I wasn’t serious, the lasagna man thing amused me… I feel a connection to Garfield the cat. Went in looking for shit to ridicule but figured I ought to come back when I got smarter. Never did. I didn’t get much out of reading Fundamentals of Marxist Orientation because I wasn’t really dping hist mat then, I was just obsessed with the cold war.Deeply neurotic about mind control. I think realizing they faked aliens to scare people & tried to use religious terror spoopy style in SEA woke me up to the CIA’s exaggeration of their success with MK which can mostly be summed up with SERE. Well that’s reductive, but also that has nothing to do with anything I’m just doing my weekly blunt to not go crazy yet, so mooving on

Samir Amin, well where to start. Start with Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins if you haven’t already. Read Ruy Mauro Marini’s Dialectics of Dependency. Short but rigorous take notes. Read this https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-new-imperialist-structure/

Monthly Review is so hit-or-miss, a year before this they were publishing a loving memorandum for Bertrand Russell that literally said nobody would deny Stalin was an ebil dictator. O’ve been cherrypicking their archives too much… I thought the slop was contained to the newswire which just feels like Foster’s reposts… Aaaargjh

Only People Make Their Own History is a good survey of his work which can be roughly split into the study of the origins of capitalism as a mode pf production by the consumption of tributary modes of production in West Asia + China + Subcontinent, & the study of modern imperialism & how it instrumentalizes but is also destabilized by colonialism, how feudal elements persist in the global periphery. Gets into the details of how the west hoards technology & profits from laying waste to resource-rich places where they want people in squalor, in strategically marginal areas for transnational corporations they want to basically not exist lmao.

If that gets you interested, go for Eurocentrism (which really rips into the foundations of western philosophy, anthropology, history etc, if you are all reading Losurdo & Rockhill’s books, this is a must, I have found more like it: Back to Marx, as well as A Deep Plough by Zhang Yibing, groundbreaking shit).

Maldevelopment is depressing but also essential for understanding how subimperialism works, how India works, how apartheid South Africa worked.

Russia & the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism is a good intermediate one that gets into the nit & grit of how the USSR was mired in developmentalism & the periphery fell behind (building pseudo-autarky where the USSR serves as a kind of filter between the west & its allies was insufficient). He is clear that the USSR was dismantled… He argues the soviet mode of production persisted post-destruction, proving its durability & the nature of the betrayal. I am looking for more like it. Nobody listens to me because I’m too impatient on here bruh you can find them for sure

Brb lemmygrad