ComradeRat

My grandmother says similarly about e.g. 20 years of abusive marriage to an alcoholic or her experience being left to raise her siblings at like 10 when her mother remarried. At some point ig there's not much that can be done but laugh

Caroline Humphrey's Karl Marx Collective, Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm is very, very local but a really interesting look at day-to-day functioning of collective farming in the 80s. The more recent edition, sub-subtitled "Marx Went Away--But Karl Stayed Behind" (A reference to the fact that post 1991 the Karl Marx collectives renamed themseves to Karl collectives).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9098764

It's very, very dry reading (and the goodreads description is right when it calls it 'dispiriting'), but lets you get a closer look at people who don't get much attention (other than as vague "the farmers"), and who generally aren't able to write themselves (and those who do write don't tend to be representative of those who stay on the farms)

Also there's some interesting descriptions of how local religions interacted with socialism e.g.

To the best of my knowledge that isnt really accurate. For one, smallpox, the biggest recurring epidemic disease, is from rats. Bubonic plague is from fleas on rats drawn to cowfeed and other grains stored in large quantities. Chickenpox, cowpox etc also from livestock.

For another, the water in pre-1800s Europe was much more drinkable than is commonly assumed. You might get worms, but generally you dont see the massive outbreaks of dysentry until urban populations explode from the 1600s on. Generally pre1800s epidemics are a complex mixture of lack of nutrition and a disease transmitted from some animal, rather than just "people drank their own shit".

Animal cruelty? Causing disease? And general horrors? Another thing marx talked about (quote from Saito Karl Marx's Ecosocialism):

...Responding to...enthusiastic reports about the 'system of selection developed by English breeder Robert Bakewell, [in 1864] Marx wrote in his notebook: 'Characterized by precocity, in entirety sickliness, want of bones, a lot of development of fat and flesh etc. All these are artificial produces. Disgusting!'

Basically all of them afaik. Most of the big epidemics spread to humans from 1. domesticated animals 2. kept in very close/tight quarters

the gospel of mark (haven't gotten around to reading the others yet) gives me a lot of impressions of a jewish proto-nationalist struggle against rome, but then mystified and distorted by 1. people from outside the context misinterpreting stuff and 2. the empire itself adopting and coopting the movement (or the movement selling out)

There's a neat sorta process of

"jesus inspired to preach (which, in historical context is equivilant to agitation)"

"jesus starts preaching literally about the corruption of judean society and the temple"

"jesus gets his ass beat by locals for telling them they're sinful"

"jesus starts preaching in parables so he doesn't get his ass beat"

"jesus builds movement and explains things literally to the apostles, but continues parableing in his preaching"

"jesus does mutual aid, healing people of physical and mental ailments (not curing imo, but alleviating symptoms (psychologically or literally with oil))"

"jesus confronts the demon legion (which is many)"

"jesus goes to jerusalem, intending to agitate more and die as a matyr to incite rebellion"

"jesus's followers abandon him and it all falls apart"

30 year break until the actual attempted revolution

"some guy remembers jesus's ideas (sees visions) and thinks "the rebellion would work if the whole roman empire rose up instead of just judea""

"starts spreading faith to non-jews"

which leads varying religious/cultural ideas being taken literally, misinterpreted and morphed until apocalypse means "the literal end of existence" instead of "the collapse of the existing social order" and jesus is turned into literally god, when in all likelihood he was preaching more or less what isiah or jeremiah did

Jesus also gives instructions for agitation:

8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.

9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt.

10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.

11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

12 They went out and preached that people should repent.

13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

Sorta. It's very materialist. It treats economics as the foundation of historical development. Interest groups attract people based primarily on material concerns. Classes hence struggle against each other (afaik without scripting) and create alliances with other classes and do revolutions. What its really missing imo is the environmental aspect to be truly 'marxist' tho (the 19th century is when concerns about "what happens when we run out of fertiliser/trees/fish/etc" started really growing as a result of unprecedented extractivism, and these are recurring concerns in Capital)

I wonder if it is because with the game becoming less popular again

A lotta the reason people keep talking about marxism in vicky3 is because the devs of vicky3 outright said they uesed some of Marx's economic theories because it makes for good game design.

Also something something reality has a marxist bias.

not a great feeling

Just wait until part 8

I'm hoping I'll be more active then (school currently murdering me)

also hilarious how even the people more sympathetic to de-growth on here imagine it as a world where you just get a new smartphone every 5 years instead of every year

often using the same works.

This is pedantic maybe, but I wanna mention there are actually Marx-works available today that weren't 20 years ago, and 20 years ago there were works available that weren't 40 years ago etc. Marx wrote a lot, and its still not all transcribed into print, much less translated from Marx-language into German.

Saito absolutely a GOAT (for an academic. I'll put my issues with saito at the end of this post). Shitstain who wrote this article has barely read Saito's work, because if he did he would 1. realise that actually Saito does directly address modern fertiliser and several other things the article brings up 2. Saito's proofs for Marx's changes are far more conclusive than a letter and some excerpts. It actually hinge more on Saito's discussion of the differences between all the different manuscript varients of Capital, and his reading of the critique of the gotha programme.

Thing that pisses me off the most is actually the complete distortion of marxism the fool writing the article (others have given his name in other comments; i am genuinely too spiteful to remember it. Leigh-something i think). Firstly and most infuriatingly, the fucker editorialises critique of the gotha programme to make it agree with his machine fetishist nonsense. Article-writer cites the conditions for 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' as simply "after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" The full list of preconditions is as follows:

"after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly"

I.e. the distinction between physical and mental labour needs to be abolished, labour needs to be the thing people want to do. Anyone who's read ch15 of capital knows machine work is not something people want to do. In Capital, Marx is actually very critical of complete automation of everything. Marx's solution to the drudgery of machinework is to distribute it more equally and reduce the amount of work (in the sense of alienated, uninteresting labour) done altogether, not to make more shit using more machines. If the author of the article had even read the editorialised quotation they published, they'd notice Marx demands not just the increase of productive forces, but also the "all-around development of the individual" which Marx repeatedly asserts is incompatible with division of labour in the workshop or the mindnumbing repitition of machine labour for someones entire life.

All this said, while I think Saito has a better grasp on Marx's analysis of capitalist production than the article-writer will ever have, Saito's more practical politics are horribly academic-radlib. I don't trust the article-writer to represent Saito's most recent book accurately, as he fails to do so regarding either of Saito's earlier works, but the sorta urban solarpunk imperial core stuff described wouldn't shock me much from him, and it is true that Saito does the ritualistic academic-radlib 'marxist' denunciation of Stalin.