saltphil

[saltphil]

My writing on Women, the State, and Revolution.

Wendy Goldman’s Women, the State, and Revolution is a thorough analysis of the circumstances of women during the 1920s USSR, with a focus on the state’s attempts to create legal and economic gender equality. Space is also dedicated to the condition of children, focusing on children who lived on the street, and to the ultimate fate of Bolshevik attempts at radical reform in the 1930s. Throughout the book, the contrast between the radicalism of the Bolshevik imagination and the limits of what was possible under the material conditions of the time is a constant theme, as repeated attempts at reform were challenged by the poverty and “backwardness” of the USSR.

Goldman begins with a brief summary of feminist history up to the 1920s, with a specific focus on Marx and Engels. The most important idea here is that the context of social relations is determined by the economic relations of the time. The shift from tribal society to feudal and agricultural societies reduced women to a subservient role, and the imagination of historical ‘feminists’ was consequently limited. Only with the advent of the capitalist system could questions of women’s liberation be raised and discussed, and in Marx and Engels’ view, only with the advent of socialism could they be answered. Upon the success of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks quickly established the equal rights of men and women under the law, a legal stride forward that the rest of the world still struggled with. The socialist promise of economic equality would be far more challenging to deliver.

Goldman splits the Bolshevik program for women and families into four major interconnected components: the liberation of women through waged labor, the replacement of marriage with a free union based on mutual love and respect, the socialization of household labor, and the withering away of the family. Arguably the most essential of these was waged labor, as the Bolsheviks identified women’s dependence on their husbands as a cause of many of the issues women faced. War communism suggested a positive outlook for women, as men left to fight the civil war and women took their place in the factories, but this would prove to be short lived. After the conclusion of the war and the establishment of NEP, unemployment skyrocketed and men returned to take their jobs back. The ideal of women as wage workers, independent from their husbands, would not be realized in the 1920s.

The Bolsheviks introduced civil marriage largely as a shot at the church, and many of them ultimately believed that marriage would become unnecessary. Romantic and sexual unions between men and women (and only between men and women) would be based on mutual affection and respect, and there would be no need for the intrusion of the state into these private affairs. In the same vein, the Bolsheviks legalized no-fault divorce as a means of ending bad unions. This utopian view ran into the unfortunate reality of women’s economic situation, where despite the efforts of the party, they were still overwhelmingly dependent on their husbands. The Bolsheviks were forced to enact a system of alimony to allow dependent wives who had been abandoned by their husband, often with children, to extract economic support. This system was overburdened and ineffective, often running up against the simple issue that men were too poor to support their ex-wives and children, especially if they took another wife. The result was devastating for women and children.

The Bolsheviks also hoped to socialize all housework, with domestic labor being communalized compensated instead of being done by unpaid housewives. While this ideal was enacted partially during war communism, after NEP was established, it became clear that it was simply too expensive to socialize housework in this way. The “subsidy” of unpaid housework by women was too costly to remove.

Most radically, the Bolsheviks predicted that in time the family would wither away as various functions of it were replaced by the state. Most crucially, they hoped to socialize childcare, placing children in homes that would raise them collectively. This ran into the same issue that socializing of housework did. The resources to create massive state programs to raise children did not exist in the 1920s USSR. NEP gutted funding for social services, and amidst the insufficiency of what remained, Bolsheviks were forced to return to the family as a means of raising children the state could not care for. Adoption, initially outlawed, was reintroduced.

Goldman dedicates the final section of the book to the 1930s USSR and the brutal end of the libertarian dreams of the 1920s. Women finally achieved near-equal participation in the labor force, but only after real wages had fallen so significantly that a married couple’s combined salary would only purchase as much as a single man’s salary in the 1920s. Marriage was strengthened, divorce made more challenging, and legal punishments for failing to pay alimony became more punitive. The family returned for good as an essential labor unit, irreplaceable in its economic value. Abortion was outlawed, and the jurists and theorists who advocated for more radical, libertarian ideals for women and families were purged. While equal participation in the labor force did change the power balance between men and women, the changes crushed the idyllic hopes of the 1920s, and they would not be resurrected.

