newleftreview.org/I/73/arghiri-emmanuel-white-settler-colonialism-and-the-myth-of-investment-imperialism

reading like 5 different books rn

German ideology still
Basic understanding of the communist party of china
Heavy Radicals: FBI Secret war on America's Maoist

Just got Hobsbawm's "the age of" series, I'm going in

The more I notice, read, learn, the more I realize Bhukarin was right.

u got the physical copy of heavy radicals ?

jakarta method

the info in it definitely deserves to be more well known. well researched. got issues w the author tho def a lib and tends to take non material approaches to exposition sometimes

i'm reading this too actually

to be honest i really want to f***ing finish it as fast as i can. the topic is just so gruesome and emotional, i can feel it tearing at me when i read it.

definitely gonna read a feel-good book after this one

nah just found some pdf

wish i could read on digital

tbh when the repression comes and i have copies of stalin and mao in my room i will be the first to get a bullet in my head

yea its tough to actually be forced to endure the chronological perspective of a genocide but clearly enough that even a non socialist like the author felt the need to quit his job to write the book.

definitely feel that whole "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away ..." mood when im reading it even more when he mentions "crony capitalism" and s***

when he said the crony capitalism i wrote in the side "LIBERAL"

I think Bevins has only become more and more Communist since the publishing of his book, just going off his tweets.

Wasn’t bukharin’s NEP basically what Deng did?

It’s a smart choice that also helps ease the post capitalist socialist state into an orthodox socialist state

the thing is the point of the NEP and New Democracy was to phase out feudal relations, which they both did. There was no need for capitalism more than that, as we seen productive forces develop under Stalin. Guess im a get bit sectarian now.

The whole productive forces argument is the most vulgar mechanical materialist theory there is, you dont reach socialism or communism by just building productive forces, you also gotta change the social relations between people and production, it completely forgoes how the the base and superstructure influence each other ( the base being the primary), and only focuses on how the base influences the superstructure.

I know people like to think that China has their billionaires under control but I seriously doubt thats the case, the leading economist in China Justin Lin Yifu, Yi Gang, Zhang Weiying are all western neoclassical economists who bought into neoliberalism just a not neoliberal world order that is subservient to the USA. The new left movement in China is just a fringe academic movement.

Xi is trying to reverse the course of neoliberalism the mass wealth inequality, and skyrocketing property value with him being harsher on capitalists than the previous leaders, but still the capitalist class amassed a lot of power, and I doubt its under control as much as we'd like to think it is.

This what we gotta do.. turn the tables on these hoes 💯

NEP didnt even last 10 years and was after a world war and a brutal civil war

The NEPmen were never inside the party or politburo

The NEPmen never got to be billionaires

The Soviets did what they could to keep the NEPmen from reaching any power and dropped them like a hot potato very quickly

China wants a 70 to 100 year "NEP" (from to 1978 to 2050 or 2078), has a private business representative in its highest politburo committee, has over 100 billionaires inside the party as well as over 600 billionaires nationwide

Not comparable

Hit em with the BILLIONS

How the World Works by Paul Cockshott

Basically goes from hunter and gatherer to capitalism and socialism,step by step, explaining why each system came to be and switched the way it did like slavery or feudalism

I need to read Cockshott, especially since ive been getting super interested in cybernetics

His main book is Towards A New Socialism which you can find free online

Here he describes how a progress beyond money would look like, a good start to his ideas IMO. It's 25min tho so better take your time

Thanks for the video, one thing that caught my interest was the virtual labour voucher part, do you think crypto can be a gateway to that, of course not in its current form but maybe a potential development.

Mr Cockshott is not so found of crypto-currencies and says it is not useful for what he proposes:

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/bitcoin-is-not-what-socialism-needs

"For people interested in money laundering, tax avoidance and illegal d*** deals Bitcoin has its attractions, but as a model for payment in a socialist system, the infrastructure provided by existing chip and pin cards and card readers is more promising. The essential difference between Marx’s proposed labour accounts and bank notes is that the labour accounts do not circulate. They are credited to people for work done and cancelled out when a worker purchases something from public shops. If you read Bellamy’s utopian socialist book Looking Backward you can find an account of how this was seen as working using 19th century technology. Bellamy imagined a Socialist America in 2000. People had social credit cards, like the punched cards that had recently been invented by Hollerith for data processing. At the start of each month you got a new card with your credits marked on it. You went to public stores to buy stuff and the till physically punched the credits out from your card as it read them. The goods were then dispatched to your house by pneumatic tubes.

