Sociology courses have been nice and all and my last two profs in it were left-liberals who were fairly civil and nuanced about Communism as far as liberals go. but my new one, on day 1 of a course titled Inequality, described it as a "bloodbath", said Mao "killed several hundreds of millions" (to hell with Courteois and his 100 million, I think we can get to a billion) and asserted that the Russian and Chinese revolutions produced societies with greater income stratification than.... imperial core countries like US and Nordics *today*. Animal Farm theory of Communism being "make everyone equal overnight", undialectical liberal worldview, numbers multiplied several times even from what was in the Black Book... This is more what I expect to hear from a high school teacher.
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thank you, this checks out
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It appears that Sakai's answer is that land hunger was so severe that, yes, petty bourgeois individuals would be willing to endure it to have something like the standard of living they had been used to.
the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika... What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.
Here is a quote he takes from ""Social Origins of Some Early Americans". In SMITH, ed., 17th Century America. N.Y., 1972."
Land hunger was rife among all classes. Wealthy clothiers, drapers, and merchants who had done well and wished to set themselves up in land were avidly watching the market, ready to pay almost any price for what was offered. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons...It is commonplace to say that land was the greatest inducement the New World had to offer; but it is difficult to overestimate its psychological importance to people in whose minds land had always been identified with security, success and the good things of life.
Marx: > Today's wage-labourer is tomorrow's independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse. Sakai: > A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian > many English farmers and artisans couldn't face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor. Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn't it? So it may be that by Marx's time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?
Does the Montessori model provide a model for how everyone could be educated? Should a socialist project attempt the reconstitution of public education informed by the principles of Montessori education?
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四叶妹妹 is yotsuba&!,btw
immediately downloaded 宝葫芦的秘密 and 四叶妹妹 for later reading. So i havent looked at much else, but it already has more hits than Libgen, and I am not really in the know about the actual sites popular in China for this.
I've been studying this book all summer (in my free time) and am a bout halfway through and feel I've learned a lot.
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maybe instead I should be criticizing UBI for being too flimsy (can be reduced by legislation, can be held back by inflation so that costs surpass, etc)
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ty, i will check this out!
Here's what I'm responding to, put it in pastebin to slightly anonymize this, though I'm sure its easy to find the original source, that's OK. https://pastebin.com/hkH5gVGp These are my bullet points for a three section plan to respond. Please let me know your thoughts and how they can be improved. I hope to write with a tone that gives a Marxist viewpoint without alienating a willing, open minded lib reader. ***How will people support themselves?*** - Technology is a social phenomenon and not a march of progress separate from material conditions - Why automation is a problem under capitalism - What private property is and how it is distinct from personal property - Why it is just and good for private property to be socialized and personal property retained - How a socialist society would benefit from increased automation **Do we need universal basic income (UBI) to sustain people once their jobs are replaced by technology? What are people going to do to keep themselves occupied?** - UBI as a cash payment does not solve precarity. It keeps consumer spending up and maintains a flow of income to landlords, mortgage holders, grocery monopolies… - A universal basic needs guarantee would grasp the problem by the root. - We could instead enshrine full education, adequate housing, all basic needs including health, leisure time, and dignified work for the able, as rights of everyone in our society. - Democratic planning mechanisms could replace the autocratic petty fiefdoms of profit-seeking businesses in all these sectors. - We have the means to communicate with the whole body politic at light speed, and create revolutionary education such that “every cook can govern”. ***The cost of living and the housing crisis are definitely part of the labour shortage, but they are just a symptom of a greater issue — the world is getting older and we are running out of people to staff all kinds of jobs.*** - The role that human labour-power plays in the economy has been diminishing gradually since the Industrial Revolution. - The fact that resources spent on human’s wages were more and more outnumbered by resources spent on constant capital (raw materials, machinery, equipment) is obfuscated by the fact that markets grew such that real wages and the wage-working part of the world’s population generally grew. - The labour shortage is a framing that is sympathetic to business and corporate power. - The obvious solution, recognized by everyone from Joe Biden to **TODO: find other random public figures who commented on this**, is to increase wages. - If the entreprises or the wider system cannot handle this, that failure is the problem. Our mode of production should meet our needs or be discarded. - Capitalism is no longer a dynamic system, and the global, general rate of profit is in decline. - It is a time of difficulty for small business, increasing malaise for big business, and more significantly, real precarity and hardship for the working class (all those who work for a wage to sustain themselves). - Capitalism will not eventually fix itself, but it will eventually destroy itself.
