Hello everynyan, we’re finishing This Soviet World.
Week 16 we are reading the last chapter, 16: “New Men Emerge.” And discussing the book as a whole
EPUB, a link to a PDF, and online reading options, can be found on Comrade’s Library. If you find problems with the EPUB tell me and I will fix it. An audiobook is available through torrents or on the Internet Archive
Previous discussions:
Week 15 - Week 14 - Week 13 - Week 12 - Week 11 - Week 10 - Week 9 - Week 8 - Week 7 - Week 6 - Week 5 - Week 4 - Week 3 - Week 2 - Week 1
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I have a similar thing with Part 7, I would like to have 1. Understanding Lenin, 4. Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action, and 5. The Correct Handling of a Revolution together in one week if possible
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Interesting. I’ll take a look at it and adjust well before we get there, thanks for the suggestion. I don’t oppose it if you wish to bundle it that way, as long as Understanding Lenin is first then I’m happy with it, but I want to see if I think it needs to be rearranged for the master list itself.
On a side-note, considering chopping a huge amount of the list out. Everything needs to fight to stay here, so by the end of the list it might be about half as long. Really trying to shift to the reality that reading lists are fun, but every org worth its salt has a cadre training program of their own, even the DSA does this. If I have the belief that everyone should be getting organized, then the list must be made with that assumption in mind and help facilitate that process, not risk stretching it out and creating a period of time where people feel that they aren’t “correct enough” to join an org.
Keeping it as-is would be good for the reading group, but for propaganda it might not be as good. That’s also why I am considering writing a propaganda pamphlet, maybe making a substack or something and spreading that around.
Just ideas rattling around my empty head.
For me the goal is just to cut down on how many weeks it will take, while trying to keep the weekly reading below 2 hours, around 1 where possible. The current program I have marked up would take 28 weeks.
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That’s a great breakdown! Ideally I can trim it to 12 weeks by the end of it. Section 1 I am considering just having Why Marxism and General Rules of Independent Study alone, for example, and section 2 would pretty much just have Karl Marx. I really don’t want to do this, but I could swap back to Stalin and Mao for philosophy to trim it, but I really like Cornforth there. Section 4 could just be Nia Frome’s work. The rest of the sections could see similar trimmings.
This is where I am debating a microlist, knowing it would compete with the main list, or a propaganda pamphlet, or just having one trimmed list and perhaps a compository of recommended works in place of an advanced list for future studies. I honestly have no clue at this point, and the reading group will hopefully give me the experience and feedback I need to decide on a direction.