Parsani

What did you or are you planning on reading?

I was very bad at reading books this year, so I'm going to make a better habit of it this year. Here is my short list so far for 2024:

• The Eye of the Master
• Palo Alto
• The Long 20th Century (and maybe Adam Smith in Beijing?)
• Socialist States and the Environment
• The Capital Order
• Collapse of Antiquity
• (maybe I'll finish) Vol 1 of Wallersteins The Modern World-System, but probably not
• reread Capital vol 1
• Intelligence and Spirit
• XYZT

Also:

• one of Ilyenkovs books?
• something about or by Hegel. I've only read the introduction to the philosophy of history
• one of Losurdos books
• Maybe the Grundrisse instead of capital vol 1
• Marx's Inferno
• Bataille's book on prehistoric art

Pls share what you have or plan to read so I can get some recommendations! I posted in c/theory but fiction is welcome too.

Context: https://twitter.com/crulge/status/1737624516946219192

Forest and Factory

The Science and the Fiction of Communism

A long but interesting essay that is in part a critique of Soren Mau, about science fiction and utopia, outline of what communist global organization could be, and a fictional account of the communist construction of a DC motor.

Yes, it starts with a Bordiga quote, no it isn't left Com communizer stuff.

Posting this to the dunk tank because everyone involved sucks.

tl;dr Writer writes something nice about Jeff Koons (lol why?), Koons doesn't understand its a positive review (because of course he doesn't), Brooklyn Rail pulls the article because Koons is unhappy (because art criticism is solely about masturbation now), writer cries about "free speech" because they couldn't publish their masturbatory "review" of Koons.

Here is a sample of the people and writing involved:

Of the Koons sculpture, Golan wrote: “There is a certain tension that reads as the aftereffect of the violence that prompted the memorial, latent in the way Koons’ arm juts out diagonally from its base.” Golan added: “It is this remarkable mix of benevolence and tension in Koon’s gesture that marks his ‘Bouquet’ as an important artwork.”

That tension was at the heart of Koons’s objections. In an email message, the artist’s representative, Lauran Rothstein, wrote to Golan: “You refer to Jeff’s passive gesture of offering as one of violence.” She added that Golan’s essay had aligned Koons “with extremely negative connotations.”

Also after pasting this in, I just realized that the NYT must have fired any editors because we have "Koons'" "Koon's" and "Koons's" within two paragraphs lol.

What follows is an unusually long and math-heavy essay compared to other writing on RedSails; not coincidentally, it’s also the first time we’ve had to render math by implementing LATEX. [1] In our opinion the effort is worth it — the transformation problem has dogged Marxism for long enough, and we do not want our readers to be caught by surprise when neoclassical economists (or worse, other Marxists) throw it in their faces.

The political stakes are straightforward: Marxism ceases to be Marxism when it bails on the labor theory of value. Intellectually, Wright’s research opens the door to further investigations of the fault line between capitalist and natural necessity running through economic thought and modeling. [2] [3] It is our hope that further work in this direction will be able to expose more and more concrete ways in which capitalist social arrangements, despite their seeming necessity, are ultimately irrational and superable. — N. F.

Good ep for theory heads and haters alike