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.)
It's more or less exactly the "primitive communism" described by Marx. It's conspicuous because Marx's idea was a somewhat inventive oversimplification.
I thought this weeks outrage was going to be about the menstrual cup
Don't tell libertarians or they'll try and have sex with it
I genuinely loved that, because in every apocalypse show I’m like “wtf do they do about periods”
It's not true communism because she doesn't have to share the menstrual cup. :shapiro-gavel:
Foundation for Economic Education
that name is fucking hysterical.
As a Floridian this is correct, for communism to be successful Florida must be either smoldering ruins or underwater (preferably both)
Floridians are driven out and Cuba settles the peninsula, creating Greater Cuba.
There are some really rad Kibbutzes out there. They're not inherently a colonial institution
It turns out revolutionary violence might not be necessary to achieve a communist existence if a Deus ex fungi does it for us :shrug-outta-hecks:
The show itself engages in anti-communist messaging as later in the same episode when Joel and Ellie are talking she asks him if society used to be like that (the commune) before and he says no and then goes on to say before the fungus there were two types. One who wanted to own everything and one who wanted everyone to own nothing (muh toothbrush). So they have their work cut out for them. He then goes on to talk about how he was a contractor and how everyone loved contractors.
To be fair, I think Joel was being cheeky and sarcastic with the "everyone loves contractors" line and Ellie just didn't pick up on it cause why would she, she's an apocal babie
Also wouldn't make much sense for Joel to be a die-hard commie considering he's basically just a Texan construction contractor from 2003, honestly his agnostic "I was neither" response is pretty progressive considering his background
He's also from 2003, I think people were a lot less activated. Its pretty standard par for the course that he just doesnt really identify.
how everyone loved contractors.
I actually thought this part was a really funny follow up to the banter where ellie tells joel that he could just make shit up and she'd never know, because everyone hates dealing with contractors and what contractor wouldn't want to revise that part of american history?
but yeah also the show either knows that joel wouldn't know any theory or the show doesn't know any theory
Given that Bill becoming less selfish ends up with him having one of the happiest ending in that universe I think you are meant to disagree with Joel extremely cynical worldview.
I thought that line was especially bizarre because he was supposed to be describing the world of 2003 which in the context of the show doesn’t seem to deviate much (George w bush is president)
Writers for things like this are rarely half as dedicated to maintaining integrity of the world and its history as your average D&D GM. To some degree it's inevitable for it to resonate with audiences of the now. Also easier for the writers and in this case certainly lets them press home that "end of history", capitalism is awful but communism is worse and there are only these two false extreme choices for us which isn't even a new idea necessarily, it's many decades old anti-communist propaganda.
The real anti-communist messaging of the show is how the revolutionaries at Kansas City are written to be just as bad as Fedra who are misled by a revenge-obsessed woman to their demise.
How do you read a bunch of white militia guys going around killing harmless ex-collaborators as "revolutionaries", is it just because they have guns and got rid of fedra or is there more?
Like, were they portrayed differently in the game, am I missing something, what's up?
They are also hell bent on hunting down a black man and his child.
It was a mass uprising of people against a fascist military dictatorship which is pretty revolutionary imho but they're written to be unreasonably evil for some reason so they ignore all the actual issues (including the imminent threat of hordes of zombies under their city about to burst up) and hunt down a collaborator till the ends of the earth at the behest of their leader who is very clearly not thinking straight due to grief yet goes unquestioned. In the game they don't have the whole "hunting down traitors" plot line, instead they're just made to be psychos who hunt people for sport (and they don't all die at the end).
It's like a reactionary caricature of the French revolution. In both the show and the game it would not affect the plot at all to make them regular-ass people just trying to protect their home from threats. It would make more sense if they were like that. It might even be interesting to portray them as a commune like Jackson to contrast Joel's action in the two places. Instead the writers consciously wrote in this whole "revolution gone too far" background plot. It might just be so the player doesn't feel bad about killing all these people, but they rehash the same line on revolution in the second game which leads me to believe they are making a point.
In the game it also mentions that the hunters kicked out/murdered the Fireflies after they overthrew Fedra because the Fireflies were too controlling. Maybe I'm reading too deep into it, but it seems like the implication is that the Fireflies are the enlightened ones and the regular people are too greedy/selfish/stupid to govern themselves. Even the portrayal of Joel at the end of the first game and into the second is kind of like that.
Edit: To add on top of that, the Fireflies are constantly portrayed as naive and idealistic for believing they can restore constitutional government and yet we have multiple examples of people rising up and overthrowing Fedra in the few remaining strongholds of civilization left. Why is that?
No it isn't.
In my opinion I actually appreciate them depicting what happens when your whole ideology can be summed up as "smash the apparatus of state and do retributive violence against the oppressors and people who hurt us personally" with no "and..." at the end that describes coherently within an intellectually sound framework what you do beyond that to survive in a dire situation.
Sounds a lot like certain idealistic people who think people will just get along and you'll have a nice functioning healthy society once you remove the bad authority structure. Made only worse given their precarious situation against an awful horde of zombie monsters, isolation, lack of resources, and threats from other groups of people. The lady in charge of it all (and behind it all) wasn't an organizer, a revolutionary, or an intellectual, she was just some vindictive, injured person personally aggrieved at the death of a relative who had some (probably liberal) ideals and ideas as a (again liberal) revolutionary and who might had they led the uprising actually been able to build a more productive and solid society that isn't just raiders with a base who ambush and murder travelers for goods and waste all their time and energy and resources vindictively seeking out to murder the people who betrayed their leader when they had other very pressing concerns. And the whole back-story from what I can tell is spontaneous (and probably opportunistic) uprising after a catalyzing event of abuse (possibly her father's murder) that was a metaphorical straw that broke the people's back and caused them to act out with enough of them having smuggled arms and some basic organization to carry that out successfully against a probably already demoralized occupying force.
