this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Soviet

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Hello everynyan, we're reading This Soviet World.

Week 2 we are reading Chapter 2: "The Party of Revolution."

EPUB, and link to a PDF, of the book can be found on Comrade's Library. If you find problems with the EPUB tell me and I will fix it. Dessalines has made an audio book.


Previous discussions:

Week 1


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[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I've already forgotten the first chapter, but this one is fresh in my mind. I find it equally inspiring and dismaying. Inspiring, maybe I don't need to explain. My dismay stems from my perception of the conditions there/then vs here/now. In a way, they were starting "fresh". They didn't have a century+ of anticommunist propaganda, and (it sounds like) they had a single party! While I can see a lot of the propaganda fraying, it sounds like even then, the bar for party membership was exacting. Here we have a smattering of parties, with (I suspect) less stringent requirements for membership. Is Hexbear the vanguard?

[–] iByteABit@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I kinda get the anticommunism propaganda point, there already were anticommunist talking points back then, though I do feel like society as a whole has become much more brainwashed by the huge volume of anticommunist propaganda that exists today compared to then, it's not far fetched to say that today there's a whole industry of automated anticommunist and fascist propaganda with smart algorithms picking out the most vulnerable parts of the working class that are going to suck it up.

The single party thing is not true, even from this text you can see that there are already fractions, the biggest one being the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, but there are also mentions of people leaving the party because of disagreement and breaking off into their own groups. And also there's the factions before the Marxists started gaining ground that are subtly referenced here too, like the adventurists that believed in assassination strategies and another party believing that the revolution can only happen by the peasants, the Marxists had to argue with both until it became clear that their ideology is the most materially and scientifically grounded.

Starting fresh also comes with negatives, they had no idea what was coming for them and only had some very limited examples to draw from like the French Commune. We on the other hand have a whole century of revolutions, successes and failures to analyze and perfect when revolutionary conditions arise again. It's not all bad for us, and the decades of propaganda are weak against the wrecking ball of material conditions radicalizing the working class once again. You can already start seeing this with young people, the truth always wins eventually, as long as we survive long enough for it to happen.

[–] BuhbyeLittleGumshoe@hexbear.net 3 points 23 hours ago

Conditions are very different yes, they were living under modernism back then vs the postmodern spectacle in the international-community-1international-community-2 today. We see communist movements in places still on that paradigm, like the CPM(Kenya) but the fact that consumer societies are having the beginnings of a new socialist movement calls for analysis to push action. Certainly there is a crisis of capitalist reproduction.