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It was weird reading Stalin for the first time, because I had gotten so used to reading Marx and Lenin. Those two were firebrands, constantly belittling their opponents, mocking people, using grandiose language. It’s awesome.
So I expected Stalin to take that even further, since he’s so much more widely demonized. I thought he was going to be flinging the spiciest insults I’d ever read. I was stoked.
I was kinda shocked to see he was actually very polite and chill compared to them. He wrote a lot more clearly too. I’ve read that one interview Stalin did with HG Wells a bunch of times. Wells is kinda rude to Stalin a bunch of times, and says a boatload of liberal claptrap. But Stalin just remains composed and even compliments Wells a few times. Stalin was way more respectful to his political opponents than Marx was to his allies lmao
Hot take, Marx would be debating people on Twitch if he was alive today.
He’d debate people in the New York Tribune. I also heard once that the amount of material Marx wrote about Max Stirner exceeds the material that Stirner himself wrote in total.
Marx and Stirner are the 19th century Destiny and Hasan.
Ok maybe not, I don’t see Stirner debating anyone. Dude was too edgy to even do that.
It’s a tragedy that Marx was born too early to be history’s greatest poster.
There’s the annoying stereotype you sometimes see where people are like “Oh, Stalin wasn’t smart, he was a brute who only rose to power through violence and coercion” b/c when you read anything he wrote, he shows a clear understanding of his subject by making very careful, easy to follow arguments that explain the concepts he talks about concisely. Obviously you gotta hand it to the kind Vladimir Ilyich but for me Stalin might actually be more enjoyable to read
Che: I read Stalin before it was cool to read Stalin, you fookin posers!
they told me not to read stalin. so obviously, i chose to read nothing but stalin from then on
Gottem.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism is gold, and easy to find online.
“I’m not very bright” ~Doctor, freedom-fighter, novelist.
And field commander.
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I think it’d be easier to get a copy of Henri Barbusse’s Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man in French than any of his actual works
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Libgen? For the online digital version I mean.
Might need a vpn to use libgen some eu countries block it.
Does anyone know where Che said this? Would like to read more.
https://www.idcommunism.com/2016/04/che-guevara-i-came-to-communism-because.html?m=1
The writer here attributes it to a letter he sent from Guatemala.
No, wait, WTF. Che literally called him Daddy Stalin? Is this real?
When I saw that I did do a double-take out of the absurdity of such a turn of phrase. I haven’t read enough of Guevera’s writings to get a gut feeling for whether or not such a choice of words would be in line with his general style of writing like I am with Stalin, so I have both no clue and no general idea of its validity unless someone’s willing to hunt down a photocopy of that letter it’s said to be sourced from.
I checked a reader I have of Che’s, but that letter is not included.
However, looking at the article again that quotation isn’t from the letter to his aunt and there is no source cited for that quotation:
In 1953, situated in Guatemala, the 25 years old then Che noted in his letter to aunt Beatriz: “Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated” (Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, 1997).
Years ago after his letter from Guatemala- in the midst of the revolutionary process in Cuba- Guevara would re-affirm his position towards Stalin:
“In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Series of things that are very good.” [anarchoilluminati: no source in original]
While praising Stalin’s leadership, Che was always pointing out the counter-revolutionary role of Trotsky, blaming him for “hidden motives” and “fundamental errors”. In one of his writings he was underlining: “I think that the fundamental stuff that Trotsky was based upon was erroneous and that his ulterior behaviour was wrong and his last years were even dark. The Trotskyites have not contributed anything whatsoever to the revolutionary movement; where they did most was in Peru, but they finally failed there because their methods are bad” (Comments on ‘Critical Notes on Political Economy’ by Che Guevara, Revolutionary Democracy Journal, 2007).
I want it to be true.
And I have Anderson’s Che but without a page citation, it’s difficult to find the letter.
If I had Cuban revolutionary scholar connections that’d allow me to ask random silly questions, I’d want to ask them about the validity of this because it’d be such a silly little footnote in history
