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A comment on Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression. Parent comment

Re:Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression by wahern on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:32PM (#23198747)
> how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's "vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven; everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical, individualized motivations. See, generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism

That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book reading was or still is.

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Re:Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression by monadic2 on Friday May 15, 2020 @08:44PM (#23199297)
I agree with your statement, but I feel like it's rather splitting hairs in terms of the entire conversation. Both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came out of Iskra (and it's impossible to describe Lenin without it), and reading culture very much fueled the rise of the vanguard and Lenin's immense popularity. The narrative passing from Lenin to Stalin was also driven by essays in newspapers by political figures. Reading culture was inseparable from political culture at the time!
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