Ask Lemmygrad

I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don't lead me to believe this guy's well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they're not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.

Parenti's work speaks vaguely about "less inequality", "public ownership of the means of production", and "priority placed on human services", but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was "public ownership" of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It's a "socialist" history of the USSR with the working class' real, material experiences written out.

I know this feels right to people who haven't got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won't become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn't have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren't immaterial, but they are only ancillary.

Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.

The poster has to know this ain't true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn't have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they're studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?

... In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker's "class interests", inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.

I'm not sure I'm reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn't exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We're who we are here, we've at least skimmed Capital, we're better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.

Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how "socialist" the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR "was" for excuses about "why". Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR's existence. ...

And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question "Why didn't the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?" is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it's filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.