Ardennes posted:

That is quite a bit to unpack.

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Centrist Committee posted:

Only labor produces value

Centrist Committee posted:

Only labor produces value

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Crusader posted:

https://twitter.com/comrade_waluigi/status/1419308066181423116?s=21

Ardennes posted:

That is quite a bit to unpack.

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Yossarian-22 posted:

Despite Mao being against Deng his entire chairmanship and calling him the "number two capitalist roader"

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

its also not even true, mao wasnt always the elderly paranoid crank that started the GPCR

Yossarian-22 posted:

Mao was right all along and was vindicated by later events. He just went about the GPCR all wrong

gradenko_2000 posted:

my two cents here is that Lysenkoism was, in a way, a reaction to, and a rejection of, eugenics

[...]

of course, it didn't work out that way, but he often never gets much more of a discussion than "crackpot dude has crackpot theories, causes havoc with Soviet agriculture"

Letter from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx, 1st of October of 1873 posted:

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Dear Sir,

I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge, & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Darwin

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

Cpt_Obvious posted:

There is a newish field of genetics called "epigenetics" that studies the way that genes are expressed based on real life experiences like famines and may be inheritable (unproven): https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm

gradenko_2000 posted:

I used to watch the series "The Affair" and in the last season they make a big deal about this "epigenetics" thing where supposedly experiencing trauma can cause biological changes in a person's DNA, and then those changes, since they've manifested into the physical realm, are passed-on to later generations. I thought it was like a sci-fi thing that the show wrote just for itself.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

yeah I wish I understood biology because cell stuff is really interesting but gently caress organic chem to the 9th circle of hell

dead gay comedy forums posted:

I think that is a good take. The problem with Lysenko, the way I see it nowadays, was that he equivocated dialectical materialism into a fundamental law of nature that preceded all other scientific understanding of the world in a rather bizarre way. The best way to explain that is with the vernalized seeds you mentioned: instead of working from the established material understanding of the world, Lysenko believed in the contrary direction of Marxist analysis, that the actions directed at nature take precedence against its material bases. That sort of analysis makes a lot of sense if you are trying to change society, but reality is a different beast entirely.

my bony fealty posted:

thats sci fi yeah

epigenetics has been around for a few decades now, it's very solid mainstream biology. the whole point is that environment factors can influence how DNA is expressed via processes like methylation but (and this is important) the underlying genetic code itself does not change at all. so "environment changes your DNA!" is fiction

its been a while since but last I remember there is a lot of conscious effort in epigenetics studies to emphasize that no, Lamarck wasn't correct, but neither was the rigid prevailing idea that DNA was all there was and the pure sequence of genetic code is destiny. I don't know enough to really say but I doubt Lysenkoism is going to find any vindication in epigenetics

Raskolnikov38 posted:

yeah I wish I understood biology because cell stuff is really interesting but gently caress organic chem to the 9th circle of hell

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I only got a cursory look at this stuff in college but isn't epigenetics dealing with certain genetic markers/expressions being more likely but not necessarily guaranteed from generation to generation? I learned about it within the context of, like, predispositions to addictions being inherited but that even then it can and frequently does skip generations. "Epigenetic trauma" sounds like straight pseudoscience to justify poo poo like standpoint theory in increasingly ludicrous circumstances. Like the Zionist grandchildren of Holocaust survivors claiming epigenetic trauma means only they can speak on antisemitism or whatever. My understanding was that even if the genetic markers for certain types of behavior were "activated" it means only that someone would have a predisposition towards said behavior and nothing more.

Mr. Lobe posted:

It is not so bad if you aren't learning it in a college course formatted to weed out premed students

Raskolnikov38 posted:

lol it was high school chem: teacher started the basic org chem section and the day we got to “alkaines, alkenes, and alkynes” I knew it was not for me

mila kunis posted:

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/adam-toozes-chartbook-28-china-in

One of the most intriguing things I read whilst researching the piece, was the World Bank’s report on China’s Socialist Economic Development from 1983. What is so fascinating is that this was the first time that the World Bank had the chance to do an in-depth analysis of China’s development under Communism. The report asks all the questions one might be tempted to ask at that point. Where was China at after the end of Maoism? What distinguished it from other low-income Asian giants like India or Pakistan or Indonesia.

