I love the very opening story of the dance troupe, it's just a story that would so obviously never be possible in a capitalist prison state. It would be the kind of premise that could only happen in some sort of feel-good comedy movie, not in real life. And from there, the rest of the chapter makes it clear that the "Gulag" system was tantamount to prison abolition, while also setting forth an extremely clear conception of the Marxist understanding of human behaviour and 'human nature'.

Many other comments talked about other parts of this chapter in detail, so I will just mention a highlight for me that I didn't see anyone else discuss - the part about the judge and the party members at a saint's day festival (so much for the ruthless suppression of religion) collecting everyone's knives so when they got drunk later, no one got stabbed. It's just so pragmatic and non-punitive, in a way that anticommunist propaganda would have you believe a socialist state could never be.

In a capitalist police state, they would either ban the festival, or ban the alcohol, or enforce a curfew, or flood the area with cops and arrest, imprison and perhaps enslave anyone they found making trouble, or just do nothing to prevent a tragedy and then mercilessly destroy anyone who in a heated moment of poor impulse control became a murderer. Or else the festival would be a private event, with paid entry and security guards standing in for the police. There could never be a scenario where the police defuse the situation in a humane and pragmatic way, with the consent and understanding of everyone involved.

And actually, I just realized I might be skipping over the most notable part of the story, which is that the judge went and organized this himself! Could you imagine any US justice stepping down out of their courtroom throne to go out amongst the people and directly prevent crime from happening like this? To pre-emptively stop people from being criminalized in the first place? Of course not.

I don't have much to say about this one, as others commented it's particularly bittersweet knowing that all this youthful vitality and wonder was about to be spent fighting off the assault of the united capitalist world. I already said much of it in my comment on the Democratization of Science, but this chapter also hit me with the feeling of how wasted the energy of my own youth was, how completely without direction I felt until I was able to understand that that directionlessness was neither an accident, nor a fault of me as a person, but instead an inescapable feature of capitalism. One which, as the description in this chapter will attest, has not changed in nearly a hundred years.

Despite the bittersweetness, this chapter perhaps makes me the most hopeful about the fight for a socialist world, in the way it describes how quickly a new generation can flourish in new conditions. If we struggle and win, the reward will be to see, in just ten or fifteen years, the 'explosive joy which becomes increasingly plain in the words, the sports, the celebrations of Soviet youth'.

As others said, a strong ending which ties many threads together. I particularly like the explicit contrasting of the values of Soviet society and the Soviet citizen against those of the capitalists and especially the fascists. The eternal postwar liberal project is to equate fascism and communism under the umbrella of totalitarianism, so to have the subjects of fascism so specifically decried as slaves of blind obedience, in opposition to the 'strong and original individuality' of the Soviets, this far in advance of anything Hannah Arendt had to say, is an important and useful point.

I also love the quote about "that ability to look on both sides of the question which intellectuals under capitalism prize as a sign of high intelligence, but which Pravda disdains as “division of personality and double-mindedness, Hamletism in romantic colors.”" Postmodernists destroyed, Zizek in absolute shambles.

And I also love the description of the Stakhanovites. The classic anticommunist depiction, exemplified in caricature by Boxer the horse in Animal Farm, is of blunt, foolish illiterates being goaded into overworking themselves by their communist puppetmasters. Instead, here is an image of vibrant, intelligent, passionate master-craftspeople striving to become the absolute best at what they do, to break every record set before, and push and in turn be pushed by their fellows - and not by driving themselves recklessly to exhaustion, but while taking pride in their safety and efficiency. It makes me think of physical record setters like mountain climbers or arctic explorers, or, in a not entirely joking way, of the speedrunning community. So much for the idea that people would have no incentive to work in a socialist system, they were literally competing for high scores! For the love of the game! Once again, how much potential is wasted by capitalism failing to utilize the latent passion of workers?

That also gave me a sudden thought, that Stakhanovism seems so incomprehensible to the capitalist-indoctrinated mind because labor is necessarily devalued in capitalism - it can't be allowed to become a source of pride or identity, because that way lies class consciousness, and because capitalists would always lose at that game. You can only be passionate about becoming the best at activities that are ultimately frivolous - done for their own sake (and ideally requiring large amounts of capital), like sports, car or boat or plane racing, mountain climbing, deep sea diving, etc. And, because all work requires being exploited by a capitalist, anyone born into the capitalist world would understand that someone who voluntarily tries to work harder, let alone tries to set world-records at their job, must be a rube who's been tricked into it (even as capitalism's official line, the protestant work ethic, preaches exactly the same virtue).