ComradeRat

Another essay has hit the rockhill debates

Anyone who lived in Jasper Park in the period preceding the 1960's sure knew about bears as they lived with them and their troublesome habits all throughout the summer. Bears wandered through the town like dogs. Although they were most active in town at night there was always one or two active on the edge of town and often down-town in mid-day...

You could not walk down a back alley after dark without running into a bear every couple of blocks...scavenging in the garbage cans. They frightened the tourists by strolling across the lawns and sometimes coming up behind them...

...When a bear saw a nice white [golf] ball rolling over the grass near him, he sometimes got up and strolled over for a look and more often than not picked it up in his teeth and wandered away. The dilemma was then to try and recover the ball from the bear — not wise — and if not, how to score that stroke...

I delivered groceries after school for Jasper Hardware and Grocery...and you had to watch the back door very closely or a bear would wander into the store attracted by the smells. One day I was loading the truck for deliveries and...I noticed that a loaf of bread was missing...I looked around ans saw a big black bear strolling away toward the C[anadian].N[ational].R[ailway]. station with the bread in his mouth. He crossed the station platform, which was crowded with people off the train, and never looked right nor left...

There was no hollering or shouting, no fuss, no muss, and nobody trying to shoot him or immobilize him with a drugged dart as they do now. It was just a bear.

Our house was just off the edge of the townsite at the foot of Pyramid Hill and I have seen as many as eight bears go through our yard in the interval between supper-time and dark...

If you strolled along the banks of the Miette River in the daytime you could see bears of all colours and sizes, big bears, little bears, black bears, brown bears, cinnamon bears and shades in between, sleeping in the trees or at the foot of the big trees, or swimming in the Pond or Dead Man's Hole to cool off...

The kids used the Pond to swim in and sometimes there would be a bear enjoying the deep end and a few kids splashing around at the shallow other end...

Even with all those bears around nobody got hurt from bears. One or two tourists got bit or scratched on the arm while trying to feed the bears by hand in spite of being warned not to — but nothing serious...

In the 1960's the Park Authorities destroyed [just say killed ffs] a lot of bears when they persisted in coming into town or to the campgrounds and also "bear-proofed" the garbage cans and buried and burned the garbage so that the food source was generally eliminated. The result of those actions was to slowly erode the bear population down to a very small portion of their former numbers, and a tourist is very lucky if he sees a bear in the park today, although there are still a few coming to the campgrounds at night. I think they learned that if they came around in daylight they would probably get a bullet in the head or an immobilising dart in the arse.

–Bruce Neighbour, Memories of a Mountain Man

My grandmother lived in jasper around the same time and has said the same thing: the locals were fine with the bears, the tourists did foolish shit like trying to take closeup pictures

https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2Farchive%2F6820822%2Finternational-saturday-surprise%2F%20

So big today looms Adolf Hitler in the minds of Europe’s statesmen that Der Führer’s habit of always picking Saturday as the time suddenly to throw his weight about has caused the Continent’s major stock exchanges to remain closed every Saturday—just in case the No.1 Nazi should upset prices.

finished reading this book last night, was pretty interesting. Tries to create an "autistic marxism". Imo it lacks engagement with 1)bipoc, 2) global south and 3) exploitation (though Chapman at least acknowledges the gaps), but otherwise great analysis of the connections between disability and capitalism particularly in the global north over the last 80ish yearz. I also do like how he draws on the connections between disability and surplus population

Rly shit takes from Engels here [Engels - The Magyar Struggle] Apparently there's worse yet to come in "Democratic Pan-Slavism"

Its also a total reversal from his position in septemberish 1848, when he was castigating germans for their chauvanism being the cause of slavs opposing revolution

Reading this like "nope, sorry bud all ur hopes and dreams are gonna be crushed next year" Poor marx

Marx has been maintaining this nonviolent resistance stance since the first article in Neue Rheinische Zeitung back in June, in part bc he believed the reactionaries would definitely lose

However, counterrevolution rallies and two days later Marx admits he was wrong: [Marx - Confessions of a Noble Soul]

And two days after that, Marx is explicitly advocating violent resistence: [Marx - A Decree of Eichmann's]

Source is Marx Engels Collected Works vol8. Its very interesting to see Marx and Engels operating as agitators/organisers rather than theorists

From Marx Engels Collected Works vol7

Overall the Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles have been very interesting both theoretically and to see Marx and Engels engaged in organisational work during what they hoped would be THE revolution

been reading Barbara Allen's biography of Shlyapnikov. Very well written and sourced almost entirely by archival stuff. But depressing because the workers' opposition gets run roughshod over by basically everyone in power (Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Molotov, etcetc). Been wondering what others' have read on the workers' opposition and what your takes are.

The 1930s have been by far the most depressing

But even the late 10s and early 20s have some "dude wtf" moments from leadership imo

Somewhat relatedly, what do folks think of the Democratic Centralists? I've actually never heard of that faction in the 1919-21 debates before

Very good book on soviet nationalities policy using archival research

This one does a good job of showing how rapidly the (centre) of the party shifted lines on nationalism

Russian opposition to affirmative action programmes was pretty strong

Nationality could be shockingly arbitrary and sudden (and often informed by politics)

Stalin begins to turn towards supporting Russians

collectivisation interacted badly with the nationalities policy

The degree of internal conflicts within the party and soviet bureaucracy was also a huge part of the book.

Ethnic cleansings going on, and there's still tons of affirmative culture programmes running. Weird contradictions

(Not gonna spam any more books / articles [today at least] but this one is Important)

This is an excellent essay that examines the similarities and differences between Marxist and Indigenous critiques of Capitalism. Imo they miss a bit in terms of the Marx side (mostly I'm just salty that they don't cite Marx in the Anthropocene), but overall this is an excellent piece that every single settler should be reading

This is a very important contemporary marxist work imo (despite being published only this year). It's VERY relevant to climate change, the question of production under socialism and communism. It's also essential if you wanna have an idea of what Marx was up to (in terms of theory) in the late 1870s until his death bc Saito's source for his arguments is the previously unpublished MEGA2 (which he worked on) and others' work on MEGA2. Highly recommend it, though it is somewhat (prolly VERY) abstract/academic.