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terramythos · 3 years

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TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 16 of 26

Title: Tales From Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle #5) (2001)

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Short Story Collection, Novella, Third-Person, Female Protagonist

Rating: 8/10 (note: this is an average)

Date Began: 7/2/2021

Date Finished: 7/6/2021

Tales From Earthsea is a collection of five short stories and novellas which take place in the Earthsea universe. In addition, there’s a supplementary timeline of Earthsea’s history, tradition, and cultural details of note. The last story in the collection, Dragonfly, serves as a bridge between Tehanu (#4) and The Other Wind (#6), the final book in the series.

Of the five stories, my favorites (both 10/10s) were The Finder and On The High Marsh.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it— can we even remember it— until we can tell it in a story?

Content warnings, individual ratings/commentary, and spoilers below the cut.

Content warnings for the book: Death and violence, child abuse (including implied sexual abuse), police brutality, slavery, reference to torture and execution, brief reference to inc*st, misogyny, animal cruelty, mild body horror, very brief implied mind control via a "love charm" (it doesn't work).

#1 - The Finder (10/10)

In The Dark Time, magic is widely mistrusted. Petty tyrants use the once noble art in pursuit of power and glory. Medra, the son of a shipwright in Havnor, has magical talents honed in secret. One day, he curses a ship built for a warlord’s fleet. Unfortunately, he gets caught and sent to a prison camp. There he is forced to use finding magic to locate veins of cinnabar.

The prison exists to refine quicksilver, a substance the most powerful mage on the island believes will turn him into a god. While in the refinery, Medra feels a spiritual connection to a dying slave, a young woman named Anieb. The two of them devise a plan to kill the mage and escape. Medra’s journey eventually takes him to the island of Roke and the founding of its prestigious wizard school.

‘The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.’

I really enjoyed this novella. The Dark Time is largely unexplored in the stories of Earthsea, so it was interesting to read about it here. I get the feeling that we’re approaching or in the middle of one such time in the real world, so seeing a version of it on the page is depressing yet hopeful. The story is dark; mass feudal warfare, a literal concentration camp in the opening half, widespread enslavement, and abuse of power. But it also offers hope and the promise of change. The story also explores the integral role of women in not only the preservation of magic in a bleak age of humanity, but the very foundation of Roke.

Medra’s story spoke to me; how he resists the despotic powers-that-be, his connection with Anieb even after her tragic death, and how despite his disillusionment with humanity, he ultimately fights to create a better world. I also thought Gelluk was a horrifying villain. He’s characterized as a soft-spoken, almost kindly man who loves children and animals— yet his narrative thoughts involve burning hundreds of slaves alive in order to better fuel the quicksilver refinery. “Nice doesn’t mean good” taken to an extreme, and a mirror of many villains in the real world.

Le Guin was anti-capitalist, but that way of thinking seems peripheral in the Earthsea series. The Finder, however, definitely has a Marxist reading in it. A recurring theme is the disenfranchised rising up against the powerful. Indeed both antagonists, who are despotic wizards of great power, are soundly defeated by groups of people they consider powerless. Magic is only considered relevant for the value and power it produces, an idea antithetical to the rest of the series. The quicksilver refinery also embraces anti-capitalist rhetoric; this section focuses on how mass enslavement and death is used to manufacture a meaningless commodity only one person “benefits” from. That’s not even getting into the prison-industrial complex.

I dunno. This story slaps. It’s not at all what I expected from a Roke origin story.

#2 - Diamond and Darkrose (5/10)

Diamond, the son of a prosperous lumber merchant, struggles to find his true calling in life. His father disapproves of almost everything he does, including his close friendship with the local witch’s daughter Rose. While he loves music, his father derides his talents and forces him to abandon the pursuit. When Diamond shows some promise in magic, he travels to a neighboring town to serve as the local wizard’s apprentice. But when this path estranges him from Rose, he grows disillusioned.

Rose had looked after herself from an early age; and this was one of the reasons Diamond loved her. With her, he knew what freedom was. Without her, he could attain it only when he was hearing and singing and playing music.

I did not like this story very much. I gave Diamond and Darkrose a 5/10 because it’s competently written (duh), and the protagonist has a character arc not entirely dependent on the central romance. But that’s about all I can say for it.

None of the characters are especially appealing. Diamond’s mentor figures are all extremely narrow-minded. Rose, supposedly his true love since childhood, drops him the moment things become difficult. And Diamond himself is a pushover who only grows a spine and pursues his dreams at the end of the story. I understand that’s his character flaw and his arc is about overcoming that. But due to all these factors, I was annoyed by every major character. The only person I didn’t dislike was Diamond’s mother, who only shows up for a couple of scenes.

Someone please tell me there are love stories out there where the romantic tension is NOT based on a fucking MISUNDERSTANDING. That shit drives me up a wall! It’s so overdone and painful to read.

#3 - The Bones of the Earth (8/10)

Dulse is an aging wizard on the island of Gont, reflecting on his life and relationship with his former apprentice, a young man he calls Silence. But he senses something amiss on the island; a massive earthquake poised to destroy a nearby port town and its inhabitants. To avert disaster, Dulse realizes he must turn to an ancient form of magic taught to him long ago— and he needs Silence’s help to save the town.

In there he knew he should hurry, that the bones of the earth ached to move, and that he must become them to guide them, but he could not hurry. There was on him the bewilderment of any transformation. He had in his day been fox, and bull, and dragonfly, and knew what it was to change being. But this was different, this slow enlargement. I am vastening, he thought.

So I’ve always liked Ogion in the main series; I love the idea of an immensely powerful wizard who lives an unassuming life of silence, contemplation, and appreciation of the natural world. In The Bones of the Earth, we get a glimpse of Ogion through his mentor’s eyes. Ogion’s heroism and how he stopped the earthquake is mentioned several times in the main series, but this is our first look at what actually happened.

Dulse is an unexpected and fascinating perspective character. It would be so easy to tell this story wholly from Ogion’s perspective, but I think making Dulse the protagonist was the right call. In particular, Dulse’s mind is starting to go. Le Guin presents this by utilizing flashbacks and connecting them to the present. This technique conveys Dulse’s disorientation and confusion so the reader experiences it alongside him... it’s hard to describe without actually reading the story. I also loved the little twist at the end regarding where Dulse learned the ancient magic that saves the island. There’s also a strong thematic connection to The Farthest Shore; death and becoming one with the rest of the world.

#4 - On The High Marsh (10/10)

A half-mad wanderer named Irioth comes upon a small settlement on the volcanic, marshy island of Semel. A murrain has been devastating the local cattle population, and Irioth offers his powers as a curer to heal the animals. He settles into a calm rural life with Gift, a widow working a small dairy. Though Gift likes Irioth, and the animals instinctively trust him, she senses something amiss with the man. Soon, Irioth’s dark past threatens to return and disturb the peace.

“Oh, yes,” Irioth said. “It was my fault.” But she forgave, and the grey cat was pressed up against his thigh, dreaming. The cat’s dreams came into his mind, in the low fields where he spoke with the animals, the dusky places. The cat leapt there, and then there was milk, and the deep soft thrilling. There was no fault, only the great innocence. No need for words. They would not find him here. He was not here to find. There was no need to speak any name. There was nobody but her, and the cat dreaming, and the fire flickering. He had come over the dead mountain on black roads, but here the streams ran slow among the pastures.

This story is a banger. It has a Western vibe— a stranger coming into a cattle town haunted by a mysterious past. Also cowboys. It’s an atmospheric story, and I think hits on the “small rural town” vibe better than Tehanu did. But there were several writing choices I especially liked.

We don’t learn Irioth’s name until a little while into the story; his physical description, temperament, and ability to immediately identify Gift’s true name just by looking at her makes one assume he’s Ged. He’s also got an interesting redemption arc, because it’s presented in a reverse order. We see Irioth’s genuine desire to do good, and his gentle and patient manner with animals and other people. He doesn’t even consider asking for payment for curing the murrain until Gift tells him he should. But there’s a sense that something is off; he’s paranoid, clearly running from something. The use-name he picks is Otak, a fictional ferret-like creature— which Gift asserts looks nice, but has sharp teeth.

Near the end, Ged actually does show up and explain what happened to Irioth. They have pretty similar backstories; both were powerful, arrogant young mages who messed with forces they shouldn’t have, then went through great personal sacrifice to right the wrong (oh god the initial deception was intentional they’re narrative foils oh god). Ged embraced the darkest aspects of himself to avert calamity. Irioth came to Semel to escape Roke and atone by helping others. One detail I especially liked was that Irioth once considered healing beneath him, but now he takes a deep joy in using it to help.

#5 - Dragonfly (8/10)

Irian lives a solitary life-- her father is a drunkard living in the ruins of their family’s once prosperous estate. Her closest relationship is with the local village witch, who named her in secret in the dead of night. When a disgraced young wizard named Ivory comes to town, he sees Irian as a potential conquest. To gain power over her, he hatches a scheme; disguise Irian as a man, travel to Roke, and sneak her into the male-only wizard school— humiliating the great Masters.

But Irian is restless. She knows she has power, but her true nature is a mystery even to her. Irian sees Ivory’s plan as an opportunity to find answers from the most powerful wizards in the world. When the Doorkeeper actually lets her into the school, she finds herself in a magical and political conflict over the future of Roke— and discovers what exactly she is.

“Dark is bad,” said the Patterner. “Eh?”

Irian drew a deep breath and looked at him eye to eye as they sat there. “Only in dark the light,” she said.

This is one of those stories that has a rocky start, but a great second half. The first part of the novella felt dry to me; I’ve read plenty of tales about social outcasts with weird, unexplainable powers. On top of this, a chunk of the early narration is from Ivory’s POV, and he’s a complete tool. That can be a fun perspective to take, and I like the fact that he thinks he’s manipulating Irian when she’s the one pulling the strings. But since he’s an irrelevant character who disappears from the story halfway through, it feels like a waste to devote a huge chunk of the story to him.

However, once Irian arrives at Roke, the story gets much more interesting. Her presence at Roke causes a huge scandal that divides the Masters. Women being forbidden from Roke is a Series Thing at this point, but Earthsea is in an era of change (although I DO question that she’s the first woman to try it). The Finder demonstrated that women were pivotal in the foundation of Roke, something largely erased from history. Barring women stems from a power hungry bigot codifying it into tradition.

Irian finds some unexpected allies--minor characters in the previous books. The Doorkeeper continues to be the coolest motherfucker there. The Patterner is a major character in this story; he was in just one scene in The Farthest Shore, so I liked learning more about him. The Namer is the kind of guy you’d expect to be a stodgy traditionalist, so him siding with Irian is surprising. The Summoner, a heroic figure in previous books and stories, is a sinister villain here. As for the ending, well… if you didn’t see it coming, I’d wonder if you even read Tehanu. The same hints are there.

There were little particulars I liked, such as Irian moving into a decrepit hut that’s definitely Medra’s old home. My favorite detail is that this story has a parallel scene with The Finder. In The Finder, there’s a scene where an antagonist, Early, invades Roke in the form of a dragon. He lands on Roke Knoll, a site of power that reveals one’s true form. It turns him back into a human, leaving him defenseless when the residents of Roke attack him and repel his invasion. The reversal happens in Dragonfly. Irian gets attacked by one of the Masters while at Roke Knoll — and its magic turns her into her true form, a dragon. Props to whoever picked the cover design, since it references both scenes.

#6 - A Description of Earthsea

I’m not rating this since it’s basically a lore dump. It’s a deep dive into Earthsea’s history, languages, cultures, and other relevant world details. It’s the kind of bonus info a lot of fantasy series tack on as reference material. According to Le Guin, she wrote this to get some idea of the timeline on each of these stories.

As a series, Earthsea has relatively little worldbuilding exposition. Sometimes characters reference legends or historical events, but usually the reader lacks the context to fully understand them. The focus is more on the lives of the characters and their personal experience of the world. I think something like A Description of Earthsea has benefits and drawbacks for the reader. On one hand it's nice to have some definitive information to tie things together. On the other, this does represent a loss of some of the mystery in the story.

I think this is the first thing in the series that even mentions homosexuality, so props for that I guess?

Closing Thoughts

A short story collection is always going to have high and low points. I tend to look at each story individually and score that way, but an average is always misleading. Diamond and Darkrose dragged the score down since there were only five stories total. But I enjoyed the majority of them. I am interested to see where the human/dragon subplot goes in the final installment; I assume Irian will show up at some point? We’ll see.

#taylor reads #8/10 #2021 reading challenge #almost done with this series!

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carldavidson · 4 years

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Book Review: Mike Stout’s ‘Homestead Steel Mill’ Is a Manual for Organizers

Homestead Steel Mill: The Final Ten Years

USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy

By Mike Stout

PM Press 2020

By Carl Davidson

Keep on Keepin’ On

Mike Stout’s remarkable new book of a recent large-scale class battle in Western PA can be read in many ways. First, it’s a history of Homestead steelworkers in the last years of their battles to improve their conditions and save their jobs. It’s also Stout’s personal autobiography of a working-class youth radicalized by the 1960s and 1970s and the culture of rebellion of which he was a part. Then one can read it as a fine example of sociological investigation and economic analysis of the Pittsburgh region.

All those brief summations are fine. But most of all, within all these, Stout has written an organizing manual for radicalizing workers of any age embedded in large manufacturing industries. Despite relative declines, these still exist in the Rust Belt and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the current younger workers in them have never been in a union and only know about them from the lore passed down by fathers and grandfathers. Thus nearly all of them are in dire need of new crews of organizers like Mike Stout--or who at least have studied this book.

