. leaving aside the fact that boer is a pro deng revisionist, which doesn't seem to have too much bearing on this particular book,


i take this part back, in the conclusion he changes tack from what he was emphasising in the main body of the book and asserts that stalin's conception of a socialist society in which class struggle had been completed supports a program of peaceful reform and then immediately starts talking about the belt and road program. no mention of what mao had to say about class struggle continuing under socialism. file under productivist brainrot

#18568
Post rating: ~
so, just to draw out a bit more of a discussion on productivism, since it comes up in your ponderings a lot, what do you take to be the happy medium? like, there's what gets filed under the bukharinist/dengist heresy, but then there's also the view articulated the 1859 preface that everyone likewise swears to uphold. the former can easily look like fidelity to the latter; likewise, the latter can be seen as affirming the former. something i don't see very often is an attempt to articulate what must be the case for both of those takes to be held.



or, maybe as a more general point in my own mutterings and meanderings of late: it's one thing to denounce one or another error — productivism, voluntarism, tailism, revisionism, reformism, ultraleftism, and all the others — but much more interesting to me than the negative position is the positive position: what specific move is the remedy? (and, as seems to happen a lot: does that recourse open one up to charges of the opposite error?)
#18569
Post rating: ~

Constantignoble posted:

so, just to draw out a bit more of a discussion on productivism, since it comes up in your ponderings a lot, what do you take to be the happy medium? like, there's what gets filed under the bukharinist/dengist heresy, but then there's also the view articulated the 1859 preface that everyone likewise swears to uphold. the former can easily look like fidelity to the latter; likewise, the latter can be seen as affirming the former. something i don't see very often is an attempt to articulate what must be the case for both of those takes to be held.



or, maybe as a more general point in my own mutterings and meanderings of late: it's one thing to denounce one or another error — productivism, voluntarism, tailism, revisionism, reformism, ultraleftism, and all the others — but much more interesting to me than the negative position is the positive position: what specific move is the remedy? (and, as seems to happen a lot: does that recourse open one up to charges of the opposite error?)


i don't know that i have an idea of what the best medium is. i guess i tend to take a mao-like position where the primacy of class struggle has to be maintained even when you are, as is very often necessary, trying to build up productive forces. but otoh i'm not sure you can just theorise about this, if you're not actually in charge of an economy it's going to be difficult to come up with remedies(although i think that the line of some groups that are not even close to being in power is very much informed by productivism, e.g. the marcyite sects' support of post mao china). i'm not sure this is very helpful for a wider discussion though, sorry. the mention of bukharin/deng is funny though because i read something by some marcyite people recently where they condemmed bukharin as a traitor but were very pro deng, which i guess is sort of emblematic of how muddled this viewpoint can be

#18570
Post rating: +
i’m reading mark neocleous’s book on immunity. i have had a terrible cold since starting it.
#18571
lies half the time
Post rating: +
im reading your post about having a cold & i feel great. personally like healthwise doing p good imho


e: busted my leg the other day and will be hobbling around for a while. serves me right

Edited by zhaoyao ()

#18572
Post rating: +
i'm reading 'dreamer of the day: francis parker yockey and the postwar fascist international' which has a lot of information about various failson crank nazis, many of the national bolshevik persuasion. there's a bit where they quote evola saying that jewish culture has a 'corrosive irony' and that was funny to me, a man poisoned by irony online
#18573
Post rating: +

Constantignoble posted:

Just finished reading Colin Drumm's dissertation, "The Difference That Money Makes"...



Update: After chewing on this for a couple of months, I think I've gestated some responses to Drumm. I no longer believe that his chapter critiquing Marx succeeds, though the rest of the book is still plenty interesting, and I give points for at least making one of the more unique attacks I've seen.

If anyone else here has read chapter 1, let me know. I'm eager to discuss the specifics, but whereas the audience here is fairly sympathetic to my position from the outset, I'd prefer that folks look it over independently; when I attempt to express the arguments alongside arguing against them, I've found the feedback has been a bit less muscular than I've hoped. It's probably just not a good way to absorb an argument, to see it summarized and then immediately attacked.

