What are you reading?

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I tend to juggle a lot of books at once but the physical works I’m reading current are:

Right now, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Previous, Anti-Dühring.

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Same, pretty much confirmed Xi as an opportunist in my mind

Here's a nice companion piece from a modern Marxist anthropologist, Chris Knight. Engels was actually very correct in that book. To the point where bourgeois """anthropologists" made it their mission to portray patriarchy and patrilineal heritage as the eternal truth of humans. Actually, anti-Marxism has even caused the science of EVOLUTION to be falsified in order to make it seem like male chimps were the dominant sex the entire time they were evolving into humans.
A very good talk from him about this, absolutely mindblowing shit:
vimeo.com/292893544
More here:
vimeo.com/user33365184
and here:
radicalanthropologygroup.org/journal
radicalanthropologygroup.org/reading/all

Reading Raymond Geuss - Philosophy and real politics. Just got started really but it seems pretty neat. It seems to aim to tear down idealizing notions of politics and is supposedly pretty compatible with a Marxian framework. Cuck Philosophy recommended it.

I started reading the philosophy of poverty a while back, but Proudhon is a boring and stupid idealist, so I stopped reading. Decided to cut to the chase and read Poverty of Philosophy, but mostly it just seems that it's Marx agreeing with me that Proudhon is a boring and stupid idealist.

3 stars out of 5. This short book is an OK introduction, very easy to read and superficial. All their sources seem to be in English and the pirated ebook doesn't list them at the end. They don't walk you through any algorithms. If you are already familiar with the works of Paul Cockshott (he gets positive mention) and the discussion about the book Red Plenty that happened a couple years ago on Crooked Timber (liberal blog) and elsewhere and you have heard about Chile's Cybersyn as well, there isn't anything new to learn.

I think they still have left in them some rest of a belief in the cult of entrepreneur genius. Does Amazon actually use particularly clever "algorithm marvels"? I don't believe that. I think it's all about the scale effects and optimizing taxes. It looks like there's already adequate free software out there for anything Amazon does, like Easyrec for recommendations.

Minor annoyances: Some of the plebbest pop culture references, and they write of "OLED displays" and say "horizontal integration" when they mean vertical. They refer to the "neoclassical Austrian School", despite themselves pointing out that Austrians don't assume perfect knowledge and equilibrium everywhere.

The bit about Sears is funny:
>Lampert, libertarian and fan of the laissez-faire egotism of Russian American novelist Ayn Rand, had made his way from working in warehouses as a teenager, via a spell with Goldman Sachs, to managing a $15 billion hedge fund by the age of 41. The wunderkind was hailed as the Steve Jobs of the investment world (…) An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
He also believed that the new structure, called Sears Holdings Organization, Actions, and Responsibilities, or SOAR, would improve the quality of internal data, and in so doing that it would give the company an edge akin to statistician Paul Podesta’s use of unconventional metrics at the Oakland Athletics baseball team (made famous by the book, and later film starring Brad Pitt, Moneyball). Lampert would go on to place Podesta on Sears’s board of directors and hire Steven Levitt, coauthor of the pop neoliberal economics bestseller Freakonomics, as a consultant (…)
What could possibly go wrong? This is why Sears beat Amazon and Walmart and now rules the world!

Sorry for the formatting, the paragraph with the baseball guy Paul Podesta is also a quote from the book.

If the book is supposed to be an introduction, does it discuss Marxian/Ricardian econ at all?

Nope.

Wow. I suspect the book will not really help much then.

libcom.org/files/Peter Hudis - Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism.pdf

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Hudis misrepresents what Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Programme and he waffles on and on. Shit book.

I am in the bad habit of reading various books at the same time, but:
What is Sex? by Alenka Zupancic, so far really good psychoanalytic text

The Total Art of Stalinism by Boris Groys, which compares the avant-garde of the 20’s to the socialist realist era to argue that the totalitarianism and the union between party and artists were already present in the former.

The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media by Walter Benjamin, a collection of short (2-30 pages) essays split into Art, Image, Painting, Photography, Film and Radio. Just resumed it by reading *Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century*

Also in the midst of reading Jameson’s Postmodernism

Other reccs:
Althusser’s on the reproduction of capitalism
Zizek’s Did somebody say totalitarianism
Ilyenkov’s Cosmology of spirit
Jameson’s An american utopia
Xenofeminism
Joan Copjec’s The Sexual Compact

Probably gonna read .pdf related after I finish Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds as I'm going to Berlin for a few days this week. Anybody know if it's any good?