What makes Stout’s narrative unique is the quality of his personal commitment. In the 1970s, thousands of radicalized young college students, with or without degrees, went into the factories to organize ‘for the revolution.’ A few did well; most did not. But Stout was not one of these. Getting into the mill and the struggle there was a step up for him, as an unemployed kid from Kentucky trying to make a living as a political rock and roller and folk singer. He desperately needed a day job, and getting into Homestead mill enabled him to do both, however hard the work. He had more in common with the returning Vietnam vets in the mill than transplanted student radicals, not that he lacked respect for the latter.

This is not to say that the thousands of workers in a four-mile-long mill were monolithic. Far from it. Stout goes on at length throughout the book describing rivalries between a dozen nationalities, between races and sexes, generations, skilled and lesser skilled, and old timers and newcomers.

‘As the book’s title suggests, however, Stout sticks to his outline of ‘the last ten years,’ although it stretches a bit longer to include the aftermath. At the start, hardly anyone had a premonition of what was in store for them—the mills had been there as long as anyone could remember, and thus they would continue into the future. What was different was the owners were squeezing the workers harder, and after the Red purges of the 1950s, the unions had grown cozier with the bosses, The stage was set for rank and file insurgency, and this is the setting Stout entered as a new hire.

Nearly everyone in Western PA gets a nickname in high school or at work. Stout was no different, and his fellow workers tagged him ‘Kentucky’ and it stuck. He laid low in his early months, trying to find the best ways to survive and thrive working rotating shifts. The older ‘beer and a shot’ workers in the bars raised an eyebrow because he only drank red wine, but he slid in easy with the younger crowd that liked their alcohol combined with reefer. Mainly Stout had his eye on a crane operating job, but he was amazed at the skills—and luck—involved to do it safely. It would take some time. But early on, he got the reputation as a guy who resisted any crap thrown at him by foremen. This led him to find a small group of militant workers seeking to find a way to change the union into an instrument that would fight for them.

They certainly had a history behind them. Homestead was a center for more than 150,000 steelworkers in Western PA and neighboring states. The ‘Battle of Homestead’ of the previous century had been compared to the Paris Commune, and fierce battles of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the 1930s had helped found the CIO. FDR’s Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, visited the Homestead Works, but forbidden to speak on the grounds. Legend has it that she spotted a US flag flying over a post office, made her way there, where she delivered a fiery speech for the rights of labor.

Stout quickly joined up with the rank-and-file group and started planning a campaign. Perhaps their most important early project was to start a plant-wide newspaper, the 1397 Rank and Filer. Stout’s description of its impact and evolution over the years is an instructive tale of how a newspaper can become a ‘collective organizer.’ When an organization had to spread the word over a mill measured in square miles, and where thousands of workers on one end often knew little of events on another, it was indispensable. Moreover, the mill was subdivided into what Spout called ‘feudal fiefdoms’ ruled by petty tyrants with divide and rule tactics

The workers also had to have access to the newspaper and to trust it. So it was open to letters, hand-drawn cartoons, and a popular feature called ‘Plant Plague’ that expose the injustices and pure nastiness of plant foremen. It also published studies of the union contract and the misdeeds of the union officials, all with an eye toward replacing them.

After many skirmishes, it paid off. The Local 1397 Rank and File Caucus eventually evolved from a militant minority to a progressive majority of union members and took over the local. There’s a long story in between, of course, but it’s worth reading Stout’s account in full.

For his own role, Stout appears to have made several wise decisions early on and stuck to them. One was to keep his connection with the editorial group that put out the newspaper, both before and after the takeover of the local. The other was to avoid seeking a top post for himself. Early on, because of his unflinching willingness to not only defend workers with a beef, but also to get them involved in their own defense, he rose to a more organic leader. This meant he became a ‘griever’ or grievanceman, eventually becoming a chief griever, and one of the best of them. It might take years, but Stout often won his cases. Even if a worker died, he persisted, winning benefits for surviving families.

Another reason for Stout’s influence was practicing a consistent left politics, expressed in his own terms, and never trying to hide his values, despite red-baiting and other attempts at personal slanders. He offers several accounts of standing up against racism and sexism when it erupted among the workers themselves, as well as used as a weapon by supervisors and other higher-ups.

Stout was known as a socialist inside and outside the mill. At one point, he was connected with the Revolutionary Union, an early 1970s Marxist-Leninist nationwide group. It had rank-and-file union newspapers in other cities and industries, but Stout detached from it as it became too sectarian for his taste.

But what is powerfully portrayed in the book is Stout’s astute combinations of politics with culture. Its pages are replete with the lyrics of dozens of songs written for working-class battles in Homestead and beyond. Together with them are stories of how music was used for firing up picket lines or finding creative ways to raise money. It helped that Stout was good at it, not just knowing a few old labor songs, but pulling together full-fledged rock band performances.

By the middle of the book, you get pulled into the sense of impending doom shared among the workers. What we now know as ‘the Rust Belt’ was being born. Faced with competition abroad and poor management at home, neoliberal capitalism tore up its postwar ‘social contracts.’ Corporate boardrooms closed plants here and shipped production offshore in search of cheaper labor. In some cases, it used modernization to cut workforces by half or more, while keeping production at old levels.

At this point, both Local 1397 and the USW generally learned that unions could not survive without wider allies. Stout unfolds the saga of the nationwide movements in the 1980s and 1990s against plant closings. Workers sought community and government partners in an effort to save profitable businesses by innovation and reorganization, or even in some cases, attempting to buy out and take over the plants themselves.

None of these paid off much, at least in the Homestead area. Stout describes somes of the proposed deals as ‘Last Suppers before our execution.’ But he nonetheless tells a tale of the value of persistence, where he continued to carry on battles and win major grievances for workers even after the plant was closed, the union reduced to a shell and Stout himself among the unemployed. He soldiered on by forming a union print shop as a workers coop, as well as making a few bucks playing concerts here and abroad.

Despite this grim conclusion, ‘Homestead Steel Mill: The Last Ten Years’ is a hopeful book. It draws positive lessons from defeats, showing the need for wider and more protracted political strategies. It’s not enough to press liberals to do good things; workers need a vision of taking power themselves. And the lessons of its victories stand out as well. Workers can win when they are well-organized, well-informed, and well-inspired. They need a culture of solidarity and mutual aid to fight for what belongs to them, not only the part, but the whole deal. You can buy the book HERE

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science-fiction-is-real · 5 years

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In which i talk about joseph stalin for a long time and also about intersectionality

You know who i’ve been reading a lot about recently?

Joseph Stalin.

And I’ve been reading, and while i’m at work all day, working mostly alone, no music or distractions, i’ve been thinking about everything i’ve been reading.

and this fucker who died before my parents were even born has been on my mind, because i just don’t fucking get it.

This idiot was a revolutionary. a god damn REVOLUTIONARY. Did hard time in siberia as a political prisoner. (I mean, probably also a prisoner for all the organized crime he was doing---to fund the REVOLUTION) That’s not the sort of thing a grifter, who is only interested in power, gets into. It’s an absolutely terrible grift. It’s a lot of risk to take if you aren’t a true believer.

And in between all the bank robberies and what not, he edited a newspaper and did a lot of writing. There’s a database online where you can read pretty much everything Stalin ever wrote (Along with pretty much every thing pretty much every other famous Marxist ever wrote). I can’t really bring myself to read too much of his stuff. Eww. Why would I want to. Gross. But also I feel like i should in the name of fact checking, and understanding what I’m talking about before I talk about it.

But the stuff i did read, was...... not terrible....? Some of it was replying to other socialist writing (because what do lefties enjoy more than arguing with other lefties, amiright???), a lot of it was old fashioned marxist stuff talking about working class vs capitalists, and a lot of it was describing legitimate complaints about the Czarist government. Expressing anger at the pogroms and the suppression of ethnic minorities and hunger and poverty. Sounds like a good reason to have a revolution to me.

Of course, those were all the same sorts of atrocities he himself would go on to do. again. eww.

But, after all of this, it’s pretty clear to me that pre-revolutionary Stalin was a true fuckin believer.

And that kept me up at night. Because how come that would change when he himself came into power?

Is it because once you’re handed power, the temptation to abuse it is just far too great? Is it because when the revolution is over, and the complexities of the ‘’Real World,’’ are obvious, and it’s all to easy to abandon idealism in order to get things done? Are all post-revolutionary periods destined to be violent and oppressive, because the new government wants to assert its power? How much blame does he get personally, and how much goes to the other founders of the revolutionary movement--Lenin and Trotsky and the like-- who laid the groundwork for how things would function? IS socialism itself just cursed to fail like my republican grandma told me?

Or is this just a classical example of the other thing our republican grandmas warned us about, radical idealists turning cranky and cruel and conservative in old age just like they did? I mean what sort of things did stalin do while in power? A lot of pretty republican things. LMAO. Banning the gays and abortion, enforcing strict gender norms, getting TOUGH ON CRIME! Beefing up the military on money that should be used to provide for people’s basic needs....

If the right gets to try and pass off Hitler as a socialist, the left gets to say that Stalin was a moderate republican. (Not full republican. I mean, he did actually react appropriately when he found out there were Nazis in his country. Just moderate republican.) LMAO!

But then i thought about it a little more.

No. He was not a right winger. No one who spends the first half of his adult life trying to overthrow a government that had been ruling for 300 years is a god damn fucking right winger. He was left wing. But..... Old timy left wing.

Because he did make good on a lot of the socialist ideas while in office. I’m pretty sure he set up a fairly solid welfare state, free housing and education and healthcare and whatnot. That was pretty new and revolutionary for the time.

But... Old timy left wing.

and if you think about old timy left-wingers. most of them are only left wing in SOME areas. The right absolutely LOVES to point this out. ‘’Sure Margaret Sanger was a radical feminist, but she was also a racist!’’ ‘’This person was a racist, this person was homophobic! All your icons are fake frauds!’’ I mean, they probably were all racist and homophobic and whatnot, but that doesn’t actually deminish the radicality of the stuff they were ‘’woke’’ on.

And that’s true for the pre-marxist left too. We can hate on Thomas Jefferson all day long for being a creepy rapy slave owner and rich asshole who should have been tarred and feathered and (sorry, i brought up thomas jefferson, i have to go take 5 and cool down before i punch something) But he still was..... left. To say ‘’all men are created equal,’’ even if you just mean straight white men, was still kind of radical in the 18th century, when the world was still divided up between the gentry and the common men, and people were presumed to have class status that was bred into them and was part of their very inner nature. The idea that you could just throw out the idea of a nobility ruling class, or the monarchy, and initiate some sort of meritocracy based system, was out of this fucking world at that point.

And you can say the say the same thing about the russian revolutionaries. You can criticize them up and down and left and right for being undemocratic, but the idea that wealth should be something everyone has guaranteed access to, that no one should hold economic power over you, that working people deserve some sort of dignified recognition for what they do, that was--AND STILL IS--radical.

Lenin, who lived in monarchical empire, saw the western countries move away from monarchies and embrace our versions of Western Capitalist Democracy (TM). He decided his revolution would go in a different direction, one of economic instead of political democracy. The western style of revolution had been tried, and now it was time to try out an eastern style of revolution.

I think he would have said something like ‘’look, ya’ll in france and england can vote, and i’ve been to france and england. Those places suck ass. You’re poor and hungry and miserable and working 10 hours a day for shit pay and going home to your crammed tenement apartments before dying of cholera at the age of 12. Hell of a lot a good DeMoCrAcY does. We need ECONOMIC democracy instead.’’

I do remember a quote from lenin, that said something along the lines of ‘’Yes, my system isn’t ‘democratic’ but if you think about it, it’s a hell of a lot more democratic than anything they’re doing in capitalist countries.’’

Of course, we modern folk who fancy ourselves so enlightened by hindsight will point out that you need BOTH economic and political democracy. A democratic government being run alongside an undemocratic economy is oppression. Anyone who lives in the United States and has read more than three books in their life can see this. It SUCKS. Likewise. An egalitarian economy being run by an undemocratic government is also oppression, because the government can do whatever it wants to the economy, like, say.... sell all the country’s food on the international market to fund various different 5-year-plan projects. Had Stalin been subjected to democratic processes, he never would have been allowed to do that.

In the early 20th century, there wasn’t really much of a concept of INTERSECTIONALITY. in the modern left, we pretty much agree that if you want to have freedom and equality in one sphere of life, you also need to pursue freedom and equality in other spheres. Oppression is contagious. If you allow discrimination against Gays for example, this leads to discrimination against the sexes because people are going to be forced into stricter and stricter gender norms. And of course, if you want political equality under the law, you also need racial equality so that one group of people isn’t disenfranchised from voting or fair treatment by the courts.

Just like how political democracy has to happen alongside economic democracy.

So yeah, I guess after the end of all this long ranting and shit. I think it makes sense why a serious revolutionary true believer like Stalin can grow into a tyrant. Because Old timy left-wing politics was underdeveloped and had lots of blind spots. People didn’t realize that it was important for movements to be led by people who were seriously committed to intersectional emancipation. Young Stalin when he would go hang out with all of his socialist dude-bro friends, planning their bank heists, wearing their newsboys hats, trying not to die of cholera, he probably wasn’t being called out on sexism or racism. They were just an economic-left movement that didn’t care much about the other stuff.

But there isn’t really a whole lot to gain by doing a character analysis on some ass wipe who kicked the bucket before color television was even invented. All the terrible things he did and all the good intentions, sincere or not, that he had, that is between him and whatever God is governing this bitch of a universe. We on the left know better than to look at individuals to answer important questions, we know to look at systems. And gather lessons so that we can build better movements in the future.

Yeah, whatever, intersectionality.

