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Ideals of the past—the Roman Empire, the Germanic gods, the feudal Britain featured by fascist-striving novels—gild with emotional glamor the tenets of fascism: that science and machine production are evil, that democracy, peace and the conquest of poverty are futile dreams of a decadent society,

We can see this play out with the Peter Thiel cinematic universe of silicon valley oligarchs. Technology has ceased to be a tool for alleviating human suffering and progress but a stress ball shaped pandoras box that can be wrung out and beaten to open up to a radically changed society. The rate of production can eliminate poverty multiple Earths over but that world no longer has any excess.

Their cry is to “share the wealth,” to start over again that old society of small owners which led to the present-day monopolies and which would lead to them again if it could be revived…

And yet the “Thiel-Musks” of the world don’t distinguish themselves from the social democrats/neocons who themselves also envision of turning back the clock of the social genocide perpetrated by the capitalist class and returning to a world where men’s ownership of the world was achieved by westward expansion. Both of these reactionary sects of society do not envision the working class as capable owners of history and society, but either as victims or liabilities.

Anyway, sorry for not giving my thoughts earlier, this week was hectic, I should be better next week.

aaaa i managed to catch up today; i hope i’m not ‘late’. if i have any thoughts, i’m going to make an effort to share them before i read others’ comments. part of my goal with this reading group is both to learn me some history and to get better about sharing my thoughts. i’m exhausted so sorry if my thoughts are disjointed.

i’m coming into this straight from a rereading of Blackshirts and Reds. i expected optimism, and to feel quite melancholic from it with the knowledge of what came next, but if anything i’m always atonished at how much history rhymes.

she talks about people digging into the past for answers to the present and succumbing to doomerism. that’s honestly why i’m reading this book. there has been a rapid decline in both health and economy in my social circles, and they’ve responded by taking to neopaganism and ecofascism (in some cases anarcho-primitivism), or a weird kinda orientalist Liberal-Buddhism lmao, like a FIRE lifestyle centred around minimalism and mindfulness, and passive income grifts. this has only gotten worse with language models eroding all of their thinking skills or training them that everything is made up and that nothing is real anynmore. someone from a periphery country basically said to me recently ‘socialism or wealth’, like ‘if i can’t have socialism, then i better be rich.’ they don’t see that there’s no alternative where they alone come out on top.

the following quote reminded me of Red Plenty (one of many books my unmedicated AuDHD brain can’t read):

Can man master the machines he has made which today threaten increasingly to enslave him? […] ==productive forces which his science and technical knowledge have released, which seem adequate to abolish poverty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic crises, wars==?

i think about Cybersyn and Aladdin and ‘big data’. i used to be a software engineer (the formal methods kind, now i’m several years unemployed) and the amount of expertise and infrastructure that could support the kind of planning cyberneticists dreamed of exists, but it’s wasted on skinner boxes for proles and fancy dashboards for wealth managers (EDIT: or weapons systems for hurting people). now that expertise is gone. fake products kept alive by a belief in its potential and not by its capability to do anything it promises, but this belief is considered rational by the fact it takes the form of contracts blessed by civic rituals. in a world ruled by fiction, it’s no wonder people think TV is theory and that ancient pantheons or anime tulpa can remake the universe and rescue their spirit or some shit.

brings to mind this quote:

There is a strong tendency to speak of the machine as solving problems, when, in fact, really, it is the program which describes to the machine what the machines do. This is overlooked. I think a great deal of confusion arises from this.

It is not that we do not have adequate machines to solve our problems many times, but rather we lack adequate descriptions of how to solve the problem. And this is a very important point to understand.

— Richard Hamming, Computer And The Mind Of Man, Episode 1: Logic By Machine

this quote most of all stung me a little:

In a world whose economic structure fails to reward honesty and altruism, ==a Marxist would not spend his efforts preaching these virtues==, …

i was raised immersed in a water of hatred; i know the people some have to become to survive. but i’ve lost my patience for the so many people who still see themselves in the bourgeois and whose entire worldview is countryball, flag emoji and the ‘clash of civilisations’. my moral high ground is unfortunately what helped me cope with decades of abuse and it’s a hard thing to let go of.

but i did come away from this chapter reminded that we’re not stuck on this path. i hope the rest of the book can be as therapeutic.

I’m excited we’re all reading this. The introduction and first chapter were kind of exciting to me in terms of the optimism. Sometimes when I’m dooming I slip into Miroslav mode:

But the optimism in the book, of the possibility of changing people by changing a system, brings me back.

Managed to go through Intro and Chapter 1 just now.

I second most comments in this thread appreciating A.L.S.’ super clear explanation of Marxism in Chapter 1, it was very easy to read and digest.

Many comments in this thread are also very in-depth and make for good commentary and analysis, please keep them coming! I truly appreciate them.

Already finished the second chapter. I love this. Can’t post much in terms of analysis right now, but I’m just thankful for this reading group and to have this book suggested to me. It’s easy enough to follow, especially since I can hear the audio book on my way to work and I’ll be able to immediately apply what I learned in my two real life book clubs. Because Strong is so great at effortlessly communicating complex ideas in an easy to understand way. If I can mimic just a fraction of this, I’ll be able to use this to help the others in my clubs raise their understanding too. The smaller one of my real world reading circles is already Marxist, the larger one, I’m actively on the process of turning Marxist. After we already read one Marxist book, I composed a curriculum of short Marxist texts to read next instead of a whole book as a quick intro to Marxism (informed by Cowbees great list). They’ll need to vote on it, but I’m confident it’ll be accepted either for this or the next round.

