"The truth is we live in a “dictatorship of the capitalist class”—that is, ultimately the things they absolutely insist on (such as their ability to continue to rule society) will be enforced through violence whenever necessary, regardless of legality.

Elections cannot be used to end their rule. The undeniable proof of this is the 40+ governments the US military and intelligence have worked to overthrow in the past 100 years, which happens like clockwork whenever some government in the Third World creates too much trouble for US global rule and imperialist profits. An equally clear proof is in the massive, disproportionate, and often illegal repression and murder wielded against domestic movements demanding deep reform whenever they get big enough, even if they are committed to nonviolence.

But since the ruling class are willing to use violence to get their way in some situations, why do they mess around with the electoral system—why don’t they simply always use violence to get everything they want? They don’t always use violence because it is far cheaper, easier, and more stable to use the electoral system to suppress the emergence of revolutionary movements in the population, and even to suppress independent non-revolutionary movements that might cost them profits or weaken their rule."

Interesting framing empire is missing as per usual just as does the last time saudis did something good, mysterious omission from jacobin

Ok so I was offline all last week.

I posted post number 42 here today, a week late – https://hexbear.net/post/3733064 – so we have the chunk carved out for next year's round.

The good news is we are considerably ahead of the curve. If you have to do Week 42 and Week 43 this week because I was offline, that's about 78 pages, not 2 full weeks really.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41 – Week 42

Week 43, Oct 21-27 – Chapter 31, Chapter 32, and Chapter 33 of Volume III

Chapter 31 is called 'Money-Capital and Real Capital. II'

Chapter 32 is called 'Money-Capital and Real Capital. III'

Chapter 33 is called 'The Medium of Circulation in the Credit System'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41

Week 42 – Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of Volume III

Chapter 29 is called 'Component Parts of Bank Capital'

Chapter 30 is called 'Money-Capital and Real Capital: Part 1' (note that, only part 1; everything under the heading 'Transformation of Money into Loan Capital' is for next week)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Comrades!

It seems like maybe something happened to @Vampire@hexbear.net and so, in the interim I guess someone needs to post the thread so we can all discuss. Feel free to suggest changes here, I'm not trying to assume I know what the plan was, just trying to keep us going until they return.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40 – Week 41

I think it may be wise to talk about how to proceed in the event that something prevents their speedy return, obviously we're not giving up this late in the game so a plan-B for going forward is probably for the best.

Feel free to delete or replace this when you return, Vampire, and I salute you for your effort all year to keep us going.

As far as discussion, there wasn't a post for last week, so if anyone has thoughts on bank capital (I read 29-31, it seemed about the right length) I'd be happy to hear them. I'm doing 32-33 this week, I dunno if that's too short but adding 34 made it seem really long.

If it seems like I have the pacing off I can change that, just let me know.

I've read a few of their books over the years and greatly enjoyed them; like October by China Miéville, Half-Earth Socialism by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. Kickstarter seems to be going pretty well. I think I will support them by buying some ebooks.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39 – Week 40

Week 41, Oct 7-13 – Chapter 26, Chapter 27, and Chapter 28 of Volume III

Chapter 26 is called 'Accumulation of Money-Capital. Its Influence on the Interest Rate'

Chapter 27 is called 'The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production'

Chapter 28 is called 'Medium of Circulation and Capital; Views of Tooke and Fullarton'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Expecting a video on Pete Buttigieg's dad next.

Among the whites in the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people.

That quote is from the Little Red Book.

That's the sort of thing I am looking for. Is there more up-to-date Chinese Thought on intersectionality or are they totally materialist?

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly.

This week's reading is shorter than most.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38 – Week 39

Week 40, Sept 30-Oct 6 – Chapter 24 and Chapter 25 of Volume III

Chapter 24 is called 'Externalisation of the Relations of Capital in the Form of Interest-Bearing Capital'

Chapter 25 is called 'Credit and Fictitious Capital'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

👍 or 👎?

I'm surprised that it took me this long to stumble on this book, by chance, and that it's not mentioned anywhere when looking for introductory reading. Everyone seems to compile their own reading list on introducing people to ML, but no one mentions that the CPSU went to great lengths to create their own "definitive" introduction. Which kinda begs the question why is it not mentioned (seemingly) anywhere?

I remember reading or watching something that I can no longer find about how US public education creates a false economy for its students by its use of numeric grades which they accumulate throughout their schooling and how these grades are a kind of currency exchanged for being "good students."

