ComradeRat

I'm doing fine (finished reading the chapter) but as quarrk mentioned the readings be announced more in advance would be helpful.

As a side note, we could extend this and say that something can gain a use-value as part of a historical process, right? ... The magnet never changed, but through scientific development became useful.

Yeah very much so.

For example a lotta the aim of "production" in consumer societies as we have in the core is to make basically anything gain more use-values so there's more opportunities to sell stuff and more possibilities to get higher prices from induced scarcity.

This ties into Marx's point ofc about stuff needing to be an object of utility to have value. Much as, if something is no longer useful it is no longer valuable, if something is suddenly useful it is suddenly valuable.

is the root cause of a great deal of all the world's problems

Idealism. Claiming that ideas are the root cause of a great deal of the world's problems is the opposite of materialism.

Materialist analysis has never treated religion very kindly.

It has actually treated religion very kindly and respectfully. Like Marx read the bible repeatedly in multiple languages. He told his wife to seek spiritual edification in the jewish prophets rather than a secular church. His analysis of religion is constantly and consistently respectful and to the point with the notable and glaring exception of people who say "i'm a christian/jew/etc" and then ruthlessly exploit their workers. And even then, Marx's disrespect is usually quoting scripture to show how far they've gone from it rather than "lol u believe in man in the sky".

Marx actually admits to an existence of a ton of abstract, non-material social things in Capital which exist, objectively, without a material form. The entirety of communism is a belief that Marx had could become reality. As many indigenous folks have argued (for example, deloria jr. in "Same old Rock" in Marxism and Native Americans) Marxism is itself a religion that demands taking a lot on faith (revolutionary optimism is faith; belief in revolution is faith; belief in an eventual better world in the future? Faith.

And if you read indigenous activists, theorists and so forth (e.g. Coulthard Red Skin, White Masks) you will see it argued very strongly that indigenous religions/spiritualities are materialist in that they are methods of describing and organising empirically obtained information, disregarding theology which no longer holds true to investigation. When you research religions besides Christianity in the global north in particular and organised hierarchical monotheistic religions which developed to support material inequalities and sufferings it becomes very evident that this is how most of them work, except for the religions of the nobility who write things down and get obsessed with literalism.

If you don't mind my asking comrade what sorta investigation into religion (past or contemporary) have you done? What sorta investigations into the structure of science and how it works (e.g. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Siltoe ed Local vs. Global Science or Aikenhead and Michell *Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature) have you done?

I don't have this idea and never said nor implied it. I have repeatedly been saying that this is a thing I have seen occur time and time again, not that it is true for every single person and case. I would appreciate it if you would not misrepresent what I'm saying comrade. It doesn't help anyone

Why not use your limited time on this Earth to build your comrades up instead of tearing them down in private? Why do you need to mock people, especially if your mockery hits your comrades in the crossfire? Is this a materialist analysis aimed towards revolutionary praxis or is this you just wanting to get more upvotes with le burn?

And you don't get a pass to mock people without that having consequences (e.g. POC especially from global south leaving whitedominated spaces time and time again because y'all care more about whining about metaphysics and spreading the gospel of Dawkins than actually getting off your asses and doing shit)

yes? Have been told by several queer friends from latin america for example that they've felt alienated from white/global north queer spaces bc of the casual mockery of their beliefs (with the justification that they are only mocking the "bad ones")

Very unfair summary of Kohei's work imo.

MitA actually has tons of references to Capital, Gotha and various newspaper articles, in addition to exploring later unpublished writings such as letters and excerpt-notes. MEGA2 is mostly released online afaik; if you have the ability to read the various languages and abbreviations Marx uses in them you could easily check whether or not the sentences Saito selected are representative.

MitA argues against a Marxism based on constant expansion of production and consumption without environmental or sustanable concerns. Saito also doesnt argue that Marx never had such views; he very clearly argues for a progression with key turning points relating to Marx's research. He generally uses more well known and/or published works (e.g. the editions of Capital) to show how Marx's research, as seen in excerpt notes, is reflected in his writings.

I agree that it is a very academic work, but in Saito's defence he published a more popularised book in Japanese with similar themes (English translation coming soon iirc) so he is likely aware of the need to not just focus on super obscure marxology.

About half and half I think. I prefer physical book, but the library sadly doesn't have everything.

my goodreads year in books has everything I've read this year

Some highlights:

Kapoor & Jordan eds., Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia. Collection of essays/reports from scholar-activists engaged in class struggle in South America and Asia. In addition to a lot of very concrete details as to how struggle works, what doesn't work, what methods are used, etc, there's some very good essays on what it means to do research aimed at dismantling oppressive systems rather than just doing research for the academic industry. One of the main things this entails is, rather than studying the movement the aim of the academic activist is to study the enemy. When an academic researches a social movement and publishes their findings, this simply makes strategically important information more widely available to academic and governmental spheres i.e. the enemy. Two of my favourite quotes from the book's essays:

...engaged academic research...is usually unconventional out of political necessity and given the dual (though not necessarily equivalent) political commitments (social struggles and academia) at play. This is potentially incompatable with rigorous academic analysis...as commitments to practical politics transform research methods (including use of contradictory means like using the master's tools out of strategic necessity) and at times prioritize politically-induced analytical closure...over futher complexity driven by the search for ever greater analytical complexity and sophistication...

