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Obviously this kind of argument by credentialing is BS but also 9 times out of 10 they mean they have an undergrad degree.

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Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance by Torkil Lauesen in Monthly Review

Interesting article that gives a brief bio for Emmanuel and a short explanation of his concepts of unequal exchange.

The core of the theory of unequal exchange is the Marxist concept of value.10 It assumes the existence of a global value of labor on one side, and, on the other side, a historical capitalism, which has polarized the world-system into a center and periphery with a correspondingly high- and low-wage level. This difference in the price of labor entails a value transfer, hidden in the price structure when commodities are exchanged between the center and periphery of the world-system. The central point is not the exchange itself, but the difference between the global value of labor and the different prices of labor power.... At the center of Emmanuel’s work is the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the imperative to expand accumulation—to produce more and more commodities—on one side, and on the other side, the inability of the market to absorb the production and hence realize the profit for continued accumulation. The “historical” solution to this contradiction became the development of “unequal exchange.” Through the imperialism of trade, value was transferred from the superexploited proletariat in the periphery of the world system to the center—expanding the power of consumption, hence balancing the expanded accumulation. This “historical solution” was not a cunning plan by capitalism but one generated by the class struggle of the proletariat in Northwestern Europe and North America.

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I hope there is some clarification here. Tereshkova had a solo flight with Vostok 6, accompanying Vostok 5, but although all three women were in an all-female cosmonaut squad, they never flew together on a mission (unfortunately afaik Ponomaryova was never actually on a mission, though several were scheduled and then cancelled).

btw the katy perry/bezos' girlfriend/other four irrelevant billionaires 10 minute space stunt was not the first all female expedition no matter how much they try to market it as such. the first all female mission was in 1963 with soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova, Irina Solovyova and Valentina Ponomaryova - all three of which were working class and had to pass incredibly hard exams to be chosen from 400 potential candidates. just in case we started falling for the propaganda machine again

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Trump’s Tariff Aggression by Prabhat Patnaik (2025) in People's Democracy

It is important for an intellectual position not only to be right but to be right for the right reasons; and the near-universal condemnation of Donald Trump’s aggressive imposition of tariffs, though right, is right for the wrong reasons. A pervasive presumption underlying such condemnation has been that unrestricted trade is a good thing for all concerned; and that Trump, in deviating from this maxim, is being both nasty and stupid. Much of the critique of Trump’s strategy in short is based on an acceptance of the free trade argument that has been handed down from the days of David Ricardo. This argument however is totally wrong. It is based on an acceptance of Say’s Law that states that a capitalist economy can never have a demand constraint, which is palpably absurd. Once we move away from this Law attributed to the “trite M. Say”, as Marx had described him, then it follows that trade policy, that is, whether free trade is pursued or tariffs are imposed, is devised for obtaining a larger market for the producers of one country at the expense of others. Free trade in other words does not necessarily benefit all; and faulting Trump for moving away from free trade amounts to faulting him for the wrong reasons.

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Comparative advantage is racist

Ricardo assumed in his model of comparative advantage that “both countries produce both goods”—indeed his assumption was that “all countries produce all goods”—while showing that specialization and exchange according to comparative cost advantage led to mutual benefit. The material fact was ignored that unit cost of production could not be defined for tropical goods in the cold temperate European countries where the output of such goods was and always will be zero, and hence absolute cost was not definable, let alone comparative cost advantage. The supply from domestic sources of a large range of goods was zero at any price, and this continues to be the case at present. Ricardo’s theory contained a simple material fallacy, the converse fallacy of accident, wherein a special case is assumed (both countries produce both goods) and is used to draw an inference (trade is mutually beneficial) that is then improperly applied to cases where the assumption is not true.17 Since Ricardo’s basic assumption was not true, the inference of mutual benefit did not follow. On the contrary, historical evidence shows that the less powerful country, obliged to specialize in export crops, loses out through area diversion (since augmenting cropped area needs state investment, which is not forthcoming), leading to falling domestic food grains output. It also sees a decline of domestic manufacturing output and an increase in unemployment when it is kept compulsorily open to imports of manufactures, since there is little unused land to absorb those thrown out of work.

Strongly recommend works by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik on the role of agriculture in imperialism.

It seems that your cheap phones are not a god given right but actually a luxury sustained by imperialist inequality after all. Mirá vos.

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With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also an categorizing by subject matter.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

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However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

I guess I really should read this

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statement from mahmoud khalil shared by the center for constitutional rights

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kids don't know about the Storyteller system

Step 1: Have your formative experience of tabletop roleplaying with Dungeons & Dragons.

Step 2: Notice that the rules seem to be fighting you every step of the way when you try to use it to tell certain stories.

Step 3: Rather than interrogating how the game's structural assumptions about how it ought to be played might clash with your own assumptions about how the game's story ought to go, become fixated on the idea that there must be a specific game-mechanical feature of D&D that makes it Bad at Roleplaying™.

Step 4: Identify the existence of character classes as this feature, for some reason.

Step 5: Write your own D&D clone which dispenses with character classes but changes little else, thereby producing a game whose structural assumptions about the shape of play remain at odds with what you actually want to do with it, but which is somehow even worse at making those assumptions transparent to the player.

