Aug 19, 2025 11:16 PM
RELATED (scivillage): The Left's 100-year-long civil war with itself
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DWARKESH CLIPS
https://youtu.be/AWYjy1G2iug
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Think about Marx. Marx says: "You get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, you're going to get freedom, you're going to get abundance."
But you don't get that. And then people say, "Oh, you know, but Marx wanted freedom. He didn't want Stalin's dictatorship."
So, it's not Marx who's the problem. It's Stalin who deformed Marx. We see this argument all the time. Stalin is a deformity, whereas Marx was about freedom.
So, think about a nuclear bomb. You're going to nuke a population, but you don't want to kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but magically nobody dies.
You're going to get rid of capitalism. You're going to nuke it, but instead, everybody's going to prosper. And you give that order to your generals. You say, "Nuke them, but everybody lives. Nobody dies."
So they nuke it and everybody dies [becomes poor and stifled] instead of everybody living [prospering]. And you say, you know, I never said to kill the people. I said that they should live.
But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to lose freedom. You're going to lose the ability to have politics. You're going to end up with some version of a Leninist system. And the ideology is going to drive that outcome to the doubters.
[...They deter that doubt by saying...] it was Stalin who was the problem, not the system that was the problem. So here we have the experience of going through the horrors, then having those horrors publicly denounced within the party.
[...] But instead of saying, "Oh my god, this system is evil. We made a big mistake. We have to undo state ownership of property. We have to undo collective farms. We have to undo the dictatorship."
Instead of saying that, they say, "Oh, we get a chance to do it right this time without the evil Stalin who messed it all up."
[...] And so this is a paradoxical element of Marxism: where its failures don't become discredited. They instead say it was Stalin's fault, Mao's fault, etc. It was never the system at fault.
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COMMENT: A literal dictatorship of the proletariat is not possible, since the working class will ultimately be represented by Marxist intellectuals running the state. The latter know that the proles are ultimately fickle populists who would eventually undermine the system, when things aren't going well. And so the proles cannot be allowed to directly vote on anything substantial. It's inevitable that the intelligentsia and the state bureaucrats will be overwhelmed by a "strong leader" among them who will be even more rigid and tyrannical than they are. Or the revolution has such an individual from the very start, as in the case of Mao. Even when the Chinese Communist Party partially surrendered to capitalism, after a few decades they still got a Xi Jinping who has calculatingly eliminated all of his opponents. An ideology and single party system that cannot tolerate and survive competition is doomed to be authoritarian, since it cannot persist if it allows more potentially successful rival parties.
Stalin was not the problem (Stephen Kotkin) ... https://youtu.be/AWYjy1G2iug
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DWARKESH CLIPS
https://youtu.be/AWYjy1G2iug
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Think about Marx. Marx says: "You get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, you're going to get freedom, you're going to get abundance."
But you don't get that. And then people say, "Oh, you know, but Marx wanted freedom. He didn't want Stalin's dictatorship."
So, it's not Marx who's the problem. It's Stalin who deformed Marx. We see this argument all the time. Stalin is a deformity, whereas Marx was about freedom.
So, think about a nuclear bomb. You're going to nuke a population, but you don't want to kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but magically nobody dies.
You're going to get rid of capitalism. You're going to nuke it, but instead, everybody's going to prosper. And you give that order to your generals. You say, "Nuke them, but everybody lives. Nobody dies."
So they nuke it and everybody dies [becomes poor and stifled] instead of everybody living [prospering]. And you say, you know, I never said to kill the people. I said that they should live.
But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to lose freedom. You're going to lose the ability to have politics. You're going to end up with some version of a Leninist system. And the ideology is going to drive that outcome to the doubters.
[...They deter that doubt by saying...] it was Stalin who was the problem, not the system that was the problem. So here we have the experience of going through the horrors, then having those horrors publicly denounced within the party.
[...] But instead of saying, "Oh my god, this system is evil. We made a big mistake. We have to undo state ownership of property. We have to undo collective farms. We have to undo the dictatorship."
Instead of saying that, they say, "Oh, we get a chance to do it right this time without the evil Stalin who messed it all up."
[...] And so this is a paradoxical element of Marxism: where its failures don't become discredited. They instead say it was Stalin's fault, Mao's fault, etc. It was never the system at fault.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
COMMENT: A literal dictatorship of the proletariat is not possible, since the working class will ultimately be represented by Marxist intellectuals running the state. The latter know that the proles are ultimately fickle populists who would eventually undermine the system, when things aren't going well. And so the proles cannot be allowed to directly vote on anything substantial. It's inevitable that the intelligentsia and the state bureaucrats will be overwhelmed by a "strong leader" among them who will be even more rigid and tyrannical than they are. Or the revolution has such an individual from the very start, as in the case of Mao. Even when the Chinese Communist Party partially surrendered to capitalism, after a few decades they still got a Xi Jinping who has calculatingly eliminated all of his opponents. An ideology and single party system that cannot tolerate and survive competition is doomed to be authoritarian, since it cannot persist if it allows more potentially successful rival parties.
Stalin was not the problem (Stephen Kotkin) ... https://youtu.be/AWYjy1G2iug