I’ve read through this chapter but don’t have anything to say that which has already been said.

There was so much optimism in the Soviet Society, regardless of where you go and who you encountered. The USSR gave a fresh start to practically everyone regardless of who they were before as long as that person chose to put in the effort to change themselves. A majority of the responsibility to rehabilitate a person imprisoned was on them but they were able to do that because of the resources given to them by how the Soviet Prison system , compared to under capitalism where people are have everything taken away; given nothing; then expected to rebuild in the themselves into something ‘acceptable’ for society in the horrible prison system: which rarely happens and the cycle ends up repeating.

Come! Let’s read and discuss This Soviet World.

Additional reading to this chapter:
See the post I made on “A typified case of a Comradely Court.”
I will also be posting an article on Bolshevo (very shortly mentioned in this chapter) later today. Posted
And the book mentioned in the chapter: Russian Justice (Incorrectly stated as Soviet Justice) which we will hopefully read as part of the reading group in the future.

Also, we are nearing the end of the book. I am thinking of starting Soviet Democracy once done with this book. Most likely we will also be reading multiple chapters per week starting with that book, otherwise it will take us years to get anywhere. And I want to start a theory reading group, for Cowbee’s list. Tell me if you have any thoughts.

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I am still reading, I’m just bad at saying something that hasn’t already been covered by others or feeling like I don’t really have anything novel to say. 😭 But I’ve started recommending this book to my friends because of how easy-to-parse it is. I’ve been really enjoying the read/listen.

What I really like about this book is just how much our misconceptions based on bourgeois framing get flipped around. Strong sort of redirects our assumed views on labor camps and contextualizes them with Marxism and the Soviet policies and conditions as they actually existed, their purpose, etc. Also enjoyed seeing the numbers on falling crime rates, the anecdotes of children’s courts, etc.

This book was written almost a century ago, we’ve regressed so much since then. Every chapter fills me with feelings of “what could’ve been.”

Once again another common Soviet myth tackled and debunked, this time the gulags being horrible torture murder nightmare hellscapes. Anti-communist ideas are always so flimsy, monsters made of cardboard to scare people.

They have, however, been the center of some of the most spectacular attacks on the Soviet Union in recent years. Allegations of brutal treatment and even of torture have found their way widely into the foreign press.

Hmm…sounds oddly familiar with regards to accusations against China today. Anti-communists never even bother to change their bullshit. All the same claims about the gulags are identical to their modern claims, they just “ctrl+f, replace” the names and call it a day. I genuinely hate how little effort they put in to be convincing, how little effort they’ve ever put in. It’s always the flimsiest, emptiest nonsense that relies on the person accepting it uncritically because they have been trained from birth to view communists as an evil other, who does horrible things for no reason or benefit.

This book has talked a lot about the idea of “remaking the man” and how material conditions shape who we are. I think this is the biggest tragedy of capitalism, people are forced to be “a human beast, that most fearful two-legged blood-thirsty species without love or goodness or feeling or pity.” just trained to be hateful, small, pathetic and bigoted, never being better, being placed in conditions that prevent them from becoming better, but a society that will still shame all of us for not being immune to our material conditions.

I don’t think any piece of socialist literature has made me despise capitalism nearly as much as this one has. It’s one thing to dryly describe its inner workings, or outline methods of combatting it. But a work that shows us how different things could be if we managed to defeat this system, how even just 20 years after the revolution these people are living lives of unimaginable social richness to me, someone living 80 years later, it just really paints a picture of just how much we lost in the fall of the USSR and just how much humanity is suffering.

It’s almost like Plato’s cave, reading about and understanding the lives of the people of the Soviet Union and understanding what we are all missing, while everyone else is too busy chasing shadows on the wall and get downright hostile if we try to tell them that there are things beyond the cave.

Strong again does a really good job of explaining marxism in an accessible way in this chapter.

