What are you reading?

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blindpig
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 03, 2018 2:14 pm

Bout the only fiction I read is the weird stuff, SF & Fantasy(but not Horror) and it is increasingly difficult to find stuff that is good and that I can stomach, SF being dominated by the worst sort of old school libertarianism & the other patriarchal garbage. Used to enjoy Ian M Banks for lightweight amusement but he died & gotten into M John Harrison for more substantial reading.China Melville's early work was great but he's turned into a regular Trotsky fanboy. I've been re-reading Samuel Delaney's stuff. This Marxist stuff is tough, everything you knew is wrong.

I've hardly touched the 'classics', much less contemporary fiction, guess I need novelty to get interested in fiction. Did get around to Moby Dick couple years back & loved it, probably for all the wrong reasons.
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Howler
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Howler » Sat Nov 03, 2018 5:15 pm

Have you ever read Robert Jackson Bennett? Hubby read his newest, Foundryside, and indicates that he's pretty sure the author's a lefty. He also has a trilogy that sounds good.

I've read some of Mieville's fiction, good stuff, weird & heady. Was curious about October but never did read it.

I know what you mean about the old-school sci-fi, but there is a lot of really cool stuff coming out lately in Sci-Fi/Fantasy by women of color, and international authors getting translated into English... Haven't read her yet, but NK Jemisin seems to be righteous af. NNedi Okorafor is bad ass. Octavia Butler was way before her time and is being rediscovered right now. Anne Leckie is another one who seems to be good. Hubby read the first in a scifi trilogy (Three Body Problem) by a Chinese author, Cixin Liu, that he thinks is awesome - 'not particularly leftist, just really cool' are his words. Point being I think there is a movement away from the patriarchal crap.

Do you know about the whole sad puppies/rabid puppies thing with the Hugo awards? Those old-school testosterone-fueled libertarian types have been losing their collective shit in the last 5 years about all these radical lesbians and women of color invading their safe space bwahahahahha. And winning lots of awards. Worth a google if you have time to kill.

I read a trilogy called Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Started out seeming very left-ish what with the Reds being the most exploited class which finally rises up, ended up pretty wishy-washy in that regard but entertaining to me. Not too deep (borderline 'young adult' style), but very fun.

We carry the Samuel Delaney stuff but I still haven't read any. Not familiar with M John Harrison, maybe we should add his trilogy to the store?

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 04, 2018 2:47 pm

Old friend is serious SF fan, proly got every 'Analog' ever printed. We argue constantly, he is a partisan of the Old School(Clarke, Asimov, etc) whereas I think those scientists/writers were hacks whose only merit was a few good ideas He is a hippy survivalist who refuses to admit he's a liberal. We have our moments...

I've known of Butler but never give her a try, perhaps it was the book jackets, they usually put me off. So yeah, fully informed on Rabid Puppies, buncha assholes but still representative of a lot of the field(I've found most reptile keepers to be of the libertarian sort too, I can't get a break)

Yeah, give Harrison a try, the trilogy & the 'Viriconium' collection, SF that reads like fantasy all the while destroying every trope in the category.

Just picked up 'Red Moon' at the library by that Robinson character. All that I've read of him has pissed me off & expect this to do the same, goddamn liberal.
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 30, 2018 6:51 pm

Here's an interesting resource:

https://archive.org/details/@mixedforestzone

Image

Not looked at everything but this account seems trustworthy...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 10, 2019 12:23 pm

Next on my reading list:

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy
V. I. Lenin
1908

http://marxistphilosophy.org/LenEmpCrit1.pdf

I will obtain a hard copy, 400 ppg of screen is way too much
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:16 pm

, China. MiévilleOctober. The Story of the Russian Revolution. London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017. $26.95.
Grover Furr
First published: 15 February 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12321
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The primary requisites for any historical work are evidence and objectivity in studying that evidence. China Miéville's October has neither. There are no footnotes or endnotes. October is a partisan Trotskyist screed that ignores evidence—including that from Trotskyist historians—that threatens to complicate his simple framework: “Trotsky, good; Stalin and the post‐Trotsky Soviet Union, bad.”

