Hello everynyan, we’re reading This Soviet World.
Week 3 we are reading Chapter 3: “The Dictatorship.”
EPUB, a link to a PDF, and online reading options, 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:
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This is what I think everytime I read ‘Hello everynyan, we’re reading This Soviet World.’
Why is Stalin doing the You know I had to do it to em pose
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I just looked through the Emoji Comm to grab Stalin poses for the edit.
I assume this is his natural form for floating down to visit us for the Reading Group
On to my thoughts for this week
This chapter pretty much explained itself and went into explaining why a revolution is needed, what stages it goes through to consolidate power and how it deals with the possible contradictions of a ‘dictatorship’ that seemingly arise with such rapidly changing conditions.
The word ‘Dictatorship’ as Strong said at the start invokes the image of being dictated to and not oneself dictating. I feel this one word dictatorship has pretty much lost its actual meaning and just means 'evil authoritarian state because of how much its been thrown around to attack Communism and Socialist States.
When dictatorship means the working class dictates what is done to them and also what they will do with the State most of the actions taken by the USSR in its early years makes sense. The material conditions did demand certain actions such as the War Communism Stage to happen, the Bolsheviks needed to have the country functioning to survive the Civil War and Foreign Interventions. It did place a big cost on the People, especially the peasants with grain procurement, but then during NEP and Collectivisation where the interests of the Workers and Peasantry were focused on once the Country was no longer threatened and power was placed in the People via the Soviets.
I like this, Education under Capitalism is hypocritical in its nature as on one hand it needs educated workers but also can’t have people too critical and educated that they could be a threat to the owning class, resulting in today with functionally illiterate populations (honestly a miserable thing to be aware about). Workers must be able to criticise for their best interests, especially when they are the owning class.