Sorry this was so long and poorly written. I shall cite no sources and do no editing. Fuck you. Thanks for reading.

#history #hot takes #politics #socialism #opinion time

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anti-marxistcult · 5 years

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Yellow Vest protest in France

i watching videos of France yellow vest protests, very graphic, very bloody and horrific brutality to the french :( the police are attacking citizens, not just protesters. People are losing hands, eyes, teeth, fracture skulls and jaws, broken bones.

I can’t show the videos, heavy violent stuff, if you can handle it then you go find it. I’m not linking it. sorry, can’t. the MSM are not showing it, they even tried to push false narrative that the french are doing this due to “fake far right news” online, fucking liars

in contrast it makes the Soros funded little antifa thugs protests and riots that get the police to side with them look all the more set-up just to serve the media narrative. fascists posing as “anti-fascists”

the left dont handle reality very well, some of them not at all. they fabricate and exaggerate to serve their emotions and goals, they defend criminals and they vilify heroes, dont ever expect to get the whole truth from them, they can’t resist distorting facts and gaslighting

yup you can thank Obama for that, he legalized propaganda, that piece of shit needs to take a long walk off a skyscraper

globalism is their term for global control aka world domination

history shows this that is why the left has their cunt revisionists rewriting history

see why masculinity is crucial for men? and why the left want to condition it out of our boys? emasculating them makes them cowardly and obedient to dictators

And this is why the 2nd amendment matters.

far left ideologies are destructive to peace and humanity, the fuckers grooming kids in public schools ffs and the left wing mothers are doing it to their own kids

the left allow it because of their twisted “oppressed/oppressor” victim stack BS, so you white girls and women being gangraped by non whites is ok in their book, think of Rotherham and Telford grooming gangs in the uk... the left didnt care

it is cultural marxism, they placed marxist template onto identity, so they can shift the focus away from the ruling elite class and demonize whites and western civilization and divide and conquer the masses

fucking bastards

blood is already on the streets, the footage was full of graphic bloody injured folk

no this is not french values, this is abuse of power

i can just imagine the american left say shit like “if the french weren’t white you wouldnt help them” ...srsly you can believe the MSM and twitter leftwing hate mob would say some fucked up shit like that, they fucking would

FUCKING A!

do not let another far leftist in power, just dont. they have already revealed they’re un-fucking-hinged. If they chest and do get in power, prep for war because they have.

true that

I hope it does, they’ve given us no other option to cure the poison they have injected into the west. We’re on borrowed time.

look up world leaders that say “new world order”, it is not a conspiracy theory

major respect to the french, at least they are doing something, and canadians are not far behind, the rest of the west has it’s tail between it’s legs because it dont like to be called labels and doesnt want to be smeared by media by saying ‘2+2=4′. Listen; fuck em, they are smearing western peoples regardless if you comply or not, they have have done so for fucking decades, brainwashing, shaming and blaming the west for slavery when FACT is all cultures and races were complicit in it, but you know why they target whites? because they fucking ended it. that is a big no no to these tyrants because in their eyes it shows whites has a “weakness”, and that is mercy. Totalitarians see mercy as weakness. why the fuck do you think “white nationalism” is used to shut down dissenters for? to undermine sovereignty, they just add “white” to it so it discourages any people from defending their own nation because “muh political correctness, muh diversity, white ppl bad because the left said so” against this strategic and long time carried out plan of the pedo commie globalists conquering the west. fucking hate seeing this happen in my life time. stupid me for expecting my generation to grow a brain, instead they soaked it in marxist bile.

#france #yellow vests #psa #news #europe

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makerof150papermasks · 5 years

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The Three Governments of Spyro the Dragon

Today, I have something really interesting that I feel would be worth talking about. Now I remember recently reading a post titled “’Kirby Super Star’ is a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union,” which delves into the titular 1996 SNES video game so deeply and somehow matches it up with certain pieces of USSR history (Reddit). After viewing this, I began to think, “I know a few other games that I could analyze like this guy did with Kirby.” Yes, I was motivated so much by this blog that I had a hunch to work on my own research chat.

Now the games I am about to talk about are the first three games in the Spyro the Dragon series first released for the PlayStation from 1998 to 2000, titled Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, and Spyro: Year of The Dragon (Additionally, all three titles recently received a remake collectively titled “Spyro Reignited Trilogy,” which makes this document relevant as of 2019). With a little research, I was able to pair those games with a government that best defined them in a nutshell. Of course, not all real-life elements of these governments may actually match up with how any of the fictional societies depicted operate, but I’ve tried my hardest to make sure the details match up strongly enough that they can be talked about.

*If you haven’t played the games yet and don’t want to be spoiled, then don’t bother reading!

Spyro the Dragon: Confederation (Left)

I want to start this discussion by saying something unique about this first third of the review: unlike the latter two titles, Spyro the Dragon seems to promote the idea of its featured form of government rather than point out the significant flaws and ensure the audience doesn’t sympathize with the concept at hand. First off, I want to give you folks a good look at how the populace of the Dragon Worlds goes about their lives and organizes themselves socially speaking. For those of you don’t already know enough about the game’s context, there are five socially-unique sectors that each owe something important to the well-being of the larger society. The Artisans represent the working class, the Peace Keepers are equivalent to a military system, the Magic Crafters are most likely representative of the business owners and upper class (As noted by the sheer presence of overly-elegant architecture in their specific area), the Beast Makers represent those who work in health, medical, biological, and other science-related fields, while the Dream Weavers can be considered a spiritually-grounded group of dragons who are experts in the field of meditation. Then there’s the extra sixth sector known as Gnasty’s World (Residence of main antagonist Gnasty Gnorc, who holds no true political power under any circumstance; therefore, I will leave him out of the equation), which I’ll just shoehorn into the sanitation sector, even though it would still easily be associated with the working class (Artisans).

With the exception of Gnasty’s World, these groups all serve an equally vital role in establishing the economic stability and societal foundation of the Dragon Worlds, in the form of a confederation. Now if you folks are wondering what that’s supposed to mean, here’s the definition; “an organization which consists of a number of parties or groups united in an alliance or league.” For a historical example, the United States operated in this manner under the Articles of Confederation of 1777, which was ratified in 1781 and formed a society whose power lay mostly in the hands of the member states. Up until 1789, these states could establish laws without having to worry about a federal government trampling over those laws since the existing equivalent had far less political power than the one present (Reference.com).

Revisiting my view from the previous paragraph, it can be noted that each of the first five sectors can be viewed as separate, autonomous states that, in spite of their different approaches to solving daily situations, hold a common view of some sort that unites them into a larger entity. While it’s not known in canon if the sectors that dragons live in have ever come into conflict with each other at any point, I will bring up some backstory later on that may be worth identifying.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage: Empire (Middle)

Now looking at the titular villain and his path to wretchedness, picture him as this small, colonial society. From what we’re aware of based on the context provided in-game, Ripto and his cronies have no idea that Avalar (The main setting of this sophomore title) even exists at first. Now keep in mind that since Ripto despises dragons, he’s picky about where he wants to expand his influence. But anyway, once he finds himself in this dragon-free dimension, it becomes the perfect opportunity for Ripto to slowly nibble away at the land until there is no more for him to take over, aka, colonize. Of course, once Spyro shows up, the horned, red midget becomes rather peeved, prompting him and his goons to actually begin setting up the framework for his proposed kingdom.

Throughout the events of the game, Ripto not only uses his magic to spread his negative influence across the dimension (AKA: Cause various beasts and baddies to run amok and result in calamity), but we are also shown the blue banners of Avalar being rolled back in favor of emblems donning the antagonist’s mug, THRICE. According to my searches, an empire is defined as, “an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress.” In this case, Ripto can easily be seen as emperor because at his highest position, he holds control over not just his two reptilian brutes (Who serve as a metaphor for his “kingdom” at its most basic), but also numerous realms scattered throughout Avalar, each serving as their own formerly independent municipalities until he enters the picture.

Now here’s another point: even with Spyro around, Ripto still feels the need to settle in Avalar because there are no dragons around other than Spyro himself currently present to scare him away, which thereby gives him access to a shipload of land and resources. When it came to real-life empires, they were strategic regarding which areas to conquer. For example, the Roman Empire wouldn’t go east into modern-day Germany because the cost of conquest in that area was far above the monetary worth earned from the extractable resources available in that region (The Daily Reckoning).

Moving on, the western half eventually collapsed primarily due to internal conflicts over power that left them exposed to outsiders (The eastern half, dubbed “The Byzantine Empire,” managed to survive until 1453, when it fell to Turkish invaders as a result of their victory in the Byzantine-Ottoman wars). In-game, the biggest reason Ripto is defeated is because he overlooks the possibility of Spyro collecting Avalar’s sacred talismans and orbs, which collectively allow the young dragon to pass through the barriers that separate both parties.

Spyro: Year of The Dragon: Totalitarian State (Right)

Jumping ship to the final third of the original Spyro trilogy, we now examine the Forgotten Realms and its central government in the form of the despotic, blue crocodilian-esque Sorceress. Now the previous two games sugarcoated their subject matter immensely (Though the second game still views the concept of an empire as a detrimental idea), but this time the game doesn’t make things look as rosy. First and foremost, The Sorceress displays a position of superiority around anyone in her vicinity, and in an overly aggressive manner most of the time. Already, we’re seeing her being established as a straw tyrant; alas, there is still so much more to discuss regarding the Forgotten Realms operating as a political body that blatantly abides by the guidelines of totalitarianism. Now where do we begin on this topic?

My first point of conversation in this segment is that unlike Gnasty Gnorc or Ripto in the previous two games (Now although the latter does become “ruler” near the end of his respective game, he doesn’t spend nearly enough time to be officially considered a grand-high patriarch by any of the residents of Avalar), The Sorceress is a formally-recognized monarch, is referred to as such by the inhabitants of the Forgotten Realms, and to make matters much worse, has been ruling this same exact dimension, in the same throne for AT LEAST 1000 YEARS. Not only that, but at one point, the dragons currently living dwelling in the Dragon Realms once lived in the Forgotten Realms. But when they left, they took their magic with them and as the centuries passed, magic began to drain and caused their fancy-schmancy portals to stop working. We’re convinced to think that the reason The Sorceress has become so wary of Spyro’s presence is because he will disrupt her plans to gather the eggs they had stolen from the dragons; she is supposedly gathering them in order allow this upcoming generation of winged reptiles to bring magic back to the dimension she rules over.

I will bring up that part about the dragons and the eggs again, but there is an important detail that points further to establishing The Sorceress as an antagonist known for taking full advantage of her position over everyone around her and therefore preventing anyone from reasoning with her other than Spyro and a slew of animal friends she had recently imprisoned. A little more than a quarter way into the game, Spyro finds himself in a realm known as Enchanted Towers; it is here that he discovers that a slew of lavender-skinned counterculture humanoids had been tasked with erecting a statue built in their highness’ likeness.

There’s just so much to talk about regarding what the statue situation represents, but first let me define what this government is. Totalitarianism is described as being, “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.” The aforementioned statue in Enchanted Towers is probably one of the biggest pieces of evidence pointing to the Forgotten Realms operating under that kind of system. To start, the Sorceress displays unrivaled power in the world she inhabits and no one dare beg to differ with her on that matter. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that the citizens of Enchanted Towers mention that they certainly did not enjoy creating this tremendous work of art (Though they agree that it looks prettier than the actual character herself, further driving the sense of rebellion in), but they completely understand that going against what The Sorceress is telling them to do is like flirting with death.

You, the reader, have to realize that this is a form of government where there isn’t a legislative or judicial system to limit executive power. Heck, that’s not even getting into the fact that the denizens of the Forgotten Realms have neither a right to free speech nor the freedom to vote in elections, as far I’m aware. It’s certainly no fun living in a society where one person holds all the social and political power and you’re not that one person, nothing delightful about that (And there’s nothing anyone can do to change the fact unless someone successfully uses force to overthrow the one in power so they wouldn’t be able to enforce their laws any longer).

Before getting to the climax of this essay, it’s that time I bring up a real example. Although I’d be talking about a dictatorship along the lines of Nazi Germany, I’ve decided to take a more interesting example from further back in history. The Qin Dynasty, an empire to which China borrows its name from, relied on an authoritarian set of regulations that would become hugely influential to every Chinese-based dynasty that followed. Although it only lasted from 221 to 207 BC, there’s still some valuable information to extract from this chapter of human history. It also makes sense for me to select this example because the game’s title, Year of The Dragon, references a specific birth year on the Chinese Zodiac (Speaking of which, the year the game itself originally released just happened to land on a dragon year, which only happens once every twelve years).

Now allow me to continue with the example. Under the commissioning of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the very first leader of a unified China, came a standardized system of writing and a strictly-guided formula for measuring the width, weight, and length of highways. Huang also oversaw construction of what would become the first section of The Great Wall of China and eventually went on to abolish the feudal system that flourished during the Zhou Dynasty decades earlier (In which landowners owed allegiance to the emperor as a result of kinship rather than fulfilling legal obligations). In addition, he commissioned the burning of almost all of the books currently available in that region at the time, only sparing those that provided information on topics like medicine and issued gigantic tax levies in an effort to pay for his military and construction expenses. This matrix of catastrophes led to a rebellion following Qin Shi Huang’s death in 210 BC, which went on to ultimately knock the Qin Dynasty out of power and make room for the Han Dynasty roughly 3-4 years later (Britannica).

