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Eat This Glob posted:where's the best place to start reading socialist theory? ive read a bunch of history, but I'd like to play the left version of the Cosmo quiz to figure out exactly what type of socialist I am PLUS how to drive my partner wild in bed If you haven't read it already, definitely start with the OG, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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Jan 16, 2020 21:18
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Pathos posted:I just finished reading “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” and I cannot recommend it enough. It was written in like 2014 and it’s not an expressly political book - it’s about modern Russia and the collapse of truth and meaning in their country. It feels incredibly prescient in a really astonishing breadth. I really strongly recommend it. It's a good book, though I'll caution anyone reading it to take the parts where he talks about how certain things are ingrained in the Russian soul or psyche or w/e with a grain of salt, Pomerantsev is at his best when telling specific stories about how weird Russia can be and at his worst when he starts extrapolating from specific weird instances to try and pontificate about what this means for the soul of Russia as a nation.
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Feb 28, 2020 03:23
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SKULL.GIF posted:I don't have patience for the long dry tomes. quote:I have Everything was Forever, Until it was No More already on my Kindle. lmao you poor fool quote:What's some other good pop-history-type books about the USSR, some good historical fiction set in the USSR? Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is good historical fiction set in the USSR.
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Apr 15, 2020 22:35
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BBJoey posted:any recommendations for books about the russian revolution? my experience is that it's a favourite topic for reactionary dickheads so i'm looking for something that wasn't written by a staunch british anti-communist The Russian Revolution is a huge topic but there was a big wave of centenary books a few years back written by top-tier academic historians for wide audiences. There are a few to avoid (don't read the one by McMeekin) but most of them are solid. My top three recommendations would be Laura Engelstein's Russia in Flames, S. A. Smith's Russia in Revolution and Mark Steinberg's The Russian Revolution 1905-21. I haven't read the Engelstein but it was very well received in the field, I've read Smith and Steinberg and they're both good. I also know them as people and neither of them is a staunch anti-communist, so they give pretty even-handed readings of the revolution's causes and consequences.
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Jul 2, 2020 14:23
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StashAugustine posted:i read adam tooze's The Deluge, which basically tracks the attempt by the allies in ww1 to impose a liberal world order from american entry into the war up to the great depression; and the factors that lead to the failure of the interwar period and the beginnings of ww2. there's quite a bit of interesting stuff in there- a big part of his argument was that the main problems were basically america refusing to cancel war debts owed by the allies and wilson's insistence on american dominance. I haven't read Tooze but the gist is that Lenin and Trotsky, who started out as the foreign minister of the nascent Soviet state, basically thought diplomacy was unnecessary because the world was on the cusp of a huge communist revolution resulting from WWI. They thought this for two reasons, one ideological and one practical. Ideologically, they (initially at least) believed in what was then Marxist orthodoxy, that revolution would come to advanced industrial states before backward developing ones. Lenin had argued that Russia was a bourgeois industrial state at the time (he thought emancipating the serfs in 1861 was Russia's transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that the 1905 revolution when Russia got a neutered proto-parliament confirmed that the bourgeoisie had enough power for Russia to be considered capitalist and therefore potentially socialist), but it was obvious to everyone that Russia was still mostly agricultural and nowhere near the level of economic development as Western Europe (this was, incidentally, one of the big doctrinal differences between Lenin and other Russian socialists, they thought Russia still had to pass through a capitalist stage before it could become socialist, and so up to and during 1917 they remained open to partial capitalism and to alliances with liberals as representatives of the bourgeoisie, whereas Lenin thought Russia was already fully capitalist and so they could go straight to socialism without needing more capitalism or any alliance with the bourgeoisie). So the ideological belief in transitioning to socialism in developed states before developing ones led to a line of thinking that you could sum up as "if things are so bad that we're getting socialism here in backward Russia, then the advanced industrial states must be right on the verge of a revolution too". And practically, they initially thought that socialism wouldn't survive in Russia unless there was revolution elsewhere, because the other great powers would never let a socialist country survive. Thus, based on a dual belief that a) revolution elsewhere was right around the corner, and b) without revolution elsewhere, Russian socialism wouldn't survive anyway, they basically didn't do any diplomacy at all for the first little while. They ghosted the German peace negotiators, humiliated the Allies by publicly airing their dirty laundry, and assumed that none of it would matter because revolution was right around the corner. This was a huge diplomatic blunder, but it was also a huge tactical/strategic blunder too--for example, the majority of the Russian Imperial Army's war materiel fell into German hands after the revolution because the Bolsheviks didn't bother doing anything with it, because they thought it didn't matter since the Germans would be their revolutionary allies any day now, and so the advancing German armies just grabbed a bunch of free guns and ammo on their way into