Currently reading through A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Freud and trying to work my way up to Lacan
I'm also planning to check out The Origin of the Family by Engels afterwards

How so?

“The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems ‘educated’, even scientific, but it is ignorant, bungling. Freudian theory is the modern fashion. I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles, dissertations, pamphlets, etc., in short, of that particular kind of literature which flourishes luxuriantly in the dirty soil of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always contemplating the several questions, like the Indian saint his navel. It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary hypotheses, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.”
-t. Lenin
marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm

It is very good. Read it. Speak of coincidence: I finished Blackshirts and Reds about a month ago and read that book right after, are you me timeshifted?

Berlin? No, Hamburg is by far the better city (sorry)

Here's Hudis:
Marx on the lower phase of communism (in CotGP):
>But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege.
So not only did Marx expect that in the lower phase of communism people will get higher remuneration for working longer, but also that they will get more for more intensive work. His expectation for the lower phase was that only the part of income differences that stems from owning natural resources or means of production will be removed.

Notice that Lenin is writing here in 1920 when most of the new developments in psychoanalysis (i.e Lacan, Zizek, Zupancic, Dolar etc now) were nonexistent. Theoretical engangement with Communism is outright impossible without the tools offered by it.
Just remember that as much as gendered or sexual vocabulary is used in it, psychoanalysis operates at the level of the unconscious, irreducible to whether one has a father or a penis.

Assgoblins of auschwitz.

Dengism is a cancer and should be a ban-worthy offense

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thanks

Your post.

I'm sure this is not gonna be chock-full of stale anti-communist memes.

kek

that's absolutely wrong but I guess you didn't bother to read past that paragraph:

This

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Capital vol. 2. Had to restart a few times so far because I'm really good at putting a book down and forgetting about it. Tried keeping notes this time around. Dunno if it's helping.

Nice. You can do it user. Took me three or four months, but I was able to get through it. Some of Vol 2 is tough but necessary reading, but I found Part 3 to be much lighter than Part 1 and 2.

Reading a lot of Walter Benjamin and Benjaminian studies for my thesis. I'll be returning to Mark Fisher soon though.

Read that post again. It's not an endorsement of pay differential based on contribution as some platonic ideal. It's about having that during the lower phase of communism. Which is what Marx said in CotGP (and which is backed up by the very paragraph that you are quoting from at the end of your post).

I've heard 3 is way easier to read than 2, yeah. Mostly I just have an attention span measured in the negatives. Went for a walk a week or so ago and took my copy out there and it was kinda amazing how readily I found myself understanding what I was reading when there weren't a bunch of things I could distract myself with.

The Power Elite by Wright Mills

Starting The Gay Science today!

Stop what you're doing user. Please read The Unique and it's Property translation instead

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Reading this too. Almost finished, on chapter 9. It's ok, but is a very simple overview of planning. Cockshott was mentioned at the end of the last chapter as a modern theorist of how economic planning would work.

However, I had a big problem with some of their core arguments that got worse the further the book went, and is really culminating in this chapter covering Allende. It is clear this book is about informing a normie of the entire problem around economic planning (presumably they are unaware of this historical argument since it really is rather esoteric compared to the normal "muh human nature" kind of argument), but also to then convince them why for one planning is possible, but secondly why prior attempts failed, and how this is not only because of lack of technology but also due to authoritarian approaches. To start talking about how I think they fucked this up, I'll indulge my inner ☭TANKIE☭. They spent the initial chapters talking about how marvelous the logistics and planning of corporate behemoths like Walmart and Amazon is, but then when they get into the USSR their history is basically:

That is the rough outline. What bothers me about it isn't just a sketchy historical inaccuracy/bias or anything, but that the tale is used to suggest that what was flawed about Soviet planning was that it was authoritarian, and this authoritarian nature led to bad flows of information from the bottom to the top. This created huge gaps in supply and demand of needed goods, and supposedly while Khrushchev's period was prosperous because it was relatively democratic, Brezhnev was the beginning of the end because he was a Stalinist.

However, the writers outright state towards the start of this sequence that after the civil war there was a fear of invasion. It seems as though they do the typical condemnation of Stalin's administration as being almost needlessly authoritarian, an unfortunate result of a justly paranoid Leninist government that built the apparatus which Stalin commandeered to create his terror. Despite spending many pages describing how Stalinist terror resulted in inefficiency, fear to accurately report economic activity or suggest rational solutions (with great flourish, referencing millions dead, seeming to suggest the entire government was extinguished, using the word "chaos"at least once a page), the authors simply admit that development occurred and production did increase, and that the Stalinist USSR defeated the Nazis. They literally handwave this away by saying "I suppose other tyrannies like Walmart and Amazon also function well enough".

