Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Have a seat in the overpriced, sweat-infused Razer™ gaming chair over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!

We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.

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Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.

  • @redtea
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    61 year ago

    It’s similar where I am, btw – I keep an eye out in second hand bookshops and book fairs for the good stuff.

    Some ideas for finding tiny publishers…

    Versobooks and Pluto Press re-publish some classics. In fact, it’s a bit annoying because they don’t always make it clear that they are publishing something that is out of copyright. Sometimes it’s also ‘filtered’ by a modern ‘radical’. An example of both problems in one is a collection of Mao’s essays taken from marxists.org and introduced by Zizek.

    It’s still useful if you know what you’re looking for. Haymarket and Brill also publish some rarer classics, working with the Historical Materialism journal.

    FYI versobooks has just started a new project of translating it’s major texts into Spanish under a Spanish-language wing. It’s a bigger market, but maybe there are plans to do the same for Italian. Just note that verso apparently refused to translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into English (while translating most if not all his other make works) – if that reveals anything about verso’s politics and how it ‘guides’ the English corpus of leftwing thought.

    There’s also Akal, which has published some verso books in Spanish. And Plutón Ediciones has published some Marxist work, like Politzer’s Principios Elementales de Filosofía. Maybe there are similar small Italian publishers that only have websites? It sounds like you’ve already checked and been disappointed, though.

    El Viejo Topo did translate Losurdo’s book on Stalin into Spanish. Maybe they have an Italian partner, which does similar things?

    Strangely, of all publishers, Penguin releases some Marxist classics. Don’t discount the big publishers when looking for some rarer works.

    • @frippa@lemmy.ml
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      71 year ago

      Apparently the most important and prestigious communist press in Italy “editori riuniti(reunited editors)” published a book called (and I translate) :stalinism and nazism: A comparison of dictatorships, this was the largest and best press in the 60s 70s and 80s and now became jacobin-level opportunism

      Anyway sorry for the rant, its always painful to see a real one fall to opportunism

      • @redtea
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        51 year ago

        Oh shit.

        Keep ranting! I don’t mind.

        • @frippa@lemmy.ml
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          61 year ago

          Stuff other than theory? I could write a das kapital with all of my rants but I will start with this: The Italian education system is the most reactionary in the world. My choice of school is very limited, either I continue going to this one I hate (graphical school, soubds good in theory but in practice is shit, like social democracy) Or i go to artistic school (I dont have the artistic abilities to go there) or I go go the agrarian school (waking up at 6am every morning ) and why so you may rightly ask? Because every other fucking school has (and get ready) LATIN!!! a language that no one speaks as a native, a dead language, and yet most high school paths have this class in it, for this small little fucking clause I’m excluded from most schools (Latin is extreeeemely difficult, just Google or dyckduckgo it) and get this, put your seatbelt on comrade because this one is very funny, you won’t stop laughing even tomorrow, the nearest school to me (I could basically jump ofd my window and be already in school) HAS FUCKING ANCIENT GREEEEEEK like comrade, we are not in Greece, no one speaks ancient greeck, anyway I’ll stop ranting and I hope I didn’t waste too much of your time

          • @redtea
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            41 year ago

            Honestly, I’m hear for it. It’s interesting hearing about Italy from someone who lives there.

            That’s bizarre, though. What a strange choice of languages.

            On the other hand… Marx read Latin and Greek, so you could go straight to his sources if you learned one of those. And you’d find it much easier to teach yourself the other romance languages if you had Latin under your belt.

            How did you learn English? Is that taught in schools?

            • @frippa@lemmy.ml
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              31 year ago

              How did you learn English? Is that taught in schools?

              From kindergarten to university, american imperialism to “thank” little fun fact: Italy has 31 endangered languages, none of which thaught in schools, but we still teach languages that people last spoke thousands of years ago!

              edit: pls tell me if you can read this message, lemmy is giving me problems

              • @redtea
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                41 year ago

                I can see your message. You might have to refresh the page to see your own comments.

                I knew there were a few. I didn’t realise how many. It’s a shame about the endangered languages. I bet some of them are based on Latin, still. But are any of those languages from another language family?

                • @frippa@lemmy.ml
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                  41 year ago

                  I think there are some based on slavic (from the south slavi stem) in the Friuli region, on the border with Slovenia, maybe some germanic on the border with Austria, but idk

                  As for the comments, it’s the app giving me problems, other comrades encountered problems too

                  • @RedSquid
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                    21 year ago

                    Lemmy keeps eating stuff I try to write for some reason… ffs.

                    Slovene is actually protected and taught in the Slavia Friulana, it’s co-official in FVG alongside Friulian, Italian and, I think German too? (there’s a couple municipalities with German exclaves)

                    The problem isn’t so much the languages that have neighbouring states to protect them, it’s the ones that don’t, like Sicilian, Neapolitan, Piemonteis, etc. Horrifyingly enough, the Valle d’Aosta, which is autonomous, has no protections to speak of for the native languages there (Arpitan, also known as Patois or Valdotain, and Walser German) but instead has co-official status for FRENCH! There is no native French speaking area in Italy, it’s insane.

                    Plus there’s a whole host of very small minority languages like Arbereshe, Griko, Molise Croat, Gallo-Sicilian, etc. that are either extinct or verging on it right now.

                    It still hope to one day learn and be able to read and write at least in Sicilian, and am kind of annoyed that I didn’t get the chance growing up as my dad only spoke English to us.