During the 1930s Leon Trotsky himself was widely published in, and handsomely paid by, the capitalist press. Miéville's October is similarly celebrated and for the same reason: it is an anticommunist attack on the heroic period of the Soviet Union, the historical legacy of the revolution of 1917.

What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the twenty‐five years after Trotsky's exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world‐historical event. Like Trotsky and the whole tribe of anticommunists, Miéville slanders them.

October is a one‐sided interpretation of the insurrection of October 25/November 7, 1917 in Petrograd and the events leading up to it. At the end Miéville outlines an explicitly Trotskyist, and completely inaccurate, interpretation of the subsequent development of the history of the Soviet Union. The flagrant incompetence, even dishonesty, of this false thumbnail sketch of Soviet history naturally raises the question: How historically accurate is the main part of the book?

Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (HRR) likewise contains no footnotes. It is a frankly anti‐Stalin polemic published after his exile from the USSR. Beyond the Trotsky cult no one takes it to be a reliable account. At almost 900 pages only dedicated scholars or Trotsky cultists read it.

Miéville's text is much shorter. And Miéville is a skilled story‐teller. But how much of it is accurate?

Miéville:

…the embrace of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis of the Bolsheviks … (314)

This is Trotskyist dogma. In fact, Lenin had repeatedly said that Russia had “all that is necessary and sufficient” for building a socialist society. (“On Cooperation”, 1922). Miéville also claims that building socialism in the USSR was a wish for “autarchic socialism” and a “bad hope” (sic). Better that the Soviet Union fail than that it attempt to build socialism! Hitler, Winston Churchill, and in short the capitalists and imperialists of the world, would certainly have agreed.

Miéville:

[Lenin] grows suspicious of Stalin's personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary. His advice is not followed. (313)

Valentin Sakharov's detailed study of Lenin's supposed “Testament” was published in 2003. Sakharov concludes these documents are forgeries, not by Lenin. Stephen Kotkin agrees.1 Miéville ignores Sakharov's study.

The revolution in the rest of Russia is entirely missing—even the ten‐day armed struggle in Moscow, which was not a coup against minimal opposition as in Petrograd, but a hard‐fought Bolshevik victory with hundreds of casualties. Yet Miéville discusses only Petrograd.

Following his hero Trotsky Miéville can say nothing but lies about Stalin. A few examples:

There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party's Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him’. Would that the rest of Sukhanov's description had been accurate: that Stalin had remained no more than glimpsed, ‘looming up now and then dimly and without leaving any trace’. (97)

The words highlighted here are accurate. The rest is a “cheap shot.” Trotsky himself wrote that “Sukhanov obviously underestimates Stalin” here. (HRR, 2092) But Miéville cannot resist insulting Stalin.

These words are from the minutes of the Russian Buro of March 12, 1917 published in 1962 after Khrushchev's lie‐filled attack on Stalin at the XXII Party Congress and the same year Khrushchev expelled Viacheslav Molotov from the Party.

Molotov was one of the three members of the Russian Buro already in Petrograd in March 1917 along with Aleksandr Shliapnikov and Piotr Zalutskii.3 And Molotov says this never happened! He wrote: “The transcript of March 12 is completely inaccurate as regards the factual situation.4

Shliapnikov published three volumes of memoirs on the year 1917. He discusses the arrival of Kamenev and Stalin from Siberian exile5 but mentions nothing about Stalin's being given less than full membership in the Buro. Even Trotsky, who misses no opportunity to attack and belittle Stalin, does not mention it.

In fact, it cannot be true because Stalin was already a member of the Russian Buro! He had been appointed to it and to the Central Committee in 1912 by the All‐Russian Conference of the Bolshevik party.6

Miéville claims:

…the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks … (104)

This is a lie. Miéville copied it straight from Trotsky, who cites no evidence (HRR, 721–2). Trotsky also lied when he wrote that Stalin admitted this error in 1924. In reality, what Stalin in 1924 acknowledged as “profoundly mistaken” was the policy of “pressure on the Provisional Government through the Soviets.”7

Melville:

… his [Trotsky's] supporters are … driven to suicide. (314)

Also false. Adol'f Ioffe, the only Trotskyist suicide of the 1920s about whom we know anything, cited illness as his reason. Ioffe's letter was published in the official Party journal Bol'shevik in 1927.

