Link, if you truly need 90 minutes of liberalism in your life https://youtu.be/_WXSsSgLpRE

  • replaceable [he/him]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    Did anyone here actually try to watch the video? I remember that it was posted a bunch of times on leftist subreddits for dunking and people in those threads said that it was actually a good video

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I got through the first half hour. The core of his argument seems to be that the Bolsheviks were all rich kids who believed a bunch of stereotypes about peasants, and then got mad when the peasants didn't live up to their expectations and erroneously decided that peasants had to be eliminated as a class in order to build socialism. He spends a lot of time talking about how the Russian peasants had some similarities to anarchist praxis, but doesn't seem to care about the peasants who owned property and did capitalist praxis. He's also strangely mum on the topic of workers' councils and the massive support - including the support of many, many peasants - that the communists had before, during, and after the civil war.

      A lot of what he said is extremely bad, which is why I stopped watching it. No, all socialists aren't rich kids. No, all Marxist-Leninist states aren't dictatorships.

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Haven't watched it so I'm just dog-piling, but personally I'm not risking wasting 90 mins of my life on something with such a reductive title and thumbnail.

      Former empires and new imperial powers just had enough levers to pull to stymie the threat of labour revolutions internally while escalating military technology. Since industrialized countries didn't experience revolutions, capitalists were able to coordinate how to ameliorate their populations (unsustainably) with the spoils of their former empires and burgeoning imperial projects, and use control of the press to divide those populations internally. That the revolutions occurred in those states which had been relieved of their historical wealth is certainly far more consequential than any missteps which occurred there as a result of someone in a leadership position having come from a family which benefited from the previous system.