I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
not sure how unpopular this is, but i’m of the opinion that having a strong education in diamat is more important than any other political/philosophical education, because it is simply more fundamental in the sense that it itself can be applied to all spheres of knowledge and discovery. furthermore, a lack of interest or knowledge in diamat is one of the main problems i perceive from western ML orgs. there’s a lot of room for new theory here but i haven’t really seen anything major published, although i might just not have seen it.
I do think that it should really be taught in schools (under socialism because capitalism will reject it) because idealist thinking (as Faux) mentioned is really harmful in many ways, like the propagation of harmful beliefs (anti-vaccination) to misinformed ideologies about how capitalism works (“free market” is capitalism). Thank you for mentioning that it applies to all spheres of knowledge because I kind of forgot.
Don’t know if it’s really unpopular but I certainly agree with that. Metaphysical and idealistic mindset being a “common sense” for people is one of decisive factors sustaining contradictions like workers defending the system actively exploiting them. Dialectic grounded in materialism is necessary for true understanding of how the material conditions shape us and how can we shape them back.
I perceive myself as abnormally cautious, hesitant, wanting to be thorough (sometimes to the point of inaction). Some of it’s anxiety-driven, some I suspect is a predisposition toward looking for threats and anticipating problems. I don’t say it as a good thing, but not necessarily a bad thing either. It makes me shy of leadership positions because I can be too plodding and uncertain to take immediate action. Sometimes I think it’s the times or a cultural thing though. I had little enough use of technology in the earlier parts of my childhood that I can remember the contrast between that and when I became an adult and started using high-speed internet regularly. There’s something about the pacing of things that changes. Not only on how you operate, but how society operates.
For example, a society that needs days or more to send a message from one place to another simply can’t move as quickly as a society that can instantaneously send a message across a great distance. This makes snap decision-making more common and more valued. It’s strange though because it’s not like this means society changes instantaneously. Rapid movement does not mean rapid change, necessarily, since the superstructure has to catch up to the base.
So you can get this “hurry up and wait” feeling a lot. “Why am I even rushing? For what? To where? Is time actually running out quickly or do I only perceive it that way because of the perceived pace of the world?”
I don’t know. I feel abnormally older than I am at times. Probably in that messed up childhood way, not actually wise from experience. Life is strange, but I am glad for diamat because it helps ground me in the sea of nebulous western ideologies.
For example, a society that needs days or more to send a message from one place to another simply can’t move as quickly as a society that can instantaneously send a message across a great distance. This makes snap decision-making more common and more valued. It’s strange though because it’s not like this means society changes instantaneously. Rapid movement does not mean rapid change, necessarily, since the superstructure has to catch up to the base.
I was just pondering about this yesterday: We in 2026 are more than twice as far away from 2001 (hi 9/11) as those who convened at the Bandung Conference (1955) was from the end of WWII (1945).
I also think a lot about hurry/urgency (probably has something to do with anxiety, at least a little bit) and not doing enough/not being able to do enough.
I have always believed that without Trotsky, the 1917 Revolution would have failed.
I am not sure how many people would denounce his achievements related to the 1917 Revolution (the main criticisms are expect come after he starts being that weirdo anti-Stalin guy that anti-communists use).
I think Mao gets a bad rap for stuff that happened during his later years.
I’ve seen a lot of people who kinda just melancholically say he would’ve been remembered better had he not led China through the 50s and 60s. I guess I get it, but is that what we care about? Legacy? Everyone should just hang up their hats when they make a bad decision?
Additionally, i think in any case, it’s hard to blame Mao and Mao Zedong Thought for the problems that occurred specifically during the era. Establishing a new proletarian state us hard, establishing one of the first ones ever is even harder, establishing one in China was a miracle. The economy grew at similar rates before before reform and opening up as it did after, and without that initial foundation of independence there could never have been an independent reform and opening up. I also think the red book is one of the most important texts for beginners and should be one of the first reccomended.
