Comrade:Deogeo/Study notes

Assata: An Autobiography

• "Only a fool lets someone else tell them who their enemy is" Assata nails it. The owner-class. Capitalists, CEOs, majority stockholders, big kahunas if you prefer, reproduce on a daily basis their antagonist role in the lives of myself and my fellow comrades.

• I don't have a map for what the socialist revolution in the United States of Amerika will look like, but i know that we need a black messiah to lead the way. in other words, black leadership is absolutely a core pillar that must be continuously strengthened daily. the same must also be said for the latino community. a movement lead by a black lenin and a latino lenin with massive white support is the way. Police must be abolished. they are the primary reasons no new black leaders have emerged since the death of mlk and malcom x.

Capital Vol 1

Chapter 1

• Relative and equivalent exchange value. For some reason Marx chose to name the two sides of a given value relation, eg. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat. The LHS is a relative value and the RHS is the equivalent value. Why?

• Using the simple exchange relation 20 yards of linen = 1 coat (1) again. The basic equation here is equivalence. Any other commodity equivalent to 20 yards of linen is also equivalent to the value of 1 coat. Let 20 yards of linen = a, let 1 coat = b and some third commodity c such that a=b=c (2). The relative value only appears when a 3rd commodity c is present. Suppose through new, more efficient technology, that the same amount of labor-power makes 2a and 2b and c remains unchanged in how much labor power it requires. Equation (1) still holds, but now equation (2) becomes 2a = 2b = c. So the relative value of a and b have dropped, even if their equivalent value is still the same.

Chapter 3

look into section on ottoman empire

Chapter 4

Luna Oi's primer on M-C-M cycle is nearly perfect. It misses the finale of this chapter m-c-m'

Chapter 6

Workers/capital cause the centralization of Labor power. The former by organizing and understanding the importance of labor power. The latter by reducing the number of children workers can have, by reducing the number of workers qualified to operate the means of production. Thus by one way or the other, labor power is centralized until it has sufficient strength to suppress Capital.

State and Revolution

• Chapter 2 the core difference between Marxists and other anticapitalists "It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky's pamphlet, The dictatorship of the proletariat, published in August 1918, i.e., long after the first edition of the present book, is a perfect example of petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and base renunciation of it in deeds, while hypocritically recognizing it in words (see my pamphlet, The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky)."
• Chapter 4 "Engels here approached the interesting boundary line at which consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into socialism and, on the other, demands socialism. For, in order to abolish the state, it is necessary to convert the functions of the civil service into the simple operations of control and accounting that are within the scope and ability of the vast majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single individual. And if careerism is to be abolished completely, it must be made impossible for “honorable” though profitless posts in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to highly lucrative posts in banks or joint-stock companies, as constantly happens in all the freest capitalist countries."
• chapter 5 section 4 the distinction between socialism and communism

• chapter 6 section 2 kautsky

Sino-soviet split

Relevant books http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=AF380EA55971E742D456B81DCE53C0DC https://china.usc.edu/calendar/mao-and-sino-soviet-partnership-1945-1959-new-history https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9781498511667/Mao-Sino-Soviet-Split-1959-1973-New-149851166X/plp http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=9B2636AAB3B45485D9E7D6D853645A0B

Chinese Analysis on Why the Soviet Union Collapsed

https://jamestown.org/program/chinese-analyses-of-soviet-failure-the-party/

Also this jamestown org is a NED cutout.

See also

https://socialistchina.org/2021/06/24/will-china-suffer-the-same-fate-as-the-soviet-union/

Cheng Enfu

https://socialistchina.org/2021/09/06/cheng-enfu-speech-at-the-launch-meeting-of-from-pluripolarity-to-socialism/

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/05/01/five-characteristics-of-neoimperialism/

Michael Parenti

A People's History of Ancient Rome

• Page 190
• Julius Caesar was a reformist. He was Rome's Bernie Sanders. He was the most successful Bernie Sanders the Roman Republic ever had.
• The proletariat are clever in all sorts of ways that historians, due to bourgeois influence, largely miss. And therefore most of us are ignorant of.