Women, the State, and Revolution is thorough, exacting, and relentless in driving home its core point: it is impossible to radically change the social relations between men and women without the prerequisite economic shifts. No-fault divorce for women without economic equality for women is not freedom so much as yet another way they can be exploited, equality in sexual relations between men and women is impossible while no effective contraception exists, the liberation of the peasant women is intractable while the household remains the primary unit of production, and the withering away of the family is little more than a distant dream while thousands of children that the state cannot care for walk the streets. This is not to say that Goldman condemns the Bolsheviks; she acknowledges the incredible strides forward in legal equality, the legalization of abortion, and the care the legal system took in its attempts to handle divorce and child criminality. But the reality of the incredible poverty of the 1920s USSR was inescapable, and as a result, the set of radical Bolshevik ideals aimed at reimagining the role of women and the family failed.

#title: women the state and revolution #communism #post by: vacuouslyfalse #text by: wendy goldman #russia #politics

[saltphil]

Book review notes: Not One Inch by M.E. Sarotte

- pro-NATO, but qualifiedly so, and lays primary responsibility for what’s going on today at the feet of US internal politics - Eastern Europe’s calculus in the 90s: Russia simultaneously too strong to handle with a regional alliance/weak enough to provoke with unapologetic pro-US stance? - Chechen war, Russia’s horrible decision + abuse of force and the now-forgotten fallout of that in Eastern European capitals; Russian nationalism an enduring force in the 90s, Yeltsin a true believer if a moderate one, contra later Putinist myth of 90s leadership being “liberal sellouts” (both have been economic compradors) - Balkan wars: mixed bag, stoked Russian nationalism further, but gave a practical model of local cooperation - Partnership for Peace failure; electoral politics leading US to inconsistent stance + no-breaks NATO expansion; Russian leadership then assumed PfP was a sham all along - US triumphalism esp. in the early 90s on the whole; Clinton somewhat understanding of a need to find rapprochement with Russia, still too dependent on Republican hawks and aggressively short-termist not to send Yeltsin down a path of increasing authoritarianism + discrediting rapprochement on the Russian side (FM Kozyrev particularly demonized by hardliners) - ratchet effect where supporting unconditional NATO expansion was a costless status-quo move in US politics, and no electoral incentives to handle Russia more carefully - some conclusions (such as the potential for detente with Russia) void in light of Ukraine war? especially the praise for French/German wisdom and moderation aged poorly - facile throwaway mention on a need for further “partnerships” in Asia and elsewhere; author cites examples like Uzbekistan setting up NATO-compatible airfields that ended up useful in taking out Osama bin Laden… given shelter by Pakistan, another nominal US “ally”

Sarotte’s primary thesis is that the new cold war has been set up and primed more by leaders’ decisions than inevitable structural factors. (Note: look at Turkey! pursues own interests aggressively, did a major ideological turnaround due to Erdogan’s takeover, frequently at odds with US and especially the EU; still a key NATO member)

I couldn’t expand this into a real review because I’m dying of stress, but I might if you tip me, and I’ll post more history/IR stuff too

#reviews #post by: multiheaded1793 #text by: m. e. sarotte #eastern europe #geopolitics #nato #russia #united states #title: not one inch

[saltphil]

America's most embarrassing political exile until Edward Snowden.

#reviews #post by: inverarity #text by: frank brady #Biography: Bobby Fischer #chess #chess history #title: Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall

[saltphil]

This book is probably one of the best war memoirs written by someone who wasn't a soldier and wasn't there.

#reviews #post by: inverarity #text by: mark bowden #Somalia #Somali Civil War #U.S. military history #War #title: black hawk down

[saltphil]

I am now on presidential biography #11. James K. Polk followed John Tyler and preceded Zachary Taylor, and if all three of them are just names you barely remember from U.S. history, you're not alone. Borneman begins and ends this biography of the 11th president by arguing that Polk was in fact one of the GOATs. He supports this with polls of historians, beginning with Arthur Schlesinger, who consistently rank Polk among the top ten U.S. presidents. This might be surprising considering who he typically shares the list with: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, etc. Those are A-list presidents, while Polk is just another early 19th century dude who warmed the Oval Office chair before Lincoln. But Borneman makes a convincing case that, by the criteria by which a president's effectiveness is measured, Polk was actually pretty darn effective. That didn't make him particularly interesting, though. Walter Borneman, a historian, tries with Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, and I came away from this book more educated and largely agreeing with the arguments Borneman makes about Polk's significance, but still... Polk was no Washington or Lincoln, or even a Johnson.

