I’m halfway through Parenti’s Blackshirt and Reds, I’ll post about it when I finish it, like I did for Mark Fisher’s Capitalism Realism, but I actually want to ask where can I know more about the Soviet Union as a whole and about the criticism Parenti does in the book alongside any other issue it might have had?

In Chapter 4 - Communism in Wonderland, Parenti does an actual critique of socialist experiences and it’s, in very broad terms, basically how issues ranged from lack of incentive to corruption, what’s funny is that some of the stuff he presented there is actually stuff I have seen here in Brasil, for different reasons usually, yet still something that happens here, and probably that also happens on other capitalist countries. But what I’m interested really is in how much of what he’s talking about is still considered true given that it’s been 29 years since the book was released and there could be more information about these issues that he might not have had access to at the time. I think I get why he didn’t really expand much into these issues in the book since it feels like the book is structured as a quick read to dispel the myths liberals kept and still keeps parroting to this day.

I know Hakim did a video about Soviet mistakes, but these are not really issues he touches in that video IIRC.