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What are you currently reading?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Comradeship // Freechat
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Just now getting to Blackshirts and Reds, got to Chapter 6 today. His criticisms of the Soviet Union are making me believe that China and Deng Xiaoping were correct, so perhaps I need to read some Deng next, lol.
It's a good book. His examples of this ga that went wrong have been really helpful in conversations for me.
Yes actually, it's a sobering reminder that communism isn't a utopia, and that there's a lot more to people's needs after the basics have been covered.
I do think he might have been a little too harsh on Stalin though, the man tried to quit four times (and they wouldn't let him! some dictator lol) and was at the head of a socialist state that was constantly under siege from capitalist and reactionary forces in and out. Mistakes were made but that's just cause nothing is perfect, if the USSR really had a major flaw it was that it was unable to understand the needs of the people and learn from their mistakes.
That's funny... in both the book and at the end of "Friendly Feudalism", his essay on Tibet, Parenti bashed China for being a hair too capitalist-roaded for his liking.
Yeah he said China was "sliding" down the path of free market reform but the book was written in the late 90s so there's a bit of outdated information there.
Nearly all western leftists coming up in the 70s and 80s got it wrong on China, or didn't understand the strategy, probably because there was a dearth of translated materials. Parenti and Sakai for example.