theory

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Now that we're a Federal People's Republic, we can get more comrades participating in study across the two domains.

I will be making the post for The Wretched of the Earth. I have also taken it upon my self to make short summaries of what we read for each post. I think we can split the book up by chapters in five parts. We would be counting the foreword and conclusion as part of the first and final chapters respectively. My thought process is that we take one week per chapter so that you guys can take your time with the book. Please let me know if that is too slow of a pace. regardless we will be having our first post on Sunday so have the forward, preface and chapter one On Violence read. the importance of this book cannot be understated, if you cant keep up with the post please read the summary and discussion in the comments.

The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book by Frantz Fanon. It analyses the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation, and the broader social, cultural, and political implications of establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people.

• English translation by Richard Philcox – https://ia801708.us.archive.org/3/items/the-wretched-of-the-earth/The%20Wretched%20Of%20The%20Earth.pdf – you'd be reading from page 42 to 311 of this PDF, 270 pages

• English translation by Constance Farrington – https://abahlali.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Frantz-Fanon-The-Wretched-of-the-Earth-1965.pdf

• Original French text – https://monoskop.org/images/9/9d/Fanon_Frantz_Les_damn%C3%A9s_de_la_terre_2002.pdf

• English audio version – https://inv.tux.pizza/playlist?list=PLZ_8DduHfUd2r1OOCtKh0M6Q9xD5RaR3S – about 12h20m – Alternative links

Counting the preface by Sartre and the conclusion, there are 15 chapters/sections, so I would suggest taking about 15 days at it. I won't be able to take the initiative posting daily readings in the coming weeks because of reasons, so maybe @MF_COOM or @TraschcanOfIdeology or somecomrade else will volunteer to do that?

Reading socially is just so much better than reading alone.

There was no appetite for bread when I asked, so I welcome other suggestions. Highly-upvoted comments in the thread will be bookclubbed. Some suggestions that're on my radar:

• David Graeber – Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (100 pages)

• Cockshott – Towards A New Socialism (199 pages)

• Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism

• Amílcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonisation (205 pages)

• Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (251 pages)

• Bread Is the Devil: Win the Weight Loss Battle by Taking Control of Your Diet Demons by Heather Bauer and Kathy Matthews

How to achieve efficient allocation of resources and make the right decisions about what to produce:

• provide money to citizens (this would be conditional, but Taylor doesn't want to get into the conditions. No uggos, I suppose.)
• let them make consumer choices (output produced by state enterprises). This tells you how important goods are. The price reflects the importance.

"As such sole producer, the state maintains exchange relations with its citizens, buying their productive services with money and selling to them the commodities which it produces"

Ok what's interesting about this description is it's a fully centralised, fully planned economy. It's NOT free enterprise BUT it is a market economy. Production is centralised in the state – the state's interactions with people are market interactions (buying/selling/supply/demand)

The planners set a price that fully covers production cost. This considers the scarcity and renewability of materials (land, non-renewable aquifers, etc.)

How could the planners figure out the costs of raw materials and intermediate goods?

• By trial-and-error.
• The amount of steel available is known.
• If the amount of a good isn't known, or if its amount exceeds demand (seawater), it has no price.

Because the effective importances of the commodities are expressed in terms of money value, the importances of the several factors will be so expressed. At present it will be assumed-to prove this assumption will be the task of the second part of this paper-that the authorities of our socialist state will have proved able to ascertain with a sufficient degree of accuracy these effective importances or values of all the different kinds of primary factors, and that they will have embodied the results in arithmetic tables which I shall usually designate factor-valuation tables.

In order to determine the cost of producing any particular commodity, let us say a sewing machine, it would be necessary to multiply the valuation of each factor used in producing that machine by the quantity of that factor so used and add together these different products. If the resultant total turned out to be thirty dollars, we should have to say that the producing of the sewing machine made a drain on the community's economic resources of thirty dollars; or, in other words, that its resources-cost was thirty dollars.

"the kind of cost just explained, resources-cost, is in fact very closely allied to what, under our system, is often called expense-cost."

They know how much steel is, they're trying to set the price of steel:

• They estimate it
• If there's a steel mountain, they lower it. If there's unmet demand they raise it.

Vampire's thoughts and conclusion: it's interesting and a little sad to see how in those days people were coming up with market-based mechanisms to make Marxism work. Marx never wrote one essay on what the communist economy would look like. It was up to post-Marx communists to work out the theory. And market theorists like Taylor and Lange and Dickenson made contributions. The model described here is nothing like the economies of China or Vietnam today.

Congratulations to all who completed the 'How to be a good communist' book club. Let's keep the momentum going.

So how about unironically reading The Conquest of Bread? It's on Wikisource in English and French. Audio with a (significant) French accent here, and with an American accent here. Audio runs between 6 and 6½ hours.

It consists of a Preface (2412 words) and 17 chapters (totalling 69,004 words). The longest chapter (5) is 8760 words, but many are under 4000 or under 3000. (Hey Vampire why do you keep talking about word counts?? Well I'll tellya why, because if you're inviting somebody to commit to a task, they need to know the size of the task)

Could do the preface and Chap 1 today (July 26th) and read one chapter a day til Aug 4. I'd rather not start tomorrow, because then the long chapter would fall on a Monday.

If there's no interest, I'll read it by myself.

Hi all, if this isn't the appropriate comm for this post then please redirect me to a better one.

I would like some constructive feedback on these articles. They're meant to serve as an FAQ-like rebuttal to common misconceptions, so that typical predictable questions (both good faith and bad faith) can be effortlessly handled by linking to the relevant page.

Because of this, the main target audiences are non-leftists and babby leftists. Feel welcome to crit the content but also the style, structure, theming, whatever. One question on my mind is if there is a good balance of clarity, succinctness and comprehensiveness, another question is whether the red-coloured links are a problem.