#reviews #post by: inverarity #text by: walter r. borneman #biography: james k. polk #U.S. history #U.S. presidents #title: polk: the man who transformed the presidency and america

[saltphil]

I first read Lord of the Rings in...seventh grade? The summer between seventh and eight grade, I think. I can't recall if this was before or after I had seen the movies. Possibly before? I had already read the Hobbit by this point, accompanied by the surprisingly good video game which I found for 5 bucks on the clearance rack at T.J. Maxx, and if I had a dime for every meaningful computer game of early-adolescence found on said rack I would have 20 cents. Not a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.)

This is a long way of saying that it has been a very long time since I have properly read Lord of the Rings. I know I tried a reread a few (read: probably 6 or 7) years ago and ended up stalled around Midgewater. My Hobbit re-read in the impossible halcyon days of 2018 was quite enjoyable, and I have finally decided to follow it up.

#post by: dan throne of salt #text by: j. r. r. tolkien #fantasy literature #literature #j. r. r. tolkien #high fantasy #title: the fellowship of the ring #title: the two towers #title: the return of the king #title: the lord of the rings

[saltphil]

Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War is aptly titled for a memoir that narrates the waves of death that washed over Iraq and Afghanistan in this new century. Readers today might be surprised to learn that the book was published in 2006. Filkins worked as a conflict journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times first in Afghanistan (from 1999 to 2003) and then in Iraq (from 2003 to 2005).  The book is a masterly crafted man-on-the-scene account of what the words “civil war” actually mean.

#post by: Tanner Greer #text by: Dexter Filkins #Afghanistan #civil wars #Iraq #U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan #U.S. Invasion of Iraq #U.S. military history #United States #war #War on Terror #title: The Forever War

[saltphil]

Having read several books about serial killers, I was struck again by just how banal and pathetic most of them are. There are very few Hannibal Lecters or Norman Bates. Instead, most of these guys are dimwitted losers with sad lives. [...] He fancied himself a big man in his tiny pond as a Democratic precinct captain. but he was just a small time contractor with a conviction and a divorce in his past and nothing to speak of in his future, a delusional sociopath who, as his lawyer repeatedly reminds us, never seemed to grasp that he was not the hero of his story and he was not in control of it. He was a deeply closeted homosexual still trying to please his late father, and when it all came out, he proceeded to talk to anyone who'd listen to him, including the cops. His lawyer, of course, tried to get him to shut up, but Gacy was not exactly a cooperative or sharp client.

#post by: inverarity #text by: sam l. amirante #text by: danny broderick #biography: john wayne gacy #crime #history #serial killers #title: john wayne gacy #yes i know it's not really a biography #but this is how my filing system operates

[saltphil]

#reviews #post by: inverarity #text by: marcus aurelius #ethics #philosophy #stoicism #title: meditations

[saltphil]

Ansary's thesis is that while today, both Muslims and Westerners speak of "the West" and "Islam" as two opposing global forces that have been at odds throughout history, in fact they have until recently existed in almost completely separate worlds. Even during the height of the Crusades, Muslims mostly regarded Europeans as annoying barbarians chewing at the edges of the Holy Land. So Ansary tells the story of world history from the perspective of the Muslim world, a perspective in which Europeans and Christendom were only minor players until recently.

#reviews #post by: inverarity #text by: tamim ansary #history #islam #mythology and religion #title: destiny disrupted

[saltphil]

Highlights — Salt

Highlighted passages from Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky.

Introduction

My rock lived by its own rules. When friends stopped by, I told them the rock was salt, and they would delicately lick a corner and verify that it tasted just like salt. Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this.

The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the world salacious.

One Hundred and One Uses for Diamond Crystal Salt — keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; making ice cream freeze; whipping cream rapidly; getting more heat out of boiled water; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; sealing cracks; putting out grease fires; making candles dripless; keeping cut flowers fresh; killing poison ivy; and treating dyspepsia, sprains, sore throats, and earaches.

A French folktale relates the story of a princess who declares to her father, “I love you like salt,” and he, angered by the slight, banishes her from the kingdom. Only later when he is denied salt does he realize its value and therefore the depth of his daughter’s love.

In Afro-Caribbean culture, salt’s ability to break spells is not limited to evil spirits, Salt is not eaten at ritual meals because it will keep all the spirits away.

