/edu/ - Education

>Did you guys go to university or any other forms of higher education?
Yes.
>Why or why not?
Because it is expected and you cannot get a job in my country without some sort of degree
>Did it help you achieve what you want to achieve?
No. I had no real goal and i hate the field i ended up graduating in.
>Would you go back in time and choose a different path?
Yes. Probably something in art or politics rather than STEM, i didnt learn shit in my course, 99% of what i know is pure self study.

>>4196
STEM is more valuable for the Time being than a Degree in Art or Neoliberal Politics.
Mind if I ask which field you graduated in?

>>4198
Software engineering

"more valuable" isnt much use for me if it makes me want to kill myself and i would rather try and make my living as an illustrator

>>4199
Can you switch to a different Engineering major?
Or do you hate STEM in general?

>>4200
I already graduated. I realised that my depression wasnt caused by anything inherent but by programming too late.
So im just winging it atm and doing teaching.

post this on leftypol maybe someone will answer fuck the mods

>>4145
>Walmart
In the OP I say this is a good book for socdems as opposed to one for socialists. Either way it is useful to read to disseminate lib ideas easier.
>Imperialism
This thread is about bringing new ideas, bringing communism into the 21st century. This isn't a cybernetics thread solely, that book has been recommend by many comrades, while I haven't read it yet I believe it is useful to study. Idk this VAT thing seems exceedingly nitpicky over one sentence. If you have an overall criticism of the book I'd love to hear it

>>4144
>ecology
why doe

>Vanguard
Yes I think this is the pivotal question for us. I mean there is no reason to believe a vanguard is the way apart from it has been proven to work (under certain conditions) but as Marxists, this shouldn't be sufficient. This is why we need new analysis rooted in our space and time.

I also thing while it seems good that we aren't religious anymore, the 'job' of religion (as an opioid) is being replaced by other things. We have some people looking up to Elon Musk as a god figure, some looking towards environmentalism for their purpose and blind faith, etc etc.

Regrading Marx, he was a product of his period, and that was one of great unrest in Europe. France deemed it necessary to exile him for his writings, you get where I'm coming from? This shaped his attitudes when it came to organising, and made it a lot easier for him to organise proles, since the revolutionary energy was already there. Lenin recognizes this in Left Wing Communism, it is really fookin' difficult for communists in places where there isn't this energy or general class consciousness.

I feel like I missed something in your last paragraph though so please let me know. What do you mean by 'far more workers party'?

>>4147
>this VAT thing seems exceedingly nitpicky
Can you repeat in your own words what you think is said in that paragraph? Taking for granted that what is said there about John Smith's book isn't a misrepresentation, can you follow the argument against what Smith is saying and do you agree with it?

>>4154
Hahahaha what is your point? Why are you so insufferable?
>Explain the extremely basis concept of VAT to me right now!! I want 1000 words on whether the benefit a buyer gains from VAT is exploitation or not!
You've misread every post so far yet want to give me some high school quiz on your copy pasted out of context quote. If you have read the book you'll be able to critique it, if you just want to repost some arbitrary quote about VAT I can't discuss it IN REFERENCE TO THE TEXT because I haven't read it.

To clarify for you, I never said this was a misrepresentation. It is nothing in the context however. because it isn't a critique of the work. Perhaps I could post some quotes from books you haven't read and we could simultaneously wank over how big brained we are and pop-quiz one another?

>>4155
>1000 words
It's a short paragraph, about the size of the post you just wrote.
>If you have read the book you'll be able to critique it
I did read Smith's book and I agree with the copy-pasted argument against Smith, which is why I posted it.
>if you just want to repost some arbitrary quote about VAT I can't discuss it IN REFERENCE TO THE TEXT because I haven't read it.
You don't have to read the book, since you were only asked whether you are able to restate the paragraph in your own words and whether you agree with it under the condition that it doesn't misrepresent Smith.

>>3706
Keep in mind if it's US history specifically you're interested in, Blackshirts and Reds and the first two Hobsbawm books (the ones I've read so far) don't generally discuss the U.S. in much depth.

>>3730
Why?

>>4088
Bad citation practices, tendentious in a bad way (i.e., not just that Zinnhas ideological presuppositions, which everyone does, or that his sympathies are with the left and/or the downtrodden, which to be sure is good, but that it's persuasive writing meant to identify good guys and bad guys rather than to really investigate causal logic.)

>>4088
Because Zinn clearly wrote a lot of this with conclusions already in mind that he at times desperately searches to find evidence for, often times distorting the impact of say, slavery as a dominating factor in the Americans decision to declare independence.

this is the classic that started it all when it comes to a new type of Marxist history.

Bumping this as I'd like to know too.

I had some but I've forgotten the names and i' can't be arsed to look through my bookshelves.

>>4142
If I spot any I'll let you know though… they're mostly in Russian however

>>4126
This is wrong.
> Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
This is from Capital, first chapter.

>>4127
"If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract."

Abstract labor exists as an abstraction of concrete labor, labor towards creating value from a commodity. Concrete labor is the labor that creates use-value from a commodity, it creates a commodity's physical properties. Abstract value, however, is ABSTRACTED from concrete labor, it is the labor of the entire productive labor of a human society as a whole rather than labor for the purpose of creating value out of a commodity. We can use abstraction of the concrete labor used to create two commodities (Marx uses corn and iron) to be able to compare the use-value and exchange value of a commodity. Concrete labor is socially necessary labor, it is fundamentally required to create value in a commodity, whereas abstract labor contains a multitude of labor that may not directly correlate with the value of a commodity, because it contains the entirety of labor. Concrete labor creates use-value, value on the basis of the expenditure of labor and the physical properties of a commodity, whereas abstract labor creates through the totality of labor the exchange value of a commodity, through comparing the concrete labor put into any commodities, and the labor required to create them, compared with the total abstract labor.