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#18574
Post rating: +
Recently read a few pro wrestler memoirs just because I needed some quick & breezy reads to cleanse my brain and get my numbers up. But then I read Yannis Varoufakis 'Adults in the Room' and realized, oh man, this guy lies about himself like a wrestler
#18575
Post rating: +
here's a 7zip of readmarxeveryday: https://mega.nz/file/eCpjUbSK#W_SFtojD3fgBRRTQuPTbEwMb8XhkHkJX0RiP9_BTxio

still working on getting it back up on my own server
#18576
mt.real
Post rating: ~

gay_swimmer posted:

Recently read a few pro wrestler memoirs just because I needed some quick & breezy reads to cleanse my brain and get my numbers up. But then I read Yannis Varoufakis 'Adults in the Room' and realized, oh man, this guy lies about himself like a wrestler



was there anything good in there? i've always been mildly curious

#18577
Post rating: +

drwhat posted:

gay_swimmer posted:


Recently read a few pro wrestler memoirs just because I needed some quick & breezy reads to cleanse my brain and get my numbers up. But then I read Yannis Varoufakis 'Adults in the Room' and realized, oh man, this guy lies about himself like a wrestler



was there anything good in there? i've always been mildly curious


no, unfortunately pro wrestlers are quite bad at writing memoirs

#18578
Post rating: +
I picked up "marx in the anthropocene" and its mostly tedious marxology so far but hes dunking on some people i think are annoying so its a land of contrasts
#18579
Post rating: ~
i read smith, riccardo, hegel, eliade, batille, neumann, plato, apulius, gibbon, jung, land, basically ive been reading
#18580
Post rating: ~

shapes posted:

that penguin edition that collects Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe is great. don't like "Frolic" tho -- do not like "serial killer that's a genius" stories no matter how well done!


thanks i read this too

#18581
Post rating: ~
also spengler, the koran, zimmer, lyell, the ramayama, thucidides, nietzsche, darwin, beowulf, rouseau, amoung others, hope everyone else a book or two last year
#18582
Post rating: ~
also read a 1925/6 autobiography by a painfully nasal man who's writing oozed the essence of the downwardly mobile petty bourgeoise, inbetween trying to justify exactly why he was too cool for school
#18583
Post rating: ~
i'm reading 'Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities' by darko suvin, which is about yugoslavia, and i'm finding it kind of frustrating because he is contantly citing trotskyites and left-coms and talking about stalinism as a caricature like you would expect guys like that to do. there is some interesting stuff in it about how yugoslavia worked and how it was a kind of weird mishmash of half carried through policies that often contradicted each other, and it's touching on very interesting topics around socialism in power, possible alternatives to a soviet style centralised economy and so on, but you really have to read it against suvin himself which is a little annoying.
#18584
Post rating: +
i'm reading How to Read a Book and i'm finally learning how to read. 2024 is looking up
#18585
Post rating: ~
oh yeah i read some Carl Jung too. pretty good stuff, i need my spirituality intellectualized clearly.

and read Christopher Lasch's revolt is the elites recently, which wasn't very good. basically seemed like disconnected essays and a crank opinion, although he has some zinger sentences and i somewhat agree with a few of his points just there's not a lot there to back them up.
#18586
Post rating: ~

animedad posted:

i'm reading How to Read a Book and i'm finally learning how to read. 2024 is looking up


the mortimer adler one?

