His final hit of adrenochrome

Having read My Disillusionment with Russia after learning how genocidal the war against the Soviets was and how stretched thin all aspects of society were due to the breakdown of economy, Emma Goldman unfortunately comes off as an extremely embarrassing American who can’t stop expecting everything to revolve around her. It also goes unmentioned in her account how many of the anarchist cells that were being “purged” were openly destroying and murdering the emerging Soviet state, this would be unacceptable anywhere and especially because this emerging Soviet state was exactly what was needed to end the economic crisis.

The conditions the Soviets made their revolution under was harsh and unfortunately necessitated the decisions made later on, but they should be critiqued with the context in mind or else we’re failing to learn from their successes and failures. When we apply our own context and preconceived notions onto a revolution which happened over a hundred years ago we are unable to take anything meaningful away except the most basic and propagandistic things.

Yeah, I’d definitely say part of it for me was the unchecked assumption that “those” revolutionaries messed it up because they were cruel or stupid. As much as I looked up to the things they’d done, I looked down on them for their lack of “purity” and lack of democracy.

For me it took genuinely reflecting on my western chauvanistic attitudes, and meeting real communists in Cuba and having a legitimate conversation with them. Once I’d found out what a communist in an existing communist country was like, I’d realized they had the same drive as me, and were far more effective than me!

which, yes, set the entire rest of the world against them. They had a few teeeensy difficulties. They still used it as a license to be otherwise just as awful as everyone else, and handled their problems in utterly deplorable ways.

To be absolutely clear, the poor and lackluster decisions and retreats from “pure” Marxism and Leninism were by far the result of material conditions over a personal desire for power. The USSR was the world’s first socialist experiment and thus went on to make mistakes which would be corrected by later socialist experiments which would survive the 90s, but many of those things were forced by the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and the genocidal war campaign of the Nazis shortly after.

The history of Marxism (from the Marxist perspective) can be seen as legitimately taking the most successful form of liberatory thought and action in the modern day and trying to make it continually work in the cruel world we’re born into. It’s not perfect, but it’s been shown to work on a scale larger than any other strain of thought, and socialist revolutions have fed more children who’d gone hungry before than anything else prior or after.

For more context in this worldview, I highly recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo

Volcel Police!!!

I LOVE MY TRANS COMRADES

DM me, we’re actively running a drive to make sure we capitalize this momentum. We can exchange matrix info and I’ll try to get you in contact with someone and make sure your application is seen.