>>4130
Abstract labor is how society derives how it should exchange two products based on their use-value, their exchange value. Concrete labor is the actual labor used to create use-value.

To give a concrete (har har) example, think of a car. A car is a commodity produced to make a profit. When Toyota directs its workers to make a car, they're utilizing a tremendous array of different kinds of labor - some of which is directly employed by them, like the assembly line workers and the engineers, and some of which is indirect, such as the labor required to extract minerals from the earth or to create specialized parts that Toyota order from other firms rather than makes itself.

We can think of this mass of labor as a certain quantity - as a homogenous quantity once we *abstract* away from the particular kinds of acts people do - and if a firm finds a way of making a similar product with less of this amount, they can produce it more cheaply in real terms and undercut Toyota. So this is why abstract labor regulates prices under markets - we can, and firms do, compare different amounts of qualitatively different employed labor to guide decisions about what gets produced and what prices they exchange at.

Now consider a hobbyist who repairs their own car for convenience or to mod it for fun. When they spend time understanding the how the car works, attaching and removing components, diagnosing a problem with it, and so on, they're performing various kinds of concrete labor that are, as concrete labor, similar to what employed workers in the Toyota supply chain are doing.

But although all abstract labor is also various kinds of concrete labor, not all concrete labor is abstract labor. The hobbyist's creating mods for himself or his friends is not regulated by the market in the same way.

Marx distinguishes between concrete labor that produces use values and abstract labor that produces value.

Concrete labor is the labor that is actually performed. The real problem in Marxist value theory is to determine how actual concrete labor—real world human labor—is converted through the process of exchange of the products of that labor into abstract human labor.

One person can produce far more of a commodity of a given quality in a given amount of time than another person. People produce commodities with different use values involving different types of labor. No two people labor in exactly the same way or with the same productivity. Nor do they labor with the same productivity at all times. Some people work better in the morning than they do in the afternoon.

Does a person who takes more time than average to produce a given commodity of a given quality produce more value than a person who can produce the commodity in the average amount of time?

The case of a lazy shoemaker is often given to illustrate this point. Suppose in a given epoch under average conditions of production a shoemaker of average skill and industriousness can make one pair of shoes per hour. Assuming the workday is eight hours, the average shoemaker can make eight pairs of shoes per day.

But our lazy shoemaker makes only one pair of shoes every two hours, or only four shoes in an eight-hour workday. Does a pair of shoes of a given quality that takes two hours to produce by our lazy shoemaker represent twice the value of a pair of shoes made by an average shoemaker?

No, what Marx called the individual value of a pair of shoes made by the lazy shoemaker represents two hours of labor, but its social value is still only one hour of labor. In the marketplace, our shoemaker can’t sell the pair of shoes for twice the price simply because he or she is lazy. Therefore, over an eight-hour workday our lazy shoemaker is wasting four hours out of every eight hours worked. Of every 40 hours of concrete labor our lazy shoemaker performs, 20 hours consists of socially unnecessary labor.

Things would be no different if instead of a lazy shoemaker we had a lazy gold miner who produces the commodity whose use value is to serve as the money commodity. Suppose an average gold miner working under the average conditions of production of a given epoch can produce two ounces of gold in a 40-hour workweek. If a lazy gold miner produces one ouncPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>4123
within marxism itself there is a distinct early modern agricultural revolution which drove the birth of capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries by what became the earliest capitalists, farmers. the technological early modern agricultural revolution led to the creation of the wage laborer in the 18th century and these are the laborers that went on to be the primary commodity in the industrial revolution.

from a marxist standpoint, i think its clear that the industrial revolution led to the single most increase productive ability in humanity, and therefore has the single most impact (good and bad) on our history and society

>>4125
Hmmm, I guess honestly this makes sense. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that mankind even had a collective expectation of constant technological and social progress, before humans assumed all was static, they didn't even realize that there was a time before classes and even agriculture. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that mankind believed that an existence away from their world was not only POSSIBLE but even INEVITABLE

>>3768
please bros i need help

>>3777
Why?

Non-marxist theorizing of the craft of history: Hayden White, John Gaddis

Non-Marxists with big theories of history: Peter Turchin, Michael Mann, various New Institutional Economics types

Historiographies of specific subjects: any collection with a name like "[blackwell|cambridge|etc] [guide|handbook] to [subject] history," there's almost always a chapter with a good overview of the historiography

keeping up with the discipline in general: reviews in AHR, especially those related to theory and method

a nice primary source collection: fritz stern's "varieties of history" collects, essentially, the introductions to leading popular works of history over the last two and a half centuries; most aren't esp *individually* interesting but you get to see certain trends develop in their own words, which is valuable, rather than taking some meta-historiographer's word for it

>>3768
Incidentally, I was wondering about the Whigs today. What would the world be like if Whigs had become hegemonic rather than Libs?

>>4120
Not sure what you mean by this - the Whigs were THE prototypical libs, and "Whiggish history" is a putdown term for history that uncritically celebrates the victory of liberalism.

>>4089
Is that Yoko Onna?

>>4090
yup

Based Frankfurt Schoolians:
>Horkheimer
>Adorno
>Habermas
>Walter Benjamin
>Erich Fromm
>Herbert Marcuse
>Ernst Bloch
did I forget someone?

>>4116
>Marcuse
"Repressive tolerance" was kinda cringe, tbh

let's revive and add to this thread instead of reeeeeing and screeching "read theory" all the time

>>4093
>Read theory
&ltHegel
&ltNietzsche
&ltKant
&ltWilliam James
&ltArendt
Who the fuck made that second one

>>2933
reddit is for cringe Zionist Neolibs, anon.

does this still have value?