A video from fellow pole, I haven't seen it posted here. I'm interested to hear opinions from community, I don't see many voices from ex-communist countries. There are english subtitles (alternatively you can learn polish language).

  • SolidaritySplodarity [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The idea that a state can implement communism is oxymoronic so without having listened to it I'm gonna guess they've never read Marx.

    • Garpagan [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      I would say that is a thesis of this video, that they were state capitalist countries, not coummunist

      • SolidaritySplodarity [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Which is not something requiring 35 minutes because literally no MLs would ever expect to create communism within a state. It's oxymoronic and they actually read theory. You could make that thesis in five minutes of quoting Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Sankara, Castro, etc.

        I'm not exactly hyped to read 35 minutes of captions, but so far they seem to think they're very clever for discovering the capitalist aspects of the state capitalism, despite them being explicitly predicted and embraced by Marxists as a necessary transitional stage within socialism. They use this discovery to crap on those AES countries to distance his positions from them. They then define socialism as direct worker ownership of enterprise, like the co-op model. Their description of communism is similarly incomplete and only focused on the ownership of enterprise. They then state that the primary goal of socialism is the elimination of hierarchy.

        Their thesis, so far, is just anarchist sectarianism that is ignoring all other theory and context to push their particular formulation of anarchism as the guiding principals of socialism, despite saying it applies to all formulations (it doesn't). More simply, their thesis is that ML countries aren't even socialist and they seem to be making this point to distance their preferred idea of socialism from the big bad commies.

        It is also overlooking the material economic forces aspect of any critique of capitalism and is attempting to imply that Soviet leadership was the combination of the political class and the bourgeois class, whereas they did not actually enrich themselves off of the surplus labor value of workers via the owner-laborer dialectic. Soviet leadership did not gain wealth by paying workers less and lived fairly modest lives.

        To be honest this is pretty trash.