Now what I’ll be explaining next is going to be extremely horrifying in hindsight, so grab your popcorn and hold your breath. While exploring Evening Lake, the third home world of the game, Spyro’s close friend Hunter winds up in a subterranean trap set up by The Sorceress that was meant for Spyro himself to prevent him from collecting any more of the dragon eggs that she desperately wanted to remain untouched. He is then approached by her servant, a magician-in-training named Bianca (To whom he has a developed a liking for over the course of the synopsis), who comes to tell the caged cheetah that the reason the dragons left so many years ago was because it had to do with their wonderful wings. As they began to realize that the obese blue saurian autocrat wanted to clip them off to give her immortality, they had no choice but to find solace in another reality. Linking this information to Spyro 1, we can now go back to viewing the example of confederation as the United States during the era of the Articles of Confederation, trying to recuperate from their religious tension with the monarchy of England and emigrating from there before ultimately deciding to settle in North America and establish a self-governed nation over the course of several decades. In the Spyro continuity, the dragons succeeded in building an autonomous series of societies in the then-vacant Dragon Realms following their disastrous affair with The Sorceress, where they then proceeded to push aside Gnasty Gnorc to the wastelands at some point later in time so they would have enough room to properly establish their footing in this uncharted land.

But sadly, that is not the end of the suspense; when Bianca returns to her master’s throne room, she discovers a dreadful truth she hadn’t been aware of until now. Ever since her henchmen brought the yet-to-hatch eggs back from the Dragon Worlds, The Sorceress hoarded them not because she wanted them to return their magic to the Forgotten Realms once they did hatch, but because she wanted to KILL THEM FOR THEIR WINGS LIKE SHE ATTEMPTED TO DO WITH THE ADULT DRAGONS BEFORE THEY LEFT. What she’s basically telling us is that she plans on committing an act of GENOCIDE ON AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF NEWBORNS in a similar manner to how Hitler promoted the large-scale massacre on an enormous number of Jews during the Holocaust.

With not a pinch of sympathy for anyone but herself by this point, the malevolent indigo monarch has become nothing short of a filthy caricature for the horrors of tyranny and dictatorship. By the way, she didn’t have to kill the newborns at all for that to happen, she just felt the need to do so JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T WANT TO SEE THEM SQUIRMING AROUND IN HER QUARTERS. Prompting a drastic change of heart, Bianca decides to cease working for her master, opting to rescue Hunter from the trap her former supervisor had set up in Evening Lake. Fed up with the treason her lackey recently committed, The Sorceress decides to create an absurdly powerful, bat-winged monster intended to annihilate practically everyone in her opposition (Simply put, that means almost the entire population of the world she governs, plus Spyro and some of the friends he bought along).

Even though Spyro manages to eradicate The Sorceress for good, (Much to the satisfaction of the Forgotten Realms inhabitants) the atrocious myriad of actions she takes during that one game position her as an antagonist who is regarded as a dark villain for a normally light-hearted sugar bowl series like Spyro, thereby leaving an indelible mark on the narrative of that franchise’s continuity. Serving as a harsh critique for the concept of autocracy and its consequences on the people, Spyro: Year of The Dragon uses a surprisingly pathos-inducing series of events that favors a call to action for executive reform, appealing to the wants and needs of the governed rather than the desires and aspirations of the government itself.

Sources:

Kirby Super Star: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/39dbqi/kirby_super_star_is_a_marxist_critique_of_the/

Confederacy: https://www.reference.com/government-politics/examples-confederate-government-230a5f967d7f24fa

Empire: https://dailyreckoning.com/how-empires-really-work/

Totalitarian State: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Qin-dynasty

https://www.reference.com/history/feudalism-ancient-china-8ddd0bf737a29fc5

#spyro reignited trilogy #spyro the dragon #playstation games #i need to post more often #my very first critique #enjoy ur day

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culturevulturette · 7 months

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They're doing their best.

#quotations #george orwell #little marxist tyrants

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kentmwz-blog · 3 years

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WHY I AM NOT A CONSERVATIVE

2018-12-02

In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience.

Why am I not a liberal? Because I admire the luxuriant giant tree of civilization, including its roots. So it seems being a conservative is the “natural” answer. But what does it mean to be a “conservative”? What do conservatives “conserve”?

A conservative today is usually an economic liberal. He promotes free market whose major principle is free trade and free market. The goal of all this, is actually nothing else than the goal of a socialist: the increase of efficiency, the increase of employment, the increase of living standard, the increase of literacy, the decrease of fetal mortality and the advancement of technology.

We are told that the increase of total social wealth is what actually made these goals possible. Surely I do not oppose the increase of total social wealth, but what does that mean? In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the word “wealth” usually means one thing, the material profit. As the classical liberals boasted, “it was the capitalist who created the condition where any socialist activism is possible”, and “without capitalism, 80% of world’s people would not be there!”

But is humanity better just because we have more people? Does the happiness of humanity hike with the sharp improvement of the material life? No matter how much the material condition improves, one could not help wondering why, despite all this material progress, the spiritual, or mental wealth is shrinking.

The rise of suicide rate in the more materially wealth parts of the world, and the prevalence of drug abuse and the political consensus of both left and right wings on pot legalization, the trend in legalizing non-hetereosexual “marriage”, and the vulgarization of popular culture.

Even worse, the mind and the behavior of the deracinated masses are now being engineered by social media giant corporations. One may argue “but this is not the intention of free market capitalism!” But the road to hell is paved good intentions, and moreover, I am not sure urging young kids to engage in computer games with gambling functions (“microtransaction”) is “good” intention.

The obsession with the material, is perhaps inherent in the bourgeois mind. Historically, they have no real sense of loyalty to any land, any king, any belief, any community or even any family. Nor do they have any fixed social function. As the great conservative thinker Edmunk Burke put it, “the laws of commerce…are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” (Maybe Burke and his students believe in Hermes, the God of Commerce? “Orthodox Christians” without charity, what a paradox!)

In other words, they are materialists. What does it take to go from this kind of materialist to the Marxist dialectic materialist? Hegelian dialectics, the black magic of sophistry, that is. Besides, after the rise of industrial capitalism, there has been more and more giant companies which is not actually owned by any private person. Yes, everyone can buy their stock shares, but what is the separation of management from private ownership, aside from being the sheer violation of the private property right?

Of course, usurers need this, so they can concentrate their attention in the financial industry, which makes everyone else “proletarian” – whose only possession is the labor-power. The ideological and economic continuity means industrial capitalism is the prelude of socialism. Surely there are free-marketeers, and there are mainly two sorts of them, “minarchists” and anarchists.

The so-called “minarchists” ask for such as minimal modern sovereign state: it has a standing army, a nationalized police and a centralized legal system. One has to remember the first economic liberals, i.e. Physiocrats called for an Enlightened tyrant – it means compared to the ancient free states supported by pious and loyal people, the so-called “minarchy” is nothing but a tyrannical modern state supported by deracinated masses: the instrument of a Leninist state is already there.

As for anarcho-capitalism, there is no anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism; there is only lawless anarchy, where physical violence and “smart” backstabbing are the eternal law of survival. In reality, the so-called minarchy is being practiced, and here we are, bound with quantity over quality, efficiency without purpose, property without ownership, and snobbery without organicity: the greatness of a modern industrial capitalism!

The eternal state with its permanent laws, seems to be ingrained in the mind of the eternal Anglo conservative, and conservatives in other spheres of culture are believing in it as well, thanks to the neoconservative Wilsonian order. It is said, that only by trial-and-error, we will know what works the best.

It is also said that we must preserve the traditional political institutions unconditionally. These two are in fact contradicting each other. The change in the internal and external, material and spiritual environments, requires the relevant changes in the social and political institutions, so a civilization can survive.If we see certain political institutions as god-given eternal entities, the fate of the Late Qing Empire will be repeated: the state is getting paralyzed by European colonists, peasant rebels, cult terrorists and radical revolutionaries – from 1851 to 1863, China’s population declined by more than 200 million! Why? Because they were overly obsessed with their ancient political traditions without making any effort to revitalize them.

As T. S. Eliot put it, “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” This political sloth has proven to be causal to the repeated defeat of conservatisms in history. Surely, many conservatives care words more than reality, so much so that they would sacrifice anything for their “political values”. They are too persistent on political values but sometimes too flexible on moral values. I wonder how much this overintellectualization is related to “sola fide” of Martin Luther.

It is the central conservative dogma that the state can do little, if nothing, to promote moral thoughts and behavior. Edmund Burke once said, “It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else.”

But is it true? Centuries before Burke, St. Augustine of Hippo believed that the state simultaneously serves the divine purposes of chastening the wicked and refining the righteous. Many conservatives argue, based on the minarchist doctrine, that the state is an evil, but a necessary one. Meanwhile, they also argue that the state should be impartial, and by “impartial”, they mean amoral. From the theoretical point of view, anyone committed to the mission of promoting evil must start his adventure by convincing evil is “necessary”: “Only Catholics soaked in canon law and papal superstition maintained the old prohibitions against usury”, wrote Cotton Mather; “If we did not nuke Japan, we would have suffered unbearable losses”, argued the 21st century neoconservative.

Even worse, conservatives like Andrew Sullivan are actually the pioneers of various postmodern progressive social movements. So, political amorality becomes political anti-morality. Again, if one looks back into the history of the progress of such a political ideal, despite of its ostensibly just claims, what it has wrought us is one license to vices after another. Virtues need no license, because anyone with moral conscience know that virtues are hard to maintain so there is no real legal restriction on them.

By contrast, an interesting observation from the generation educated under Estado Novo or its Spanish counterpart is said to be extremely polite and respectful. “It can do very little positive good in this”? History seems to disagree. For a traditionalist, as opposed to a conservative, what must be permanent are the moral values, and the political values can be flexible and the political institutions must serve the purpose to preserve the moral values, not the other way around.

Needless to say, the flexibility on moral values has cost conservatives a lot, besides the well-known political defeats. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once said, “the urban conservative…is nothing but an inhibited ‘progressive’.” From Lawrence v. Texas to the eventual legalization of non-heterosexual marriage, one sees this pattern, especially from the opinions of the conservative judges, such as this opinion from Clarence Thomas on Lawrence v. Texas, “Although he agreed with Scalia’s dissent for the most part, Thomas felt obliged to write separately to point out that the law was ‘silly’ and should be repealed”.

Is this law really “silly”? One would wonder why CDC stopped publishing data about AIDS back in the years of Obama administration. The progressives are convinced missionaries of their progressive previsions, while conservatives are half-hearted followers of social traditions.In reality, I really do not think any Old Whig could tell others to obey the traditional political values when they themselves were the revolutionaries who destroyed the legitimate ancient institution via the “Glorious” Revolution. Those “eternal” Angloes who boast about Magna Carta never pay any tribute to Alcuin of York: so much respect for tradition! So it is not really surprising that conservatives are just Fabian progressives – progressives with a 10 year jet lag.

Thus, it is not difficult to understand why conservatism lacks real content and has no actual proposal. The conservatives today are more radical than the Radicals back in the 19th century. Paul Joseph Watson, “the defender of gay rights and women rights against bigotry”, once said, “conservatism is the new counter-culture!” By that I guess he means it is the new urban fashion among spoiled middle class kids. Maybe in 10 years, Kanye West will become the new William F. Buckley Jr. yelling “Stop!” in his hip-hop songs.

Why am I not a conservative? Because conservatism is insufficient for the mission of restoration and regeneration: there is little to “conserve” in modernity and postmodernity (or, “neo-modernity”). In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience.

#oldblog

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years

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The same old stupid game

I’ve recently had the misfortune to come across a few articles, one by Inez Feltscher Stepman of The Federalist and David Satter, “senior fellow” at the so-called Hudson Institute. Naturally, as reactionary commentators for reactionary propaganda outlets, their tripe is full of lies, half-truths, and glaring omissions meant to serve their biases. It’s the normal bourgeois playbook for libeling Communism.

I’m not a tremendous fan of the Soviet Union, or the manner of “actually existing Socialism” that developed there, but I feel compelled to refute this nonsense not only because it’s dishonest, or that it’s a perversion of the actual history, but at least because the Soviet Union is the dead horse reactionaries love to beat when Socialism as a subject is discussed.

I came across Stepman’s tripe after seeing someone post the following cap from her twitter:

galaxymind.jpg

I try not to go by screen caps alone. A favorite of /pol/’s tactics is taking things out of context to craft their own narrative around events, which often have little or any basis in reality. Given the... content of this tweet, the meaning seems pretty obvious, but I try to err on the side of caution, so I ran her name through my sophisticated crime computer and was immediately directed to her posts at The Federalist. The results weren’t particularly impressive, but something did jump out to me: “The Biggest Legacy Of International Women’s Day Is Communism.”

I had a feeling it was going to be painful given the title, and I wasn’t wrong.

As a Communist, I have a soft spot for International Working Women’s day, as the event was originally known. Women have played a special role in the history of labor organization and revolutionary activity, and today Capitalism derives much of its profit from the relentless, merciless exploitation of the female gender in its various forms.

How progressive.

Even in the so-called First World, I’ve seen my female friends and co-workers mistreated and immiserated by the Capitalist system in ways unique to their kind. I celebrate IWWD because in its ideal form, it is an opportunity not only for women to build solidarity between one another (which is often sorely lacking) but for men to show their support, and build solidarity with the other gender (and vice versa on International Working Men’s Day). It’s an opportunity to remember the work of women past, the progress we’ve been able to achieve together, and lay the ground work for a better future for us all. The purpose of the day is to pay special attention to the circumstances of our working sisters, but at its heart it’s a day to reaffirm our dedication to the cause of true egalitarianism, and not the false mirage offered by bourgeois “feminists” that demand more female CEOs while ignoring the Mexican nannies they underpay to raise their children for them, or pushing expensive shirts for “charity,” assembled in stifling and dangerous sweat shops by the thousands of women they actually should be fighting for.