#18587
Post rating: ~

animedad posted:

oh yeah i read some Carl Jung too. pretty good stuff, i need my spirituality intellectualized clearly.


i'd recommend Erich Neumann's works: The Great Mother, Origins and History of Consciousness, Amore and Psyche - i have fear of the feminine but havent started yet. i never know how much significance to ascribe to jungian anthropology since it is all rather outré even by psychoanalysis standards, but when im being uncharitable i joke that jungianism is the greatest corpus of theory-fiction ever written. a totalising system to effervesce your lizard brain

#18588
Post rating: +
i don't know where to post about this but zak cope has apparently gone insane over october 7 and is now a pro free market anticommunist style of guy who cites austrian economists

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-031-25399-7_82-2 posted:

My last two published monographs (Cope, 2015, 2019) are based on Marxist views that are outright false or misleadingly one-sided. I hereby retract them. Having been committed to the toxic Marxist perspective for more than half my life, it ultimately proved impossible for me not to perceive the consistent and century-old pattern of far-left apologetics for every conceivable atrocity committed by avowed enemies of the West (including war crimes and genocide), these typically starting with denial, moving to excuse, and ending in justification (Glazov, 2009, p. 208). This was starkly highlighted in the leftist response to the bestial violence unleashed by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023 (Berkovits, 2024). Laboring under Marxian fantasies for so long, following the shock of recognition in witnessing such moral and intellectual decrepitude its dissolution in my mind was precipitate. Undoubtedly, as Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) wrote, “the extinction of myths requires certain conditions. But,” he continues, “it will be a mass extinction: once one myth is exposed, the rest will follow, hurtling down like an avalanche. And its collapse had to be as total as its rule had been: a chain of divinities, collapsing like a pack of cards. What folly to imagine it was possible to extract just one!” (Kolakowski, 2012).

#18589
Post rating: +
impressive that he was able to absorb and regurgitate so large a chunk of right-wing ideology in just ten short months and definitely no longer. must have had some real tailwinds — such as the threat of genocide, as he names! a chilling thing to contemplate in the holy land, of all places
#18590
Post rating: +
wishing zak a speedy recovery

#18591
Post rating: +

Constantignoble posted:

impressive that he was able to absorb and regurgitate so large a chunk of right-wing ideology in just ten short months and definitely no longer. must have had some real tailwinds — such as the threat of genocide, as he names! a chilling thing to contemplate in the holy land, of all places


it almost feels like he was forced to write it at gunpoint or something, just bizarre. marxists going right wing obviously happens but they don't usually do a complete 180 into the von mises institute instantly

#18592
Poronto
Post rating: ~
apparently there were some ghosts of it in some sort of compilation work thing called "the oxford handbook of economic imperialism" (he wrote one chapter). i may read it as soon as i have finished picking my nose hairs

addendum: his brand new "unequal exchange is fake" position is the one i find most exciting. tweet embeds dont work now grr hold on

In short, unequal exchange theory is predicated on untenable Marxist assumptions that could only lead to economic failure in any country unwise enough to institutionalize its central precepts. The state interventionism required to correct the underdevelopment allegedly stemming from low wages must distort the market's ability to allocate resources efficiently. As such, the optimal means to address global inequality is through more free trade, not less since free trade promotes competition and innovation which ultimately benefits all parties by allowing them to specialize in their comparative advantages. By contrast, the concept of "unequal exchange" is flawed insofar as it assumes a zero-sum game where one party's gain is another's loss rather than a positive-sum game where all partners can benefit even if the benefits are not evenly distributed. Wage differences across the world are a result of various factors including differ- ences in worker productivity, education levels, government policies, job market reg- ulations, and labor demand. If a worker in one country is paid less than a worker in another, it is likely because the worker's cost of living, productivity, skill levels, and employment opportunities are lesser. In a free market, workers have the ability to choose their employment and can work for higher wages, negotiate with employers...



brother how'd you get here, i've seen better on reddit

Edited by littlegreenpills ()

#18593
Poronto
Post rating: +

Constantignoble posted:

impressive that he was able to absorb and regurgitate so large a chunk of right-wing ideology in just ten short month



this is probably just a sign of how puerile right wing economics is. you can learn about humors and phlogiston theory in five minutes too

#18594
Poronto
Post rating: ~
.
#18595
Post rating: ~
Apparently this has been brewing through the 2020s, if not for longer. Some remarks from Immanuel Ness in here a couple years ago indicate tensions had already reached a point of virtual disavowal even then: https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2022/12/26/the-oxford-handbook-of-economic-imperialism-interview-with-immanuel-ness/

