Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow is a good account of the CPC in its earlier days.

They will sell this as saving the planet and ‘progressive’ liberals will go on more flights thinking they are combating climate change.

They will avoid trains for being too inefficient – too few travelers per carriage!

Thank you.

Hip Hop and rap mainly. Preferably radical / pro-communist / pro-revolution.

In English, I’d happily listen to a few artists on repeat: Tupac, Dead Prez, Immortal Technique, Akala, Stormzy, Wu-Tang Clan, Bambu.

Some pop music is good, too. Probably not boybands, though. I quite like Tove Lo if you know of a Spanish-singing equivalent?

I’d also listen to Shakira, Christina Aguilera, or Karol G, but they’re lyrics aren’t exactly political. Maybe there’s some political reguetón?

Simple things.

I’m eating better. A bit more veg and salad. Fewer processed foods.

And I’m able to enjoy reading fiction in Spanish now. I love reading fiction but cannot easily justify the time spent on novels. If I read in English, it’s either theory or for work. But I told myself that I could read fiction if it were in another language. So I started learning Spanish. And at the start of this summer I got through my first full novel. I’m on #4 now, and while I have to check the odd word, I can more-or-less breeze through (at a slower pace than I read in English). So now I can read fiction and improve my Spanish at the same time. It’s been fun, but it is a bit of a chore in the middle, after you’ve learned the easy bits, but before you can fully enjoy native content.

He’s good.

The ‘most rational’ critique of him that I came across is that he is not an historian. The ‘critic’ implied that as history is not Furr’s expertise, his work is sub-par. This could indicate serious problems with Furr’s work.

But:

1. This criticism gives away the critic’s bourgeois world outlook and their inability to treat history as connected to other fields. If they were a Marxist, they would see that a Marxist English literature professor would work with history, political economy, etc, because Marxists see these fields as interrelated.
2. The ‘argument’ is the height of arrogance and can be reworded: “leave history to the historians”. It’s a self defense mechanism, because if people take Furr seriously, it means that leaving history to the historians was a mistake because they missed what an ‘amateur’ spotted. All this is quite embarrassing for bourgeois historians because it suggests they have not been researching in good faith.
3. I’ve only read Khrushchev Lied. Furr might have produced less rigorous history because he is not a historian. Unfortunately for the bourgeois critic, any flaws in his rigour are negligible. The whole text is fully referenced and, even more condemning for the bourgeois critic, his sources are included in the appendices. So any reader can make their mind up as to whether he is right or wrong.

His conclusion is measured. The argument in Khrushchev Lied is that Khrushchev lied in his ‘secret speech’. He does not argue that Stalin was right or never made mistakes. He dismantles the foundation of the anti-Stalin paradigm. For this reason, Furr will always be slandered.

The so called secret speech is the one that led to rifts in communist parties in the imperial core. It was this speech that gave e.g. Trotskyists an upper hand. Khrushchev’s lies vindicated almost everything Trotskyists had been saying for years. The Marxist-Leninists who had supported Stalin were silenced. That support was now taboo. And the left in the West fell apart.

Considering that most modern knowledge about Stalin comes from either Trotsky or Khrushchev, Furr provides the evidence that most of that knowledge is incorrect. He performs a mass reductio ad absurdum to a huge swathe of anti-communist arguments.

If Khrushchev lied about Stalin’s record, then what did Stalin do? We may never know. But we can now simply laugh at bourgeois historians whose work can be traced to or relies on Krushchev’s speech, because we know they are wrong. And if they persist, at least they have identified themselves as an agent of the ruling class.

They are horrific numbers.

The underlying message is interesting, here, too.

Around €320b in Russian assets seized or frozen, to be used to rebuild Ukraine. So on top of Biden’s deal to make Ukraine borrow from the US for rebuilding, the US is also going to launder all that Russian money through Ukraine construction projects.

I could be wrong of course. Those construction contracts could be put to open tender and be undertaken by, say, Angolan, Indonesian, and Chilean based firms.

The gall of the US to pretend it doesn’t want this war and doesn’t have a direct hand in it. Flashing those many €billions in front of anyone would make them act strangely.

Last Christmas I gave you my heart

The very next day you gave it away

So this Christmas to save me from tears

I’ll give Covid to someone special (special)

(The Smurfs did a cover, for anyone wondering wtf I’m on about: https://youtu.be/eEIJcK-VM7s)

(Tbh I’m now wondering if this is the song that led Kanye to synth 808s & Heartbreak. Thankfully the Smurfs have not slipped into antisemitism.)

Edit: formatting

I was leaning towards being opposed to AI art, but you’ve convinced me the other way.

I imagine the same debates that happened twenty years ago will come round again, on whether digital art is really art. I’d say so. It seems much more obviously art than something AI generated, but there will be fine art buffs who reject it.

And before then, there would have been a debate on natural or artificial pigments or the virtues of rabbit skin glue over a synthetic alternative, and so on.

The employment thing is the problem, rather than the technology. But that’s not new. It’s even a meme to be a starving artist.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish this cave drawing.

PS There’s a good podcast episode on art history. RevLeftRadio,I think. Could be Proles of the Roundtable. Spoiler to hide sensitive description:

I get that. Some people don’t mind. But those with a strong political view… even mentioning a Marxist, a Marxist idea, or speaking neutrally about certain topics (never mind positively). And they’re gone.

It’s like they switch off. Nothing you say after that point goes in. It’s just noise while they’re waiting for you to stop or figuring out what they should do.

You can feel them experience cognitive dissonance as they realise they’ve met someone who shouldn’t be able to exist – a person who accepts a different reality and a set of entirely contrary facts, which should not be possible except in the most unreasonable monster.

And here you are, an apparently reasonable human that doesn’t look anything like the bogeyman. And now they’re starting to question things: why do we choose to let people starve?

david attenborough voice Which will overcome which, the listener’s ideals or the material truth in front of them? fade to credits

Or maybe I’m inferring too much.

It’s so frustrating. And if you do get the chance to reply, you just get another move from the playbook. While they’re telling you to read history, does it ever cross their mind to read Marx et al?

It would be too much effort, for the most part, to explain what’s wrong with the instruction, ‘read history’. Lenin covers it really well in the first para of ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, but will these people read Lenin? And still, we’re the ignorant ones.

Edit: the paragraph in question (which is actually the first two paragraphs, sorry):

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.