Medieval European etiquette paid a great deal of attention to how salt was touched at the table—with the tip of a knife and never by hand.

Wherever records exist of humans in different stages of development, as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, it is generally found that hunter tribes neither made nor traded for salt but agricultural tribes did.

Keep reading

#post by: me #text by: mark kurlansky #highlighted passages #cuisine #history #title: salt: a world history

[saltphil]

Sadly, Wrong on Porn

My impression so far of TLP’s “Sadly Porn” is “I agree, or at least find insightful, all the parts that aren’t about porn.” However, given the title, that’s quite the caveat.

(Though admittedly a lot of what remains is just top level Lacan stuff that you already get from reading Zizek, SMG, or even myself. “Whether or not a Creator exists, our idea of G-d is a psychological projection of what we imagine is judging us, and we often base our actions on this imaginary judge more than on what effectively solves our problems.” Yes.)

So I’m putting this behind the jump for people who don’t want to read a lot of porn commentary.

Keep reading

#post by: bambamramfan #text by: blackbeard #grand unified theories of culture #philosophy #title: sadly porn

[saltphil]

Scott wrote a decent review of The Last Psychiatrist’s Book. I bounced off TLP long ago and don’t have much to say about the book in particular. I just wanted to follow up on a bit Scott tangents onto:

Antimemetics is its less well-known (ha!) cousin, the study of ideas optimized not to spread. “But I can’t think of any ideas like that!” Exactly. A low-grade antimeme is merely boring. A medium-grade antimeme is invisible in plain sight. A high-grade antimeme is worst of all; you can attend an entire college course about one, come out the end thinking “man, that was a good course”, get an A+, and still not get it at all.

…

A lot of Sadly, Porn feels like a guy trying to cram an antimeme into your head. Psychoanalysis is about defense mechanisms; you actually like Shel Silverstein books because they speak to your secret desire to kill your father and marry your mother (or whatever), but you’re horrified by that desire and want to repress it. The Shel Silverstein book gives you some sort of protective cover, hides it under ten layers of symbolism and misdirection. You can say something like “the job of a literary critic is to reveal the secret desire the work is speaking to”, but if your brain wants it hidden so bad that it’s willing to use ten layers of misdirection, probably saying “hey, the hidden desire is that you want to kill your father and marry your mother, okay?” isn’t going to work.

(just to be clear, Teach isn’t arguing that kill-your-father-marry-your-mother is a real secret desire; I think he even claims that this is one a misinterpretation/misdirection that society invented in order to defend against the real meaning of Freud)

This might sound silly to some so I wanted to highlight how incredibly common it is.

Scott is describing works that are respected, loved, even popular yet no one can agree on what they mean.

For instance Hegel. He’s definitely considered a very serious philosopher (unlike the blogger obsessed with porn) and really the foundation to Marx and a great deal of the twentieth century.

But his main texts are nearly unreadable, and philosophers, to this day, can make a name for themselves by writing a good and original interpretation of Hegel. This is in fact how Slajov Zizek first got his start.

The same goes for Marx, who had some zingers but also had some very dense text that to this day left wing scholars are still interpreting.

Is the Bible like this? (Scott mentions Revelations and Sadly, Porn itself interprets the gospels.) Well really the various scriptures have a spectrum for this. On one end you have Protestants believing every man can have a bible in his home and if you have need of answers you can open it and receive it’s simple wisdom. On the other end you have the study of the Torah, which thousands of years later new Rabbis are making a name for themselves finding new interpretations.

Freud was like this. Some of his ideas were highly memetic and we all know them by now, but he wrote a lot and the first sixty years of psychiatry were really different psychologists justifying themselves by saying it was an interpretation of Freud. Lacan himself did this. And Lacan is so convoluted that psychoanalysts continue to offer their interpretations of him - including Zizek and TLP.

… I note that already, while having no intention of reading “Sadly, Porn” myself, I have come across four very thorough and long reviews of it explaining to me what the book “means.” And they definitely are not saying the same things.

Is this all nothing? Is it purely taking a text of random gibberish, and projecting your own thoughts onto it? It’s hard to prove that it’s not.

But consider whether I should read a non-fiction book my friends like. I ask them to summarize it in a sentence for me. If they can’t, how can I know whether to read it, time is finite, so I don’t. But if they do summarize it - now I have the book encapsulated in a much shorter form. Time is finite, why would I bother to read it then?

