#large marx

[alwayswithrain]

im 25 pages into capitalist realism on the plane and i ran out of sticky tabs :(

[alwayswithrain]

cataloguing some articles i read today/last night from lausan:

'The forgotten path of Tibetan communism' by Khalden Dhatsenpa (2026)

'Pingpu Indigenous and Han Taiwanese Solidarity with Palestine' by Leona Chen (2025)

'Why China is capitalist' by Eli Friedman (2020)

lausan save me... save me lausan... i think white people (or just generally westerners but especially westerners who consider themselves leftists) would benefit a lot from reading about taiwanese/hong kong liberation and civic movements. the current strain of american empire decline tankieism pisses me off so bad because it's so out of touch with any sort of regional/continental asian politics between china's imperialism/colonialism and any of its surrounding regions or countries LOL

[alwayswithrain]

okay returning to the other article after my translation sidequest (this will soon become relevant). these are from "brain rot without borders: dispatches from a postliterate world" published by the baffler

Nicolás Medina Mora

I disagree with Philip Roth’s 2009 dictum that the novel will soon become a “cultic” concern, not because I believe that literary fiction is enjoying some sort of heyday in the core of the American empire but rather because I’m convinced that literature has always been an esoteric practice in the United States.

These correspondents’ reports are refreshing in that they are entirely free of the commonplaces with which Americans tend to explain the decline of the written word—e.g., mistaking the symptom for the illness and blaming ChatGPT for students’ plummeting reading-comprehension skills, as if people hadn’t begun to forget how to read long before Faustian Markov-chain machines became the fetish object of an apocalyptic theology—and remind us that there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in American publishing offices, where people believe that reading literature in translation is evidence of worldly sophistication rather than the refuge of the monolingual.

both of these bits are objectively hilarious bits of writing. that random last snipe at the end is also very very intriguing to me because yeah this is the violence of translation thing again from here!

And though the causes for our common predicament that these writers offer vary wildly, it’s possible to discern a terrifying trend: the loss of deep literacy is not an organic development or an accident without an author but rather the intentional consequence of concrete actions undertaken by the unholy alliance of capital and the state, which has availed itself of technology to slowly erode our capacity to understand what we read—and therefore to imagine a more just future.

been coming up against this idea a lot in reading generally; the fact that falling literacy rates are more intentional than incidental and by the design of fascist states seeking to disempower their peoples. which makes sense in the wider context of literacy, and how it's been historically wielded/accessed as a means of obtaining power and self-determination. hrm.

(also concerning in the context of my tutees seeming to be less knowledgeable about the world at large or literate in ongoing happenings??)

idk if i fully agree that imagining a just future is the threatened end-goal though, i think the larger priority is narrative control/getting people to just accept what they've been told through media because they don't have the capacity of discernment for themselves anymore