we are

Andrew Carnegie: The US should go to war but not colonize

Historians: Someone like Carnegie opposes this war? Are American businessmen anti-imperialist?

J.P Morgan, the Rockefeller and DuPont families, the American Bankers Association, Manufacturers Association, Asiatic Association, and National Association of Manufacturers: No. In fact we need more of this—

Historians: Wow, that's very interesting, anyways Mr Carnegie can you elaborate?

Reading about the Spanish American War has cleared up a lot of my questions about why the US went to war in WW1 surprisingly

How do those correlate?

Just the importance of literal security when doing business. Bullets flying around, ships getting blown up, military mobilization, very hard to make, transport or sell anything in these conditions and that's what lobbyists are constantly complaining about to the McKinley administration, urging him to go and intervene so the war can end already.

Currently reading the WW1 section from Walter LaFeber's The American Century, very good, highly recommended

Hegel is really something

need yalls rundown on ussr and poland. whatever happened there. im sure its been discussed in this section but the search function is trash here

reading him really forces someone to rethink on how to read. the way i’d read him over the months went through so many changes from overestimating him to underestimating him cause his clarity on sense certainty and think i finally got at the right way to read him where i would read a chapter, then read the chapter again but more in depth where i’d read a paragraph think how it fits in the chapter then read each sentence and think how it fits in the paragraph

it’s about time i brush up on the world wars again i guess

I wouldn't necessarily say that. Investment side of tech continues from FIRE industry because there's a key point to understanding investment culture; investors are incredibly stupid. It's important to note that during the .com bubble, while the market was ACTIVELY POPPING, millions were still actively being funneled into failing .com businesses because investors thought the crash was happening in a vacuum, not inherent to their invested business models.

That said, semi-unrelated, but this whole mindset of investors being retards + the modern set of business FIRE/Tech standards is how we ended up with the recent FTX scandal. FTX has likely destroyed a massive institutional interest in crypto, web3, and much of modern fintech as a whole. Not completely, but it's contributed to it.

You will continue to see FIRE money flowing into tech because of one major reason alone; it has to go somewhere. How it manifests within tech is anyone's guess, but you're going to see it one way or another.

The "downsizing" of tech is a complex situation. I would caution saying that tech is truly crashing or popping. What's rather the case is that tech has been largely overvalued and due to overvaluations, tech has been a massively inflated industry thanks to investments, poor management, and lack of standards paired next to variable revenues despite not being profitable. The "downsizing" of most tech is not true downsizing, it's rather a market correction of overvalued businesses coming down from overvaluation to their actual real market cap, but since overvaluation was widely accepted as the norm for almost 2 decades now, this will appear to look like a downsizing or recession for the vast majority of onlookers.

That said, it is also important to note why much of overvaluation exists - modern FIRE investments in tech essentially defy the 1st law of business; investments are not made for profitability. They are made for theoretical return on investment. That return on investment is NOT from revenue. This is why "exit investing" exists; an exit is ONLY one of two things - M&A or IPO. This means that FIRE investors generally do not invest in a business with the idea that the business is even viable to begin with; they invest with the idea of sustaining the business until an exit is possible; a M&A means another company simply absorbs it (thus rendering the business model null), or an IPO replaces the investors' liability with the liabilities of the public, shifting the monetary balance to others. This is why after Elon took over twitter you're suddenly hearing that twitter is financially unsustainable. That's the thing, it ALWAYS has been. That's the secret tech doesn't want you to know. Twitter is post-IPO; that means much of the company has been running on fumes from wide investment + credit for years. The problem is, almost every company in tech is like this. In fact, there is even a term for a company that is actually profitable w/o investment prior to M&A/IPO - a unicorn (alternatively this is used for $1B+ IPOs, but same thing). That is how rare profitability is in big tech - that LITERALLY being profitable is compared to a mythical creature. This gives you an idea of why markets are f***ed - you have entire sectors whose business' wide-spanning monetary policy literally denies the 1st law of (well accepted business) economics; they do not exist to functionally make profit. FIRE also makes up the vast majority of america's wealth