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Thanks for your viewpoint and I think I'll do that and keep working towards my first dev co-op etc. Nice to have the flexibility to transition down the line.
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Thanks for your input. Web dev seems great and I've considered trying to deploy some kind of useful REST API, like for computing directions from one place to another on campus, probably with FastAPI in Python. Doing something with Docker is also on my todo-list...
I'm a little over half done my CS degree. I love programming, Linux, etc. I am considering getting CompTIA A+ and Linux+ this summer with pirated Udemy courses. I do coding projects too, like I am almost done my homebrew NDS game, threw together a Tkinter pomodoro app last week, and in the past I made a command line program that computes a readability score on a body of text. Finally, I am participating in 100 days of leetcode problems together with my CS club. So I've done a lot to move towards coding professionally. The question is what kind of career should I go for to suite my goals in life. I would like to be able to own a place to live in Quebec (don't live there yet) whether it is in MTL or a rural area, not sure what I want yet. So software dev. gets a point for higher income, I think, plus it's what I've studied for, mostly. But it's important to me too that I have free time outside of work and so can participate in social movements. Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle? I'd really like to achieve fluency in French and Chinese (currently a beginner and intermediate learner respectively) eventually, and maybe the IT world would have me talk to people more. Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two? Interested in others thoughts on how to proceed here. For the meantime I think I'll start the A+ course because it can't hurt, and keep working on my DS game, cuz it's almost done. I don't even know if I want to do either of those professions, I could see myself teaching English too, to Francophones and Chinese especially as I want to learn those languages...
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I just started Forces of Production the other day. It's interesting.
The other day I started reading a Chinese scifi novel 猫城记 Cat City/Cat Country. I thought about trying to translate it even though it's above my reading level by just looking up all the words as I go. But I'm below that threshold of 95% understanding or whatever and have to look up many phrases on each page.
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Behind the Urals is great. John Scott was a fellow traveller or party member in New York as I recall. Immigrated to the USSR to work in Magnitogorsk.
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this board is a godsend.
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I'm starting to think I should make this my whole undergrad research project. I could develop a tiny part of it for this DB course. Thanks for your response, lots of helpful stuff here and will come back to it and others' comments...
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Haven't done any linear algebra or dug into matrices yet... do you think light study of the basics on KhanAcademy would be enough? I've done calc 1 and 2 and discrete math.
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I read it years ago, and I should definitely dig in again and review. Big part of why I want to do everything in labour time as much as possible. However I think he suggests the use of a neural network at one point which is a little over my head for now. I am thinking simpler like the pen and paper material balance planning the Gosplan cdes used to do...
Hi folks. I am a CS major taking a 3rd year course in relational databases. The example DBs we study are pretty much all either a school or a company. On the bright side we get to do a project of our own design with C++ and Oracle DB. Has to be some kind of program that makes use of a reasonably sophisticated schema. I was thinking I could make a DB program that does economic planning, but I don't know what direction to go with it, really. Maybe the kernel of it, the usefulness could be, computing everything down to hours of human effort using the LTV. Labour time accounting. For example, we create a profile for what we want the living standard to be, like private and shared square feet per person, food choices, clothing choices, level of convenience of transport etc. Then the program could use a database containing information about the SNLT to produce different products and services to compute what professions would be needed and how much we all need to work, basically. But like any idea this is starting out huge. So does anybody have ideas for how to make this small but extendable? Or different directions go with it, or totally different ideas that you have?
Not kidding either, it'd just have to be a very low priority and part of a broader campaign to socialize the internet.
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interesting thoughts
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I'm asking because I wondered if dependence on colonial wealth could inform an argument that capitalism is historically contingent, that it was possible for there not to be capitalism
My hunch is yes, because of how successful English agrarian capitalism was early on... but likely more slowly?
According to Marxist historians writing on the origin of capitalism, namely Ellen Meiksin Wood (Origin of Capitalism) and Ian Angus (War Against the Commons), the first capitalism was defined by a particular triad arrangement: landlord, yeoman / capitalist tenant, and wage labourer. Does anyone know good sources to particularly examine the circumstances and lives of each? Short little descriptions of the daily life of a landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage labourer in 1400s-1800s England? Btw, I was taught Northanger Abbey for a class last year and I think I could pick any random character to get a depiction of the life of a landlord or hanger-on, just kidding, looking for non fiction anyway.