Miéville calls collectivization “brutal.” In reality collectivization was a real reform that modernized Soviet agriculture and stopped the 1,000‐year cycle of killer famines, four of which had struck Russia and Ukraine in the 1920s alone.

Miéville on the Moscow Trials:

Party activists are … forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations. (315)

False again. We have had strong evidence of the guilt of the Moscow Trials defendants for decades. Beginning in 1980 the discoveries of Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué proved that Trotsky had consistently lied about the Moscow Trials and his own conspiracies in all his writings, including in “The Red Book on the Moscow Trials” (1936) and to the Dewey Commission in 1937. The clandestine bloc of Rights, Trotskyites, and other former oppositionists, did indeed exist. Broué's discovery dismantles Trotsky's claims that he and the defendants were “framed.”8 Trotskyist writers do not mention it.

Stalin, however, did not lie about Trotsky. In a Pravda article of November 6, 1918 Stalin acknowledged Trotsky's leading role in winning over the Petrograd garrison. Stalin retained this passage in his book The October Revolution, published in 1934, when Trotsky had been slandering Stalin for years.

According to Molotov Stalin complained that Trotsky's contribution to the revolution was being suppressed.

In 1939 Stalin looked through the second volume of the “History of the Civil War” and asked me:

But where is Trotsky's picture?

But he is an enemy of the people!

He was People's Commissar of the Army and Navy!—said Stalin.9

At the second and third Moscow Trials Trotsky was charged with conspiring with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan against the USSR and with plotting assassination and sabotage in the USSR. There is a great deal of evidence to support these charges.10 Miéville ignores it.

In 1961 Robert McNeal wrote:

Rarely has the historical image of a major leader been shaped as much by his arch‐enemy as the generally accepted conception of Stalin has been shaped by the writings of Trotsky. … To the end of his life [Trotsky] could not believe that so vulgar a person as Stalin was capable of the most staggering social and economic undertakings or that “history” could continue to suffer such a creature.11

Miéville's October perpetuates this historical falsification.

The accomplishments of the socialist Soviet Union: collectivization, industrialization, a panoply of social welfare benefits for workers, the defeat of the Nazi hordes, the feats of the Communist International under Soviet leadership—these were the pivot on which the history of the world in the twentieth century turned. If we are to learn the lessons of 1917 we must discard biased, subjective, and anticommunist accounts like Miéville's and face the evidence squarely, no matter how disillusioning this will be to some of us. The new and better world for which the communists of the last century fought can only be built on a foundation of historical truth.

Notes
1 Stalin. Volume I. Paradoxes of Power (New York: Penguin, 2014), 498–501.
2 Haymarket Press, 2008.
3 Sovetskaia Istoricheskaia Entsiklopedia, at http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/sie/15125/РУССКОЕ; Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 32.
4 Vladimir Nikonov, Molotov. Molodost’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 234–5
5 A. Shliapnikov, Kanun Semnadtsatogo Goda. Semnadtsatyi God. 2 (Moscow: Izd. ‘Respublika’, 1992), 444–5.
6 P. V. Volobuev, ed. Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1917. Biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Nauchno Izdatel'stvo ‘Bol'shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia’, 1993) 303 col. 3.
7 J. V. Stalin. Works. Volume 6. 1924. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 348.
8 A thorough discussion of this evidence is in Grover Furr, Trotsky's ‘Amalgams’. Trotsky's Lies, the Moscow Trials as Evidence, The Dewey Commission (Kettering, OH: Erythrós Press & Media, LLC, 2015).
9 Feliks Chuev, Molotov. Poluderzhavnyi Vlastelin (Moscow: Olma‐Press, 2002), 300. This is the expanded version of the Russian edition of Conversations with Molotov.
10 Grover Furr, Leon Trotsky's Collaboration with Germany and Japan. Trotsky's Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume Two. (Kettering, UK: Erythros Press & Media, LLC, 2017).
11 Robert McNeal, “Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalin.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 3 (1961), 97.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... wusa.12321
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:57 am

What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the twenty‐five years after Trotsky's exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world‐historical event.
This is an interesting question. There was "a road not taken" (so to speak) in the form of continuing the NEP as before ~1929. I think the SU had absolutely no choice but to change course but it very much seems that things are coming back around (eg China). Sometimes chronological order isn't the best way to organize the calendar.