Naturally, Stepman starts off strong.

Leon Trotsky, of icepick fame, wrote afterwards: “We did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike … which led to mass strike … all went out into the streets.”

What a splendid introduction. I wonder if she characterizes so “Abraham Lincoln, of getting-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head fame.” She links to a Fortune article, which in turn links to an apparently defunct World March for Women site. Usually, not linking directly to the source material (when possible) is a strong indicator of chicanery, to say the least. After a bit of searching, I was able to track it down to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, where the actual quote goes like so:

THE 23rd of February was International Woman’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organisation, and a most militant one – the Vyborg borough committee, all workers – was opposing strikes. The temper of the masses, according to Kayurov, one of the leaders in the workers’ district, was very tense; any strike would threaten to turn into an open fight. But since the committee thought the time unripe for militant action – the party not strong enough and the workers having too few contacts with the soldiers – they decided not to call for strikes but to prepare for revolutionary action at some indefinite time in the future. Such was the course followed by the committee on the eve of the 23rd of February, and everyone seemed to accept it. On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metalworkers with an appeal for support. “With reluctance,” writes Kayurov, “the Bolsheviks agreed to this, and they were followed by the workers–Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike, one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead.” Such was Kayurov’s decision, and the Vyborg committee had to agree to it. “The idea of going into the streets had long been ripening among the workers; only at that moment nobody imagined where it would lead.” Let us keep in mind this testimony of a participant, important for understanding the mechanics of the events.

Certainly lends a different perspective to the “quote,” I think, but we can’t show that the Bolsheviks weren’t power-mad, bloodthirsty tyrants now, can we? Of course, progressing through the article we find the same ridiculous libels that we usually find.

That revolution, which caused Russia to exit WWI and brought Vladimir Lenin to power, started the chain of events that eventually lead to the slaughter of as many as 100 million people under the banner of Communism.

To say that the revolution “caused Russia to exit WWI” is a half-truth at best. Russia was suffering severely from the deprivations caused by the titanic struggle with Germany, for which Russia was horribly unprepared. All the nonsense that reactionaries like this try to pin on the Soviets--not enough rifles or ammunition for their troops, mass human wave tactics, shooting ‘cowards’ retreating without orders, etc--was committed by Tsarist Russia. By the end of the war, due to incompetence among the aristocracy and general staff, unpreparedness either militarily or economically, intervention by the Tsar himself in military affairs on the Eastern Front, and the terrific conditions the Russian soldiers and peasantry were exposed to, Russia would see more than four-million of its people dead. Russia was incapable of continued involvement in the war. The Bolsheviks end up signing away a vast expanse of Russia to buy peace, which is exactly what the people wanted, and what the parliamentary government refused to give them.

The “100 Million Dead” is the usual smear, but I’ll return to that shortly.

Obviously, few people celebrating International Women’s Day in 2018 intend to glorify Communism’s dark history. But the day still retains the essence of its Marxist roots by encouraging women to think of themselves as a homogenous [sic] class with discrete common interests, in opposition to men’s.

Here the brainlet further exposes herself for the pseudo-intellectual that she is. There’s a lot to be said about Marxism and its history with “Feminism.” This sort of characterization reveals how little of either Stepman understands of either.

In Marxist terms, men and women don’t constitute separate classes within society. In short, one’s social class is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production, i.e., do you have to work for a living, or do you live from others working necessary resources to which you control by monopoly? There are numerous divisions possible based on how you want to slice it, but generally you can say that there are the bourgeois, those that own the things people need to live, and the proletariat, those that earn a wage working for the bourgeois. From the Marxist perspective, men and women inhabit the same class based on their material relations, but nowhere are their assumed to be “homogenous,” or that they have universal or even necessarily opposed interests. As workers, they have a united interest in overthrowing the capitalist system of bourgeois ownership that keeps them in bondage, but to treat people as a homogeneous mass with all the same needs and goals runs directly counter to the materialist analysis on which Marx bases his thought.

It’s well understood by the actual Left that until we’re all free, men and women, etc, then none of us are free, and even a cursory glance at the history of people’s revolutions reveals that without the united effort of women and men, they’ll both languish in bondage. One half of the proletariat trying to get a leg up on the other isn’t just nonsensical, it’s counter revolutionary, detrimental to the well being of both.

The rest of her rubbish-bin of an article is just more smears and ignorance (to be charitable, rather than to assume she’s knowingly lying).

David Satter’s brain rot was ladled out during November of last year, the centennial of the Russian revolution, and he plays the same old tired tunes, inflating the supposed atrocities of “Communism.” That’s always the way, isn’t it? Anyone that dies in a “Communist” country is a victim of Communism, but the swollen mountain of stinking corpses that are still being piled up in the name of Capitalism, well, sorry! that just don’t count.

From the megamind himself:

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

Another brainlet misrepresentation. Marxism is a materialist philosophy. It’s concerned with the objective and the real. There was nothing “spiritual” about the Bolshevik’s desire to abolish Tsarism, educate the peasants, feed them, house them, clothe them, and modernize the country. I fully doubt that Lenin et al made claims of “infallibility,” and as usual this dipshit completely ignores the reactionary, pro-Tsarist character of the Orthodox church and its role in supporting the aristocracy at the expense of the common people. To say that an “atheist state” is incompatible with Western civilization is utterly idiotic. What is he a “senior fellow” of, exactly? Poopy?

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

This is a bald faced lie. David Satter is either embarrassingly incompetent as a historian, or he’s an out-and-out liar. He blithely ignores that, previous to the Bolsheviks, the Tsar had no compunction about executing political dissidents, siccing his Cossacks on unarmed civilians, sending ordinary Russians to die by the thousands in wars his country could ill afford, much less equipped to fight, and a devoted proponent of autocracy.

There is no one or two ways about it: the Great War was a Capitalist war, fought for access to markets and resources. There was no noble aim, just destruction and mayhem to secure the fortunes of the wealthy. By the war’s end, Russia alone would lose more than four-million of its people. In total, nearly 25 million people would end up victims of a conflict that resulted ultimately only in ruin and misery for all involved. Pricks like Haig and Ludendorff would “lead” their armies from comfortable, opulent settings, ordering men to march into machine gun fire by the tens-and-hundreds-of-thousands. Even more would die in World War II, approximately 85 million people--110 million people in all, dead in ten years of warfare, and that isn’t even counting all the other conflicts and deaths resulting from the normal operation of Capitalism. Even if the “100 million killed by Communism” was true, it would be absolutely dwarfed by the casualties incurred by Capitalism.

But that’s a stupid game that I don’t like to play, reducing human deaths to some sort of barometer of “rightness.” It ignores the historical context of these events and smacks of bourgeois moralism masquerading as concern for humanity. More than that, it’s an insipid tu quoque parroted by idiots to convince other idiots.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

I don’t know what this brainlet is trying to say by this. Communism is completely in line with Western values of fairness and democracy. The United States was one of the most militant countries in the world at the time, and for good reason. It was the Communists that won workers the 8-hour work day, sick leave, overtime pay, and so on and so on. The implication here is that this “political confusion” is the result of the plebeians standing up to their social betters. It’s clear that by David Satter’s idea of “Western Values,” he means social domination by an aristocracy of blood or wealth. Ah, yes, but it was the Bolsheviks and their mad desire for social equality that undermined human value.

He cherry picks some more quotes, plucking them from any explanatory context because they sound apparently vicious (violence is the prerogative of the wealthy, apparently). To be fair, I’m not entirely familiar with those sources. They very well could be as sinister as they sound, and if this piece wasn’t already stretching beyond the point of readability I’d investigate further, but for now that might have to wait for another day.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

This is a swell little piece of sleight-of-hand. The Bolsheviks now aren’t only responsible for every dead person in Russia, they now have to take responsibility for every dead person ever in every ostensibly Socialist country. Of course, this little weasel doesn’t provide any sources, no links or citations, but I’m sure we can just take him at his word.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”

Every subsequent paragraph proves that David Sater is naught but a dishonest shill. Does he shed the same crocodile tears for all the innocent men, women, and children killed in Dresden? Tokyo? Nagasaki? No, I don’t expect so, not from this towering intellect working for the “Hudson Institute.” Just who was Hudson, anyway?

In 1961, Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen founded the Hudson Institute.

Oh, well that doesn’t sound so ba

Unlike most strategists, he was entirely willing to posit the form a post-nuclear world might assume. Fallout, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses and inconveniences, while the "much-ballyhooed" rise in birth defects would not doom mankind to extinction because a majority of survivors would remain unaffected by them. Contaminated food could be designated for consumption by the elderly, who would presumably die before the delayed onset of cancers caused by radioactivity.

Ah, well, so much for moral principles, I suppose. I’ve stopped being surprised by the complete hypocrisy of the reactionary right. They’ll twist and turn every event, word, and statistic, go to any lengths to secure the moral high ground, and with the blase recalcitrance of a sociopath. Many of the deaths to which Satter is attributing to “Communism” are the result of specific circumstance prevalent at the time. He tries to paint the famine in the Ukraine as entirely the fault of the “draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization.” Nevermind the intentional destruction of wheat stores on the part of the “kulaks,” or the fact that the country was still devastated by World War I and the subsequent Civil War. No, it’s stupid, brute, evil Communism to blame. Why? Because.

The famine in China, too, occurred in unique circumstances, after more-or-less a full century of internecine warfare, civil war, invasion and destruction at the hands of the Japanese (to say nothing the predations of the Europeans, such as Britain flooding the country with opium). Governmental incompetence and mismanagement factored significantly, but to pretend that it was the exclusive result of some quality special to and inherent in Communism is nothing short of deceitful. These mitigating factors don’t absolve them of responsibility for what happened, but they certainly account for the severity of some of the aforementioned crises.

This is only a partial rebuttal to all the wrong in these tools’ empty-headed scribblings. All of this sort of bullshit is repeated tiresomely often by brainlets and the shills sent to influence them. I’m not certain if Inez and David are stupid, dishonest, or both. They’re certainly hack historians at the least. They ignore critical context, surreptitiously edit text to fit their narrative, and display nothing but the most stolid ignorance. It’s really no surprise considering the outlets of their “work,” but they’re still contributing to perpetuating the sort of stupid myths used exclusively to malign Communism.

Unfortunately, as the contradictions of Capitalism continue to compound, increasing the misery of the working class, I fear that this sort of inane garbage is only going to become more prevalent.

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darksydebryde · 3 years

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As a child, I honestly thought we would have flying cars and lasers. I was sure that teleporting was going to be a thing as well as taking a vacation in space.

Instead, we have a "woke " society that questions if a 6 month old baby is a bigot, a person in Congress who thinks we can land on the dark side of the sun and wait for it...people who believe the earth is flat.

Yes, I now have a permanent red mark on my forehead from dojng the old face palm. I am worried. Do people read anymore ? If so what are they reading--Madlibs? (Are those even a thing anymore?) I think that is where all these "woke" people are getting their ideas.

How far are we willing to allow this to be pushed? I mean come on, Disney canceled Dumbo of all animated movies. The story of a baby elephant who thought he could fly. He was a little different because of his big ears. Yes he was bullied by other elephants. But you know what all of that taught him...to be strong and standup for himself. He learned to ignore the naysayers and flew...literally. I guess the woke society doesn't want kids to grow up and ignore the garbage spewed by the "woke" individuals who think they have a right to tell everyone on the planet how to live, think and feel.

That's ok. I own the movie and am happy to show it to any child who wants to see it.

This all comes back to one thing...control. I have watched the politically correct part of society grow into political tyrants who want to make your life a living hell if you do not fall in line with "wokeness." If you disagree then you are a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, and a few other names that I really don't feel like repeating here.

These people are the same dumbasses who listen to an uneducated child about the environment. They are the same people who voted for a man who quite probably has Alzheimer's eho then placed a mentally ill person in charge of our nation's health.

Most days I wonder how far we are going to allow this to go. Then I think back to my history lessons. In the 1930s a small country was about to embark on a war the world would never forget. 1935 Germany began placing German Jews un repression camps. This didn't happen over night. No. It began with political correctness and a then "woke" society. The world was ripe for this kind of evil because quite literally the economics of the time were bad.

Fast forward to today. We have a global economy that is failing, migration is failing, a pandemic has swept through the entire planet that basically imprisoned and impoverished nearly every country. Who will be the ones blamed?

Right now it is Conservatives who are the blame for the woke mobs woes and manufactured angers. It is those who believe in freedom of speech and free thinkers who refuse to sit idly by and say nothing.

Trump, it's him and all his supporters . They hate him and all deplorables so much they blamed him for all the paid for riots brought about by self proclaimed marxist called Antifa and the BLM.

Trump is no longer in office...the radical left has control of society and still it is not enough. No. We must pay for having a mind of our own and believing in ourselves, our nation and our future. Kind of like what Dumbo taught us. We learned we could fly. We learned we could stand up and say no. At least I hope so.

If we haven't then we are doomed to repeat the history of 1930 and 40s Germany. I fear we are already on this path. If so, what happens to the free thinkers and those who refuse to bow down?

It is not a future I want for my kids. It isn't one I want for myself either.

That's all I have to say.

#freespeech #women #woke #Germany #cancelculture

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laundryandtaxes · 6 years

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1/2) Hey Julia, why do you think the Borderlands series (video game series created by gearbox and 2K) gets so little recognition for how incredibly gay it is? Like there are canonical gay characters who are multi-faceted along with dealing with misogyny through actual justice. It also has Marxist/anarchist elements to it. Is it because it panders too much to this and it comes across as fake or because it is a single player rpg that to play multi player, you have to have friends willing to play

2/2) like i know your knowledge on it is probably really limited but i guess i want to know your opinion on gaming companies that actually do this kind of thi g. Because i know its a marketing tactic, but gearbox has never really advertized it as "hey look at our game! We have so many gay characters! We are true allies!!!1!1" they just kinda put them in without making them all gimmicky.

