Link, if you truly need 90 minutes of liberalism in your life https://youtu.be/_WXSsSgLpRE
new bit idea
if you're marx and advocate for socialism you're jealous
if you're engels and advocate for socialism you're a rich kid
I haven't seen it yet but communism being a ploy by rich people who are disconnected to the working class is a common liberal criticism. It's nonsense though, because like Parenti says, it's not a common route to power to become a communist revolutionary where you're more likely to get arrested and killed than you are to somehow, someday, maybe have some power in a hypothetical socialist government.
"Marxism is just a false ploy by the rich ruling class to retain their power over the masses" is such an incredible brainworm mobius strip that's even more unbelievable for how common it is.
"I'm not antisemitic, I'm only repeating everything the antisemites say!"
Yes it definitely feeds into that whole bag of brain worms. "It's the jews I mean uhh bankers uhh I mean the rich!"
he's an anarchist so ... his older videos on anthropology from a marxist lense are actually great. Watch those.
Okay. I'm gonna watch this and edit my reactions with time codes in this post.edit: okay I'm thirty minutes in, this guy has said nothing insightful and I'm all out of good faith. It's all actual baby-brain tropes like "rich kids love communism!"
“rich kids love communism!”
Ah, of course. That's why the Romanovs were the Bolsheviks' staunchest supporters.
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
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.
they are dictatorships...
Of the proletariat
:chad-stalin:
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.
Came up on my recommendations. I feel like I might have tried watching the first few minutes, but ended up not wanting to waste time on some long ass video regurgitating anti-Communist talking points.