Marxist and Soviet History Resources

http://eregime.org/index.php?showtopic=17670

https://archive.org/details/@ismail_badiou

Antonio Gramscii

• For the page on Ideology, use some of Gramscii's writing on the topic

Living Marxists of Note

• William Claire Roberts. https://www.blogger.com/profile/08526758278565458289
• Fantastic tier: the Patnaiks, Cheng Enfu
• good to great tier: John Ross(learningfromchina.net), Ronald Boer
• hazy tier: Michael Hudson

Reading List(incomplete)

• America Against America by Wang Huning
• Ludicrous The Unrivaled Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer (completed, not useful beyond a specific example of what a sham the bourgeosie are)
• The Historical Retrieval and Controversy of Walter Rodney’s Russian Revolution (https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-historical-retrieval-and-controversy-of-walter-rodneys-russian-revolution/
• The Counter-Revolution of 1776
• From Mao to Now: On Chinese Marxism, https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:NewcastleX+MTN101x+1T2017/home
• Lenin: Reply to P. Kievsky, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00b.htm
• The Kievsky mixtape, https://redsails.org/the-kievsky-mixtape/
• Political Economy, A textbook by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/index.htm https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PoliticalEconomy.pdf
• look into Adam Garrie's work
• North Korea Foreign Minister On What Is Needed For Negotiations With US, Adam Garrie, https://web.archive.org/web/20210308133300/https://www.mintpressnews.com/north-korea-foreign-minister-on-what-is-needed-for-negotiations-with-us/
• The Library:DPRK Study Guide page
• Understanding North Korea, Stephen Gowans, https://gowans.blog/2007/03/03/understanding-north-korea/
• Open Veins of Latin America
• Marx's Inferno
• The Black Jacobins
• Night-Vision War and Revolution
• Illusion and Reality
• Lenin Rediscovered
• The Apprentice's Sorcerer
• What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?
• The Sexual Contract
• What Is To be Done by Chernyshevsky (https://redsails.org/why-read-chernyshevsky
  • Why Read Chernyshevsky? https://redsails.org/why-read-chernyshevsky/
• Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer
• Discipline Inspections and the Transformation of Party Authority in China’s Banks (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/43/article/898343/pdf)
• Ronald Boer's useful links: https://roland-theodore-boer.net/useful-links/'
• Lecture mentioned here: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202301/1283772.shtml
• Abou Rijal's substack (https://substack.com/@abourijal)
• Several monthly review pieces, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/what-every-child-should-know-about-marxs-theory-of-value/ and https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/what-do-we-learn-about-capitalism-from-chip-war/ and https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/ and https://monthlyreview.org/2023/12/01/imperialist-propaganda-and-the-ideology-of-the-western-left-intelligentsia/

CPUSA TODAY

Useful article for its collection of CPUSA national members and their historic relations to the webbite crisis. The call to action in the piece is reformist crap. The rest of it is golden.

https://archive.org/details/corruption-in-cpusa/page/n22/mode/1up?view=theater

Keynesianism and the United States Empire + Warmachine

https://monthlyreview.org/2022/04/01/the-political-economy-of-systemic-u-s-militarism-2/

Ecuador

https://www.mintpressnews.com/elections-ecuador-western-media-bias/283696/#.Y-5i-h4W8dg.twitter

Latin America

The Deprogram episode 33, the benjamin norton interview has a fantastic breakdown of the last 75 years of progress, victories and defeats of the various members of the Latin contenent. This episode would serve as an excellent backbone to beef up many of our articles on the countries in that part of the world.

Fascism

What is it?

The open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital. (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s2)

What did the Nazis do to the Germany economy when they took over? What is the banality of Nazi Germany?

https://www.historicly.net/p/the-economy-of-evil

What is new world white culture?

https://juanfitzcarraldo.substack.com/p/theses-on-mexicanism-americanism As an aside, I want to learn spanish!

Fannon

The wretched of the earth

"...once the last settler is killed, shipped home, or assimilated, the minority breed disappears, to be replaced by socialism."

What is the rules-based order?

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1753242956595896477

Chinese economy in 2023

https://twitter.com/orikron/status/1747228493543362656

Why did the USSR fail?

Nia Frome:

toxic masculinity (that is, overemphasis on heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods, overextension in foreign policy, lack of soft power, insufficient attention paid to repairing relations/overcoming divide between state and citizenry, despite stalin's best efforts)

of course the US basically had to lobotomize itself with anticommunism to win the cold war, and even so it wasn't quick enough to succeed before socialism could spore

the first into the breach rarely live to see victory

https://twitter.com/NiaFrome/status/1696345010193445086

Yeminis twitter posts from the end of 2023

https://twitter.com/revolutionaryem/status/1737419003394490421/photo/3