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 27, 2019 11:48 am

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:57 am
What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the twenty‐five years after Trotsky's exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world‐historical event.
This is an interesting question. There was "a road not taken" (so to speak) in the form of continuing the NEP as before ~1929. I think the SU had absolutely no choice but to change course but it very much seems that things are coming back around (eg China). Sometimes chronological order isn't the best way to organize the calendar.
Don't tell our 'Western Maoists' that, they will scream that you are a 'Dengists'! Hardly more than Trots in a Mao jacket, bourgeois idealists and warped by despair(to be generous). Perhaps I'm reading too much into it but looking at the recent history it looks as though China has a most excellent plan. a large component of which is avoiding confrontation with US until they are confident of the strength to prevail. The trick of course is to complete this without the nukes being loosed by desperate, savage capitalists.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:03 pm

I think China had little choice but to go the route they have. They realized they were impossibly behind and had precious few avenues forward that din't involve being immolated by the Americans. And there was no one to defend them. (ask Venezuela where the "Western left" is now..ah, hanging on pretty boy Trudeau's coattails..or mouthing "socialist" rhetoric..in their tweets. Fuckers.)

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Re: What are you reading?

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 02, 2019 3:11 pm

So I went to the library the other day looking for some SF for distraction. Been meaning to take a look at 'Three Body Problem' since it had buzz and was Chinese even though reviews made it look rather run-of-the-mill to me.Here is a plot summary:
Aliens are coming to destroy humanity and it's the communist's fault.
They say the author is very popular in China but It seems to have been written with a Western audience in mind. And when it was written China was bending over backwards to assure the West that it was in the process of chucking it's 'communist past'. And ya might believe that if you get your info from Western MSM or Manhattan Maoists but a bit of investigation shows otherwise. In any case, standard tropes like 'smart ass cop', can we never escape cops? And there's too much 'science' and not enough 'fiction'. This book gets 2 rotten turnips and a year in the gulag.

**************************************

Whilst cruising the stacks I came across the Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht on an endcap. Don't know shit about poetry, don't 'get it', got no education & vulgar besides. But smarter people than I say it's the shit, who am I to argue? I have seen enough quotes by Brecht to know he was a Smart Guy so I picked it up. Nobody would know(until now).I read this:
The hopeful!

What are you waiting for?
That you will speak with the deaf?
And the insatiable
Will share a morsel with you?

That the wolves will feed you instead of devouring you?
Out of friendship
The tigers will invite you
To pull their teeth!
That is what you are waiting for!
and this:
The Internationale

Comrades report:
In the Pamir foothills
We met a woman, director of a silk farm
Who has convulsions if she hears The Internationale. She told us
During the Civil War her husband
Was leader of a group of partisans, Badly wounded
Lying at home, he was betrayed. Arresting him
The White Army guards shouted:you won't be singing
Your Internationale anymore. And before his eyes
they did the woman violence on the bed.
Then the man began to sing
And he sang the Internationale
Even after they had shot his youngest child
And he stopped singing
When they shot his son
And he himself stopped living. Since that day
The woman says, she has convulsions
If ever she hears the Internationale anywhere.
And, so she told us, it was hard
To find a workplace in the Soviet Republics
Where it wasn't sung
Because from Moscow to the Pamir Mountains
Nowadays you can't escape
The Internationale.
But it rings out a little less often
In the Pamirs.
And we spoke further about her work
She told us her district
Had at present only half-fulfilled the Five Year Plan.
But already the place was utterly transformed
Becoming unrecognizable and at the same time more their own
A host of new people
With new work, making new stability
And next year
Very likely the plan will be exceeded
And if that happens
A factory will be built: and if it is built
She says, on that day
I shall sing the Internationale.
Pretty good stuff.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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