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 :)

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

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

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