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
can’t say that quite as confidently now given recent developments but
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’s frustrating because postmodern academia IS a thing (there is a “graphic novel” summary of Marxism that spends much of its last pages arguing that there are too many identities for class conflict between proletarians and bourgeoisie to be Real) but like… it’s literally even presented very readably lol…
it literally brings up the Sokal affair lol
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
the latter part of that, phrased as a “crisis of freedom”, might accurately describe how hustle culture works, but how on EARTH can you SERIOUSLY CLAIM that the dialectic is ENTIRELY internal when people ABSOLUTELY still have to sell their fucking labour-power to make a living???
anyway the book ends on the chair going after such academics so it feels Pretty Bad
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”
*on the chapter that criticizes such “anything but class” academics
lmao literally the next paragraph after i stopped to post that: “While the Chinese government continues under a nominally communist leadership, the process of private capital penetration goes on more or less unhindered”