Additionally, like I’ve said in other threads, I’m not one for discussions on morality. I think i got empathy overload [edit: more like empathy burnout] at some point and have just accepted bad things are going to happen no matter what when things get violent. If you just boil it down to “is hurting x necessary to establish socialism? Yes? Then it’s moral. If not then it’s immoral” then life becomes much simpler. I’d kill the entire Romanov family 20 times over personally if that was the decision that needed to be made to save the USSR. I would lie, cheat, and consort with the worst to establish socialism, and that’s the attitude that’s needed to do so. I will argue at length about what is necessary–materially–to establish socialism [I don’t think the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki were necessary, so they were immoral] but individual sob stories are pointless and I’m glad I’m becoming numb to them. Maybe your grandpa wasn’t a counter revolutionary, but the wider purge was necessary to save the people from the blackest era of reaction. So it was moral. Life is very much a play of averages and odds. Unfortunately it will be that way until the last capitalist is dissolved. Edit: However this also applies the other way. I don’t really care about justice if its unnecessary. It’s not about what people deserve, it’s about living, about science, and about the natural coarse of human events
Lastly, the Jacobins are more than just Bourgeois revolutionaries. I wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as proto-socialist or anything, but there was a difference between them, the Girondins, thermadorians, etc. The jacobins were the Bourgeoisie who aligned themselves with the journeyman proto-proletariat and the peasantry. This is opposed to people like Cromwell in Britain who aligned themselves with the lower landowners against the peasants. It’s why we appreciate Sun Yat-sen more than Chiang Kai-Shek, or Thomas Paine than George Washington, etc.
Dialectic logic is unnecessary to explain the world. The job that dialectics supposedly does is better done by complexity science, classical economics, critical realism, evolution, and psychology.
Dialectical methodology was used by Marx to analyze classical economics, Engels noted evolution as dialectics at work, and psychology can be analyzed dialectically. I am unfamiliar with what you mean by “critical realism” and “complexity science,” but I don’t see why they surpass dialectics. What do you believe dialectics to be, and why do you think these areas are better without dialectics?
Just for one example of why this conclusion doesn’t make sense:
psychology
Psychology is not an unbiased, purely neutral field of scientific observation. Bourgeoisie psychology (which tends to be very individualist) is not the same as explicitly working class psychology, for example (which will more so promote the collective). Dialectics helps us look past the pretense of neutrality toward the constant interplay of differing class and caste interests (depending on how / what way a society may be stratified). Without it, class analysis is hamstrung in bougie points of view that pretend to be neutral.
That said, I do think the material out there for understanding dialectical and historical materialism can be painfully hard to follow. A large part of that in English material is probably due to the fact that there hasn’t been a successful proletarian revolution in the English-as-first-language parts of the world (unless I’m forgetting one). That plus the academic watering down of Marxism in the west to make it more acceptable to the ruling classes, can make it feel a bit “ancient text written on scrolls” trying to engage with what it is and how to put it into practice. The main practitioners of it in history are people who also had to test it against reality, harshly, or their revolution might fail and their people could literally die. It was sink and swim; learn to use the scientific tool or be unequipped to meet the moment. By comparison, the theoretical vacuum academic view of it can make it seem almost quaint, like an odd little hobby of a view that you pick up to clarify a few things.
I do think it’s worthwhile examining psychology closely. I don’t doubt at all that psychology has been used to crack open social divisions. We could call this bourgeois psychology. Conversely, we could seek to fix these social divisions with something we call proletarian psychology.
However, bourgeois and proletarian are historically determined categories. They exist today because capitalism exists today. And yet humans have existed before capitalism (and hopefully after capitalism). It was before capitalism that we developed our pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacity.
We have studied our own pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacities. And we have consistently found some things to be true about them.
For example:
- Working memory limits
- The levels of processing effect
- Classical and operant conditioning
- The testing or retrieval effect
- Behavioral momentum or self-efficacy
- The framing effect
Again, these mechanisms are not dependent on capitalism. They are not bourgeois psychology. They are not proletarian psychology. They are dependent on our biological equipment, including our recently-evolved cognitive capacities.
Am I pretending these mechanisms are value-free? Not necessarily. These mechanisms determine the playing field. They determine the constraints we have to work with. It’s up to us what we make of them. We could choose to use these mechanisms and our understanding of them to legitimize and bolster class divisions or to critically examine and dismantle them.
Although I’m sure we can isolate some elements of psychology that are more of a universal observation than they are a sociopolitical lens, I would still emphasize that 1) most of psychology is not that degree of truism/universality and 2) dialectical and historical materialism is itself based on scientific observation. Prole and bougie is not what diamat is fundamentally; it’s one historical manifestation of class struggle.