[...]

In the early 1950s, Communist China and India at independence were in a broadly similar place. Both were barely above subsistence. India’s per capita GDP was slightly ahead, as was its level of industrialization.

[...]

If the starting point in the early 1950s, was one of poverty and underdevelopment. Three decades later, what kind of society had the Communist regime made?

[...]

Strikingly, though income had doubled relative to 1950 and though population had practically doubled too, China had not urbanized. In 1949 the city and town population had accounted for 10.6% of the population. The urban share peaked at 15.4% in 1957. After that the share declined to 12 and 13 percent in the 1970s. That compared to more than 20 percent in India. The low urban share was all the more striking because in terms of the weight of its economy, China was considerably more industrialized than its low income peers.

China had industrialized without urbanizing. This is confirmed by other material indicators such as China’s electricity consumption, which surged.

In terms of per capita energy consumption, by the 1970s China was already well ahead of other low-income countries. In 1979, per capita its energy consumption in China was three times that India. China had a huge coal industry. It was also, it is all too easily forgotten, a major producer and exporter of oil.

[...]

Industrializing without urbanizing was remarkable, but it was not the unevenness of China’s development that most impressed the World Bank investigators. What struck them was that the Communist regime had laid the foundations for growth by delivering basic services to its population.


"China's most remarkable achievement during the past three decades", the Bank remarked, was to have made "low-income groups far better off in terms of basic needs than their counterparts in most other poor countries". As a result, the most basic indicator of human well-being, life expectancy had surged in China from 36 in 1950 to 64 in 1979. In 1979 China, the most populous country on the planet and one of the poorest, had an average life expectancy that put in the higher tier of middle-income countries. In Shanghai China’s richest province, average life expectancy in the late 1970s was 72 years, no more than a year behind that in the UK at the time. Overall life expectancy, at 64 years was in the words of the World Bank "outstandingly high for a country at China's per capita income level".

[...]

Life expectancy reflects an entire complex of factors, but the World Bank did not hesitate in its interpretation. In its view it was due to the fact that unlike other low-income countries - notably India since independence - the Communist regime in China had secured a basic provision of food, health care and education for practically everyone.

[...]

China’s superior nutritional level reflected the more advanced state of its agriculture. Reduced to a common denominator of grain-equivalents the World Bank estimated that China’s agricultural production per capita was 27 percent higher than that of India in 1979. The endowment of Chinese agriculture with farm machinery and the use of fertilizer was far greater than in India. Yields per hectare were higher, as was historically the case.

The World Bank’s statistics painted the picture of a Chinese agricultural economy that used a high intensity of industrial inputs to produce superior yields per hectare compared to most low-income countries.

[...]

It was not high spending on rural development, that secured the far better outcomes for the mass of China’s population but the comprehensive organization of social services and the priority given to food distribution, education and health .

[...]

Whereas the cities of other poor countries were places of extreme inequality, China’s cities in the Mao and immediate post-Mao era were places of relative equality. In China, the gini measure of inequality was lower in the city than in the countryside, in India the reverse was true.

exmarx posted:

epigenetics stuff is sus to me. things can be heritable without being genetic!

my bony fealty posted:

drat. how many millions of lives did Mao save lol. almost doubling life expectancy is wild

Raskolnikov38 posted:

lol it was high school chem: teacher started the basic org chem section and the day we got to “alkaines, alkenes, and alkynes” I knew it was not for me

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

Is it fair to say that the error being made is to regard dialectical materialism as, as you say, a property of nature, instead of an observation of how humans categorize things and interpret objective reality and, subsequently, the patterns that emerge when we socially construct shared reality?

indigi posted:

how?

indigi posted:

that still seems entirely dependent on genetics unless I’m mistaken