Great book overall, very enjoyable to read. I have some criticisms though.

• In terms of structure, it would have been good to bring up the facism point clearer again at the end to round things off, perhaps by pointing out the facist elements of everything discussed in the rest of the book.
• Denouncement of Stalin as a plain dictator severly lacks nuance AFAIK. So does implying that he had control of everything that happened in the Purges.
• Parenti claims that no computerized system could control a planned economy. This is a weak claim, because first of all it has never really been tried. Secondly, if anything the Soviets needed more and stricter state control/better control mechanism of the economy to curb the shadow economy and ensure proper rewards for efficiency - I don't see how computerization could fail to help here. As a modern example, digital currencies such as even just bank cards could severly hamper the shadow economy because it could be implemented to be entirely transparent to investigation or automated oversight. Oversight, communication, logistics and planning support could be massively better than what Soviet planners had to work with.
• At one point he claims high-paid athletes are relatively speaking heavily exploited because they produce so much value for the club owners compared to lifetime pay. This makes no sense from a LTV perspective.
• Parenti seems to favor, at least in an ideal world, liberalization and desentralization of the economy in favor of the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie. Although this probably make sense in some situations as long as the DotP is enforced and other class interests are properly controlled, you can't both support liberalization in the Soviet Union and oppose China post-Dengism. This seems clearly contradictory to me. It makea no sense to only support a national petite bourgeoise (which is the only possible implies distinction I can think of based on my reading), if you're gonna have a free market why oppose influx of foreign capital and technology in a controlled manner or into lower strata of the economy?

One smaller point I really like though is him using the word Ecology instead of Environment. Environment implies something external to us, something surrounding us, something that could be replaced. I feel ecology makes it clearer that we are a part of it.

::: spoiler Notifications (I forgot)

@Atomicus@lemmygrad.ml @bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml @Conselheiro@lemmygrad.ml @Cowbee@lemmygrad.ml @dosuno@lemmygrad.ml @rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml @Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml @steakboi@lemmygrad.ml @Tofutefisk@lemmygrad.ml @uncanny@lemmygrad.ml @UntitledTankie@lemmygrad.ml @o_d@lemmygrad.ml @AngeryProle@lemmygrad.ml @egs81t@lemmygrad.ml @blobii@lemmygrad.ml @UminekoEnjoyer@lemmygrad.ml @into_highest_invite@lemmygrad.ml @xenautika@lemmygrad.ml @SpaceJack@lemmygrad.ml

:::

I may skip this one, but let me know when or if we're doing Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology by Nikolai Bukharin.

Just starting my read through and I think the first chapter, Rational Facism, does a great job of giving a clear and compelling introduction to the core problem wrt capitalism and facism. Seems like the sort of thing that could be refined and distributed as a pamphlet or short course. Has anyone seen someone publish something like that? I'm always on the lookout for ways to make this sort of information more compelling or easily consumable by the general public.

All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not "make inevitable" the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regard­ing the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deporta­tions of "suspect" nationalities.

Where can I get more context on these claims? In particular regarding Old Bolsheviks, since it's not the first time I come across this denomination, and I know nothing about them.