devils_dust [none/use name]

Yes, no problem

Can you add me again when reading volume 3? That’s the one I missed last year

Do you happen to remember the name of the episode? Would like to show this to a few friends

Call me ignorant if you want, but I did not know the Barclays bank was founded by literal slavers. Not surprising in hindsight but definitely something I’ll keep in mind. Always thought finance was a sophisticated way of enslaving people (especially after reading Debt), but this makes it even more obvious.

Comrade, just want to say thanks a lot for this. I’ll digest it and try to post a proper response, I just can’t say it’ll be soon, but I’ll do it

I picked it up and couldn’t take my eyes off the page. Maybe others here are better acquainted with this development framework, but Rodney put it so eloquently, I’m still awed.

The book is obviously focused on Africa but IMHO the framework from chapter 1 applies (in different degrees) to anywhere in the imperial periphery.

This right here.

Story time: a former coworker told me the story of when he decided to leave business consulting for anything that did not involve corpos. He did a lot of extra hours into a supposedly important report that was to be read in a meeting over the weekend. Upon delivering it, his boss read it for 10 seconds and put it in the shredder right away, with a malicious grin.

Most of corporate “work” is basically corporate courting, with its own set of meaningless rituals. Unfortunately Graber isn’t here to expand on it, but for whoever feels like it, IMHO this idea would be a nice follow-up to BS Jobs.

It depends a lot on the context. Degrowth in the imperial core? Sure. In the periphery? Hell nah

There was a relatively recent study about the responsibility about climate change that puts the ratio between north / south countries at 9:1, see https://globalinequality.org/responsibility-for-climate-breakdown/ for further references.

I am still reading and waiting for comments, and I intend to write some thoughts down after some reflection, but Capital volume 2 is hard, comrade.

Gotcha, seems like a similar trajectory to many comrades who were more liberal - when they figure out the end result of “free” market competition it’s almost a straight line towards Marx

there was this weird phase in US anarchism, where a whole lot of anarcho-capitalists finally started becoming anti-capitalist (which is good of course) and they wrote a whole book about it like they just personally came up with the idea capitalism is bad for the first time ever

Can you give more details on these people and this book? I always found ancaps very ideologically incoherent, wondering how they got around to reinventing Marxism using their own theory

Capital volume 2 is such a change of tone and pace that almost made me give up. Volume 1 is very readable, especially after the hard first chapters. Volume 2 feels like it’s back to that style, but for the entire book.

Also using Emacs. If you are a dev magit is another must have. Even if there was a decent substitute for it (which I doubt - saw a lot of IDE churn and Emacs was very capable of keeping up with the times) I’d still use it just to use it and Org-mode.

My version has that quote as “[The banking system] presents indeed the form of common bookkeeping and distribution of the means of production on a social scale, but only the form”.

From what I could understand it is about how that information could be used in a socialized (“general”) economy for the benefit of all, but in practice conforms to the whims of Big Capital (the “private”).