This seems very lazy to me because the whole point of this segment was to demonstrate that "authoritarian Stalinists" weren't effectively doing planning BECAUSE they were being too authoritarian. Additionally, this was implied at several points to be due to a mistrust of democracy or something. Prior chapters on the NHS had talked about the technocratic bureaucrats who thought they knew what was best as opposed to actually doing democratic planning with the common people, and this theme had been carried into the Soviet chapters. So it's kind of suggested that the Stalinists thought they could impose an efficient socialist economy from above, rather than being good like Lenin and supporting gradualism that integrated the needs and desires of the people.

1/2

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Yet just to reiterate, we started this whole affair with an acknowledgement that there was a great fear of invasion, and we also acknowledge that the major achievement of Stalin's administration was to defeat the Nazis through rejection of gradualism. So before going onto how this plays into the Allende chapter I ask, how is it possible the authors didn't recognize that Stalin's strategy was literally justified in their own pages? How could they even pretend to not see that their thesis on authoritarianism ruining Soviet planning is directly challenged by the story they themselves accidentally displayed, that under Lenin the Bolsheviks outlawed factionalism in anticipation of sabotage and invasion, that Stalin carried this centralization on logically to a rapid industrialization through massive top-down state mobilization which had a huge death toll that also SAVED THE SOVIET UNION AND EUROPE ITSELF FROM FALLING TO THE NAZIS.

So now to continue to the Allende chapter (which I'll note I haven't completed), the authors introduce Allende as the world's first democratically elected Marxist who was committed to building socialism while respecting civil liberties etc. They very quickly state that Allende was overthrown by a military coup under Pinochet that was very brutal, and that the promise of Allende and his humanitarian cyber-socialism is much lamented by true leftists everywhere. While I'd say all of that is very true, we just got through the fucking chapters about how Stalinists fucked up the Soviet Union with their shitty ideology and jumped into the martyrdom of Allende by saying "here is the civil liberties man we can all get behind, he was swiftly eliminated by a foreign backed military junta".

HOW DO THEY IGNORE THIS? I mean, maybe they don't, but this is what material analysis is about. It wasn't just that the Stalinists had the bad ideas, and it wasn't just that Allende had the good ideas but unfortunately got defeated by evil foreign capitalists. Stalin saved the USSR from the very foreign aggression that saw Allende get assassinated through his flawed but effective policy. The whole "authoritarian bad, democracy good" thesis is revealed as AHISTORICAL liberalism. At one point they actually seem to denigrate the term "political economy" as being used in a dogmatic way against the "mathematical economism" of Kantorovich (or some term like that) by Stalinists, but I'd say that while there was plenty of fear and dogmatism in the Soviet Union that led to suspicion of cybernetics, their own failures in this book to account for the reason behind the authoritarianism of the Stalin period are the same kind of faulty reason why they would consider it absurd that Marxists in the USSR would claim someone like Kantorovich was being "undialectical" or "economistic" or something. The more holistic theoretical approach of "political economy" and historical materialism makes it easier to conceptualize why you can't just be alternatively dogmatically committed to civil liberties or common law institutions or whatever. If you are, you can end up coup'd like Allende, or fuck even a social democrat like Lula getting jailed for total bullshit.

But anyways, I think the book has some value, I just think this is a kind of trite misrepresentation of the history of actually existing socialism through this scale of authoritarian vs. democratic planning in order to make a point that just feels like a weird Frankenstein monster, kind of just ignoring how none of this seems helpful in describing how the Soviet Union developed and what this may or may not have to do with a future cybernetic socialism. Unfortunately, since this was clearly written for normies I figure the actual goal here was somewhat separated from the book's subject of planning, and more like jamming in some sort of explanation for why the common wisdom of the USSR sucking is true but has nothing to do with ideal, cybernetic socialism. Instead of just doing the normal bullshit, they could have easily told the same story and expressed how the rocky development of the Soviet Union unfortunately built momentum behind this perpetually mobilized, bureaucratic, paranoid state that was difficult to change and so wasn't ever able to implement computerized socialist planning. There you go, now the normie knows you aren't suggesting we do the USSR again, and they also have some vague concept of historical materialism that explains why the failures of actually existing socialism aren't just due to "bad ideas".

2/2

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I'd rec it

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Leaving your shitposting den helps, but nicotine can also help.

Wow, thank you for this review comrade. I guess this PRWalmart book is really kind of insidious. It's about what you would expect from a bunch of Jacobin writers, which is what the authors are.