Step 6: ???

Step 7: Successful crowdfunding campaign!

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Watching Defunctland on Kid Cities and they really built capitalist roleplaying camps for kids where they had to buy insurance and start businesses. Called "Exchange City".

Beyond cold war parody, but they kept going into the 2000s. Wild.

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The Social Formation of the Far Right by Conrad Hamilton in Cosmonaut Magazine

"That capitalism contains within it both patriarchal and anti-patriarchal elements should caution against putting forth any sort of bald teleology regarding its progressive development. It is often taken for granted, for example, that women’s rights will, by some stroke of eschatology, necessarily incline. Anyone who’s been carefully following global politics over the past few decades would know better—one only need look at the stark regression seen in nations such as Afghanistan or Iran since the 1970s. But what recent developments have underscored forcefully for those in the West is that there is no guarantee: that causes which have fallen fallow are susceptible to losing ground, and that the imperatives of the social formation do not respect any linear arc."

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one of those things where you would be tempted to assign it a class character, but which I think is often a matter of culture and temperament

svrsishodnost

@vernadskova and i had a collaborative philosophical discussion on how to exactly translate the concept of svrsishodnost as it lacks any direct translations or similar terms that would be, well, svrsishodni, but in the end comrade sibila and i came to a conclusion:

A way of thinking that takes into account the purpose, the function, the usefulness and the appropriateness of a certain action or an object. To be svrsishodan is to serve a purpose, to have a function and to do it well or well enough. The key is in the subjectively perceived relationship between functionalism and minimalism, balancing them in order to eliminate redundancy, futility, unsuitability. To partake in svrsishodnost is to make do with what one already has; to use what you already have on hand that could perform a desired function, fill a specific purpose satisfactorily enough and to such a degree that it eliminates the need for some other tool that could do a better job but that is now rendered unnecessary given that what you already have works well enough. Svrsishodnost could be understood as minimalism applied in the context of everyday life without creating excess. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about making a judgement about usefulness and necessity required in order to achieve a certain purpose. In a microcosm, it’s about my grandmother’s old coffee grinder that has been sitting in a drawer for years ever since her death because my mother only buys pre-ground coffee, and it’s about the fact that my mother now uses that old coffee grinder in order to grind her pepper. Getting a separate pepper grinder would be much more utilitarian and efficient, but in every day use it is redundant; the old grinder might be harder to clean and it might not do the job perfectly, but it serves its purpose more than well enough in order to be svrsishodan.

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Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (2023)

from Chapter 08, The Rise of Mass Fashion

"A man expects to find daintiness, charm, refinement in the women he know," Woodbury Soap reminded readers in 1922. "And when some unpleasant little detail mars this conception of what a woman should be -- nothing quite effaces his involuntary disappointment."

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Worn: A People's History of Clothing

Cotton

cotton produced by US China India but largely exported by USA

high degree of automation in planting and harvesting

rapid growth of cotton production from 1790 to 1820 (from 1.5 m pounds to 167.5 m pounds)

one million slaves moved south to grow cotton

expansion driven partly by exhaustion of the land by cotton production

Ogallala aquifer and liquid nitrogen used in irrigation water piping systems (runoff)

use of paraquat to wither cotton plants for harvesting

~ 75% of the workforce undocumented, life expectancy 49yo compared to 73yo for Americans

origins of cotton in India and Peru

accumulation of wealth from Rome and west Asia in India due to textile trade

massive increase in textile exports by BEIC from 1600 to 1700, tied into triangle trade

slaves as agriculturalists who didn't make their own cloth, import of cotton cloth from India for slaves

monopoly trading (like retail monopoly) by Brits as demand increased

first factories were spinning mills and then loom factories, labour costs in Britain dropped below India

cotton gin made American cotton viable

increase in coerced cotton production in India due to US civil war, British cloth forcing weavers into agricultural labour, similar to enclosures in England

reliance on purchased grain due to recultivation of cotton led to famine

spinning wheel as a sign of Indian self-reliance

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Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (2023)

Linen

linen as one of the oldest fabrics

losing out to industrialization in the UK, surviving as handicraft in New England, then losing out to textile mills, slavery and cotton

moral/social worth in cleanliness, colonial laundry, bleaching linens in Haiti etc.

coverture and women's lack of property and family rights but customary control of linens

1840s 10% of women in paid labour but made up half of factory workers

absolute poverty of women textile workers

sewing machines as the first complex machines mass produced for consumer market

marketing for sewing machines targeted women

prostitution and garment work rife among poor women

coverture was repealed in the US by 1882, in Canada in the 1970s, (but not even fully, see how coverture applied to Indian status in mixed marriages and still in some areas of tax law and property law)

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Ancient Marxist History by Paul Buhle in Monthly Review.

Interesting review of a book on Thomas Müntzer, a 16th century Christian priest and radical whose work was tied up with the peasant rebellions of the time.

I first ran into him in some book published by Verso that I haven't read, but then weirdly in the Mads Mikkelsen movie Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas, about a kind of early bourgeois rebellion.

It's an interesting little article about understanding class struggle in the 1500s, and I found it ironic that Müntzer and the uprisings were condemned during the Cold War and after.

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New resolution again this year to try to note down when I read a complete piece.