Finished chapter 1 at first wasn’t sure what kind of book this was since I was getting red mars vibes but as I got further into the theory talk I felt more relaxed. Marxian was a new one to me ngl but I think I understand what’s it getting at. It def feels apt reading this now gilded age 2 try to “look for a boss” 😔

A few days late because various IRL things, but I’ll edit this comment later once I’ve gone through the chapter Just finished the intro as well as chapter 1.

There something about the section which talks about how “the mind of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism, that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak with the rest of the world.” which gives an immense amount of optimism. Though I’m aware of the folly of the “human nature” argument, pessimism can still start to wear on me if I don’t keep in mind how quickly that “nature” can change with a different, less exploitative system.

It also reminds me of that one quote from Omar El Akkad that focuses on how much capitalism is changing the hearts and minds of those in the west.

“It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?”

I love how easy to digest these concepts are (though I guess the real test of this would be on someone who isn’t already familiar with marxism), so maybe I’ll be suggesting this book to my friends who are “revolutionarily curious”. Excited to read more!

Come! Let’s read and discuss This Soviet World.

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Two paragraphs in and already the quotes are amazing

And Soviet officials are not always helpful in making their acts intelligible; they often assume that only deliberate malice can doubt them and that the only needed explanation is the appropriate citation from Marx.

Make that the tagline for a whole week on hexbear lol. Reminds me of Huey Newton:

I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

Some other quotes I found amazing:

For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.

Between these two [classes] remain for a time the middle classes […]. They suffer deeply under advancing capitalism which dislodges them steadily and painfully into the ranks of hired hands. They struggle against their fate, but their strivings are confused, for their instinctive desire is to go back to small scale property. Their cry is to “share the wealth,” to start over again that old society of small owners which led to the present-day monopolies.

Thinking about the title, This Soviet World implies a sort of familiarity and tangibility, a sense of being at hand, very much with the zeitgeist. It could be The Soviet World, but that reads like a memorandum from George Kennan circa 1950- “The Soviet World seeks the free world’s destruction.” Strong talks early on about how people conceptualize eachother. In the Great Depression-era US, the unemployed ask, “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to do something.” She rightly considers this a statement of alienation. There’s a divide between I/They/Us that betrays class society. Soviet people would ask what we are to do in response to a challenge, and that’s why it’s This Soviet World.

The book evocatively takes you to that moment, where “questing hope that hardly yet dares call itself belief” stands. It’s not a history or a prose but one of those lovely primary sources that isn’t afraid to document and analyze and actively be a part of ongoing events. Living in the long 20th century, the weight still feels heavy and heavier when it comes to every attempt against that hope. “For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.” It’s hard to read in the wake of the Cold War. Colonial war, total war, nuclear war, psychological war, while the process of one class asserting itself over another is so, the 20th century’s global anticommunist dirty war lingers, Killing Hope (Blum 1995).

“What happened to that faith in inevitable progress? If it still survives in some circles as a despairing habit, elsewhere it has been replaced by belief in inevitable doom. ‘Inevitable drift to fascism,’ ‘inevitable twilight of the West,’ ‘the old standard of prosperity can never return,’ are phrases common on lips that not long since hailed inevitable advance [of progress under capitalism].” The fact that such a passage can be read as a contemporary commentary proves the mission of that Soviet project is not irrelevant.

From the intro

The difference appears in the use of pronouns.

Oh no. Nobody warned me that this book was WOKE

I spoke on this in the megathread, but one thing I greatly appreciate about this work is the beginning portion, talking about how the soviet people saw societal advancement and wealth as an advancement for all, and not just for someone to get wealthy off of. This is the real dichotomy presenting a communal spirit, in embryo.

As for the first chapter, I think Strong did an excellent job showing a big-picture anecdote, where people are being remade in the Soviet Union, and then connecting that to an excellent overview of Marxism. This is the pedagogical expertise of Strong and the utility of her works in action. She bridges the gap between curious onlooker and the communists in a way that she is uniquely equipped to handle, as someone a part of both worlds.

Loved reading this, and I can’t wait to continue with you all!

A leading Russian Communist said to me a year ago: “The mind of our people is changing so fast under the conditions of socialism that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to speak to the rest of the world. We find it harder to understand them, and they us”.

Seeing this on the first page struck me as opening with how different people are in a socialist society compared to a capital society; it made me think about how reading socialist theory, books and people’s experiences of socialism does really change you even while living in a capitalist society. That when educating yourself from a radical perspective its difficult to the point of frustration when you are surrounded with media proclaiming capitalism as the only system despite it collapsing around us; and socialism as failed yet the material conditions are constantly proving that socialism is the only system that succeeds.

I think Strong opening on this quote sets up the book to make sure that we are both aware of what socialism is capable of but also that most of the world is still living in capitalist society and to not disconnect from that, especially when living in capitalist countries.

Still got the rest of the first chapter to read, this is just my analysis from the introduction.

This has been a somewhat tough read, thanks to hindsight. It’s a little disheartening hearing reading something written in 1936. It shows such an optimism and brightness of the early USSR, it’s really sad seeing such hope for the future.

In terms of ideas brought up by the text, I find the discussion of how a person in the USSR reacts differently to the world around them compared to someone living in a capitalist country. Thinking how good fortune is a good thing “for us”(the people) instead of wanting it for “themselves.”

Makes me really think about the ways I talk about things and consider things, even to myself, and the issues I have with getting things done. Doing things “for the money” is always such an empty, hollow goal, the idea of doing things for others, to help people, to make them smile, that’s what makes people thrive.