in terms of how ideological power in institutions fits into this, the main issue that tech people are grappling with is how to make something sustainable knowing that tech institutions are not profitable but are propped up by FIRE, which they're trying to decouple themselves from. This is much of why you've seen a renewed push in ideas such as decentralization and anonymity...because the idea is they get just enough funding to make something that they do not need to sustain. If something is decentralized, they believe they can cleanse themselves of handling it as a responsibility. Basically "okay we made it now time to hand it off as a self-sustaining institution". Personally I believe that's delusional but many people do believe this and it is a massive reason why decentralization is so appealing to all these post-libertarian types; the belief they can de-couple themselves from FIRE w/o having to need money to sustain such given lack of central needs. That said, in the short term for alternative centralized institutions, I doubt you will see it as a response to current events; you will see more and more attempts at these alternate institutions pop up over the next few years, but the vast majority will fail due to the profitability problem.

Sounds like I may be making a return to RevLeft soon for the first time in a few years to discuss Althusser from a Maoist perspective. Theyre dropping a two hour episode on Althusser with someone else soon and I’d be doing a follow up episode on it to kind of discuss what I feel like Althusser can contribute to Maoism

Obviously a pretty niche yet simultaneously very broad topic but I guess is there anything that comes to mind that you guys would be interested in hearing about, given what you know and do not know about both Althusser and Maoism?

It’s pretty open ended right now so we’re just kinda brainstorming how to structure it and figure out what research I need to get done beforehand so would love any thoughts

perfect timing been binging their stuff recently

also i have no idea who althusser is so maybe start with that

i think it would be cool to know ur perspectives on maoism and then how althusser informs those perspectives in particular.

there's a lot of maoists with wildly varying ideas on maoism so i think how you came to synthesize althusser's ML principles with maoist ideology would be neat.

also if there's any crit of althusser you have as well

These are great starting points, that you. Will think on these as these type of questions are exactly the sort of general theme I want to go for

I need to get some other research and writing done first, so won’t be out til early 2023.

The episode theyre about to release will likely be a good one to familiarize yourself with Althusser a bit

This is a decent starting point if you want to read something by him that kinda gets at his general project without being as dense as his writings on ideology

@fun forgot to post the link lol marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/lenin-philosophy.htm

i hope you all are ready to hear the term "effective altruism" non-stop for the next 5 years

Maybe you can go into the theses he has in regards to Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (i.e. Representation). Especially in regards to when the Cultural Revolution was happening during the same time, perhaps link the two.

Idk I don't remember s*** about Althusser tbh

Decided to tune back into Matt Christmans stream and it mostly good. He seems to be going through The China Boom by Ho Fung Hung which I've already read (highly recommend) so I don't think I'll be listening to the upcoming streams, but he had went on a nice tangent about Mike Duncan.

Duncan argues that Soviet industrialization was bad because it was more brutal than British industrialization, but Matt points out that the horrors of British primitive accumulation is invisible to Duncan because they happened 5000 miles away in india and while people in Maos China and the USSR could rationalize their suffering with a gigantic increase in their standard of living and the world's strongest social safety net, Indians couldn't.

I'd also add that the Black Book of Communism has a very simple narrative about Communist States and their citizens, about a couple decades in a couple countries. Capitalist primitive accumulation is a web of seemingly unconnected processes by seemingly unconnected actors, spread out around the globe and across centuries.

when it comes to someone like both Christman & Duncan's disagreement or the original argument re: India you're likely going to find yourself wading into the "witch trials & roads paradox" (as its often referred to by Economics & Law Professors) which is essentially the ethical dilemma which you can trace a vast majority of modern ideological splits to

Whats the witch trials paradox

Talking to people who were raised Evangelical Christian I get the feeling it's not even really a religion, makes more sense why they're all so batshit and politicized. I could see some parallels of religious life between myself and normie Christian friends but the evangelical world seems a bit alien.

Me when I vote against Hitler but the President just dissolves parliament and appoints him Chancellor anyways

Me when I vote against Mussolini and but the King just dissolves parliement and appoints him Prime Minister anyways

Me when checking boxes on a piece of paper doesn't stop the ruling class from turning the Democracy machine on and off