I emphatically disagree with the derisory characterisation of Marx and Lenin in Cope’s chapter. He cherry-picks unflattering quotes from leading socialist scholars and revolutionaries who were also imperfect, but whose crucial contribution to the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist project (past, present, and future) has been immense. I recall stating over and again that the world is complex, and received ridicule as a response, without context or explanation. At the very end of the project, I felt that I could not the book my imprimatur. I did not contest my co-editor’s positions. This reflects a pattern which I began to see when engaging others with whom my co-author collaborated. There was always a superlative comrade with whom he aligned. Yet, on many occasions, each became a personal nemesis.



Wonder if Lauesen is now one of Cope's personal nemeses, along with Ness. Some kind of bizarre narcissism under it all.

Ness also made a few remarks in twitter replies in the last day or so about it.

Those that knew the man, have a good idea on the psychodynamics. But I personally don’t think there’s anything special about this and couldn’t care less about his ideas, almost all are derivative, as you’ll all discover in the near future. A lot of people have been used and this is what is so distressing. I know many in this category and we will respond accordingly. I was a bit too gracious in my response on Anti-Imperialist Network. It is the purity complex and religious dogmatism in the final analysis.


Exactly. Theory is meaningless without practice. Also, we were always dealing with a person consistently shifting his position. This is highly predictable if one Wa unlucky enough to know him. He engaged and dispensed with people in serial manner whenever he couldn’t use them. Those who got too close all knew. Others will be disappointed. It wasn’t a sudden turn but took place over years. I don’t want to waste my time because he’s irrelevant and just one of millions who support imperialism. He wrote an important derivative work and it will stay relevant but how different is it from J Sakai? Read HW Edwards. Her work stands for the test of time. Best to just move on. So many others have done the same that it’s not surprising that another will turn … and in a bizarre way. But Cope was shifting for nearly a decade. I feel sorry for him but this antic will not influence anti-imperialists. He has resolved the dissonance in his life and found himself and intellect family. Good for him. The dissonance is now resolved and I wish him the best in his transition.


We are building international anti-imperialist solidarity with practice. I suggest that all those who may be disappointed, read J Sakai and Frantz Fanon. Practice and theory.



Seems Cope's ultraleft inflexibilities kept him from being able to acknowledge any national liberation struggles as legitimate for their imperfections, and in more recent works was citing hacks like Robin Yassin-Kassab on Syria, big huffing about Genocide In Xinjiang, etc., all culminating in, well... this sub-Reddit grade right-wing pablum.

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#18596
Post rating: ~

littlegreenpills posted:

addendum: his brand new "unequal exchange is fake" position is the one i find most exciting. tweet embeds dont work now grr hold on

In short, unequal exchange theory is predicated on untenable Marxist assumptions that could only lead to economic failure in any country unwise enough to institutionalize its central precepts.... In a free market, workers have the ability to choose their employment and can work for higher wages, negotiate with employers...



brother how'd you get here, i've seen better on reddit



wow that's sure something, such a complete switch with such a poor justification.

#18597
Post rating: ~

Constantignoble posted:

Some kind of bizarre narcissism under it all.


the personal is political
theory and practice
i too have not been surprised
by shifts in those i knew
because i knew them
and saw how they moved

#18598
Post rating: +
there's another takeaway: if cope has always been a derivative thinker who would make connections, use them, and discard them once he'd milked them for all they were worth, then I'd like to know who his initial mentors and guides were in the lead-up to Divided World, Divided Class. Gernot Köhler was apparently an important piece of the puzzle; now I kind of want to dig out the other names who might more properly be credited, collectively, with that piece.
#18599
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

littlegreenpills posted:

this is probably just a sign of how puerile right wing economics is. you can learn about humors and phlogiston theory in five minutes too


#18600
Post rating: +
let me consult my copy of the oxford handbook of anti-imperialism... i think its next to the harvey weinstein manual of respecting women