Rejecting diamat doesn’t make scientific sense. Rejecting universally consistent facets of psychology doesn’t make scientific sense either. But, great care must be taken with thinking surrounding truisms and universality. For example, take a thing like “working memory limits”. This is not something that’s been consistently studied throughout history, so data on it is going to be limited. That already means that universality of it across history is difficult to back up. It is nevertheless useful to understanding what they are from the data we do have and whether they can fluctuate and why, but this is not the same as them being static across time and history.
I would also point out, though it’s a bit of a pedantic point, that neuroscience is not necessarily the same as psychology in the meaning of diagnosing reported feelings and thought patterns, and neuroscience can struggle to find the intersection between what it observes and what is going on inside, because of how dependent psychology research is on self-reporting.
So to reiterate, I’m not trying to say we should “throw out the entirety of the current society’s psychology because it is tainted” but rather that it’s rarely as straightforward as naming something as a truism and moving on. And that one of the benefits of diamat is explicitly naming the jockeying behind the scenes that diverts research toward one narrative purpose or another.
Oh this is definitely unpopular I think. The thing is that did not some Marxist philosopher (I feel like it was Mao) showed that dialectics is a part of science? Saying it is not necessary to explain the world is just strange to me (do you think that it is also unnecessary to explain politics)?
Marx and Engels especially tied dialectics to science. See Dialectics of Nature.
Oh thank you for the resource.
No problem!
This might be more of a complaint on how some Marxists act vs an ideological disagreement, but it has to do with some of the dismissiveness on certain topics.
For example, if someone decides to talk about their Fandom culture, or some piece of media they enjoy which is not explicitly revolutionary or just generally mainstream, there are quite a few Marxists who will jump on that person, and tell them “this is nonsense you should be busy organizing.”
I generally don’t go into my interests here on the Grad just because I don’t often get the opportunity to. Sometimes I do indulge however when a topic comes up in the gaming, free chat, or anime communities.
Regardless, I think some Marxists underestimate the amount of effect agitprop can have when you engage in Marxists analysis of consumerist media. I don’t mean just going into a fanspace for a media you like and scolding everyone there either, I mean just existing Inna community as a Marxist openly, as it can be surprising how receptive people can be when you apply Marxism to something outside of strict political discussion.
This is one of the things which strengthened reactionaries duing the 2010s and caused a social democratic backlash in the same spaces online. We are seeing a more explicitly fascist reaction confronting the old socdems and need explicitly socialist opposition to battle for cultural hedghemony online.
Gatekeeping is absolutely a problem. I would go even further - even extremely flawed bourgeois media have their dialectic. As a trash anime enjoyer, I can say that development of the modern tropes is itself an opportunity for a dialectical analysis.
Isekai, harems, getting kicked out from hero’s party… – popularity of all of these tropes have reasons in material conditions of the main audience (which is Japanese youth rather than American/European youth but mostly applies to capitalist society in general too). They are nothing but fantasies addressing concrete problems of society - people’s material conditions stagnating, romantic bonds being commodified, competent workers getting laid off by companies that can’t notice their importance…
People who enjoy these tropes should be encouraged to analyze the material reasons they are so appealing for them rather than judged for liking them. And diamat is a tool we should share with people, not just in direct confrontation with capitalism. There is plenty little things that can be used as distraction by the capital but can also be used by us to help people link dots to the source of their problems.
Absolutely! I’ve had far more success sharing ideas and viewpoints in a game-related community that isn’t involved in political discussions very often than I’ve ever had trying to organise or discuss politics at work or elsewhere online.
I can definitely see some Marxists being quite critical of works when the situation does not call for it, considering the very scientific (yet political) substance of Marxism in combination with the fact that it has not become widely accepted (the lack of widespread acceptance despite the scientific substance means that some Marxists have a tendency to be very critical in the situation you mentioned above).
People can be receptive to Marxism when it is applied outside of politics? I never really thought of it like that, and I assumed that people would not be receptive to Marxism under any circumstance.
Are there specific events during the 2010’s that show what you are talking about? I never knew of the fascist counterreaction against social democrats during that time (I just knew about anti-feminism being a toxic thing back then).
The fascist counter reaction is happening right now. We are seeing that the reactionary online personalities are shedding their “classical liberal” facade in favor of outright fascism. I forgot to mentioned that the socdem surge occurred in 2020 until today.
