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.

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 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

Cheng Enfu

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

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
• good to great tier: John Ross(learningfromchina.net)
• hazy tier: Michael Hudson

Reading List(incomplete)

• America Against America by Wang Huning
• Ludicrous The Unrivaled Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer
• 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/

Keynesianism and the United States Empire + Warmachine

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