Finally reading Blackshirts and Reds, which is really fun. The chapter on the fall of the USSR basically blames it on a lack of treats. Parenti argues that workers were kind of lazy since the USSR was a workers’ state, and that meant that the quality of consumer goods declined—which was also a result of the USSR being forced to build shitloads of weapons to protect itself from the USA. I think Socialism Betrayed actually made a better argument for the fall of the USSR (too much petite bourgeois scum created by Khrushchev), but Parenti’s point is still valid IMO.
Also reading A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a book about Kenya’s independence recommended to me by people here when I asked for anti-colonial novels, and really enjoying it. I started before the queen ate shit but it’s become even more topical since then.
I think his USSR criticisms are the best part of the book. I agree that “fun” is a good way to describe him - his books aren’t serious academic tracts but are easy and pleasant to read. But I think in left spaces like here there’s a pretty significant dearth of good-faith criticism of previous and current socialist regimes, and it leads to some serious :brainworms: or at least leaves us open for not being able to sound serious about communism. Like you have to spend your whole life campaigning for communism like :parenti: before we’ll accept criticism of the USSR in good faith, so we definitely need those voices. He does force issues in that chapter that a lot of comrades like to shrug off, but serious leftists need to take seriously - especially the part about cautioning against idealized notions of human nature around page 65.
If you are interested in further principled criticism of the USSR, Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism provides the clearest explanation I have found for how the USSR went from Stalin to Gorb. Central to the analysis is the idea that the party beaurocracy lost its connection to the people and became a separate class with a fundamentally petty-bourgeoise conciousness.
FWIW the author is obviously extremely dogmatic but the framing has been a helpful tool for developing my own understanding!
The Anatomy of Fascism by O Paxton, it’s a little bit academic so ofc it takes a standard lib approach to things (like mentioning Stalinism at all ffs or comparing communism and fascism like a braindead lib), its still a useful text since it actually bothers to look at the history of fascism’s development as well as the culture that fostered it in say Italy or Germany (so some materialist analysis, though not dialectic), rather than just trying to crunch universal definitions off observations or going off the fascist’s words themselves in isolation. It doesn’t cover much outside of Germany or Italy, and for what little is there on Lat Am it just sucks, but for Europe its something.
Idk what I’ll read next. Thinking about Gramsci’s notebooks possibly.
I’m a bit late to the party but I just found myself scrolling this thread and wanted to recommend Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascim if you’re interested in a less liberal investigation of what fascism is.
Just Old Gods, New Enigmas for the book club, first discussion post for it will be up tomorrow.
Finished Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade this week. The epilogue was a real throwback to the zeitgeist of 2010.
Almost done with Old Gods, New Enigmas. I usually don’t follow the book club because my pace of subjects is usually very different but I’ve had several Mike Davis books in the backlog that I wanted to turn to for a while.
I’ve had several books that I started as home reads a long time ago but only partially finished: Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. After Old Gods I plan to finally finish them. I’ve been moving at a feverish pace since the start of August as a result of being significantly more sober than I have been since before the pandemic.
By sheer coincidence (I swear), the next work read in my backlog was David Cannadine’s The Victorious Century, on the British Empire between 1800-1906. The one after that is The Decline of the British Aristocracy, also by Cannadine.
I started Socialism Betrayed at the start of the month in memory to Gorbachev. Since then Barbara Ehrenreich and Queen Elizabeth II has died. Feels like I’m falling behind on my memorial reading. The book’s pretty good though.
Also making my way trough Old Gods, New Enigmas for the book club.
