Hm, these "Foundation of Economic Education" folks don't sound too bad...
The Foundation for Economic Education is listed as a partner organization of the Charles Koch Institute.[3]
Lol
To sum up the vid:
It's not actually communism, it's democratic participation in a cooperative, classless society with the goal of meeting each other's needs and contributing to the greater whole!
:engels-wut:
It's also not new! Early societies have done this and certain groups of people do it today!
:marx-hi:
I suppose the response to these kinds of bad faith arguments is "Cool, maybe it's not communism. So why are we not choosing this over Capitalism then?"
(Admittedly, I haven't watched the show so maybe he is right and Jackson is not really a Communist society, just not with the arguments he presented.)
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He wrote a bunch of scenes that made the 80s-era Soviet bureaucracy look like a mix of CYA dipshits and thumb-headed cops. Which is... debatable at least. He also did a bunch of scenes in which the working class Russians showed an abundance of compassion, valor, and ingenuity in order to end the crisis. The coal miner foreman doing hard-nosed negotiations with the party apparatchiks, then going in naked to clear tunnels for the disaster relief team, was an :order-of-lenin: ass deserving motherfucker. A number of the bureaucrats having the "Just by being here overseeing this shit, we're shaving off ten years of our lives" conversation went hard as hell. The movie had a lot more complexity than Online Leftists give it credit.
But then a bunch of YouTubers and right-wing grifters got ahold of the show and did "COMMUNISM BAD!!!" clips shows, while clearing out the surrounding material. And that definitely poisoned the well on Craig Mazin for anyone who was on the fence.
It should also be noted that "Last of Us" is a fictional story about a video game zombie apocalypse. So its easy to do "American Liberals Make Communism Work" subplots without getting into any kind of serious historical material analysis or theory. Don't give him too much credit for this.
There was also the whole trope with the evil KGB/NKVD officer threatening a main character's life for shits and giggles because why not. Same shite that Stranger Things pulls.
Yeah, sure. American TV fully internalizes ACAB so long as the cop isn't speaking English.
But I'd call that a fractional view of "Russians" with respect to the overall story.
Good observation. Makes me laugh when, in Stranger Things S4, there's a bit of an aside about how there's a term in Russian for "pig" (reference to Soviet cops and prison guards) whereas the cops of Hawkins PD are portrayed as well-intentioned if useless against the supernatural.
Pretty sure I've heard people talk about how there's a whole "revolution worse/the same as current fascism" subplot.
I've heard people complain about the previous episode, insinuating that the fascist militia was actually a revolutionary communist group and their negative portrayal was anti-communist. Which is pretty hilarious, seeing as the following episode (this one in OP) was pretty unambiguously celebrating a mutual-aid based commune and calling it communism (non-derogatorily)
It would be easier to accept seeing rebels as bad, which of course a lot of the time they would be, if it wasnt always always leftists portrayed like that. Its such a trope.
? How are they leftist? They don't say a singular nominal leftist thing, they obviously don't believe in any sort of restorative justice, they don't seem to care one bit about other people in general, there's not a single economic thought in their dialogues, they are opportunistic insurrectionists with a vaguely chuddy slant. If anything, it's alluded that there's some racist motivation playing into it, seeing as the militia is almost exclusively white, killing anything that moves in a urban environment (most notably, the Black side-characters we get to know a bit). Like, if you think those guys are just leftists portrayed in an unfavorable, anti-communist light, I think you've made one wall joke too many and you must read any sort of ressentiment-driven, retributive anti-establishment action as inherently revolutionary (and not just that, communist revolutionary, for some odd reason apparently), and like, no wonder we're having to talk about red-brown alliances these days. Driving around with the boys and killing people is not inherently communist, or leftist, and portraying this negatively is not anti-communist framing :warf-wtf:
Thats my point, they arent, but everyone is so used to seeing left wing revolutionary groups portrayed this way that they jumped to the conclusion that they were. Those guys in the show are totally chuds.
I think people just read it like that because we are so used to seeing "Im a bad rebel guy who thinks we need to kill rich people and redistribute wealth! Thats why as my first action I will personally drown all these babies" you know? Thats pretty common, look at the riddler in The Batman (sorry for capeshit just saying).
Ah okay, I misunderstood you then.
well I worded it badly anyways. Yeah, the dudes in the last of us episode are fascist (or at least adjacent). I think were it gets confusing is the fireflies are left coded, and theyre the big revolutionary group. I thought the chuds from episode 5 were going to be firefly aligned at first, I havent played the game.
I’m cosigning with your line of thinking. In the HBO after-episode talks with the showrunners, Mazin says that revolutions usually result in a change in leaders who end up being more brutal/ineffective than the previous regime. It’s such an Animal Farm-esque meme that’s usually ascribed to leftist revolutionaries that also argues for the status quo/big-brain centrism
I watch and enjoy the show. The first few episodes were thoroughly fascist, but then we had the heartwarming gay dudes loving each other episode, and now we have the communism good episode. It honestly didn’t seem critical of communism at all to me; the only issue was that fucking American flags were in every shot and one of the characters mentioned that she had used to be an assistant DA. As with Andor, liberal showrunners seem to recognize that people enjoy communist slop for some weird reason.
Yeah, its defanged media communism. Its nice, I liked Andor too, but its not exactly theory (which is fine its just entertainment)
There's a fair bit of theory in Andor, but it's in the same way The Good Place had philosophy, very surface level to anyone with even a passing acquaintance.
I thought one of the nicer things about The Good Place (and also Andor) was how they broke the surface and did actually hit some harder notes.
Yeah, it was still undergrad level discourse. But that's a few steps above the "philosophy / revolutionary history for sixth graders" shit I'd seen everywhere else. Really, anything that wasn't a three hour long Marvel Adventurers advertisement for the local military recruiter has been a refreshing change of pace.
Yes Craig Mazin is the showrunner