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The “Gulag” has been the favorite cliché of anticommunists since the advent of the Soviet Union and has been applied to every opponent of capitalism and liberalism since then. In the liberal imagination, they must envision men in barely put-together coats trapped in a dark Siberia with guards barely concealing their sadism. Of course, this is just another capitalist projection of its own well-documented, brutal prison system.

Only a social system which insures to ordinary honest labor greater rewards than can be obtained by even the luckiest dishonesty will produce instinctively honest men.

A dig against capitalism being rooted in the dishonest expropriation of profit from workers into the hands of a very few. In such a system where dishonesty is rewarded far more than honesty, why would honest people be formed?

He does not believe in the existence of “born criminals” whose will must be broken by brutal suppression nor does he rely on emotional appeals to the “better nature” of the criminal,

It’s amazing how timeless this critique of the capitalist punitive system of justice is. The existence of “supermax” prisons and the enormous amount of resources spent maintaining them for only a tiny amount of people who will never work or live in the public again is the culmination of the capitalist correctional system. It’s a contest among nationalists to see who can envision the most brutal and subhuman conditions for people to live in. It’s a cycle of vengeance that in the minds of a liberal society insists upon itself.

There are even “children’s courts” in which children judge each other in the presence of interested adults.

How many bullying cases in school would be solved if children were actually allowed to deliberate on social conflicts without adults? This is such a radical concept in American schools where social intervention is dealt out in short term punishment and social stigma.

Dr. Mary Stevens Callcott, the American penologist who has studied prisons all over the world and who has had the unique experience of visiting the larger part of the Soviet camps, including those for the worst—and for political—offenders, has commented both in her book Soviet justice and in conversations with me personally, on the “amazingly normal” life that differentiates these camps from prisons in any other part of the world.

She notes the freedom of movement over large areas of territory, the very small amount of guarding, the work done under normal conditions—seven hours for ordinary labor to ten for men whose tasks, such as driving a truck, permitted frequent rests during work. She could find no speed-up; laws of labor protection operated as in factories. Wages were the same as those outside, with deductions for living expenses; all above this could be sent by the prisoner to his family, saved or spent as he chose. “No uniforms with their psychological implications, no physical abuse; No isolation except in extreme instances. Privileges and special rewards replace the system of special penalties.” Among these special rewards are the two weeks’ vacation in which the prisoner may leave the camp, and the opportunities given for his family not only to visit him but even to live with him for extended periods. Normal human association goes on; men and women meet and may even marry while serving sentence, in which case they are given separate quarters.

…

Nothing in their attitude or that of those about them showed any stigma remaining from their prison life. “Of course, when it’s over, it’s forgotten,” one of them said to her. “That,” says Dr. Callcott, “is real restoration.”

I think one of the most torturous affects of imprisonment is the existential dread of your life being paused. Your prison time becomes a void in your life in which your only instinct is to not lose more and more of yourself. In American prisons, not only is basic human rights not observed, but being put in prison strips you of the ability to vote and holding down a job becomes more precarious. It is the most brutal thing you can do to a human being.

So well known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.

That’s another part of focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment: people who want to reform themselves will actually come to you. In capitalist societies, turning yourself in has no incentive compared to all the damage that incarceration will cause. There’s very little thinking or compassion given to people who want to improve themselves.

Not to mention, the reserve army of labor under capitalism begets a section of unemployed people who have nothing to look forward to but to scrape by a living by any means possible. Under capitalism, crime and prisons literally must exist for the system to continue. Organized crime is desired by the capitalist class to reproduce the capitalist system among lumpen and to destroy class consciousness. Why would the bourgeoisie eliminate crime if crime is key in producing the victimization of the working class as helpless and in need of the state?

This is another powerful chapter in how much is cuts through the main anticommunist scaremongering of prisons. In the logic of communist societies where unemployment has been eliminated, what is a criminal but a person who needs help and should be given help. I don’t think many liberals/un-radicalized people are aware of the violence and cruelty mass incarceration and is because the damage is hidden and justified. Crime is used as a tool to divide the working class and to prolong the cycle of poverty and exploitation.

Literally everything the capitalists say about Soviet criminal reform is projection.