Russia. They were only forced into signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk when it became obvious that the Germans weren't going to stop advancing into Russia, and even then they justified signing away huge parts of Russia's population and economy because the Germans were going to have a revolution any day now and then the treaty would be null and void. Then, on the Allies, yeah Lenin et al thought the Allies would never tolerate the existence of a socialist state, and the Allies were in fact pretty distraught about the Bolsheviks seizing power, but initially at first their bigger concern was losing the Eastern front. Russia was not a reliable ally through all of 1917, but it was still an ally tying up German troops. The whole reason for the disastrous Kerensky offensive of Summer 1917 was to prove to the Allies and the Germans that Russia was still an active participant in the war, preventing the Germans from moving all their troops to the west and trying to guarantee Russia a seat at the table in peace negotiations. And every potential Russian leader except Lenin was committed to staying in the war for that exact reason, they wanted a seat at the table and they were afraid that if they signed a peace it would mean Germany could turn to the west, defeat Britain and France, then break any deal with the Russians and come back and crush them too. If you read Russian sources from 1917 they're chock full of concern that the only way to get a lasting peace is to defeat Germany because you can't trust the militarist Germans and if you sign a peace then before you know it they'll come back and crush Russian democracy and reinstate the tsar. Lenin was less concerned with that, partly because he saw the whole war as an unjust imperialist war (the other Russian socialists thought this too, they just also recognized that there was no way for Russia to gracefully exit the imperialist war three years in) and that Russia should get peace at any cost because the cost didn't matter because a worldwide socialist revolution was going to happen any day now. Anyway, once you get into the Civil War era it's a little past my time period so I'm not as familiar with what Lenin thought about the prospects for immediate Allied intervention. I do know that he thought the capitalist powers would never let a socialist state live alongside them, a fear that drove Soviet foreign policy basically all the way through the 1980s but especially through Stalin's death. I also know that a big reason for Allied intervention up until November 1918 was to reinstate a government that would keep fighting the Germans. The immediate concern was the war, they didn't really care who ended up in charge in Russia as long as the new government would keep fighting Germany. And then after November 1918 there may have been some intellectual ideas about large-scale intervention to overcome socialism but there was no actual appetite for it since the Allies were all more or less exhausted from the war and had little interest in fighting a brand new one to prop up a bunch of failures and proto-fascist buffoons, so Allied intervention was less an existential threat to the Bolsheviks and more a reliable way of shipping supplies into and rich people out of a few major ports, before the Allies realized they were propping up a losing cause and yeeted their way out of there. Turned out the desire to not fight another war right after finishing The War To End All Wars was more powerful than the desire to make sure socialism didn't take hold in Russia. vyelkin has issued a correction as of 00:53 on Jul 11, 2020 |
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Jul 11, 2020 00:50
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snake and bake posted:Recently read The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. It might have been recommended in this thread before, I'm not sure. I'm working through a huge "to read" list and many of them came from this thread. Coincidentally, I'm also most of the way through this exact same book and I have mixed feelings. Frankopan's a good storyteller and covers some interesting things, but halfway through he basically switches from a history of global exchange to a history of the British Empire in Asia. I feel like the second half of the book has been kind of a letdown after the first half was quite strong, covering the different kinds of exchange across Eurasia and then how changing historical events altered the nature of global exchange. But then he kind of just forgets about that and focuses on Britain and Asia instead. Like he has an entire chapter about the European conquest of the Americas and how important that was for shifting networks of global trade and exchange, then after that chapter basically never mentions the Americas again except for a brief reference to how the American colonists were angry about the British government bailing out the East India Company (also literally never mentions Africa, like just as an example the only mention of Africa in the book's index is one reference to, of course, the Afrika Korps) until suddenly it's Cold War time and the USA appears out of nowhere as a global superpower, while we get entire chapters about British investment in the Persian oil industry. After the first 200 pages or so I was excited for what had until then been a global history focused on the importance of trade and how global trade and exchange patterns changed over time, but the rest of it hasn't lived up to those early sections so far. For me, at least.
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Aug 15, 2020 20:46
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If you want another good book on austerity, Mark Blythe's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is imo the definitive text on the subject. Be prepared to read it slowly though since it's quite dense.
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Aug 18, 2020 17:01
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:29 |
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err posted:can anyone recommend some good historical fiction books that also teach about whatever history the novel takes place in? Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a great historical novel about the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union
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May 2, 2021 14:38
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