...intellectuals should see themselves as a "conscious wolf man", rather than the leader in the movement. The "conscious wolf man" is aware of his capacity to cause harm. Therefore, before the full moon, he tries every means to prevent himself from causing fatal damage. He constantly reminds people around him that he might betray them and helps them learn all his expertise so that the people can carry on with their struggles after he eventually betrays them.

Both quotes (and all the essays in the book) do a good job of drawing attention to how the class interests of academic researchers differ from the social movements they study, and what sorta practical organizational issues this leads to.

Another of Kapoor's edited books, Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa examines similar themes.

Cyprian Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World is an amazing book. It is a broad tome, but manages to do its subject justice. Broodbank looks at every corner of the Mediterranean showing how they resemble and differ from each other. One of my biggest takeaways from the book have been a more concrete realisation of "the history of all hithertoo existing society is the history of class struggle." There's several instances in the book where class societies arise, grow, collapse (from combinations of deforestation, over-agricultureing and internal disorder) and then seem to reconstruct more egalitarian looking (from archaeological evidence anyway) and sustainable societies.

Eva Mackey's Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization looks at what makes settlers (like me) tick and what settlers can do to work against colonisation. In the final third of the work she looks at examples of settler organisations actually working to return land to control of indigenous nations. The first two thirds look deeply into the legal fuckery of settler colonialism (e.g. the basis of Canada's existence is still the discovery doctrine and terra nullius etc), the various ways (often contradictory) settlers justify colonialism, and various organisations and actions settlers have formed to continue enacting colonialism.

Kyle T. Mays' An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States is as the title suggests. Excellent and readable history book, covers a lotta aspects (particularly the intersections of black and indigenous history) that go overlooked by most.

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour is a spectuacular book that combines all the best of Amin and Arghiri's works on imperialism and Federici and Delphy's work on feminism into a much more readable work. Unequal exchange, the function of imperialist growth, the expropriation of female labour, etc is all discussed in sufficient detail to foster understanding, but not in so much detail that one desires to burn the book.

Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism brings ecology to the forefront of a marxist analysis AND makes (convincing) arguments that Marx himself had done so in his later notebooks. While the usual themes of e.g. metabolic rift are addressed, unlike in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism here the focus is more on what Marx's ecological turn meant for his conception of communism. Saito shows that Marx's view of communist abundance, of post scarcity, is also a vision of degrowth, producing less frivolities, reducing the labour time needed and all with an aim of conscious mediation of the metabolic balance of nature (which ofc includes human society).

Yves Engler's Canada in Africa - 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation and On Guard for Whom? A Peoples' History of the Canadian Military, Gordon & Webber's Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya's The Globalization of NATO are a good (albeit mostly Canada-focused) look at how horrific actually existing capitalism is. All are amazing books to read, learn, and then be on the offensive wrt liberals, accusing their governments of horrible crimes and so forth. Blood of Extraction and Canada in Africa in particular do an excellent job of showing how horrifying 'business as usual' is in the global south (for literally every living thing there). I find a lotta people in the North (including me last year) are unaware of the cost of most of our luxuries. An example quote from Blood of Extraction:

The deposit is situated close to the Río Lempa, a crucial source of water to Cabañas and San Salvador. Residents are concerned about the potential contamination of a vital water supply from mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and zinc, heightened by the fact that there has been no independent assessment of the environmental impact of El Dorado—all while Pacific Rim, under the extant mining policy, would have paid a mere 2 percent in royalties per ounce of gold mined.480 The mine would also consume, according to one scientific study, between 75 and 110 litres of water per second from the nearby San Francisco river, in a country that already is facing considerable shortages and is, according to a Human Development Report for Latin America, the third most unequal country in the region with respect to access to potable water.481

Brett L. Walker's The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion,1590-1800 is as the title says. One of the largest takeaways here is that it shows how bullshit the borders on a map are, and how implicit terra nullius is used to portray an aggressively expansionist Edo Japan as isolationist and peaceful. Japan presents an interesting case-study as a society which developed much the same style of colonialism as Europe did without direct inspiration (at first, anyway). The processes of steady encroachment, worming their way into the centre of trade networks, creation of dependence, etc very much mirror those used by the French or British in North America and the Russians in Siberia. Walker also shows how a lot of the high culture we associate with Edo period Japan (the city culture) could only exist on this colonial basis (even to the extent that the Japanese were buying herring from the Ainu for the sole purpose of fertilising their fields which were exhausted).

Liberals will point to how improvements in quality of life have occurred in capitalist countries in recent centuries (debatable, and certainly not true for the entire world, but let’s assume they are correct for now).

