“Introducing individualism into socialism, which is based on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.”

“Libertarianism is like an invisible moth gnawing away at the people’s political integrity.”

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 2nd, 2023
  • animated ring@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•Mathematics PhD Programs
    8·
    5 months ago

    I am a PhD student in mathematics at an elite school in the US. First, some questions you need to answer for yourself: What are you looking to get out of your PhD? What do you want to do after your PhD? How strong will your application be? What kind of schools are you targeting? Unfortunately, most students in the US go directly from their undergraduate studies into a PhD program in the US. I’m not aware of any highly-regarded Masters programs in the US in pure mathematics.

    Unfortunately, saying that you are interested in algebra is a bit vague. Are you interested in commutative algebra, noncommutative algebra, representation theory, algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry, homotopy theory, or something else entirely?

    I will be very direct and say that outside of western countries, most countries only have a small number of top universities with a significant number of mathematicians who are not analysts. The fact is that there are very clearly “prestige” areas of mathematics (differential geometry, some kinds of nonlinear PDE, algebraic geometry, number theory, some parts of probability theory, geometric representation theory, etc) and they are all concentrated mostly in western countries. This is especially true after the fall of the USSR caused many mathematicians to leave countries like Russia and Ukraine for the US or western Europe.

    The communist nation with the most developed mathematical research is China, but outside of Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, and a few other top departments, the vast majority of Chinese mathematicians are analysts or completely applied mathematicians. In the last decade or two, Fields Medalist Shing-Tung Yau (丘成桐, Tsinghua) has spent most of his time trying to improve the quality of mathematics research in China while top mathematicians Gang Tian (田刚, Peking University), Jun Li (李骏, Fudan), and Yongbin Ruan (阮勇斌, Zhejiang University) have also returned from the US to lead research centers in China. They still have a long way to go, as seen in this lecture by Yau, but Zhejiang University did manage to hire complex geometer Song Sun (孙菘) away from UC Berkeley.

    Since you will have a Masters degree, you can directly apply to PhD programs outside of the US. China would certainly fit your criteria of greater sense of community, less insane politics, and more communists, but I’m not sure if you speak Chinese. In any case, you would have to write your PhD thesis in Chinese if you do your PhD anywhere in China that is not Hong Kong, Macau (which is not strong in the subject at all), or Taiwan. You would be able to write your thesis in English at any European university, but on the other hand Europeans are quite reactionary. Japan is also quite strong in algebraic areas of mathematics. What is most important to you?

  • animated ring@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•What documentaries would you recommend to a baby leftist?
    17·
    6 months ago

    Not sure how suitable it is to a “baby leftist,” but I recommend the Chinese documentary “Historical nihilism and the collapse of the USSR” (历史虚无主义与苏联解体), which can be found on Bilibili with Chinese subtitles or on YouTube with English subtitles.

    The documentary touches many themes, from the corrosive effect of the denunciation of Stalin (and Lenin) along with the achievements of the Soviet people by post-Stalin Soviet leaders, the creation of a comprador class in the USSR, the actions of western NGOs and “educational institutions” in cultivating said compradors, and the resulting destruction of the USSR. If you do read Chinese, the scrolling comments on Bilibili consistently make the connection to events today.

  • animated ring@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    14·
    2 years ago

    Obligatory Mao quote:

    Some foreigners say that our ideological reform is brainwashing. As I see it, they are correct in what they say. It is washing brains, that’s what it is! This brain of mine was washed to become what it is. After joining the revolution, it was slowly washed, washed for several decades. What I received before was all bourgeois education, and even some feudal education.

    The transcript in Chinese can be found here.

  • animated ring@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    17·
    2 years ago

    Falun Gong (法轮功) is a cult founded in the 1990s in China. At this time, various forms of 气功 (qigong) were quite popular in China (at least as explained to me by my parents). While most of these exercise/martial arts things were innocuous, Falun Gong became an anti-science cult with a whole host of insane beliefs. Eventually, the Chinese government cracked down on FLG and banned them, but not after they had two of their members set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. After they were banned in China, the cult practitioners fled to the US, where they are now based in upstate New York (and unfortunately, NYC is infested with them). Shen Yun is the dance troupe of FLG.

    You may be able to spot members of FLG by noticing one of their two main slogans, “Falun Dafa good” or “End CCP.” Most members of the cult refer to themselves as 法轮大法 (Falun Dafa) rather than Falun Gong. One of their beliefs is that their organs are superior (or maybe magical), from which it apparently logically follows that the Chinese government would be harvesting their organs.

    Unfortunately, I can’t access this even with a university library subscription, but this article explains that Falun Gong is directly supported by the US government:

    In 2000, Mark Palmer, one of the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED’s) founders and Vice Chairman of Freedom House—an organization funded entirely by the U.S. Congress—founded a new government-supported group, Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG).

