re: #131 Obdicut

And here in the US, outright communists were sometimes deluded about what was going on in the USSR, very occasionally defenders even though they knew it, but most often were a much better sort, ideologically, than Stalinists and the ruling elite in the USSR. Many US communists were labor leaders fighting absolutely appalling conditions. That they achieved a lot of success in fighting back against corporate greed and cruelty actually helped forestall any possibility of Communist revolution here. Which counts as irony.

Upton Sinclair was a sincere, big S Socialist. He wrote The Jungle
as a political tract, but didn’t succeed in drafting many people to his larger cause. We can all thank him for so shocking Theodore Roosevelt and his advisors that they created the FDA.

I never read

The Jungle

except for the one famous chapter.