ComradeEd

I would have just added a comment under the current weeks general thread. If it weren't for the fact that I really like the book and REALLY think you should read it.

Strong writes in a way that is easy to read. And, as she has done before, she writes about the successes of the Soviet Union and Socialism. My liberal brain-worms were writhing, chapter by chapter they could not accept what was written, too good to be true, propaganda! Though I must have gotten very happy reading about these success, because I at one point got teary-eyed.

Please read it, not because I made an epub (although yea, also that), but because I think it's a great book.

Download my EPUB version: https://comlib.encryptionin.space (or https://archive.org/details/this-soviet-world-anna-louise-strong)

The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by adjusting relations between property and protecting it against the “lawless” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality between exploiters and exploited is impossible. . . . It was invented to hide the sores of capitalism . . . and lend it moral strength.” [Stalin, Leninism, I, 46]