I have noticed a larger amount of fascist sympathizers lately (though maybe I just have not been paying attention to comments much before that).
Bukharin was a rightist, because he suggested that children should be separated from their families to be raised by the state.
What makes that rightist, though?
It alienates children from society.
When children grow up with parents, they are able to observe the world and society through their parents. Children are always observing and learning even when you’re not directly teaching them. When they see their parents go to work and interact with others, they learn that.
When you alienate children from that environment, like the bourgeois private schools in the UK, they are removed from the means of production and thus is more able to accept contradictions between the classes. This is detrimental for a socialist society, where class struggle is intensified after a revolution.
On the parents side, it removes them from parenting. It’s not a question of whether or not they have the right to children, but rather a question of whether or not they understand what goes into taking care of children. Knowledge comes from practice. When you remove the practice, you remove the knowledge.
This knowledge is absolutely crucial because the proletariat has political power, and they need knowledge to make correct decisions.
Lastly, Bukharin was a rightist. He was part of the faction that looked to sabotage the Soviet Union, and was executed for doing so.
I don’t think parents are the only scope for children to learn and understand class society… … Additionally, the example of bourgeois parents placing their kids in ivory towers is utilized for explicitly bourgeois means of replicating their class, where their children cannot interact with other classes as equals, but certainly as servants. I’m not agreeing with <separating children from family to raised by state> but that’s a very different thing from <bourgeois class reproduction> you gave as an example
Bourgeois class reproduction wouldn’t happen if the children actually saw their parents schedule their lives around going to work and earning money.
Kids understand that people exchange labour for money because they see what their parents do. Hence, they gain an understanding of class. How do you perpetuate an alternative narrative? You separate them from an environment where people are shown to be working. You show them that money is not gained through labour, but rather it just appears when you are able to adhere to an ideal.
The dialectic between the base and the superstructure works on a personal level as well as a societal level.
Oh, I was not debating or asking what made Bukharin a rightist (I did recall his “ABC’s of Communism” as being a bit “prophetical” and talked a bit too much about the specifics of how socialist society and communist society would operate), and I forgot Bukharin’s anti-Stalin stance; I was merely wondering how separating children from parents was rightist.
I have never thought about alienating children from parents as affecting their perception of the means of production, nor the consequences for socialism that such a thing would entail. On a similar topic, I do not think homeschooling should be legal because it can be an echo chamber of harmful influences that the parent would have full access over.
Oh, for sure. Homeschooling is not great because kids don’t socialize when homeschooled.
I meant that parents should have a right to care for their children, but shouldn’t have an exclusive right to educate their kids.
Left vs right is the diversification of political power vs the concentration of political power. Alienating children from society reduces their class consciousness and has them delegate decision making more towards authority figures, which is more rightist.
Yeah, homeschooling seems to generally be worse for children than outschooling because of those reasons. There is also the fact that I have no idea if the qualifications for homeschooling are as high as those for standard schools (they are probably lower), so they will get lower-quality education that is tinged with the ideological beliefs their parents will have.
Diversification of political power vs the concentration of political power is an interesting way of discriminating the Left and the Right (though I guess they are more vague descriptors due to the fact that the Left and Right serve as umbrella terms for numerous groups which do not share that much in common with one another, yet are still opposed to the other side).
Technically there are standards that are on par for homeschoolers, but a lot of people who homeschool as an excuse to not school their kids just don’t follow them. There’s no enforcement.
Also, educational standards are really lax. When you push kids, they can easily exceed those standards.
Concentration vs diversification of political power is the original definition of left vs right, as it originated in the French Revolution.
Weird how conservatives are like: “we are against government authority” unless their government needs to go to war or deport legal citizens with skin colors darker than they like. You would think that such things count as concentration of power.
“Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism” by Lenin
I find it important and, for me, it was a very good first read.
But it has sections that are filled with economic data for various countries at the time (Germany, France, Britain, Russia mostly) and it can become quite heavy and involved. I could see someone, who’s not used to reading that kind of book, being put off by the sheer volume of data drops that Lenin uses. When I recommend it, I usually tell people to skip the data analysis if they aren’t interested.