What they showed is exactly what CAN happen. In fact it did happen in Russia with Makhno and has happened in many other places and times. This is why a vanguard party is critical. This is why you need to be able to organize people under a coherent scientific ideology, stable leadership, to settle things down, bring control after the revolutionary violence is over and indeed to reign in the worst excesses of such violence even during that period.
And consequently what I would expect in fact to happen in the US in just such a situation as depicted in the show as it is such an American-brained thing to do. We are talking about a people steeped in reactionary superstructure, magical thinking, idealism, individualism as religion, and violence as a fetish.
As any good communist revolutionary will tell you, a successful revolution under siege conditions (as they very much were under) is only the very first step, it is in fact the beginning of the real work and the hard times.
A week or two ago I wasted three hours of my life arguing with some nut on twitter who maintained that capitalism was nothing except exchange. This means that even cells and atoms are capitalist and that capitalism is truly the nature of the universe. Any criticism of capitalism was met with “that’s not real capitalism.” Socialism in his mind is just monopoly or government regulation. I kept asking him which class controlled the government and how he could afford to spend his morning arguing with me, but he wouldn’t answer. An utterly cursed interaction, 0/10 would not recommend.
Conservatives love changing the definition of communism. More at 11.
This is a commune. We're communists.
She turns around and says it practically right at the camera
It seems people still have exclusive property rights to their own toothbrushes, so depending on how you define communism...
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.
Yeah, sure. American TV fully internalizes ACAB so long as the cop isn’t speaking English.
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.
Pretty sure I've heard people talk about how there's a whole "revolution worse/the same as current fascism" subplot.
I've heard people complain about the previous episode, insinuating that the fascist militia was actually a revolutionary communist group and their negative portrayal was anti-communist. Which is pretty hilarious, seeing as the following episode (this one in OP) was pretty unambiguously celebrating a mutual-aid based commune and calling it communism (non-derogatorily)
It would be easier to accept seeing rebels as bad, which of course a lot of the time they would be, if it wasnt always always leftists portrayed like that. Its such a trope.
? How are they leftist? They don't say a singular nominal leftist thing, they obviously don't believe in any sort of restorative justice, they don't seem to care one bit about other people in general, there's not a single economic thought in their dialogues, they are opportunistic insurrectionists with a vaguely chuddy slant. If anything, it's alluded that there's some racist motivation playing into it, seeing as the militia is almost exclusively white, killing anything that moves in a urban environment (most notably, the Black side-characters we get to know a bit). Like, if you think those guys are just leftists portrayed in an unfavorable, anti-communist light, I think you've made one wall joke too many and you must read any sort of ressentiment-driven, retributive anti-establishment action as inherently revolutionary (and not just that, communist revolutionary, for some odd reason apparently), and like, no wonder we're having to talk about red-brown alliances these days. Driving around with the boys and killing people is not inherently communist, or leftist, and portraying this negatively is not anti-communist framing :warf-wtf:
Thats my point, they arent, but everyone is so used to seeing left wing revolutionary groups portrayed this way that they jumped to the conclusion that they were. Those guys in the show are totally chuds.
I think people just read it like that because we are so used to seeing "Im a bad rebel guy who thinks we need to kill rich people and redistribute wealth! Thats why as my first action I will personally drown all these babies" you know? Thats pretty common, look at the riddler in The Batman (sorry for capeshit just saying).
well I worded it badly anyways. Yeah, the dudes in the last of us episode are fascist (or at least adjacent). I think were it gets confusing is the fireflies are left coded, and theyre the big revolutionary group. I thought the chuds from episode 5 were going to be firefly aligned at first, I havent played the game.
I’m cosigning with your line of thinking. In the HBO after-episode talks with the showrunners, Mazin says that revolutions usually result in a change in leaders who end up being more brutal/ineffective than the previous regime. It’s such an Animal Farm-esque meme that’s usually ascribed to leftist revolutionaries that also argues for the status quo/big-brain centrism
I watch and enjoy the show. The first few episodes were thoroughly fascist, but then we had the heartwarming gay dudes loving each other episode, and now we have the communism good episode. It honestly didn’t seem critical of communism at all to me; the only issue was that fucking American flags were in every shot and one of the characters mentioned that she had used to be an assistant DA. As with Andor, liberal showrunners seem to recognize that people enjoy communist slop for some weird reason.
Yeah, its defanged media communism. Its nice, I liked Andor too, but its not exactly theory (which is fine its just entertainment)
There's a fair bit of theory in Andor, but it's in the same way The Good Place had philosophy, very surface level to anyone with even a passing acquaintance.
I thought one of the nicer things about The Good Place (and also Andor) was how they broke the surface and did actually hit some harder notes.
Yeah, it was still undergrad level discourse. But that's a few steps above the "philosophy / revolutionary history for sixth graders" shit I'd seen everywhere else. Really, anything that wasn't a three hour long Marvel Adventurers advertisement for the local military recruiter has been a refreshing change of pace.
