Expecting a video on Pete Buttigieg's dad next.

Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people.

That quote is from the Little Red Book.

That's the sort of thing I am looking for. Is there more up-to-date Chinese Thought on intersectionality or are they totally materialist?

👍 or 👎?

I'm surprised that it took me this long to stumble on this book, by chance, and that it's not mentioned anywhere when looking for introductory reading. Everyone seems to compile their own reading list on introducing people to ML, but no one mentions that the CPSU went to great lengths to create their own "definitive" introduction. Which kinda begs the question why is it not mentioned (seemingly) anywhere?

I remember reading or watching something that I can no longer find about how US public education creates a false economy for its students by its use of numeric grades which they accumulate throughout their schooling and how these grades are a kind of currency exchanged for being "good students."

I don't know if "false economy" is the correct term though. The wiki says:

a false economy or hallucinated economy is an action that does save money at the beginning but which, over a longer period of time, results in more money being spent or wasted than being saved.

But this is more about economizing as opposed to a broader concept of "fake" economy with a fake currency that incentivizes certain behaviors over others. Perhaps these are short-term over long-term behaviors (like in the wiki above) or that the grades can only measure limited aspects of students performance but are a reification of subjective performance into absolute worth or like Goodhart's law the grades are a key performance indicator (KPI) and don't actually measure what they should be measuring. The topic itself isn't strictly about education and can applied more broadly.

Does anyone know if there is a better term or if I'm off base and completely wrong?

I'm trying to typeset "State and Revolution" in german and a lot of sources use a kind of double emphasis. E.g. marxists.org has cursive and bold and cursive. These seem to largely match up with the german translation from 1972 where there is cursive and c u r s i v e   w i t h   l a r g e   k e r n i n g. This makes the text very weird to read and there doesn't seem to be a proper rhyme or reason to when super-emphasis is used.

~~If I compare this with the original I cannot make out any such emphasis, there seems to be l a r g e   k e r n i n g on some words, that might match up but
a) there doesn't seem to be two types of emphasis
b) large kerning can often be an artifact of stretching the line to fit the block
c) I don't know russian and can barely read cyrillic so maybe I'm I'm imagining things.~~

Not an original, if one has a link to one I would appreciate it. Or 1,500€, either will do...

Basically I would like to do away with the strong emphasis and just use one type of emphasis, cursive of course, like Knuth intended when he blessed us with T~E~X, but would like someone to confirm whether there is a proper reason for this or if it's present in the original before I do.

Posting in /c/theory because it's about books or something I don't know, I'll let the mods sort it out.

Couldn't find any such emphasis in any other translation, even an old 1926 doesn't have it so it's gone from "my" edition. Fairly sure it's a weird choice the typesetter made that got copied and then spread. Goes to show how little technicalities like proper spacing between letters can make a great difference in how a text is interpreted and why proper typesetting is crucial.

While perhaps more important in literary circles than political, Frederic Jameson is a very important Marxist who died today.

I heard someone once say that Jameson is probably singularly responsible for keeping American Marxism on life support during the interregnum by hiding it in the English department. Kind of wild to think that the former now has life again while the latter isn't going to surivive

While I don't want to suggest a formal reading club, I wonder if we might just provide some Jameson quotations and our own glosses on them in honor of an important comrade (even if he was, at the end of the day, just an academic and not a revolutionary).

To start, I'll provide perhaps one of the most famous (and important) bits from The Political Unconscious:

History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious which has been argued here, a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or "vision," some new content, but as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an "absent cause."

Here, I think in somewhat dense language, Jameson is really trying to promote history to some term beyond historicity. To put it another way, Jameson's capital "H" History here is the material world before its interpretation by human agents. I think this is borne out by the next (and more famous line):

Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.

Emphasis is mine here. I think that really this gets to Jameson's conception of what material reality is - it's in some sense "beyond" any individual (or even collective) agency but nevertheless we act within and upon it. There's a kind of screen (the screen of Interpretation or representation, which the preceding chapter discusses) that always prohibits our real access to "History" that we are nevertheless part of and embedded in.

Anyway, I'd love to see some other passages from comrades. I'll post a couple more as well as I procrastinate this week.

RIP to a real one. Abusing my mod powers to sticky this, since he was influential for me.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 35 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38

Week 39, Sept 23-29 – Chapter 22 and Chapter 23 of Volume III

Chapter 22 is called 'Division of Profit. Rate of Interest. Natural Rate of Interest.'

Chapter 23 is called 'Interest and Profit of Enterprise'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 35 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37

Week 38, Sept 16-22 – Chapters 20 and 21 of Volume III.

Chapter 20 is called 'Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital'

Chapter 21 is called 'Interest-Bearing Capital'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36

Week 37, Sept 9-15 – Chapters 17, 18, and 19 of Volume III.

Chapter 17 is called Commercial Profit

Chapter 18 is called The Turnover of Merchant's Capital

Chapter 19 is called Money-Dealing Capital

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

i think this is an interesting perspective, as state role do be underdeveloped

I remember reading it and using it as a comparison against how the west talks about china today but i cant find it

What would you say are some of the best or most critical posts on Red Sails? The must read list if you will?