I don't know if "false economy" is the correct term though. The wiki says:

a false economy or hallucinated economy is an action that does save money at the beginning but which, over a longer period of time, results in more money being spent or wasted than being saved.

But this is more about economizing as opposed to a broader concept of "fake" economy with a fake currency that incentivizes certain behaviors over others. Perhaps these are short-term over long-term behaviors (like in the wiki above) or that the grades can only measure limited aspects of students performance but are a reification of subjective performance into absolute worth or like Goodhart's law the grades are a key performance indicator (KPI) and don't actually measure what they should be measuring. The topic itself isn't strictly about education and can applied more broadly.

Does anyone know if there is a better term or if I'm off base and completely wrong?

I'm trying to typeset "State and Revolution" in german and a lot of sources use a kind of double emphasis. E.g. marxists.org has cursive and bold and cursive. These seem to largely match up with the german translation from 1972 where there is cursive and c u r s i v e   w i t h   l a r g e   k e r n i n g. This makes the text very weird to read and there doesn't seem to be a proper rhyme or reason to when super-emphasis is used.

~~If I compare this with the original I cannot make out any such emphasis, there seems to be l a r g e   k e r n i n g on some words, that might match up but
a) there doesn't seem to be two types of emphasis
b) large kerning can often be an artifact of stretching the line to fit the block
c) I don't know russian and can barely read cyrillic so maybe I'm I'm imagining things.~~

Not an original, if one has a link to one I would appreciate it. Or 1,500€, either will do...

Basically I would like to do away with the strong emphasis and just use one type of emphasis, cursive of course, like Knuth intended when he blessed us with T~E~X, but would like someone to confirm whether there is a proper reason for this or if it's present in the original before I do.

Posting in /c/theory because it's about books or something I don't know, I'll let the mods sort it out.

Couldn't find any such emphasis in any other translation, even an old 1926 doesn't have it so it's gone from "my" edition. Fairly sure it's a weird choice the typesetter made that got copied and then spread. Goes to show how little technicalities like proper spacing between letters can make a great difference in how a text is interpreted and why proper typesetting is crucial.

While perhaps more important in literary circles than political, Frederic Jameson is a very important Marxist who died today.

I heard someone once say that Jameson is probably singularly responsible for keeping American Marxism on life support during the interregnum by hiding it in the English department. Kind of wild to think that the former now has life again while the latter isn't going to surivive

While I don't want to suggest a formal reading club, I wonder if we might just provide some Jameson quotations and our own glosses on them in honor of an important comrade (even if he was, at the end of the day, just an academic and not a revolutionary).

To start, I'll provide perhaps one of the most famous (and important) bits from The Political Unconscious:

History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious which has been argued here, a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or "vision," some new content, but as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an "absent cause."

Here, I think in somewhat dense language, Jameson is really trying to promote history to some term beyond historicity. To put it another way, Jameson's capital "H" History here is the material world before its interpretation by human agents. I think this is borne out by the next (and more famous line):

Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.

Emphasis is mine here. I think that really this gets to Jameson's conception of what material reality is - it's in some sense "beyond" any individual (or even collective) agency but nevertheless we act within and upon it. There's a kind of screen (the screen of Interpretation or representation, which the preceding chapter discusses) that always prohibits our real access to "History" that we are nevertheless part of and embedded in.

Anyway, I'd love to see some other passages from comrades. I'll post a couple more as well as I procrastinate this week.

RIP to a real one. Abusing my mod powers to sticky this, since he was influential for me.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 35 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37 – Week 38

Week 39, Sept 23-29 – Chapter 22 and Chapter 23 of Volume III

Chapter 22 is called 'Division of Profit. Rate of Interest. Natural Rate of Interest.'

Chapter 23 is called 'Interest and Profit of Enterprise'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week. However, we're a bit ahead of the curve right now, and can slow down to about 35 pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – Week 16 – Week 17 – Week 18 – Week 19 – Week 20 – Week 21 – Week 22 – Week 23 – Week 24 – Week 25 – Week 26 – Week 27 – Week 28 – Week 29 – Week 30 – Week 31 – Week 32 – Week 33 – Week 34 – Week 35 – Week 36 – Week 37

Week 38, Sept 16-22 – Chapters 20 and 21 of Volume III.

Chapter 20 is called 'Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital'

Chapter 21 is called 'Interest-Bearing Capital'

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.