reading Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds; it makes the pretty straightforward but evergreen point i’ve definitely seen elsewhere, that socialist countries always face non-peaceful relationships with global capitalism and the US in particular; i do note the book does not discuss the (at the time (1997), contemporary!) political strategies of China after Mao
what i understand is that (until recently) China has had a considerably more peaceful relationship to capitalism after opening up to foreign investment and adopting markets internally (leading to the understandable analysis that its Communist party was/is a misnomer, which frankly i don’t think i know well enough to comment on), and given in 2020 that its trajectory is toward that of a global power, i do wonder if that complicates Parenti’s point a bit
then again the US wants war now so
the most sus stuff in this book is the author’s contempt for what they call “Anything But Class” academics; what he has to say about them feels really uncomfortably close to the incurious, especially given that they say the same shit about the supposed unreadability and dismissal of logic that people throw at like, Butler
it literally brings up the Sokal affair lol
i was also disappointed that the book’s subtitle—Rational Fascism And The Overthrow Of Communism—did not mean so much “how fascism has played a role in the global overthrow of communism” as “we will talk about fascism at the beginning to hook you in, and then talk about various other topics relative to communism and its fall”
anyway remembering how the first chapter of Byung-Chol Han’s Psychopolitics makes the utterly preposterous claim that neoliberism has developed to a point where class conflict does not exist at all but instead has entirely shifted into a dialectic within the self, manifesting as depression and such