revolution

STEPHEN GOWANS—The Stone and Kuznick view is, really, rather quite silly. They believe that Mao and Kim decided to become guerrillas, and Stalin, a Bolshevik, because these were routes to the acquisition of personal power, self-aggrandizement, and iron-fisted control. Yet, at the time, guerrilla and underground revolutionary were hardly the most promising career paths for people who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement. If Stalin really lusted after these things, why didn’t he link up with Tsarist forces, rather than the Bolsheviks, which until mid-1917 were a minor political force that no one (including many Bolsheviks) expected to take power?

EDDISON FLAME—So, I was thinking about a particular problem we are facing, definitely in the United States, but possibly throughout the western world too. The problem is that it is very hard to wake people up to the truth that the government, really the whole capitalist system, is the cause of most of the problems we are facing here on planet earth.People, the majority of people in the U.S. anyway, are very well insulated from these kinds of ideas. The reasons for this are many. Most of us have been indoctrinated from a very young age to love capitalism and to fear and loath anything remotely associated with socialism. This indoctrination is reenforced in our adult lives by what we see on the television. And finally, the icing on the cake, these days the majority us spend our days in well sealed echo chambers. If we don’t go looking for the information ourselves, we are rarely if ever exposed to the truth.

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Trash Revolutions are the best… but not all Trash make great revolutionaries.This was the case in China, where by the mid-1960s many in the Chinese Communist Party lost their willingness to identify with the poor and to share in their hardships – thus, they had lost the most important two traits which had propelled them to victory.The adults in the room, unlike the hardcore capitalists eager to criticize socialist societies at the first pause for breath, understand that the mere proclamation of socialist victory does not translate into an immediate paradise of equality and opportunity. This article seeks to explain why a retrenchment of revolutionary asceticism, a second so-called “cultural” revolution, was needed in already-Red China.