• Concessions
• Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”

Come to mind. What else would you add to this list?

Edit: Compiled from the comments below:

• Why Marxism?
• China Has Billionaires
• "Tankies"
• The Swerve
• The Lost Horse from 139 BC
• “Black Ribbon Day” and “Double Genocide” in Canada
• A Critical Read of Animal Farm
• On Orwell
• On Chomsky
• On Anthony Bourdain
• Democracy is Not an Ornament
• Water Droplets Drilling Through Rock
• Another View of Tiananmen
• The Xinjiang Atrocity Propaganda Blitz
• Ads Don't Work That Way
• "Brainwashing" as long as Masses, Elites, and Rebels is presented alongside it
• Concessions
• False Witnesses
• Really Existing Fascism
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness
• On the sex trade

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35

Week 36, Sept 2-8 – Chapters 15 and 16 of Volume III.

Chapter 15 is the last one of Part III, the part about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and is titled Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law

Chapter 16 is the first one of Part IV, and is titled Commercial Capital

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

tl;dr fortress evropa will be the name of the game

but rather interesting piece, seeking to find common ground between class-based fascism and racist-based fascism (don't think it (the book in question) succeeds tbh)

Getting into some good stuff here. This week's reading is a few pages shorter than normal.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34

Week 35, Aug 26-Sept 1 – From Part III of Volume III we are reading Chapter 13 (The Law as Such) and Chapter 14 (Counteracting Influences). This is the part about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Sorry I'm late posting this.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33

Week 34, Aug 19-25 – We are finishing Part Two of Volume III (Part Two is called Conversion of Profit into Average Profit) we are reading Chapter 10 (Equalisation of the General Rate of Profit Through Competition. Market-Prices and Market-Values. Surplus-Profit.) and Chapter 11 (Effects of General Wage Fluctuations on Prices of Production) and Chapter 12 (Supplementary Remarks)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32

Week 33, Aug 12-18 – From Part Two of Volume III (Part Two is called Conversion of Profit into Average Profit) we are reading Chapters 8 (Different Compositions of Capitals in Different Branches of Production and Resulting Differences in Rates of Profit) and Chapter 9 (Formation of a General Rate of Profit (Average Rate of Profit) and Transformation of the Values of Commodities into Prices of Production)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

This week's reading is a bit shorter than most weeks. Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3182889

So I've had this idea floating around in my head for some time now, but, I finally was able to get the tools required to run on my PC.

Piper is a Text To Speech utility that uses deep learning voice models to read text aloud. This utility is primarily utilized in Home Assistant to allow for a self-hosted voice assistant experience. However, I think it has revolutionary potential.

This idea hit me a while back as a result of my use of the Read Aloud extension for Firefox. This extension supports Piper voice models, and over time I have settled on the use of a model that, I think, is very nice to listen too and gets about 90% of pronunciations correct.

I spent a portion of my day today pulling some text from various Marxist thinkers and creating a few samples. I think there would be a lot of work involved in cleaning up the output produced by these models, but only so far as to ensure the model is pausing appropriately in some situations. This usually centers around the use of punctuation such as [] () - and various date formats 1885, 1993.

For the symbols, they are basically ignored, which can create a kind of run-on sentence where it feels like the voice model should be winded due to the lack of pauses. Replacing these symbols with a comma seems to help, but it varies case by case. For dates, often the model reads the date as though it is a number, so for example, 1917 becomes one-thousand nine-hundred and seventeen, instead of a more natural nineteen seventeen.

Tools could be built to detect these patterns in the text and replace them with the appropriate written equivalents.

Another issue would be, how and when to read aloud end notes. My goal would be to utilize these audio files in something like AudioBookShelf. AudioBookShelf likes having the audio files broken down by chapter and section, so end notes likely would be read at the end of a section or chapter, making them easily skiable, as opposed to reading them inline.

Anyway, here are some samples I created today.

• Caliban and the Witch Preface
  • Text Used - Sourced from an ebook file, converted to text using Calibre.
• State and Revolution Preface
  • Text Used - Sourced from marxists.org.
• Combat Liberalism
  • Text Used - Sourced from marxists.org.

The bulk of the labor involved in generating these files is finding those areas where the flow of reading seems off. As noted above, they can be easy to spot. But also, every author will have their own stylistic quirks that you'll need to work around. From there, chop the text up into files for each chapter and subsection, as well as end notes. Then run Piper against each text file, and finally convert the output wav file into a more digestible MP3, and then apply some metadata to those files.

This is still just a proof of concept. I'm sure there is a way in which we can collaborate to build the text-scripts needed for a clean recording, maybe a Git repository of texts. That part of this process is still not fleshed out.

I think as a goal, I'd like to create a kind of "Intro to Marxism" audio collection. A selection of books to onboard people, perhaps based on prolewiki's Absolute Beginner's List.

Then eventually I can tackle the bigger fish.

Thoughts?

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 41 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31

Week 32, Aug 5-11. From Part One of Volume III (Part One is called The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Profit and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit), we are reading Chapter 6 (The Effect of Price Fluctuations), and Chapter 7 (Supplementary Remarks)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.