The very idea of the credit card actually derives from this utopian socialist literature. But unlike the capitalist credit cards of the actual year 2000 in the USA, there would be no way to carry out private trading with Bellamy’s system. Your credits are non transferable since, the moment you use them they become useless little paper chads in the refuse shoot of the till. No private black market activity is possible without some form of circulating money.

A socialist economy in 2030 would not have to revert to paper credit cards. All that is necessary, once the banks, the means of production and distribution are publicly owned is to alter the software that the banks use. Instead of Euros or Pounds being transfered from your account to Tesco’s account the software would simply cancel your labour credit. The shop, being publicly run would not be a business running for profit, so it would not need to be credited with money. The shop would not buy in goods from a wholesaler because the warehouses and factories that the goods came from would also be publicly run. In consequence there would be no transfer of ownership between factory, warehouse and supermarket, and thus no need for a chain of payments.

Statistics would still have to be collected to see how many hours of labour people were spending on cornflakes or wheat biscuits etc, to make sure that the public factories allocated corresponding amounts of resources to making these products. The same records, in conjunction with stock control would be used to detect pilfering. But there would be no money, and no need for the elaborate protection against mutual cheating that Bitcoin uses. Bitcoin, far from being a model for a cooperative economy actually epitomises a dog eat dog capitalism where nobody cooperates and nobody trusts anyone else."

The labor voucher part is the most important aspect of Cockshott IMO and it is something Marx envisioned in the lower stages of communism aka what we call socialism to transition out of money (see: Critique of the Gotha Programme). Cockshott's entire premise is how to plan with limited labor hours since human lives are not infinite. This is indirectly done under capitalism too since money just is an distorted symbol for labor power - however, there are false incentives under capitalism that rob people of their valuable time.

Under capitalism, automation can be bad because the incentive is money: The capitalist might earn more by hiring poor workers abroad than automating at home. The worker will definitely earn more than when he is unemployed because of automation.

In Cockshott's cybersocialist proposal, automation is good because anything that can lower human labor time is good. The incentives are totally different. There is no incentive to outsource because of low labor costs abroad, nor is there any fear of massive unemployment because the state's explicit goal is that people work as little as possible.

The bourgeoisie's existence verges on the existence of money ("passive income", making money from money etc.), as do all illegal industries. A labor voucher system would be an antidote against both.

Furthermore, it is nonsensical to have money in an business-to-business economy when you have (nearly) full nationalization like in the USSR. It actually is harmful because your currency can be subject to inflation and world markets, even though you are just State Company A selling to State Company B. Also the later Kosygin reforms in the 70s re-introduced the profit motive which was f***ing stupid.

Of course, there are other parameters for planning, like the environment, that are taken into consideration rather than just socially necessary labor time. Cockshott actually shows how you can weigh these and let them flow into planning (called "harmony function").

Another aspect of Cockshott, that I find interesting even though it is not classically ML, is his idea of democratic planning votes and of doing a Athenian radical democracy where sortition (sort of like jury duty but for all areas of politics) is more common than election.

Cybernetic socialism existed before Cockshott of course and there are new guys in Europe and China following in his footsteps.

The USSR was close to implementing cybernetics (Project OGAS) but it was shot down by bureaucrats because it would go against the interests of the republics (since central planning would be more important), the interests of the finance ministry (since money would be phased out), the interests of the industry leaders (since corruption would be harder and accounting would be bulletproof).

Chile tried similar things with Project Cybersyn under Allende, this ended once Pinochet couped.

Cockshott has influences from Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Althusser, De Leon, syndicalism and more. The only thing you could critique him about seriously are his social views but honestly who cares. The guy is a computer scientist and economist. It's like complaining about McDonalds having bad pizzas or whatever