This isn’t debateable. The Imperial Core states and its outposts through the world have living standards more luxurious than ever seen before. We also shouldn’t place the Imperial Periphery, on whose falling standards of living the living standards in the core depend, to the side–this exploitation formed a key part of Marx’s analysis. Improvements in quality of life in the Imperial Core go with and are predicated on increasing impoverishment of the periphery.

famines were a harsh reality of life for much of human history, modern agriculture has allowed us to now be in a position where globally, we can produce more than enough food consistently for the whole planet.

This is only true if we refer to history in the narrowest sense (i.e. only the written past) and famine in the broadest sense (i.e. any period of going hungry is famine, regardless of whether or not there were deaths).

Famines in the broader sense are endemic to history in this narrow sense. When you have a stratified class society with surpluses and urban populations doing writing (i.e. fulfil the narrow sense of history) you have an (urban) population with control over distribution of the grain. This population, historically, will restrict the consumption of the ‘lower classes’ to maintain its own (often already inflated to include luxuries as ‘necessary’) consumption, which often leads to relative hunger (but not always or even usually deaths).

As you mention Chinese famines later on, here is an excerpt from Late Victorian Holocausts describing the Qing government’s response to the famine relief in 1743-44, not paralleled in contemporary European famines (where the starving peasants died for lack of cash for the crops they sold to pay rent):

the renowned “ever-normal granaries” in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties.8…When local supplies proved insufficient, Guancheng shifted millet and rice from the great store of tributegrain at Tongcang at the terminus of the Grand Canal, then used the Canal to move vast quantities of rice from the south. Two million peasants were maintained for eight months, until the return of the monsoon made agriculture again possible.

Famines with certain deaths are an invention of the last few millenia, and are particularly concentrated at first in Europe, and thereafter to greater, more rapid extents, in places it colonises. In the narrow historical sense, “producing more than enough food consistently” has been the norm. In the broader sense of history, i.e. the entire human past recorded in writing or not, famines seem to be even less of a regular occurrence. Archaeological evidence suggests that, contrary to this stereotype of hungry and starving hunter-gathers turning into regularly fed farmers, the hunter-gatherers were consistently fed from a variety of sources with less wear and tear from labour.

Likewise in regards to medicine… in the past just getting sick could be a death sentence. People had to live with incredibly painful conditions their whole life that we now have cures for.

Not really the case (outside of the (ofc horrible) childhood mortality rates). In a lotta cases, medicine went backwards with the enlightenment as remedies/coping methods/etc for pains were regarded as “superstitions” that didn’t “truly cure the [incurable even today] ailment”. And ofc throughout the world (including Europe at some point) cultures that live on the land tend to know a variety of local medicines based on herbs, animals, plants, etc. These methods are ofc sought after today by multinational corporations so they can copyright them and sell them.

Honestly modern medicine is the one reason why I would rather live in 2023 than any other time.

When you say this are you accounting for the fact that, if you were randomly born in 2023 there is a >80% chance you’re born in the Imperial Periphery and therefore, rather than accessing such medicines you’re the one suffering for their production? You might be downwind of some industrial ‘development’ that gives you and your entire family diseases no one has ever heard of before, or you might have your entire village burnt to the ground to mine the minerals or harvest the plants used for the medicines up in the global north. Heck, even in the US or Canada we are still settler-colonial entities; you could very well be born up somewhere in Northern Alberta where much of the food you eat is contaminated with oil and the water has various industrial runoffs.

What I’m getting at is… though these advances did occur under capitalism, I don’t think I would give capitalism the “credit” for them.

I would give imperialism the credit for them. Having a large population that doesn’t have to live with the negative consequences of its luxuries (i.e. a nobility) is a key part of imperialism (and a necessity for surplus value realisation).

Obviously socialism was not possible 200 years ago. I’m not denying standard Marxist historical progression.

Did something fundamentally change between 1823 and 1848 when Marx began saying “socialism is possible”?

Marx doesn’t have a “standard historical progression”. Marx has a method of analysing society and looking for ways to transform it for the better. In his early works (e.g. the manifesto or german ideology articles) there is a schematic tendency, but this is abandoned mostly in Capital and totally in later notes and letters (e.g. to Zasulich in 1881). Marx’s near uncritical positivity towards capitalist development of productive forces also fades very quickly, to be replaced with scathing critiques of machines, agriculture (animal and plant), colonisation and peasant-clearing.

I think the only things you can give capitalism “credit” for is developing the productive forces, allowing for high levels of commodity production, and increasing levels of wealth (though not equally shared).

Because of how critical he was before the great acceleration and expansion of consumerism, I would think that Marx’s view on the current ‘development of productive forces’ would be rather more critical than you’d expect, especially since his views on all this don’t even take greenhouse gasses into account so he’d probably be even more negative on this.

Kapital is a complete work, any abridgement ruins it

(In less jovial terms; imho the work falls apart if it isn't read at least once from start to finish becausee Marx relies throughout on terms, concepts, ideas, he developed earlier on; and I don't trust abridgers to get all of those (esspecially the important footnotes like ch15 fn4))