Go to Spain comrades is not great up here in the north :/

France and Germany are probably better options for trans healthcare too

It’s not just employment either. Trans people often have to pay for medical treatment out of pocket fully or partially. Even if you do have a well-paying job, many working class trans people will have to spend a large part of their wage financing medical treatment, often in combination with unsecured loans.

Great book overall, very enjoyable to read. I have some criticisms though.

• In terms of structure, it would have been good to bring up the facism point clearer again at the end to round things off, perhaps by pointing out the facist elements of everything discussed in the rest of the book.
• Denouncement of Stalin as a plain dictator severly lacks nuance AFAIK. So does implying that he had control of everything that happened in the Purges.
• Parenti claims that no computerized system could control a planned economy. This is a weak claim, because first of all it has never really been tried. Secondly, if anything the Soviets needed more and stricter state control/better control mechanism of the economy to curb the shadow economy and ensure proper rewards for efficiency - I don’t see how computerization could fail to help here. As a modern example, digital currencies such as even just bank cards could severly hamper the shadow economy because it could be implemented to be entirely transparent to investigation or automated oversight. Oversight, communication, logistics and planning support could be massively better than what Soviet planners had to work with.
• At one point he claims high-paid athletes are relatively speaking heavily exploited because they produce so much value for the club owners compared to lifetime pay. This makes no sense from a LTV perspective.
• Parenti seems to favor, at least in an ideal world, liberalization and desentralization of the economy in favor of the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie. Although this probably make sense in some situations as long as the DotP is enforced and other class interests are properly controlled, you can’t both support liberalization in the Soviet Union and oppose China post-Dengism. This seems clearly contradictory to me. It makea no sense to only support a national petite bourgeoise (which is the only possible implies distinction I can think of based on my reading), if you’re gonna have a free market why oppose influx of foreign capital and technology in a controlled manner or into lower strata of the economy?

One smaller point I really like though is him using the word Ecology instead of Environment. Environment implies something external to us, something surrounding us, something that could be replaced. I feel ecology makes it clearer that we are a part of it.

Capitalist societies are ruled by the bourgeoisie. Under the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the law is created to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. Because liberals buy into bourgeois ideology, they support the rule of law over them. Essentially, they believe that the growth of obvious facism in the US, which has been present for over a hundred years as a major element of the United States, is an attempted coup by a minority of the bourgeoisie. In actually, the shift to naked facism is produced by a change in the material basis, namely the declining rate if profit and decline of the American Empire.

Therefore, the bourgeois law cannot stop facism, because bourgeois law will change to represent the interests of the increasingly facist bourgeoisie - liberals have an idealistic conception of law, where it is this ideal or holy thing imposing “democracy, freedom and human rights” on society, while in actuality it is just a tool for bourgeois class rule, which can be altered, replaced, or discarded whenever useful. They have this conception because they do not understand the material basis of laws, and because they are propagandized to believe in the ideals of the bourgeoisie. US facist also support the rule of facist laws, for the ideals of “order and supremacy”.

The fundamental flaw apart from not understanding the material basis of law, is that they do not understand the class character of facism, viewing it instead through a purely ideological lens as something evil and irrational for all segmens of the population (despite facism only occuring to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie). When this is understood, it is clear that the only way to prevent facism is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish the class rule of the proletariat, something the bourgeois liberal idealogues will never advocate for - instead they advocate for peaceful protests, voting, and the rule of law, i.e. obeying the class rule of the bourgeoisie as a way to “oppose” the bourgeoisie

I’m reading Socialism Betrayed now and taking notes to Blackshirts and Reds. Both a refreshing break before diving into capital vol 2 😅

It’s fun but as far as being a simulation of marxist economics it fails completely. It doesn’t treat commodities as physical entities but abstracts it as a “flow”, so it can’t really represent overproduction crisises, there is no real market uncertainty, etc. Also it suffers from the PDX game curse of running too damn slow 😭