I kinda wish there was a version of Capital without all the “p’ = s’ × [v / (c + v)]” stuff. When he talks about the process of Enclosure or the working conditions of the 19th century, or bagging on about how stupid capitalists are in their analysis I’m in to it but then the math hits and my brain goes blank.
Yeah the economic data was hard to look at, but very useful otherwise (I consider it a necessity within Marxist theory).
“What is to be Done?” was not bad for me, but that it because I read Communism books and watch Communism videos beforehand. That said “Wage Labour and Capital” and most except the later parts of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was hard for me because I have a hard time understanding economic theory.
Those were definitely harder than I thought (they were both recommended as beginner books), but they were definitely useful. I really need to reread them someday.
Who the fuck is going around recommending ‘What is to be done?’ as a beginner Marxist text?
It was one of the first bits of theory I read. I think the name leads a lot of baby Marxists to think it is a good place to start. Wouldn’t you love to know exactly “What is to be done”?
No baby Marxist with the knowledge of the historical context will get through the writing.
I do not know, but I did see it recommended by azureScapegoat as a beginner text (I think) and I kind of assumed that it was a beginner text, which might be cheating :/
The beginner Lenin work is ‘The three sources and three component parts of Marxism’. Then I:THOC or State and Revolution.
How hard would you say “What is to be Done?” is?
With the historical context, pretty riveting and comprehensible. Without the historical context, 7.9/10 difficulty.
That’s why I always recommend new readers to learn about the history of early 20th century Socialist movement in Russian Empire and Germany first.
I personally found these videos by Bes D. Marx quick and easy resources,
I appreciate the extra sources (I read a bit about the German Democratic Republic), and yeah, I need additional context behind the Russian Empire.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I know there’s an entire Spanish Armada of disinformation about the USSR - especially during the Stalin years - but I am instinctively skeptical of claims that Lavrentiy Beria wasn’t a sex pest.
For one thing, I believe all women.
For another it’s not exactly hard to imagine a man in a position of power abusing said power to take advantage of women - especially when that man is a cop and being the head of the NKVD does make you a cop no matter what way you try to look at it and all cops at the end of the day are bastards.
Of course I can still accept this possibility that it might not be true; I’m just very suspicious of the claim when covering up the sex crimes of powerful men is a recurring theme throughout history and despite the great progress the USSR made on the front of women’s liberation there was still a very visible patriarchal culture present right up until the end.
Again: I accept it could be bullshit. I just really doubt it.
Of course I can still accept this possibility that it might not be true; I’m just very suspicious of the claim when covering up the sex crimes of powerful men is a recurring theme throughout history and despite the great progress the USSR made on the front of women’s liberation there was still a very visible patriarchal culture present right up until the end.
I would say this part is what’s important to investigate rather than who was or wasn’t a “cop”, since LE for the proletariat isn’t the same inherently as LE for a parasitic class. And disproportionate sexual abuse of women is an observable side effect of patriarchy. If it was about him being a “cop”, I’d would expect more of an indiscriminate abuse, regardless of gender.
Incidentally, the “believe all women” thing is hard for me because even though I want to on principle, there are times when it’s like… if I did unthinkingly, I could be lead astray by atrocity propaganda. It’s an ugly issue, but I think the core of it comes back to: what women need more than being voluntarily believed, is collective political power. They need enforcement for protections and liberation. The magnanimous trust of some good faith observers will never come close to being enough. This is another area where I would characterize it as liberalism trying to replace literacy of political power with volunteering, like its solution for poverty being charity; this isn’t to say that believing women is a negative, just as voluntary charity among the people is not a negative, but also that neither is a systemic solution.
So I keep circling back to (I’ve rewritten parts of this reply several times now X_X), where was the USSR failing on addressing patriarchy and why. That’s probably way more important as information than whether one particular guy was a sex pest.
“Believe all women” doesn’t mean assume every woman making an accusation is telling the truth; it means taking seriously any claim of abuse committed against women by men, something our society regularly struggles with (see: Amber Heard).
Right, but what’s the followup that “take seriously” leads to, that’s the thing of it. If women had more political power, they could push back earlier and create consequences for abusers much more readily, which would remove some of the relevance of random people believing it or not.