Borderlands anon again: i mean, its still got its issues obviously but i think in terms of progressive pandering, gearbox has been ahead of the game with little recognition for it. And to elaborate on the marxist/anarchist elements, it has you help people revolt against an extremely capitalist tyrant, liberate and help wildlife, has thematic elements that basically say "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and shows what we all say: capitalism creates its own state to control and coerce people

I don’t really have a good answer for this, so I’m just publishing it for other people to see. I don’t really play video games that much, sorry! I certainly don’t pay enough attention to video game marketing and success to have any answer for you.

#Anonymous

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thesparkjournal · 6 years

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BOOKS ABOUT THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION A SURVEY & COMMENT ON RECENT TITLES-- THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE VERY UGLY

Reviews by Roger Perkins from The Spark! #27.

The explosive events of October 1917 still resonate strongly, if not always consciously, in the political practices of the present day. Capitalist ruling classes want to erase all favourable memory of October from public consciousness. Thus the capitalist ruling class and the working class must do battle over the meaning of October and utilize all available weapons – one of which is the published and promoted book.

Reviewer Roger Perkins provides a survey of contemporary literature about the Great October Socialist Revolution in celebration of its hundredth anniversary.

***

THE occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution has resulted in an intensified ideological struggle on both sides of the class divide. Although a hundred years old, the explosive events of October 1917 still resonate strongly, if not always consciously, in the political practices of the present day. Capitalist ruling classes want to erase all favourable memory of October from public consciousness. The Yeltsin regime in post-Soviet Russia changed the name of Leningrad back to its original tsarist name St. Petersburg. In the Russia of Putin November 7 is no longer a government-promoted legal holiday. In the Ukraine all communist symbols and images are banned by law. Statues of Marx, Engels and Lenin are defaced and then destroyed. But, ironically, some survive. They are sold off to foreign buyers. As Lenin pointed out, greedy capitalists will sell anything for a profit – even the rope that may some day hang them. But a new radicalizing and questioning young generation must be diverted into various dead ends. First a trickle of misleading half-truths (somewhat believable to the gullible) followed by a flood of carefully crafted outright lies. The promoted capitalist road even gives one “freedom of choice”. A fork to the right or a fork to the left – you choose! But a dead end remains a dead end, whether to the right or to the left.

The revolutionary left, in contrast believe “To Tell the Truth Is Revolutionary”. The glowing coals of October must, if not fanned into flames again, be used to ignite new conflagrations. The lessons of October and the extremely important contributions of Lenin to revolutionary theory and practice must be relearned and creatively applied if we are to organize new Octobers not yet visible over the horizon. These new Octobers may look quite different from the October of 1917 but the essence would be the same. The working class has taken power, the capitalist state has been smashed and all kinds of possibilities have opened up. The road to the future must, of necessity, run also through the past. Thus the capitalist ruling class and the working class must do battle over the meaning of October and utilize all available weapons – one of which is the published and promoted book.

[Lenin reading with tea. (Public Domain)]

There are hundreds of new and reprinted titles on Lenin and the Russian Revolution to coincide with the Centenary. Most of the books are hardcore propaganda, academic duds or vacuous twaddle poop. A few, though, are exceptional and may themselves become the classical reprints of the future. Only a handful can be mentioned, surveyed or reviewed here. Establishment publishing houses have vomited up new editions of old anti-communist warhorses with new brain-dirtying introductions. A full marked deck from Richard Pipes who served as Ronald Reagan’s “Soviet expert”, to the very anti-Leninist “liberal” Orlando Figes. A PEOPLES TRAGEDY: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION – CENTENARY EDITION by Figes expresses revulsion at the idea of an organized worker’s revolution, emphasizing instead a revolution propelled forward by mobs of lumpen types rampaging through the streets destroying all in its path.

With a selling price of Cdn. $99.46, the unsold copies may end up in a landfill. Give this book its true use value – pulp it to save trees.

Some books are so slapdash that what is presented as “fact” turns into a risible moment. For instance one book that may have been of interest shoots itself in the foot by stating that it includes “writings by participants and observers of the October Revolution Lenin, Marx, Trotsky…”. As far as can be determined old Karl who died in 1883, was not present in 1917 either as a participant or as an observer looking down from on high.

“...the explosive events of October 1917 still resonate strongly, if not always consciously, in the political practices of the present day. Capitalist ruling classes want to erase all favourable memory of October from public consciousness.”

A very ugly book is THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: A NEW HISTORY, by Sean McMeekin. The “New” in the title means a new orgy of hate against Bolshevism and all things Marxist. McMeekin is a reactionary conservative, a somewhat eccentric maverick but not quite a loose cannon. He believes that Marxism so dominates academia that very few history books are free from its evil influence, even if written by conservative anticommunists or cold war liberals. Thus, his passionate goal is to write scholarly tomes unblemished by the Marxist virus. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: A NEW HISTORY may indeed be free from Marxism but its intended scholarly nature has been severely eroded. A notch up from the ramblings of a one issue crank but also murderous in intent. Echoing Churchill’s famous statement, “we should have strangled the baby in its crib”, McMeekin gives Kerensky some advice: why didn’t you kill the Bolsheviks when you had a chance during the July Days! But how does one classify a work which ignores social forces, classes and imperialist capitalism, and concludes by putting forth the thesis that the revolution of 1917 was caused by some sort of nebulous “German conspiracy”?

As for 2017, McMeekin sees reds under the bed. Marxism is growing rapidly and not dead (a view contrary to most “socialism doesn’t work”, “end of history establishment” propagandists). Be eternally vigilant, he warns. Like a bad Hollywood movie, the monster is going to rise again. This eccentric professor from tiny Bard College may turn out to be much more prescient than his more prestigious peers. In any case, if not pulped, this book should be compressed into fireplace logs and placed in the “fire sale” loony bin.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is a well-known historian of Soviet society. Her 1982 book THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (Oxford University Press) has gone through a number of reprints and revisions, including a new one for the 2017 anniversary. Fitzpatrick states that her views were “always cool about workers’ revolution” and “it’s not in my nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast”. Nevertheless the previously mentioned professor McMeekin always and unjustly attacks her writings as “Marxist”. Fitzpatrick however classifies herself not a Marxist but a “social historian”. Right or wrong her many books do sometimes have insight and are vastly superior to the lies and trash about October, Lenin and the Soviet Union thrown at us.

REVOLUTION! SAYINGS OF VLADIMIR LENIN - Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2017.

This hundred-plus-page book is not the Lenin equivalent of the famous little red book QUOTATIONS OF CHAIRMAN MAO. Its format is much larger and facing each page with a single Lenin quote is a very beautiful colour reproduction of a revolutionary poster, painting, or other art work, with the occasional exception of a period photo. A very good-looking and desirable book indeed. But appearance is not always the same as essence. Although most of the quotes chosen are good ones, many excellent quotes were overlooked, and some obviously selected and arranged with nefarious intent. For example, a group of quotations are arranged one after the other and all try to portray Lenin as a violent blood thirsty terrorist. Some of these are indeed valid Lenin quotations but yanked out of context. All Lenin was really saying was that civil wars following a revolution are violent events. A new revolutionary government has the right to counter white terror with red terror. White officers who order atrocities will be shot.

But some quotes don’t seem Lenin-like at all, thus necessitating the reviewer to investigate. The introduction warns that there are “many unverified and dubious quotations attributed to Lenin circulating on the internet” BUT “this little volume” is “culled from the vast 45 volume work THE COLLECTED WORKS OF V.I. LENIN”. If only this were true. Unfortunately some quotes did not come from Lenin’s COLLECTED WORKS. One George Legett produces an alleged Lenin quote from his book THE CHEKA: LENIN’S POLITICAL POLICE. THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE: THE KGB IN EUROPE AND THE WEST manufactures more. Another quote comes from the U.S. Library of Congress, Russian Archives. Still another oozes out of the pages of THE FLIGHT OF THE ROMANOVS: A FAMILY SAGA by J.C. Perry and Constintin Pleshakov. By utilizing these dubious sources the Bodelian Library has seriously undermined its otherwise positive publication. We ask this question: was right-wing pressure applied to include additional quotes not in THE COLLECTED WORKS? Whatever the cause of this atrocity, REVOLUTION! SAYINGS OF VLADIMIR LENIN can now only be given a weak, visibly twitching, not quite vertical thumbs up – the art work is good.

“the capitalist ruling class and the working class must do battle over the meaning of October and utilize all available weapons-- one of which is the published and promoted book.”

Another “quote book” is MARX ENGELS LENIN TROTSKY: GENOCIDE QUOTES: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF COMMUNISM’S FOUNDING TYRANTS (2016) by one James Demeo who claims to have a Ph.D. (what university?) and was a former university professor (what university?) -- no special details given. So why stop to take a second look. Well, for one, the book was intentionally aimed at the 2017 window of interest. And two, Demeo’s previous book was titled THE ORGONE ACCUMULATION HANDBOOK… WITH CONSTRUCTION PLANS which indicates the author is a follower of the tragic German Freudian-Marxist psychologist Wilhelm Reich. Reich was the only person to be expelled, for different reasons, from both the Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytical Association at virtually the same time. His early work had some merit: THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM and SEX-POL: ESSAYS ON SEXUAL POLITICS. But after he fled to the United States to escape Nazi Germany his views took on a more pronounced weirdness. His cognition of reality suffered severe “perception problems”. He claimed to have discovered some sort of healing life force energy (he could even see it) pervading the universe which he called the orgone. He built a large box that could concentrate this super energy, had patients step inside and when they emerged all ills – even cancer -- would be cured. Reich was arrested for medical fraud, imprisoned and died ranting about a “communist conspiracy” to impede his work.

Whether selling do-it-yourself orgone accumulator plans or selling the anti-communist GENOCIDE QUOTES, the charlatan Demeo is not worth your time.

THE CATASTROPHE: KERENSKY’S OWN STORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Aleksandr Kerensky (originally published in 1927, now reprinted in 2016 by Gyan).

Kerensky was associated with the Social Revolutionary Party, a party that was influenced by Marxism but not Marxist – the dominant influence being left agrarian populism. After the Tsar was overthrown Kerensky became Minister of Justice and then Minister of War. After the “July Days” of 1917 he held the position of Prime Minister and then appointed himself Supreme Commander in Chief. Kerensky was applauded at first but his popularity declined like a stone in freefall when workers, peasants and soldiers realized they had been deceived. The promised land distribution was put off until “some day in the future”. Russia did not withdraw from the imperialist slaughter of World War I. Kerensky instead intensified the war effort, hoping for eventual “Victory”. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers deserted, many taking their weapons with them. Bolshevik support and prestige rose rapidly as the slogans “Peace, Land, Bread” and “All power to the soviets” were welcomed like a breath of fresh oxygen. In October 1917 (November 7 – new calendar) Kerensky’s government was brought to an end. Lenin became the leader of a new Soviet Russia. Kerensky went into exile to the United States where he was employed by the anti-communist Hoover Institution. The book he then wrote uses the word CATASTROPHE to describe the above events. But to millions of Russians and millions of others around the world the Russian Revolution was the most wonderful and inspiring event in human history.

This reviewer attended a public lecture given by Kerensky at the University of British Columbia sometime in the 1960s and was surprised that Kerensky still considered himself to be a “socialist revolutionary” -- it was the Bolsheviks who betrayed the revolution. His speech included much left verbiage – “imperialism”, “bourgeoisie”, etc. but Kerensky always did have a talent for talking “left” while walking (sometimes running) to the right. He died in 1970 at the old age of 89. If only Lenin (dead at 53) could have lived as long!

One new book about Lenin, and of the “what if” genre, is LENIN LIVES: REIMAGINING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Philip Cunliffe – Zero Books – 2017. It raises the question: what if…. Lenin had lived long enough to see the global spread of the Russian Revolution to Western Europe and the USA? The answer given is that socialist revolution in the most advanced economies would usher in the era of global peace, progress and prosperity. Right on! That is the answer we expected and wanted to hear. But speculation is one thing, actual reality is another. What the author sets out to describe is precisely WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN. The key German Revolution, almost successful, was defeated and European revolutionary upsurges retreated. Instead the world revolutionary process shifted elsewhere; it unwound from the “wrong “ end and instead travelled to less economically developed countries – China, Vietnam, Cuba, and even reversed itself. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is no longer to be found on any up-to-date map of the world. So “what is” and “what ought to be” is a contradiction that must be very carefully looked at.

Marxists are reluctant to describe “possible futures” in any detail, even sketchy outlines can prove to be blurry. This is so because the contingencies of dialectical, historical processes can and do affect possibility becoming a reality. Even with Lenin’s steady, wise hand on the tiller, chaotic rapids (with hidden rocks), whirlpools, strong currents and violent storms could throw the revolutionary boat off its intended course. It might not dock at author Cunliffe’s envisioned future. Perhaps Lenin would have steered it to an even better place, or perhaps not.

The words “perhaps”, “maybe” and the expressions “what if” and “if only” and subjunctive verbs enable the future to exist within the present. If idealization of the future can provide inspiration in the present for tired revolutionary souls needing a recharged revolutionary practice, then we have no choice but to shout, along with the author “long live utopia”.

BLOODSTAINED: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LENINIST COUNTERREVOLUTION -- AK Press -- 2017 -250pp.

