That's fair, I was trying to engage with xhs's ideas.

As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.

And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.

Please can you correct my understanding: Modern day China has a bureaucratic class, Mao has noted the tendency toward a new bureaucratic class, Ancient China had a bureaucratic class, we have not seen the system sustain itself without a cultural revolution.

While, yes, the bureaucratic tendency is real, are we not witnessing the system attempt to renew itself? We are having a discussion over an unsubstantiated article, all we know for sure is that they were removed as part of corruption investigations. We must simply wait and see.

thank you

When I think about Xi's published writings which I saw recently here or on Hexbear described as a bunch of speeches from ribbon cutting ceremonies, is it right to conceive of this as his thought being related to party discipline, strengthening of the party, which can also be seen in his anti-corruption purges? I was reading xiaohongshu's latest post talking about 3 CMC officials being purged - it seems to me both China and America have purged their upper ranks which I think corresponds with the qualitative shifts taking place in warfare at this moment. Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

My current books are Losurdo's Stalin, Age of Capital by Hobsbawm, Wolf Hall, Crime and Punishment, and L'étranger. I find I read most when I'm at a low point, it's the only thing that can occupy my brain.

One thing that interests me about A Black Legend that so far has only been mentioned tangentially is his idea of the second Thirty Years' War. I've been trying to come up with arguments against the author's sobering historiography of Stalin, I've read comments before about the demystifying affect of a dialectical materialist world view and I think I'm having one of those moments where it's sort of clicking in my head the degree to which we live in a world of propaganda.

I think my thoughts are not formed enough for Age of Capital, despite having read Age of Revolution not long before. It is a dry series and indulges very little in unsupported arguments, which makes for long, arduous, and nuanced reading.

Wolf hall is an historical fiction set in 1500's England. We witness the dialectic between Thomas Cromwell's home and political life play out, at an infliction point of the 16th century. We see the effects of worldwide events such as the plague both on him and society. The prose is competent and more interesting than series of books such as Game of Thrones, but not approaching the complexity of books such as war and peace.

Crime and punishment has made me cry a couple of times despite me being 100 pages in.

L'étranger est un roman qui tout le monde lit quand ils sont en train d'apprendre le Français. Le roman est d'aliénation, un sujet ce qu'était dans mon pensées depuis longtemps.

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Hello, does anyone have resources on how I can use AI while keeping brain rot to a minimum?
I abhor how it entices me to talk to it about my feelings or offload critical thinking on it.