• https://wellread.miraheze.org/wiki/Communism_killed_100_million
• https://wellread.miraheze.org/wiki/Capitalism_is_voluntary
• https://wellread.miraheze.org/wiki/Defining_socialism
• https://wellread.miraheze.org/wiki/Defining_communism

P.S. Sorry if the wiki name comes off as arrogant, it's really just a pun on 'red'

I mean, I knew the idea of dialectics. But I'd dismissed it as German metaphysics or the "iron laws of history" stuff that is embarrassing about 19th and 20th century socialism. I didn't see its relevance to practical politics, but look at the way Stalin uses dialectical thinking here –

"How do the Social Democratic Parties in the West live and develop? Are there any internal antagonisms and differences over principles in those parties? Of course there are. Do they expose these antagonisms and try to overcome them honestly and frankly before the eyes of the masses of the Party? No, of course they do not. It is the practice of the Social Democrats to conceal these antagonisms, it is the practice of the Social Democrats to convert their conferences and congresses into masquerades, into official parades intended to show that all is well within the Party; every effort is made to conceal and gloss over the differences within the Party. But nothing but confusion and the intellectual impoverishment of the Party can result from such practices. This is one of the causes of the decline of Western European Social Democracy, which at one time was revolutionary, but is now reformist."

He is saying that Social Democrats are fence-sitters. They see the duality but don't follow it to its conclusion. Communists like Lenin grasped each duality and resolved it. When you don't follow do this, you wind up as a SocDem, a compromiser. SocDems see the tension between socialism and capitalism, and try to please everybody.

So, straight up - Read the Art of War. It's like baby's first book of strategy. Forget all the business dorks who think it gives them an edge in the corrugated cardboard industry or something. Fuck those guys. The Art of War is a solid treatise on when, why, and how to engage in conflict. It can be applied to all kinds of conflict at all levels. It also has some of the hardest lines in all of world literature.

• All warfare is based in deception

• If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle

• The acme of skill is not to win a thousand battles. The acme of skill is to win without fighting

• Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

When you're reading it try to look past the specifics of the iron age from which Sun Tzu is speaking and try to see how the underlying principles can be applied.

For instance, when he talks about positioning yourself on accessible ground, he is speaking about iron age armies. He says

With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. Then you will be able to fight with advantage.

At an action in a city this might be applied to an open park - If there's a raised area move you crew there. There are numerous advantages - If it rains water will flow away from you. If you're approached by cops they'll have to move up hill towards you. The reach of their weapons will be shorter, and the opposite is true as well. You'll be able to see further and more clearly.

In a meeting this would mean positioning yourself where you are visible to the chair or the dominant political clique so they will see you when you or one of your allies is speaking. Position yourself where you can see opponents or hostile cliques so you can observe what they are doing and how they respond to propositions or discussions.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1926/11/01.htm#2

"For this very reason, at the same time as he issued his revolutionary April Theses, Lenin issued the slogan for 'patient' propaganda among the masses to convince them of the correctness of those theses. Eight months were spent on that patient work. But they were revolutionary months, which are equal at least to years of ordinary, 'constitutional' times. We won the October Revolution because we were able to distinguish between a correct Party line and recognition of the correctness of the line by the masses. That the oppositionist heroes of 'super-human' leaps cannot and will not understand."

He is saying that Lenin understood that having the right theory is one thing, having popular support for it is another

Has anybody else read this book? I'm about halfway through and I feel like I've been learning a lot from this. While the book is endlessly critical of the former Soviet experiment and the modern PRC without cushioning it's critiques by acknowledging that much of their problematic climate elements are due to material conditions, I find many of their critiques and ideas refreshing.

I'm a little ambivalent on their information about Nuclear Power too, I personally had assumed that Nuclear tech was brought to an incredibly safe level.

But beyond that I think some of the central thesis of the book of treating nature as a "known unknown", and needing to harness the power of hopeful utopianism while making use of the best elements of scientific socialism, I think these are swell things to adopt. The book is, on the whole, a bit lib in the ways that utopian socialists are, but I do think at the end of the day it prescribes some necessary ideas that are seriously worth engaging with.

Has anyone else read this book and have any thoughts, or ways we can adapt this critique to the struggle of socialism?

• Text here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/index.htm – about 27,000 words, so about 100 minutes to read

• Audio here, British female AI speaker, 2h41m21s: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=aeGlxpDvoqc&listen=1

• Audio here, American human male speaker: https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjoZVLIJX6CLKGC9Vz6Gwv9kI&listen=1

It is nine chapters, so one chapter per day for nine days seems the obvious way to go.

Liu Shaoqi is an admirable figure, Chairman from 1959 to 1968, a pragmatist who came into conflict with the worst tendencies of Mao and the Gang of Four, praised by Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. I'm getting more and more interested in the pragmatic Chinese Marxists who actually succeeded and built something with a strong eye to pragmatism, not idealism.

(Not gonna spam any more books / articles [today at least] but this one is Important)

This is an excellent essay that examines the similarities and differences between Marxist and Indigenous critiques of Capitalism. Imo they miss a bit in terms of the Marx side (mostly I'm just salty that they don't cite Marx in the Anthropocene), but overall this is an excellent piece that every single settler should be reading

This is a very important contemporary marxist work imo (despite being published only this year). It's VERY relevant to climate change, the question of production under socialism and communism. It's also essential if you wanna have an idea of what Marx was up to (in terms of theory) in the late 1870s until his death bc Saito's source for his arguments is the previously unpublished MEGA2 (which he worked on) and others' work on MEGA2. Highly recommend it, though it is somewhat (prolly VERY) abstract/academic.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/277223

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