The Anarchist Publisher AK Press describes BLOODSTAINED on its website as follows:

“On the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, paeans to the conquering Bolsheviks will be sung. BLOODSTAINED highlights the darker echoes coming from that event, with a mixture of classic and new essays that expose a murderous dictatorship as it developed, paving the way for Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others to slaughter and starve their opponents. The defense of this criminal enterprise, later categorized as actually existing socialism ends here. No more velvet-gloved hagiography. No more Lenins”.

The same description on some “alt-right” (read Fascist) website would raise few eyebrows and would probably garner a number of orders from those who actually have the ability to read books. How does one explain this conjunction of anarchism on the “left” and the fascistic right. That they both intensely hate Lenin and have a common enemy is obvious. Are they just flip sides of the same coin? Or have some strains of mutated hypertrophied Anarchism become so far out of time and so lost in space and so disorientated that they have wandered to the other side of the barricade? It is they who are counter-revolutionary, and not Lenin. Most unfortunately while a wounded bourgeoisie staggers about, and flails wildly in the futile hope of landing a lucky knockout punch to the chin, its tag-team partners, the anti-Leninist anarchists prefer dirty left jabs below the belt. Usually looked-up-to Simon Fraser University professor Mark Leier has joined them by supplying an essay to this collection of smelly anti-Leninist tirades. Leier, who in the past has called for closer collaboration between anarchists and Marxists against the common enemy, obviously hesitates to extend the wish to Leninists. Let us hope that reality forces him to reverse himself at some future date.

AK Press has done a disservice to the coming revolutionary possibilities by dredging up this discordant, divisive, sectarian fulmination against Leninism. The young generation needs to discover Lenin afresh. A new generation of Lenin haters will only bring fascism closer and socialist revolution farther away.

[Red guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd. 1917. (Public Domain)]

NO LESS THAN MYSTIC: A HISTORY OF LENIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION FOR A 21ST-CENTURY LEFT by John Medhurst-- Repeater Publishers 2017 while very similar in aim as the AK Press book (Lenin and Bolsheviks = bad), Medhurst takes a different tack. After establishing his anti-Leninist credentials, he then devotes an inordinate, excessive and voluminous amount of space to the policies and actions of opponents to Bolshevism – the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, the Jewish Bundists, the “Workers’ Opposition” faction inside the Bolshevik Party, and of course the Anarchists. The author identifies with the likes of Julius Martov, Victor Chernov, and Nestor Makhno.

The book informs us that today we should look to the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinian “Recovered Factories” movement, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the intersectional feminists and so on, ad infinitum. Anywhere and everywhere but to Lenin and Leninism.

Leninists do take note of the above movements, pointing out their positive and negative aspects, absorbing what is useful and strongly rejecting what is harmful. We often find ourselves side by side fighting a common enemy. But a left that only flies the continuous loops of an “anti-capitalist” holding-pattern will never land the plane, although it may crash when its fuel runs out. Lenin’s great genious and insight was knowing when, where and how to land the plane. In addition loosey-goosey utopian disorganizations obsessed with “authoritarianism” and “strong leaders” only dissipate the steam of revolution. What socialists need is some sort of disciplined, central coordinating body (call it a Party, or something else if you wish). Capitalism does not just “collapse”; it must be consciously brought down. NO LESS THAN MYSTIC seeks reforms that allow people to live in “safe niches or cracks” inside capitalism while awaiting its collapse. It does not project a valid strategy to bring the system down.

Another book that slights Lenin is Leon Trotsky’s HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, reprinted by Penguin for 2017. Trotsky was by far the most vainglorious, egotistical, conceited and arrogant revolutionary figure in history. This extreme character defect could only result in Trotsky inflating his own role and shrinking that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. So much so that even one of his followers, Tony Cliff founder of the International Socialists had to criticize Trotsky by stating that THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION has a “serious defect”.And what is this serious defect? According to Cliff: “The one thing noticeably missing is the Bolshevik Party: its rank and file, its cadres, its local committees, its central committee.” And again: “Throughout his HISTORY the Party is hardly referred to” and once more: “The Party, alas, is almost absent”. (all quotes, pages x-xi, preface to LENIN- VOLUME 2 – ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS – by Tony Cliff.)

We ask this question: how reliable is a book about the Russian Revolution in which the Bolshevik Party “is almost absent”? Trotsky entered the Bolshevik Party just before the October Revolution with a long history of anti-Leninist, anti-Bolshevik factionalism. Trotsky always thought his “intellect" was superior to that of the “slovenly attorney” Lenin. Naturally this led to delusions as to who was best fit to lead the Russian Revolution. The result – a very heavy, over 1000 pages door–stop written by a narcissistic egomaniac who looks in the mirror far more often than he looks at the unfolding revolution before him. Some critics, however, praise the book for its “literary qualities” which is not surprising, given that THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Leon Trotsky is a work of creative fiction.

But we do have some good classic reprints as well. The most classic of all classics is TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, by John Reed. Although never out of print, it is now available from fifteen different publishers – some adding a horrid introduction.

Less known but certainly worth reading is SIX RED MONTHS IN RUSSIA (1918) by Louise Bryant wife of John Reed and now available again in reprint. In the 1981 film REDS Bryant is acted by Diane Keaton while Reed is played by Warren Beatty.

RED HEART OF RUSSIA (1918) by Bessie Beatty is another period reprint sympathetic to the Revolution. As are two books by Albert Rhys Williams. LENIN: THE MAN AND HIS WORK (1919) – reprinted by Forgotten Books 2017 and THROUGH THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1923 – reprinted 2016 in a deluxe edition with photographs and Russian posters in colour).

THE SOUL OF THE REVOLUTION (1917) by Moissaye Joseph Olgin has been reprinted by Forgotten Books (2017). Olgin was an early translator of Trotsky (OUR REVOLUTION – 1918) but chose Marxism-Leninism and later wrote TROTSKYISM: COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN DISGUISE (1935).

Although Progress Books: Toronto was a victim of revisionist liquidation, LENIN AND CANADA by Tim Buck has been made available again by Create Space.

ROSA LUXEMBURG’S VIEWS ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, by Clara Zetkin (212 pp) was an unexpected but very pleasant find. Originally published by the Communist International in 1922 in German and Russian, it is only now (2017) available in English translation published as a joint venture between Red Star Publishers (USA) and Revolutionary Democracy (India). Clara Zetkin was a leading German Communist and close friend of Luxemburg. Her book counters the misleading views of Paul Levi (an ex-communist who returned to social democracy). Levi attempted to prove that Luxemburg was also anti-Lenin and anti Bolshevik by promoting her views while she was isolated in prison and unable to obtain adequate information. Luxemburg did indeed criticize the Bolsheviks for abolishing the Constituent Assembly. But Zetkin’s book:

“makes clear that, in the two months between Luxemburg’s release from jail and her murder (by soldiers of the Social Democratic Government), her practice and her articles in Rote Fahne show that she had taken essentially the same position as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and power to the workers”.

In other words Lenin and Luxemburg were not antagonists but in essential agreement. This book should be on every socialist’s to-be-read list.

“[Luxemburg’s] practice and her articles in Rote Fahne show that she had taken essentially the same position as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and power to the workers.”

Books directed at young people are not overlooked. THE CLEVER TEEN’S GUIDE TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Felix Rhodes is not clever enough. Its cover shows a towering Lenin giving a Nazi Heig Heil salute. Any clever teen knows immediately that the cover is a fake. Lenin’s right arm is about 50% longer than his left arm – a congenital defect common to all Bolsheviks in the minds of “anti-totalitarian” Liberals and “anti-authoritarian anarchists. The book’s message: Socialism is an unreachable utopia. Any attempt to get there will inevitably end up in totalitarianism. For even younger readers we are presented with the bizarre and incredible THE DRESS-UP RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: DISCOVER HISTORY THROUGH FASHION. The publishers blurb asks:”what did the Tsar and Tsarina wear at their engagement? Why did Lenin wear a red ribbon?” This reviewer doesn’t recall (faulty memory?) Lenin wearing a red ribbon. From black and white photographs available it does appear that he did always wear the same suit except when he went underground and disguised as a clean-shaven peasant after the “July Days”. This colourful cut-out costume book is utilized by cutting out pictures of printed clothing and attaching them to the appropriate figures. By dressing and undressing Lenin we do not and cannot learn anything about Leninism. Even if you are still curious about Lenin’s red ribbon, pass on this one.

A third title, light years better, aimed at young minds is: 1917: RUSSIA’S RED YEAR by John Newsinger and illustrated by Tim Sanders (Bookmarks Publications – 2016). Anything written by socialist John Newsinger is enjoyable reading. The publisher’s description of this graphic novel is as follows:

“A revolution made by ordinary people that had the power to change everything – that is the story we follow through the lives of two young people Natalia and Peter. In 1917, Russian women workers poured out of their factories, defied Cossacks armed with whips and took control of the streets. The government brought in the troops to restore order.

But soldiers, angry at the war, food shortages and much more, mutinied and joined the marchers. That is where Natalia and Peter’s story begins. By October workers had taken control. This fictionalized account of real events follow Natalia and Peter through a momentous year that changed those who lived through it forever and has inspired millions since.”

Recommended for all ages.

Another work very highly recommended if it were not so expensive is the two volume LENIN’S ELECTORAL STRATEGY by August H. Nimtz (Palgrave MacMillan 2014 and 2016). But, most unfortunately, with a price of over one hundred dollars for each volume the average activist or local library will not be able to afford this book. Although not specifically writing for the centennial, Nimtz convincingly refutes the standard charges made against Lenin by “democratic” socialists, anarchists, and the plethora of anticommunist centenary books – Lenin was antidemocratic and totalitarian. To the ears of a ruling class that has lost power, these charges ring true. They no longer have the “democratic” right to exploit and enslave workers and peasants: They no longer have the “democratic” right to launch wars of aggression in search of maximum profits and they no longer have the “democratic” right to arrest and imprison – even kill – those who oppose them. They have lost these “rights”. But for millions the Russian Revolution was the most democratic event ever. All power to the Soviets was a vastly superior form of democracy. A great contribution by Lenin was to take democracy to a higher level – the new democracy of socialist revolution. As for today, just how “democratic” are money-controlled parliaments, rigged elections with voting machines designed to be compromised by the capitalist who manufactured them, gerrymandered electoral constituencies based on geographical areas only, restricted ballot and TV access, and purged voter lists? Socialist democracy and capitalist “democracy” are vastly different entities, not just quantitatively but especially qualitatively.

We now come to the traditional English language left publishing houses. The severely debilitated, but still afloat, communist International Publishers (USA) and the attenuated Trotskyist Pathfinder Press (USA) survive from their backlists. New October or Lenin books are absent. Lawrence and Wishart, the publishing house of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain, totters on with a left lean that seldom ventures beyond Labour Party “moderates” and social democracy. Its contribution to the centeniary is Menshevik, not Bolshevik. TWO YEARS OF WANDERING: A MENSHEVIK LEADER IN LENIN’S RUSSIA by Fedor Illich Dan (2016) – translated for the first time into English. Unlike Martov, Trotsky or Plekhanov, who occasionally pulled back from the extremes of Menshevism, Dan was unrelenting. After 1917 and the ensuing Civil War, his anti-Leninist views gaining little traction, he left Soviet Russia and moved to the United States, where he died in 1947. Ironically, during World War II Dan gave verbal support to the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, not through any newly-acquired sympathy for the Soviet Union, but in the belief that the Russian motherland must be defended against foreign invasion.

Monthly Review Press (USA) has been publishing Marxist books for over sixty years and still going strong. RECONSTRUCTING LENIN: AN INTRODUCTORY BIOGRAPHY (2015) by Tamas Krausz argues for Lenin’s continuing relevance today.

The Chicago-based Haymarket Books, established in 2001, has now become the largest radical publisher in the United States. It publishes a broad spectrum of quite useful titles alongside, of course, its featured Trotskyist core. Haymarket is the publishing outlet for the suspect International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose variety of Trotskyism is nasty indeed. The ISO has been justly criticized as “State Department Socialists” because they serve as cheerleaders for “human rights” imperialism. Whether they are “useful idiots” or outright paid agents, the result is the same – try to convince the left to back the imperialist removal of the “dictator of the day”- Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and now Syria. They even criticized Obama from the right for showing insufficient determination to remove Bashar Al Assad. Imperialism is not really all that bad unless it happens to be “Russian Imperialism” or “Chinese Imperialism”. The ISO runs interference for all US sponsored so called “colour revolutions” and “human rights” campaigns. So one must be leary of some titles published by Haymarket. As for October, one can find more than a few centenary volumes. But it is Trotsky and not Lenin that is featured. The expected reprint of Trotsky’s extremely flawed HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION is in hardcover. LESSONS OF OCTOBER by Trotsky is now available again. But the 440 page TROTSKY ON LENIN is dishonest. This is a reprint of the post-1917 YOUNG LENIN and LENIN, NOTES FOR A BIOGRAPHER, together in one volume and given the new title TROTSKY ON LENIN. An honest TROTSKY ON LENIN would include his writings and speeches before 1917, which would reveal that Trotsky was hostile to Lenin from day one. But, of course, Haymarket will not print these because Trotsky must be made to appear as a comrade-in-arms of Lenin. 100 YEARS SINCE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION includes Trotsky’s 1932 speech in defence of the Russian Revolution followed by Ahmed Shawki’s (ISO) praise of Trotsky and the attempt to fit him into our times. EYEWITNESSES TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION edited by Todd Chretien (ISO) includes contributions by Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, John Reed, Louise Bryant and others. OCTOBER SONG edited by Paul Le Blanc is “history from below” animated by the lives, ideas and experiences of workers, peasants, intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries of diverse persuasions.