If I’m Random Nobody hearing about such a claim in the public eye, I’d still say it’s better if I take it seriously than if I’m dismissive of it. But in that position, I’m also generally not equipped well to investigate it either and being in a “eh I don’t know” position doesn’t seem worth a whole lot. Those situations are often somebody making a claim long after the fact and it’s their word against the other person’s. I understand why it happens that way, don’t get me wrong; I’m aware a lot of times people who are abused don’t speak out because of things like fear of consequences, or not wanting to harm the person who harmed them, and so on. But nevertheless, the end result is that we run into these cases where you sort of have to either take someone you don’t know at their word or “not be dismissive but also not rush to believe it either” which is sort of a weird halfway point to be in and doesn’t seem to be meaningfully advancing the liberation of women.
Then there’s cases where I may know the person and believing them matters insofar as acknowledging what they’ve been through, but again, it may be long after it happened or they may not want me to do anything.
Basically what I’m trying to get at is, far more is needed to prevent further abuse and bring consequences, and relying on public opinion to believe a claim is a horrible situation to be in. The metoo movement, for example, got some consequences out of it, which is good, but also a fair amount of “well now what”. It’s frustrating.
I get what you’re saying - and I agree that more needs to be done - but more cannot be done until we start treating the issues seriously. That’s the point of “Believe All Women”: it is the beginning, not the end. Violence against women cannot end until it is taken seriously. Even women getting the political power to fight this issue ourselves requires being taken seriously first. There is no emancipation for women from patriarchy at all until the social attitudes - which go far beyond what individuals believe - that mock and patronize women are confronted.
You can apply a similar approach to the working class: if you view workers as stupid, helpless, lazy, or uncivilized (all of which are common classist stereotypes of working class people) then you’re not going to be meaningfully advancing workers’ rights or our emancipation from wage slavery.
Same thing with racism: you have to acknowledge other races as humans before you can end white supremacy.
Etc.
I think that his execution should be viewed as a part of the dismantling of the revolutionary vanguard by Kruschev.
Regardless of whether he was a sex pest, the entire movement of destalinization should be viewed as a shift towards liberalism.
As in, he was executed as part of a power grab. Not because of his alleged deviancy.
Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I completely agree. He wasn’t merked for being a sex pest; he was merked so Khrushchev could solidify power.
all cops at the end of the day are bastards.
That only counts for capitalist countried though. The reason they are all bastards is because they protect capital. Chinese cops for example are comrades and the NKVD are too
Edit: I originally had a comment saying how the police in China were called something different in Chinese compared to the Chinese term for police in other countries, but I am not sure if that is true after trying to look into it.
Deepseek also told me that the terms are the same. At most, they say “x-country police” and “people’s police” according to deepseek
Sorry for the mistake
Nah, no worries 🤗
Yay hugs
(perhaps you could have put a trigger warning at the beginning)
In regards to your topic, I have heard something about that from a former conservative professor of mine, but it was in the same vein of propaganda that all the other anti-USSR lectures were in, so I did not really think much of it beyond it possibly being more propaganda (the person thought that Stalin was worse than Hitler when comparing the methods that they used to persecute people).
Do you have resources on the cultural sphere of Soviet society? It is not a part of my current knowledge, so resources on it would be nice.
Sorry, I didn’t think it was needed since I wasn’t going into explicit details.
That is a fair response. The issue with critics of the USSR is that while they mostly rely on atrocity fiction and Orwellian propaganda they often end up stumbling on genuine criticisms every now and then and making them part of their arguments. This ends up lending credence to their other, more sensationalist criticisms just by association which in turn makes their propaganda more effective (propaganda is most effective when the core claim isn’t necessarily a lie) and has the side effective of comrades dismissing genuine critique as propaganda by mistake, which can make us look bad if its a real critique.
As for resources I don’t really do a lot of research on Soviet society myself; mostly I just absorb the research of other comrades. Lady Izdihar and RevolutionaryTh0t have several videos going over women’s rights in the USSR (and really just Soviet society in general) if you’re interested. You can find them both on YouTube.
Ah you have a point with a small amount of truth mixing into the soup of atrocity fiction, and it honestly makes their propaganda stronger than it normally would be (because sometimes that truth is miscontextualized or exaggerated beyond absurdity, like the quote from Marx saying he is not a Marxist being used to make people believe he stopped being a Marxist when I do not think that was the original context of the quote).
I definitely know of those two, but I have not gotten around to watching them much (I probably should some day).