True sources of knowledge have to be somehow irreducible or else they could be something else.

#post by: bambamramfan #post by: scott alexander #text by: blackbeard #grand unified theories of culture #philosophy #title: sadly porn

[saltphil]

Highlights — Roles of the Northern Goddess

Highlighted passages from Roles of the Northern Goddess, by Hilda Ellis Davidson.

Introduction

Between the seventh and the third millennium BC, ending in the early Neolithic period, she [Marija Gimbutas] sees the goddess as the accepted symbol of birth and death, fertility and resurrection, ruling as the main supernatural power in a peaceful matriarchal society, until the Indo-Europeans with their militant male deities and supreme sky god destroyed it. She links the cult of the goddess with the moon, and with a large number of symbols used by early peoples, such as rounded vessels, sets of lines thought to indicate water, circles, spirals, lozenges, and various linear patterns. Other early symbols which she associates with the goddess are figures of living creatures: birds, snakes, fish, frogs, bees, hedgehogs, and bears.

A number of impressive standing stones, the ‘statue menhirs’ of Brittany and Portugal, with staring eyes, small breasts and many-stranged necklaces, have been interpreted as female guardians of the land of the dead.

It was part of the duty of the women of the community to rear the young and to prepare young girls for marriage and childbirth, while it was they too who tended sick and elderly people, and made ready the dead for the final rites of burial or cremation.

Snorri himself in Ynglinga Saga remarks casually that Freyja alone of the gods still lives.

A. Ross: “Powerful female deities, when they ceased to be actively propotiated, became embedded in the folk memory and perpetuated in the tales and especially in the topographical legends of the country.”

Particularly fruitful fields are those legends about hunting from forest and mountain areas, traditions of the spinning rooms where legends and traditional lore were passed on to young girls in each generation, and local legends about women saints in the Middle Ages.

Keep reading

#post by: me #text by: hilda ellis davidson #highlighted passages #anthropology #comparative mythology #european mythology #mythology and religion #title: roles of the northern goddess

[saltphil]

Unlike the utopian future of the Star Trek universe, Tiptree’s science fiction stories tend to be dark and pessimistic, often exploring the inexorable force of biological determinism and the futility of existence as self-aware individuals. Her tales force me to wonder: Are we as human beings ultimately slaves to our biology? Despite our intelligence, are we doomed to behave like other creatures, to overwhelm the carrying capacity of our surroundings until we experience precipitous plunges in population as a species? Although Love features no human characters, it provides an opportunity to ruminate upon these very important questions through the perspective of Moggadeet, a terrifying yet lovable and sympathetic alien.

#post by: Isaac Yuen #text by: James Tiptree Jr. #text by: Alice Sheldon #fiction #Free Will and Agency #literature #science fiction #weird alien shit

[saltphil]

When a reviewer tells me about what I’m going to experience and what excellent things the author is going to do, it disrupts the reading process for me, makes the things mentioned in the review stand out too boldly, interfering with the craftsmanship of a good story in which the author has taken great pains to give each beat just the right amount of emphasis, no more, no less.  The memory of the review in my mind makes it like a used book which someone has gone through with highlighter, which can be fascinating as a window on a fellow reader, and delightful for a reread, but it isn’t what I want on first meeting a new text, which in my ideal world consists of me, the reader, placing myself wholly and directly in the hands of the author, with the editor’s touch there too to help spot us along the way.

#post by: Ada Palmer #post by: ex urbe #text by: Ruthanna Emrys #fiction #H. P. Lovecraft #lovecraftian fiction #science fiction #title: The Litany of Earth

[saltphil]

I don't like cars. Watching the world go by through a car window is like watching television. You're too protected.

There's a book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig. It's about a father-son motorcycle trip. My dad and I liked it so the summer before college I proposed we do a father-son motorcycle trip just like in the book.

Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about being one with your machines. Motorcycles are like bicycles and Arch Linux. You're constantly maintaining your machine. It breaks. You fix it. It breaks again. You fix it again. They crash a lot when you're starting out.

My dad lives by the motto "It's not an adventure if you know you're coming home alive."

#post by: lsusr #text by: tahir shah #fiction #personal tale #title: sorcerer's apprentice