Permanently Deleted
You can find a book that strikes your interest on my party’s book publishing site I’m reading through This Monstrous War By Wilfred G Burchett, and it’s on the Korean War as told from an American reporter on the northern side of the conflict. Warning for those who might find the topic interesting, there’s details massacres in there perpetrated by the Japanese, their southern Korean lapdogs, and American monsters.
They’re one of the newer commissions, but mostly stuff around anti-Semitism and tying the struggle against that to the class struggle through things like that book you see on the store.
You really ought to read up on the history of the communist movement. If you don’t have that foundation on the particular and concrete ways the class struggles manifest, then you can struggle to contextualize the theory. For me, studying the October revolution was critical for understanding how theoretical differences do cause real problems in organizing. It was through that that I realized my org would have been the Mensheviks in the situation and that I ought to really take up the study of socialism on a rigorous and scientific basis. Not saying you have to study the Soviet experience first, you could always study the history of the communist movement in your country or somewhere you are interested in.
So, I read October by China Melville. I found it really good until about the last chapter where he kind of just reiterates the Trot point-of-view that Stalin ruined everything and the USSR basically stopped being socialist immediately after winning. However, the way it frames the struggle was enough for me to understand that this Lenin guy was onto something and so I began studying. I’ve been meaning to read a few books that I heard are better, like:
- 10 Days that Shook the World by John Reed
- The October Days 1917 by I. Mintz
- History of the CPSU by the Central Committee of the CPSU
sounds like its parenti time
:party-parenti:
If you’re really just feeling doomer-y, I can’t recommend China Mieville’s article “On Social Sadism” enough. It’s a really short read, and the final passage is an amazing antidote to doomerism.
There was this thingy that was released recently: https://www.bookdepository.com/Fundamental-Principles-Communist-Production-Distribution-Group-International-Communists/9798615430794 It is a really interesting little book with “the road not taken” kind of approach to communism. And some criticism of the ML approach.
Despite being under siege from Western imperialism, 20th century socialist projects still generally achieved superior results in measures of physical quality of life compared to capitalist countries when adjusting for levels of economic development:
In 30 of 36 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes ( p < .05 by two-tailed t-test). This work with the World Bank’s raw data included cross-tabulations, analysis of variance, and regression techniques, which all confirmed the same conclusions. The data indicated that the socialist countries generally have achieved better PQL outcomes than the capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development.