[Detail from painting depicting the storming of the Winter Palace, 1917. (Public Domain)]

YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION is written by the always-moving-on anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Marxist-till-death, Victor Serge. Today he is known more as a novelist than a political activist. YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION is a good read and does have something to say that merits attention. To conclude with Haymarket, other good books do get reprinted. THE BOLSHEVIKS CAME TO POWER: THE REVOLUTION OF 1917 IN PETROGRAD (1976) BY Alexander Rabinowitch; RED PETROGRAD: REVOLUTION IN THE FACTORIES 1917- 1918) originally 1983 Cambridge Univ. Press by S.A.Smith and surprisingly REMINISCENCES OF LENIN by Nadezhda Krupskaya (wife of Lenin). The fact that there is no stand-alone collection of Lenin’s writings on October is telling by its absence.

“...today’s tasks are not those of post-1917 Soviet Russia. Our long retreat is pregnant with the explosive potential of advance. Read Lenin rather than Žižek.”

Leftword Books in India has two books. They have RED OCTOBER: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE COMMUNIST HORIZON (1917), edited by Vijay Prasad. The book provides us with the assurance that a workers and peasants state can exist. And they have also published RANK-AND-FILE BOLSHEVIK: A MEMOIR (1917) by Cecilia Bobrovskaya. The author (1873 – 1962) was an early Bolshevik activist, and a member of the Society of Old Bolsheviks. She worked tirelessly helping build the Party for both the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. This reprint consists of two texts by Bobrovskaya: her own memoirs and her short biography of Lenin. Bobrovskaya describes what it took to make the Revolution – not one push in 1917 but tens of thousands of pushes provided by people like herself, one of the many rank-and-file Bolsheviks.

The remaining publishers are all British. The long time left publisher Merlin Press has issued OCTOBER 1917: WORKERS IN POWER with essays by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Ernest Mandel and David Mandel with an introduction by Paul Le Blanc who discusses recent scholarship and debates.

Pluto Press has given us A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Neil Faulkner. Spokesman Books has a new and expanded centenary edition of BRITISH LABOUR AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. In addition to the already mentioned graphic novel 1917: RUSSIA’S RED YEAR, Bookmarks has published LENIN FOR TODAY by John Molyneux who sets out to show that Lenin’s main ideas remain valid and relevant in 2017. Also RUSSIA 1917 by Dave Sherry which is not confined to 1917 but starts at the turn of the century.

Saving the best for last we finally arrive at Verso Books, the largest independent publisher of English language radical books in the world. It has created a new series, “Russian Revolution 1917” with some good new titles. RED FLAG UNFURLED: HISTORY, HISTORIANS AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Ronald Suny. This new volume explores the historical controversies of 1917 and Suny ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism. LENIN 2017: REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH by Slavoj Žižek with selected Leinin reprints. The controversial and puffed-up political peacock Žižek has become a “Star” to the broad left and many academic “Marxists”. This reviewer is not at all impressed. Lenin was down to earth and easily understood; the fancy verbiage of Žižek is sometimes incomprehensible and always somewhat airy-fairy. Nevertheless his ideas should be looked at and when necessary refuted.

Žižek postulates that Lenin’s true greatness is not to be found so much in 1917 but in the retreats that were forced on the new revolutionary government. In other words the revolutionary genius of Lenin should be even more remembered as the strategist and tactician of survival in hard times. But today’s tasks are not those of post-1917 Soviet Russia. Our long retreat is pregnant with the explosive potential of advance. Read Lenin rather than Žižek.

Unlikely events do happen. At long last someone has begun to reprint some of Trotsky's earlier writings. Thank you Verso! AGAINST LENIN: THE PRE-BOLSHEVIK WRITINGS by Leon Trotsky, introduction by Tariq Ali, contains a selection – mostly on organizational questions. There is much more that remains to be translated. The book is listed only as “forthcoming”, but hopefully soon. Then there is the astounding announcement that Verso will reprint Lenin’s COLLECTED WORKS. Progress Publishers has been killed off, Lawrence and Wishart is now anti-Lenin and International Publishers seems not to have sufficient funding to keep all of Lenin in print.

But it is Verso that outshines the other publishers with two “Blockbuster” Books: THE DILEMMAS OF LENIN: TERRORISM, WAR, EMPIRE, LOVE, REVOLUTION by Tariq Ali and OCTOBER by China Miéville-both very good but not beyond criticism. DILEMMAS OF LENIN by the experienced Marxist writer Tariq Ali doesn’t make us wait for his summation of the October Revolution and Lenin. On page 2 he states; “Without Lenin there would have been no Socialist Revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain.” He further tells us;

“Lenin had been working on a revolution twenty-five years before 1917. Twenty-four of those years he had worked underground, in prison, in exile. He had done so without imagining that he would see one in his life time. In January 1917, still in exile, he confessed to a Swiss audience that he and the generation to which he belonged might never witness success: They were fighting for the future.”

There is a lot of contingency in the author’s book:

“Without the First World War and February 1917, Lenin would have died in exile, one of the many Russian Revolutionaries destined to miss the fall of the autocracy. Trotsky could easily have become a Russian novelist in the Classic tradition.”

Tariq Ali, once a member of a Trotskyist organization in his youth, may be telling us, consciously or not, that it was Lenin who had revolutionary staying power, while the dilettante Trotsky might have become a novelist.

DILEMMAS OF LENIN is not a standard linear biography nor an intellectual biography as such. It is a “focused” biography concentrating on the important dilemmas of Lenin’s political life. Around these nodal points the necessary history and biographical detail are added to make a more complete biography.

The author begins with the very young Lenin and the decision he had to make after the execution of his older brother for terrorism. Should he seek revenge by following in his brothers terrorist foot steps or should he embrace the new Marxism that was beginning to make headway in Tsarist Russia. For Tariq Ali and Lenin there was no real dilemma. It was a no brainer that Lenin chose Marxism. No matter how spectatular the “propaganda of the deed” Tsardom was not going to fall. Dilemmas are more complicated quandrys, sometimes a no win situation.

The outbreak of the First World War was a real dilemma for Lenin. How could the German Social Democratic Party and Lenin’s mentor Karl Kautsky, succumb to the militarism and cries for imperialist war. Lenin “solves” this dilemma by a very angry public break with the German Party.

But Tariq Ali does not dwell on just how shocked Lenin was and what he did next. Lenin thought the newspaper he was holding in his hands was a fake. It had to be! Socialists would not advocate the slaughter of worker by worker. Had not anti-war resolutions easily passed at all International congresses? When reality set in the next day Lenin realized that the “Marxism” of Social Democracy had been hollowed out. Its outer shell provided its appearance but its inner core its rotten essence.

Lenin was probably the only revolutionary in the world who did what he did next. He went back to the basics of Hegel, disappeared into the library for long periods, and emerged with what became the PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS (Volume 38 of his COLLECTED WORKS).

Another dilemma after the February 1917 Revolution was to find a way to Socialist Revolution. Almost all the Socialist Parties, including most Bolshevik leaders thought the bourgeois democratic state would last for a considerable length of time. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were unmovable, but most Bolsheviks came around to Lenin’s view. But even then Kamenev and Zinoviev leaked the exact date of the October uprising thinking it would be cancelled.

Still another dilemma, at least in Tariq Ali’s mind, was the affection of Lenin for Inessa Armand the Bolshevik director of Zhenodel, the women’s department. Historians disagree as to the nature of this relationship. Tariq Ali believes she might have been Lenin’s “mistress”. But this view may tell us more about Tariq Ali than about Lenin or Armand.

The last dilemma mentioned in this review is the period of Lenin’s stroke and coming death. He was worried about the danger of the Revolutionary Government being weakened by the osmosis of the surrounding bureaucratic Tsarist culture. He was also concerned about who would be the next leader of the USSR. There was no second Lenin. All leading candidates had not insignificant defects. This dilemma was never “solved”. Had Lenin lived longer perhaps he would have written a new WHAT IS TO BE DONE.

DILEMMAS does have the usual minor errors. On page 103 the IWW is called the International Workers of the World rather than Industrial Workers of the World – a frequently made mistake. Over all, this is definitely a thumbs-up book.

OCTOBER: THE STORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by China Miéville. This excellent book is a very pleasant discovery, a real gem. Miéville brings the reader inside the Revolution. You are there! With most books of history one reads until it’s time to go to bed, sleep comes next. With this book sleep becomes an enemy to be fought. The subtitle claims that October is a “story”. It is a “story” and a very fine history, thoroughly researched with all the latest information, but is not cluttered with academic footnotes. It sometimes reads like an historical novel but is not. Fiction can often bring out obscured, profound truths better than a mere telling of the facts. OCTOBER is a dialectical fusion of history and fiction with the appearance of a new quality – an unquestionably nonfiction book but one that reads and clarifies as only fiction can.

What Miéville has done by bringing his skills as a novelist into the writing of history is to find a better way to unite form and content. His dynamic poetry tinged prose advances not so much as a sparkling, sizzling fuse slowly makes its way towards the bomb. Instead it is propelled, like history, by the complexity of contradictory forces pregnant with inevitability, probablity and contingency. Miéville’s narrative gallops, slows down, trots, canters, almost stops,twists, turns, veers, gallops again… and then explodes. The story moves as Russian reality itself moved.

But Miéville does not strut his stuff like a postmodern show off. He writes for the reader and not to impress other writers. The general reader becomes oblivious to the high quality of Miéville’s writing, and becomes absorbed into the “story” of history. The result is not only better history, but a much better history. What Gabriel Garcia Marquez did to a stagnant literature by developing “magical realism”, Miéville has done to stagnant history by making it excitable, readable and much more truthful.

Miéville is a world famous science fiction/fantasy writer. He has received the very top honours, the Hugo and Arthur C. Clark Awards. He is also an ex-member of the “soft” Trotskyist British Socialist Workers Party and thus brings baggage with him. But this background shows through only occasionally. Trotsky is not excessively promoted but Stalin had to be vilified as demanded by Trotskyist theology. But the 1917 views of Stalin were very little different from the orthodox Bolshevik majority. To get around this barrier Miéville introduces, luckily only briefly, a Stalin “ghost from the future” which allows Miéville to administer the required forty lashes. The perfunctory punishment inflicted, the author returns to the “story” he is telling. But by and large the author takes care to portray the main political leaders without hagiography or unjust denigration.

Trotsky is described as “hard to love, charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive and divisive and difficult.”

The 1917 Stalin is depicted as a “Georgian ex-trainee priest… long time Bolshevik activist. A capable, if never scintillating organizer. At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one. The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression”. – “A grey blur.”

“...many of the October and Lenin titles from left publishers are worth reading, time permitting. But it is Lenin himself that MUST be read--”

As for Lenin “all who meet him are mesmerized”. “To his enemies… a monster, to his worshippers, a godlike genius; to his comrades and friends, a shy, quick, laughing lover of children and cats”. “what particularly distinguishes him is his sense of the political moment …an acutely developed sense of when and where to push, how, and how hard.” Lenin of course did make mistakes but seldom admitted them. Even friends would “excoriate him for the brutality of his take-downs, flint and ruthlessness” and “intemperate polemics”. The Menshevik Martov was “widely respected, even loved” but “weak and bronchial, mercurial, talkative but hopeless orator, not much better as an organizer”.

Miéville, like Tariq Ali, tries to compensate for the previous male bias in the writing of history. Alexandra Kollontai is presented as “a provocative and brilliant thinker on a range of issues…”Inessa Armand is introduced as a “feminist, writer, and musician, Lenin’s close collaborator and comrade”. Nadezhda Krupskaya, wife of Lenin, is mentioned throughout OCTOBER but only described by Miéville as seldom taking “a different line from Lenin”.

[Detail from "Through the ruins of capitalism to the universal brotherhood of workers!”. 1920. Nikolai Mikhailovich Kochergin. (Public Domain)]

Little known Bolshevik women are now given names. Ludmila Stahl became an early supporter of Lenin’s April Theses in opposition to the majority of Bolsheviks. Lenin’s sister Maria Ulianov became more than just a family member but an important Bolshevik who worked at Pravda. Bolshevik women Elena Adamovich, Ekaterina Alexeeva, Liza Pylaeva, Nima Bogoslovskaya and Yelkaveta Kokshapova are not usually mentioned even in left histories, but given their names by Miéville. The latter three once, disguised as nurses and carrying Party funds and documents under piles of bandages in baskets, were stopped by government forces who demanded to know what they were carrying. Pyalaeva grinned and said jokingly “dynamite and revolvers”. They all laughed and the Bolshevik couriers were waved through.

OCTOBER is told chronologically with an introductory first chapter” the prehistory of 1917”and an epilogue. All other chapters are named by months beginning with February and ending with Red October.

We end with a dust jacket promotional quote by Barbara Ehrenreich with which this reviewer is in agreement:

“When one of the most marvellously original writers in the world takes on one of the most explosive events in history, the result can only be incendiary”.

In conclusion many of the October and Lenin titles from left publishers are worth reading, time permitting. But it is Lenin himself that MUST be read – there are 45 volumes to choose from. A daily Lenin coffee break is good for one’s political health. May we recommend STATE AND REVOLUTION written by Lenin shortly before October but with publication interrupted until 1918. As Lenin said in a postscript “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it”.

***

Roger Perkins is a long-time activist and student of global class struggle, living in Surrey, British Columbia.

[Detail from painting depicting Lenin and crowd. (Public Domain)]

#The Spark #Russian Revolution #October Revolution #1917 #USSR #Lenin #Zizek #China Mieville #Tariq Ali

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