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If you are looking for other lighter-reading communist newspapers I like the Red Clarion. https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2024-01-02-another-letter-to-the-youth-of-america/
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万岁！
I wish it wasn't this way, friends!
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There is no doubt that the unpaid internship is exploitative, moreso than the already discouraging/tiring path to a first job programming. But I also think you were right to accept it as a step towards launching a career. It's something you will never have to do a second time... onward and upward
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Great magazine, loved the articles about modern sailing ships and sewage handling by aquaculture.
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What was the situation in 1973? I don't think we're actually in the worst stage of automobilism right now, honestly. I think we're still in really bad shape in North America, but the worst of it must have been some point between the time Gorz is writing and like 2010. All conjecture, not basing this on anything but impressions from some reading on the topic.
I'm sketching out an idea for a readability assessment program. It will report the education level required to comfortably read a body of text using formulas, Dale-Chall being the most significant, that count length of sentences, what level of vocab a word is considered to be, etc. I was inspired by the word counter website I always paste my essays into. When it's done, I would like to plug it into APIs for it to be used on Lemmy, Mastodon, and Discord.
If not, I think we need one. I want to start postering again but I haven't had the motivation to make the posters myself, in part because I want them to be really good. Also of course historical agit prop is OK if it is still applicable which much of it, but not all, is.
Quotes: > One student born in the 1980s wrote: From Junior One to Senior One, I spent four years learning texts by heart. According to our ancestors, ‘Memorizing 300 Tang poems makes one a poet himself’. … It is also true to foreign language learning. I regret not reciting enough texts then. [1: 218; Chinese original] > After the teacher finishes his explanation and checks with the students to see if they have correct comprehension, the students are required to read the text just learned 100 times: slowly at first, then a bit faster. The text should be read with rhythm, correct pauses and accurate use of the four tones. If any student cannot perform the reading- aloud properly, another 100 times of reading are required of him. [9; Chinese original] > Yu MinHong 4 , a celebrated educator and English teacher who was born in the 1960s, wrote: In primary and secondary school, all that we had were several thin textbooks. Without any other books to read, we had to recite the texts again and again − so much so that I could recall them till now as if they were carved in my heart. [13; Chinese original] > In monastic choirs the demon Tutivillus was believed to collect up sackfuls of dropped syllables from the Psalms to be weighed up at the Last Judgement against those who voiced the texts inaccurately 6 > In her detailed analysis of uses of memory and the conceptions of memory in the Middle Ages, Carruthers [24] showed how memory played a significant role in medieval people’s intellectual and cultural lives. The great values they attached to memory can be sensed from Carruthers’s depiction: Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect. [24: I; emphasis original] … Memoria, …, was a part of litteratura: indeed it was what literature, in a fundamental sense, was for. Memory is one of the five divisions of ancient and medieval rhetoric; it was regarded, moreover, by more than one writer on the subject as the ‘noblest’ of all these, the basis for the rest. [24: 9; emphasis original] I've personally been trying to memorize the first 40 lines of the 3 character classic, the 三字经。Both as an experiment in memory: how much of this book can I commit to memory so well that I could recite it in full and explain every line and character? and also to get more familiar with classical chinese since it has such a distinct vocabulary, with words like 此，孝，昔，善，义 that occur elsewhere too but I haven't seen much of.
Would anyone join a vintage story server? I would probably do it by whitelist, and have a few mods installed. For the unfamiliar Vintage Story is (to me) a sort of spiritual successor and awesome extension of the idea behind the Minecraft mod Terrafirmacraft The mods I've been using that I remember are Better Ruins, DR Decor, Ceramos, medieval expansion, maybe a couple others... if I can get it working, I really want to add a sailboat mod. For worldgen I want to make things interesting and do a hot climate or a cold climate... probably a hot climate. I like the idea of growing pineapples :D Some gameplay concerns: I have heard that food rotting is a problem on multiplayer because of the passage of time with no players online? Could we set up the server to pause time when nobody's on? We could probably have one collective farm so that whoever's on can take care of it and just put the harvest in a basket for others to take as needed. Really, we could probably pool a lot of stuff and get something like a commune going. I would probably play around an hour a day until September at which point I would try to set aside a couple hours a week :) Anyways, interested in other's ideas.
For the last one you have to write a friggin iterator ;_; But I'll get to it!!
