I saw this 1Dime video go up earlier today, but I’m not going to watch it. He’s not a Marxist, which he admits. He thinks Žižek is worth listening to, which is cringey.
He’s made some good ones for educating liberals:
- The Problem With Taxing The Rich
- The Deficit Myth: The Biggest Lie In Politics
- Why the US Government Can’t Get Anything Done
His videos on Russia/Putin/Ukraine are not good, but they’re less bad than you usually see from a BreadTuber.
Any opinions on his Cultural Revolution Video?
It came off to me as wishy washy and needlessly sympathetic.
I didn’t watch them, so no. I’m only really interested in his videos that explain things to libs in their own language.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
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Link 3:
By and large it’s a good overview. The only thing I don’t like is at 26 minutes in when he describes Engels’ work as creating deterministic laws. Young Marx in the Communist Manifesto era could be described as such, but by the point of his death I don’t think Marxism could be called deterministic in good faith. Dialectical materialism is a mode of analysis. It can show you how two things are interdependent and where the contradictions are between them. Human agency, in the form of theory and praxis, is what actually changes things. The material/social conditions you identify constrain possibility without pointing to a specific path for the rupture of those relationships. Once we identify what exists and in what context we can change it, but that change doesn’t come from the inevitable rupture of those relationships under the weight of their contradictions. The Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China only won their revolutions from humans acting in the moment using a strong theoretical basis to understand the world around them.
Those dialectical laws set by Engels are just an ontological framework. Quality into quantity, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation are all plainly observable but don’t tell you what will happen or when.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
