Adam Curtis is a noted Lib and idealist, I don't regard his documentaries as trustworthy factually or historically sound, but do value them aesthetically and as triumphs of editing and storytelling or at least video essay. It's not for everybody, and that's ok.
As for "extreme capitalism", I think the point being made is not that it's a different or aberrant species of capitalism, but rather capitalism unchecked. In the US and UK capitalism developed gradually along with the state and society over two hundred or so years, as landed gentry and the aristocracy began to lose power to the Petit Bourgeois and then capitalists and industrialists.
I suspect the contention is that: in the USSR and the Russia in the nineties, you had a government and society that was seemingly unprepared for the class of modern capitalists gaining power at the moment when the state was falling apart. That it was like Dutch Elm Disease, the difference between sickness and plague.
Adam Curtis is a noted Lib and idealist, I don't regard his documentaries as trustworthy factually or historically sound, but do value them aesthetically and as triumphs of editing and storytelling or at least video essay. It's not for everybody, and that's ok.
As for "extreme capitalism", I think the point being made is not that it's a different or aberrant species of capitalism, but rather capitalism unchecked. In the US and UK capitalism developed gradually along with the state and society over two hundred or so years, as landed gentry and the aristocracy began to lose power to the Petit Bourgeois and then capitalists and industrialists.
I suspect the contention is that: in the USSR and the Russia in the nineties, you had a government and society that was seemingly unprepared for the class of modern capitalists gaining power at the moment when the state was falling apart. That it was like Dutch Elm Disease, the difference between sickness and plague.