    I was unable to figure out where this FoFG gets its funding, but the relationship between FLG and far-right organizations in the US is quite clear – their newspaper was one of the largest promoters of QAnon. For example, in 2021 a Republican introduced a Falun Gong Protection Act and there are several official press releases of noted gusano Marco Rubio supporting FLG.

  • animated ring@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•Role of the students and intelligentsia
    4·
    2 years ago

    Writing from the perspective of the US since OP is German. This comment is broken into spoilers because it is quite long, but it is a specific case study into a bourgeois university. If you would like references for anything contained within, please ask.

    About universities reproducing the bourgeoisie

    As the other comment states, the private institutions (I attend an Ivy League institution) exist to reproduce the bourgeoisie. In fact, my university (and employer and landlord) is not only a university but also makes money by investing its endowment (so by being part of the financial bourgeoisie) and from real estate – it actually owns two-thirds of the buildings in the neighborhood and displaced an entire other (mostly Black) neighborhood for expansion using the power of the state (yet another example of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

    As part of reproducing the bourgeoisie, they reproduce bourgeois ideology and pass this down to their students. My university actually has an entire institution which is essentially a neoconservative think tank (which may or may not also function as a private NED) and another one dedicated to advancing the cause of US imperialism in the former USSR that pumps out what is essentially Nazi Ukrainian propaganda and actually has its own “independent” news outlet that is funded by the NED, the UK Foreign Office, and Google, among other bourgeois institutions. There is another initiative of the university which used to be headed by the current Director of National Intelligence (who used to be deputy director of the CIA before being employed by the university) which I suspect is a private USAID, but I don’t have any evidence for that.

    Since there was a recent uproar over a certain member of what used to be the Tibetan aristocracy, I would like to note that he was invited to my university in 2007 and his profile contains lie after lie demonizing the Chinese government and its policies in the 1951-1959 period;

    Any revolution in the US will have to think long and hard about whether it can turn elite private institutions into proletarian ones or whether it will just have to seize all of their assets and abolish them. In addition, anti-imperialist movements in other countries must repatriate their scholars, build up their own educational systems, and diminish the prestige factor for American universities (especially for doctorates, where western universities have basically a death grip on prestige). For example, the fact that many Chinese academics are returning to China and that Chinese universities are rising in prestige is a positive development.

    About the students

    Being an Ivy League institution, the students (undergrads) themselves of course come from bourgeois backgrounds (or at least are thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois ideology), and in fact clamored for Hillary Clinton to give a speech at the previous graduation where she received an honorary degree. (Hillary will actually be teaching a course here in the fall about what it was like to overthrow foreign governments and force them to adopt neoliberal economic policies – or at least that would be the topic if she is honest). I don’t interact with undergraduates very much, so this may not be accurate.

    The undergraduate population did organize enough to vote (nonbinding) to boycott the Zionist entity, to which the response of the administration was to say that BDS was basically equivalent to Nazism (at least this is in an official statement put out by the president of the university). Of course, there are even liberals who support BDS and the official BDS organization in the US seems to be vaguely liberal Zionist, so this doesn’t say much. Undergraduates have supported other liberal causes in the past, but this is the extent of their political engagement for the most part.

    Most of the graduate students here are Masters students who pay an insane amount of money to attend. A large percentage of them are foreign (primarily Chinese) and come from wealthy families (who can afford the insane cost). Of those I have interacted with, they are either apolitical or liberal, which lines up with their probably bourgeois backgrounds.

    I don’t think the entire population of students is completely irredeemable though. There is at least a segment of the grad students who do have at least some minimal class consciousness, and the graduate student worker (mostly PhD students) population is unionized after going on strike twice and blocking all of the entrances to the university. It is unclear how many students actually went on strike and participated in picketing or other organizing activities, and if I had to guess, most of the strikers still have petty-bourgeois sensibilities and political ideologies. I would say that those graduate student workers facing significant financial precarity are the only population in Ivy League universities who can be radicalized since the undergrads generally come from either bourgeois or labor aristocratic backgrounds.

    About the faculty (this is how I will interpret intelligentsia)

    Unfortunately, we received next to no support from the faculty, even those who are supposedly “progressive” (goes to show how meaningless that term is), although there were some postdocs who seem to have some consciousness. If they are not apolitical, (permanent) faculty overwhelmingly have petty-bourgeois and pro-imperialist sensibilities, but the only evidence I have for this is one blog post by a faculty member in my department defending the virtues of liberal “democracy” (and talking about how he would like to impose it on the entire planet) and calling any anti-west sentiment “Russian trolls” and also overhearing political conversations that faculty have. I would say that almost all faculty with permanent positions in bourgeois universities are basically irredeemable.

    I should note that in my field, almost all PhD students and faculty come from relatively bourgeois backgrounds (one sacrifices a potentially significant income by attending graduate school). In other subjects, it may be easier to radicalize faculty, but during the strike, students in other departments also reported their faculty being very reactionary.