Very out of it this week, so my retention of this chapter is probably going to be a little low.

The Communists do not merely reflect the will of the masses, as a ballot might, or a showing of hands. They do not merely analyze what the “majority want” and hand it out. It is their job to lead, to organize the people’s will. No group of unurged soldiers would ever vote to storm a trench. Certainly the workers of the Soviet Union would not have voted, unurged, unled, for the hardships of the Five-Year Plan of rapid industrialization taken out of their own food and comforts, for the painful speed of farm collectivization without adequate machines or organizers.

But this is a really good line explaining how communists aim to work, it's not just handing out whatever the working class wants like a spoiled child, but directing them towards a better future and making them understand the benefit of hard work and sacrifice. So many people's misunderstandings of communism are either "it's not liberal democracy, so it's bad because not enough "Freedom"" or "It gives people too much freedom and no one wants to work." So this simple explanation tackles both anti-communist viewpoints simultaneously. It's not about encouraging people to be lazy and blindly letting them do what they want, but nor is it a brutal top down repression of the people's wants and desires. It's a process, it asks the people "where do you want to be in the future" and then going "Ok, here's what we need to do to get there."

Communists of longest experience and best records have the greatest authority; but, be it noted, they do not call it “power.” “Power” resides in the will of the working masses; “authority” is that prestige of character and insight which enables its possessor to organize and release this power.

I enjoyed reading about the distinction between "authority" and "power" that Strong makes in this chapter. It provides a side-view perspective on leadership that is so thoroughly exaggerated in the capitalist world. In capitalist eyes, Stalin had power and authority through his domination of men and not by any connection to the working mass of society. Capitalists must constantly war with their own people to maintain their status in society and so Stalin would not be seen as any different.

“The earth from the stratosphere”—the man who said this was himself an aviation engineer. Men in the Soviet Union tend to see Stalin in terms of their craft. Railway workers call him “locomotive driver of the Revolution.” An economist said to me, speaking of the leaders of Party and government in the Red Square on May-day: “Our brains are there in the tribune.” Harvester-combine operators addressed Stalin as “friend and teacher”; managers of industry say informally “the boss.” Yellow-skinned Kazaks of the desert on the fifteenth anniversary of their republic hailed him “great leader of toiling humanity.”

Stalin can't stop aura farming. But it also reminds me of the adoration that people have for the Mount Paektu family in the DPRK which gets the identical anti-communist treatment that Stain did (now with "palace intrigue"). Kim Jong Un is the head of the WPK, but he isn't the most powerful figure by his own domination but by the democratic power of the Supreme People's Assembly. KJU has the authority to rally the WPK and the nation through socialist siege that became its worst in the Arduous March of the 90s.

It makes me see "De-stalinization" in an even more negative light.

Also, and I guess it's getting repetitive, but seeing Strong mention the socialist organizations of various SSRs and cities like Lugansk does contextualize further how devastating the illegal dissolution was. All the SSR have been forcibly converted to nationalist bubbles that could not survive on their own without neoliberal doctrine (or are actively self-destructing in the case of Ukraine and possibly later nations such as Estonia, Latvia and Poland).

Overall, I like how this chapter humanizes socialist leadership rather than how the West continually spreads anticommunist libel that are the same set of unfalsifiable tropes that even a book from the 1930s can debunk.

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

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Continuing the theme of explaining core communist concepts in ways non-communists can easily understand, Strong shows both democratic centralism and further elaborates on the vanguard, while supporting it with anecdotes. The party structure really is core to communist organizing work, and understanding how to make an effective party is an enormously important task.