STEPHEN GOWANS—The Soviet Union was a concrete example of what a publicly owned, planned economy could produce: full employment, guaranteed pensions, paid maternity leave, limits on working hours, free healthcare and education (including higher education), subsidized vacations, inexpensive housing, low-cost childcare, subsidized public transportation, and rough income equality. Most of us want these benefits. However, are they achievable permanently? It is widely believed that while the Soviet Union may have produced these benefits, in the end, Soviet public ownership and planning proved to be unworkable. Otherwise, how to account for the country’s demise?
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BRUCE LERRO—Speaking of cops, research on mass psychology has shown that most of the time, contrary to Le Bon, riots are started by the police, not the crowd. Furthermore, crowds assemble and disassemble at ballgames and concerts without any police necessary. Once gathered crowds do not stick together like honey. They easily disperse and really do not need the police to do so. I have been to many a Yankee and Knicks game in which the crowd, anywhere from 15 thousand to 30 thousand people leave the game, peacefully get on the train and talk about the ballgame. There is no need for police because nothing controversial happens. For conservatives like Le Bon, they cannot imagine that crowds regulate themselves. For them crowds are filled with animalistic, hedonistic barbarians who need the police to whip them into order.
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A wide variety of critics of Marxism-Leninism, beginning with liberals and outright rightwingers and fascists, plus anarchists and libertarians of many stripes, accuse Marxist-Leninists of being inherently “authoritarian”, despotic and tyrannical. Their criticism is usually directed at nations where anti-imperialists have conquered power (Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the “pink tide in Latin America”, Iran, etc.) This is Michael Parenti’s insight on this important issue.
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There’s still a lot of confusion (much of it abetted by the capitalist world itself) about the true nature of the European Union (EU). In this post, The Finnish Bolshevik tackles that subject, while also re-examining the phenomenon of imperialism, in general, and the whys and wherefores of democratic centralism and key aspects of vanguardism.
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JEFF J. BROWN—It is hard to describe what has transpired with Mumia Abu-Jamal, since 6 June 2020, when I sent him my first message via his prison’s for profit “email” system.
Like an uninformed goober, I sent him hyperlinks to my website and books, only to learn that Mumia is completely cut off from the internet. This “Prison Connect Network” is the only way I could communicate with him, and to stifle the exchange of information, you can only send 2,000 characters – not words – characters per message. That’s like three paragraphs at a time, and it costs money for each message.
Not only that, but it’s crap quality, like using Microsoft DOS 30 years ago. I learned quickly to copy and save all my messages, since half the time I have to start over, as the system crashes frequently. The vendor, GTL must pay some handsome sunshine bribes to get this contract for concentration camps all over the USA, charging monopoly rates for prisoners to telephone and be called by loved ones. For friends and family members struggling to put food on the table and pay the rent, it’s a vexing situation. Thus, our now four-month long journey to work together through this dog-end messaging system began and continues. Including our interview below, I have 25 pages of communication between us.
