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.)
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.